SRS 200

Goals

• To bring all of your new knowledge and skills together.
• To learn to write a research proposal.
• To carefully design an experiment or empirical study, with a better understanding of threats to validity than you had for previous user studies.
• To further practice either between-subject testing or within-subject testing.
• To further practice analysis.
• To gain more experience in researching related work, writing, and group work.

Your Mission

In this project, you will find a usability research problem, propose a solution to it, and evaluate that solution with a well-designed empirical study.

In the first project, the research problem was finding a better design for stoves in general. In the second project, the research problem was to find a better design for a specific aspect of the stove. While there was definitely room for creativity, the general "shape" of the research problems was given to you. For this project, you must choose your own research problem. It can relate to any product you care to design (or it can be independent of any existing product). However, it should be a genuine research problem:

• It must be actually a problem. There must be some evidence (other than your personal feelings) that there is something in need of a redesign.
• It must relate in some way to existing research.
• It must be focused enough that a careful study can teach us something about it.

What to do

1. Choose a research problem. This will involve brainstorming with your group, library research to find related work, and doing other things to develop evidence that the problem is a real research problem (such as interviewing representative users, doing a quick "pilot study", etc...)

2. During the week of Mon, Oct 9 through Friday, Oct 13, meet as a group with Chris and Aaron to discuss your research problem. A sign-up sheet is on Chris's office door.

3. For Friday, Oct 20, write a proposal describing your research problem, arguing that it is interesting, arguing (with evidence) that it is indeed a problem, and placing the proposed project in relation to existing research. Give a presentation on the proposal.

4. For Friday, Oct 27, design a solution to the research problem, as proposed in your proposal. Describe the solution in a write-up, which will be something like an Approach section of a research paper, and give a presentation on the solution.

5. For Friday, Nov 3, design an experiment or empirical study to carefully evaluate the proposed solution. This will involve deciding what to compare the solution with, what measurements to take, and how to measure them. You should also be sure to argue that, if everything goes as expected, the results will provide good data for analysis. Describe your experiment design in a write-up (like part of an Evaluation section of a research paper) and give a presentation.

6. For Wednesday, Nov 15, carry out your experiment or empirical study, record the results, and analyze them. Write a complete research paper, using the parts you have produced so far and adding to them to tell your complete story.

7. Present the entire project on Friday, Nov 17.

Notes on Deliverables

• Your final paper is due at 10am on Wed. Nov 15. Your paper should be delivered (not emailed) to Chris's office. It should include all of the sections that we have previously discussed.

• If your team used the "book boss" model that was described in class, be sure to rotate "book boss" duties for this project.

• Even though a given section (like Related Work) may be originally written by a single team member, all members should be reading it and suggesting edits. In addition, for each section, at least two team members should sit down at a computer together and collaboratively revise. In your journal, you are required to record:
  1. the sections that you originally wrote
  2. the sections that you collaboratively revised with someone else (and who the other person was).

• Each presentation should be presented by at most two (2) members of your team. By the end of this complete project, each member of your team should have presented at least once.

• For the intermediate presentations, each team will have 10 minutes plus 2 minutes for questions and answers. For the final presentation, each group will have 18 minutes plus 4 minutes for questions and answers.

Journaling

For Nov 17, you should again write a quick (1-2 page, handwritten) response to the experience. What were your expectations and actual outcomes? How did it compare to other groups? What are your reflections on the experiment design approaches that you used? Feel free to again comment on team dynamics too. And don't forget to record which report sections you wrote and which you collaboratively revised, as mentioned above.

Grading

• We will be grading each delivered report and each presentation.

• Grades for the group project and presentation will again be based on your ability to effectively answer "yes" to the questions posed in the Grading section of the previous project. Be sure to review them.

  Be sure your report is written for the correct audience (the usability science community) and stays under the 10-page limit.

• In your journal, we will be looking for evidence that you have been engaged in the work of the group, that you have been trying different ideas, that you have brainstormed, analyzed, observed, and measured. In the response at the end of the journal, we will be looking for evidence that you are truly reflecting on the experience, in particular on the methods you and your team used to produce your results. The journal will be worth 4 points of the 10 total for the term.