Project Selection & Team Formation (Spring 2017)

Due: Sunday, February 12th, 2017, by 11:59PM UTC-12 (Anywhere on Earth). This assignment is submitted via this survey on T-Square.

Assignment Description

For the group project for this course, you will work in a team of 3-4 people and address a task in a domain that you select. You have considerable leeway in defining the domain you would like to investigate; however, note that the target audience for the task must be English-speaking individuals over the age of 18. Due to the restrictions of the IRB protocol covering projects in this class, only individuals within this audience may participate in your surveys and interviews.

To support this group project, you will complete the Project Selection & Team Formation survey linked above. In this, you will have the opportunity to request specific group members, as well as state the area you’re interested in exploring in the group project. We will do our best to put individuals with similar interests together, although if a wide variety of ideas are submitted, groups may be forced to select ideas that are significantly different than some members’ initial preferences.

Although your group will have considerable leeway in choosing its project, not all project ideas make for good projects in this class. We want to ensure that projects are in domains in which classmates are prepared to collaborate and which graders are prepared to evaluate. We also want to ensure that the project domains themselves present significant opportunity for exploring the HCI space.

In brainstorming possible project ideas, we offer the following suggestions:

  • Select tasks with large audiences. You’ll need to recruit participants to complete surveys or participate in interviews, and selecting tasks with extremely niche audiences will make this difficult, unless you have access to that audience.
  • Emphasize the task. As you’ll learn in Unit 2, when designing interfaces, we are actually designing tasks. In this project, you shouldn’t redesign entire web sites or entire apps; most web sites and mobile apps support multiple tasks. Instead, focus on a specific task to redesign, like the search function for Netflix or the password-entry part of using an ATM machine.
  • Select commonly-known task. After all, the graders and your peers need to evaluate and give feedback on your work; if they are completely unfamiliar with the task you’ve selected, they will have difficulty providing feedback.

All work except for the final project is to be completed individually; however, you are encouraged to use the Methods assignments to do some advanced exploration of your project area. The design life cycle is all about performing multiple iterations of needfinding, prototyping, and evaluation; the Methods assignments can be the first iteration, while the group project can be the second iteration. This is not required, however.

Submission Instructions

You will complete this assignment via the survey provided on T-Square.

This is an individual assignment. Every student should submit an assignment individually.

Late work is not accepted without advanced agreement except in cases of medical or family emergencies. In the case of an emergency, please contact the Dean of Students.

Grading Information

This assignment is not graded explicitly; however, failure to complete this assignment will place you in a group with other people who similarly did not complete the assignment.