Group Project

Important Dates

• Dec 2 & 4: In class presentations and playable demos
• Dec 13: Written report emailed to Elena & Nada

Guidelines

• at least 2 people, at most 5 people
• at least 1 HCI person, 1 PL person
• written communication requirement:
  • generate a report that describes the final project, structured like a research paper
  • target a venue, HCI or PL, as an exercise
• optional, but encouraged: user study? IRB approval?
• build a prototype? think what’s the minimal amount of implementation or design to support your design argument?
• presentations for all the projects during class or reading period

Deliverables

Paper

1. A design argument

   • Need thesis and evidence collected (20%)
   • Approach thesis and evidence collected (20%)

2. A design fiction (10%)

   • Describe how a particular user runs into the obstacle and then gets around the obstacle using your designed object/language
3. Describe how you collected the evidence (10%)
4. Insights (including technical) and lessons learned (20%)
5. How would you push this project further for a research publication? (10%)

In class

1. Playable prototype: could be paper (wizard of Oz), interactive prototyping tool, or partially implemented in code

How to write a research paper

See Simon Peyton-Jones’ advice.

• Main idea (should be useful and re-usable).
• List of contributions (should be refutable).
• Rest of paper is evidence for contributions.
• Tell a story: interesting & unsolved problem, idea, idea works, related work.
• Claims and evidence.

Final project types

Idea and validation:

• Study and findings.
• Implementation and evaluation.
• Design and study.

Reminder on evidence

Ways to collect evidence include but are not limited to:

• Heuristic evaluation
• Play studies with users
• Wizard of Oz studies with users
• Contextual inquiry with intended users
• Surveys
• Analysis
• Comparison
• Theorems
• Measurements
• Case studies