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Project

The goal of the course project is to give students in-depth knowledge of a subfield of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Besides the implementation aspects, completing a successful project also requires effective written and oral communication skills.

The project will be implemented individually. You can choose between two types of projects: development or research.

Development Project

Deliverable 0: Project Requirements and Plan

1. Requirements - describe the functionality that will be implemented. Be as precise as possible. Identify the most important functionality that must be implemented. Describe the expected users of the functionality and any usability-specific requirements you have for that functionality. Include any prerequisites (e.g., learning additional technologies/techniques) required for completing the task. Also, describe optional functionality that will be implemented if time allows.
2. Work Plan - a tentative plan for the order you'll tackle implementing the requirements (implement the higher-priority priority functionality first) and how long you expect it will take to implement each of the requirements.

Deliverable 1: Implementation of High-Priority Functionality

Your goal is to create a demo-able version of the application so that we can see what you've done and provide feedback. Specifically, we want real users to try to use the application. We will identify the places where users struggle with the interface and learn how to improve the efficiency of performing tasks.

At this point, you'll also have a better idea of what is possible within the time constraints. Revise the work plan and design document based on your progress and the users' feedback.

Deliverable 1a: User Tests

Verify that your interface is usable by both students and faculty. Make notes about what needs to be changed and prioritize those changes.

Deliverable 2: Final Implementation

Your application should be working completely and well-tested by this deliverable date.

Deliverable 3: Documentation

Create web pages that describe how to use your web application. Provide help for the user. Be specific and precise in describing what to do. Use screenshots when appropriate.

Deliverable 4: Final Demonstration

Your will develop and conduct a presentation of about 30 minutes (including questions) to the client, presenting an overview of how to use the application. Highlight how you made the application very usable. Since the client will have the opportunity to ask questions during your presentation, prepare only about 20 minutes of presentation and be prepared to answer questions!

Research Project

The final deliverable of a research project is a research proposal.

Deliverable 0: Plan Paper Reading in Breadth and Depth

Overview: Identify papers to read that will expose you to the breadth and depth of HCI research. Get familiar with where HCI researchers publish.

• Identify foundational papers (full citations)
• Identify the conferences and journals where HCI researchers commonly publish. Organize the conferences/journals by selectivity and topic area.
• Identify papers from diverse research groups and topics.
  • For each research group, select a paper that is representative of their work. You can select a recent paper or an earlier, well-cited paper. (The paper will likely be in a selective conference or journal.) The ACM Digital Library has useful statistics, such as number of citations and number of recent downloads to help guide you in the decision.
  • Limit your topics to only one or two topics. For each area, list at least 3 research papers that relate to the topic and the research groups who study the topic. (You will probably have some overlap between research topics and research groups.)

Deliverable 1: Foundational Readings and Breadth Papers (Research Groups) Summary

Read and summarize each of the foundational HCI papers as well as a set of the papers from different research groups. Use the Research Resources page to guide your summaries of the papers.

Based on your readings, identify and summarize the common problems, ideas, approaches, and evaluation strategies for HCI research.

The deliverable is your collection of individual paper summaries and your summary of the common threads in HCI research.

Deliverable 2: Topic Exploration/Bibliography Search Results

Based on your readings and searches, select a research topic.

Identify the "world" for your topic. Search for all papers relevant to your topic. Determine the relevance using the title and abstract only -- do NOT read the papers.

Search the ACM and IEEE digital libraries as well as recent, relevant HCI conferences and workshops. Use the bibliographies of recent papers to identify earlier relevant papers. There are also various helpful tools to use, including citeseer and Google Scholar.

The deliverable is (a) one sentence describing the overall topic/research problem you are investigating, (b) a paragraph explaining how you performed your search (stated as precisely as possible), (c) a nicely formatted reference list, created using Bibtex and Latex, and (d) a paragraph or enumerated list that cites the papers in your list and describes the classification of those papers in some way. For example, some papers may be early foundation papers on the topic, some are solving subproblem X, some solve subproblem Y, some are all by the same research group Z, ...

The bibtex file should have the entries categorized in some way for ease in relating entries to each other and ease in writing the survey. The goal is to have an organized view of the world, not just a long list of papers on the topic.

You should put your paper into version control.

Before starting the next step, meet with Professor Sprenkle to discuss the bibliography and how you can focus your research proposal on a particular subproblem of the overall world in this area. Come to the meeting with your preferences/thoughts.

Deliverable 3: Outline of Literature Review

The goal for this deliverable is to understand the timeline, overall contributions, relative merits and limitations of the work embodied in the state-of-the-art in your topic. You need to read only the abstract, introduction, related work, and conclusions sections of each paper. Do this reading in chronological order (or reverse chronological order) of paper publication dates to obtain some sense of how the research has evolved over the years. Then, develop a pseudo outline where you have grouped the papers focusing on very similar problems, and then summarize each paper in 2 sentences. For each paper, be sure to include the problem addressed, contribution or key insight to solving that problem, findings of any evaluation of the contribution, and limitations.

Your outline should look like:

1. Subtopic 1
   1. Paper 1: title and authors, citation #
      1. One sentence on the specific problem addressed and the paper's contribution.
      2. One sentence on the findings of any evaluation and the limitations
   2. Paper 2: title and authors
   3. ...
2. Subtopic 2...

This outline should be in plain text so it is easy to insert into a Latex file to start writing.

Deliverable 4: First Draft of background and literature survey

The goal for this deliverable is what would typically be found in the Background and Related Work sections of a paper or proposal as well as a brief introduction to the topic area and why it is important.

A good literature survey does not just have a separate paragraph on every paper written in the field in any order you want. Use the Background and Related Work sections of papers you have read as examples for how to write yours.

• A good literature survey starts with a background section that familiarizes a computer science reader to the basic topic area, such as testing web applications what constitutes a web application, how are they characterized, examples from real life, how does the domain create unique problems...
• A good literature survey tries to group papers addressing similar problems and discuss and compare them together.
• A good literature survey also presents the papers typically in some chronological order within each problem identified.
• Paragraphs are ordered from most relevant work to least relevant work to your chosen problem of interest. The most relevant papers to what you want to focus on are presented first, and then other papers that deal with problems related, but not as relevant, are discussed very briefly and sometimes only cited as a group with a single sentence.
• A good literature survey will do the following for the most relevant papers: describe the overall goals/contributions of the paper, general approach and unique characteristics of their approach, then end with restrictions/limitations of that research. What didn't they address? Did they implement it and evaluate it?
• A related work section should be no more than 1 1/2 pages in the double column format you are given in the Latex file. Most are more like 1 page maximum.

It takes time and sometimes rewriting to put it together as above. The deliverable is a nicely formatted document with your Introduction (overall topic area and why it is important), Background section and your Related Work section, and reference list. Use Latex for formatting.

Deliverable 5: Writeup of brainstorming session

The goal for this deadline is to

• review the key restrictions and limitations of existing research in the topic area as a whole
• write a few paragraphs summarizing those limitations
• discuss the key open issues/problems left unaddressed by existing work
• write a few paragraphs summarizing those key open issues
• brainstorm about possible approaches to attempt to address some subset of those key issues: applying some technique used in solving other problems in other domains, trying to develop new algorithms or alternate representations,...
• write a few paragraphs outlining the possible approaches you could propose for addressing these problems
• think about how would you would evaluate the success of your proposed approach: what are the appropriate questions to ask for evaluating the approach, what could be implemented, what metrics could be measured and experiments could be performed to judge whether your approach indeed addresses the problems or improves on previous approaches in some way (learnability, satisfaction, ...)

The deliverable for this deadline is a nicely formatted document that includes:

• your proposal title
• a section called Current Limitations and Key Open Issues
• a section called Proposed Research, which consists of two subsections:
  • Proposed Novel Approach(es)
  • Evaluation Plans

Deliverable 6: Complete Draft of Proposal

The goal for this deadline is a complete first draft of a research proposal, created by merging, integrating, and smoothing out your previous writings.

This proposal should include the following components:

• Proposal Title
• Abstract. Rewritten to reflect what you are addressing and your overall approach. (300 words or less)
• Introduction. Motivate the general topic and why it is worth studying, present overview of what goals your research has. (1 page)
• Background and state-of-the-art. Give the computer science reader some background on your general topic area, as if they knew nothing about your subtopic. Include your related work section as part of the background now, getting rid of the related work section title. End with a subsection called Limitations/unaddressed problems if appropriate. (2-3 pages).

  To summarize, this section includes your literature review (background and related work) and your current limitations writeup from your brainstorming session. Be sure to incorporate suggestions from the instructor on the background and related work first draft.

• Challenges and goals. Enumerate the challenges and goals that you are focusing on (1 page). This can include the open issues that you wrote up for the brainstorming session.
• Proposed research. Present your proposed approach(es), subsectioning as appropriate, including some steps you would follow to do your research (1 page)
• Evaluation plan. Enumerate the steps you will follow to do your research. (1/2 page)
• Summary of foreseen contributions - how will your work help society. Summarize the contributions it would make if you followed through with this research. (1 paragraph)
• Reference list

The deliverable is a nicely formatted first draft of a research proposal.

Deliverable 7: Final Version of Proposal

The goal for this deliverable is a rewritten, complete version of your research proposal, focusing on the suggestions for improvement by me and your own observed potential improvements.

It has the same format as the previous deadline.