Project Proposal
CS 294-7, Fall 1997
Instructor: James Landay
Due on Sept. 30, 1997
 
The proposals you make will be the basis for the course projects, so don't propose something like building a CSCW tool for audio/video conferencing along with a shared whiteboard. Instead, you should either look at resolving problems with existing CSCW systems out there (e.g., the mash tools) or propose new systems that solve problems that existing tools do not.
 
The proposal should be an essay of no more than three pages of double-spaced typewritten text. It should include a concise statement of the problem you've observed, an analysis of the problem, suggestions for a design that will address the problems and a rationale for the design improvements, and a brief experimental design to test whether one or all of your suggestions would actually solve the problem, and a contract proposal with goals that will help us determine your grade.
The contract should outline the major milestones of the system you will design, implement, and test.  You should specify the grade you should receive for accomplishing these milestone.  For example, you can give something the following with a bit more detail:
    "    design new set of Mash Tools (C).
    Plus
        implement new set of Mash Tools (A-)
    Plus
        test new set of Mash Tools (A+)"
 
The experiment section should include brief descriptions of what you would vary (independent variables), what you would measure (dependent variables), the types of people you would use as participants in the experiment, the tasks you would ask those people to perform (method), and predictions of the results you would get and what those results would mean if you got them (discussion). Since there are no psychology pre-requisites for this course, I do not expect you to know everything about experimental design for this assignment. However, a lot of experimental design is just common sense, so do the best you can.
 
Your proposals should follow this outline:
  1. Problem (short)
  2. Analysis
  3. Suggested Design
  4. Experiment:
    1. Independent Variables
    2. Dependent Variables
    3. Participants
    4. Method
    5. Results and Discussion
  5. Grading Contract