Fall 2015
Interaction Design Research
Project Abstract (Draft and Final Version)
You will must submit a draft of your project abstract. Course staff will provide feedback on the draft to assist in the preparation of a final version (see homepage for deadlines). Everything is submitted online.
The project abstract should cover the following topics:
- Research Question:What would you like to learn about human-computer interaction? Clearly summazrize this as a one-sentence question.
- Hypothesis & Mechanism: What do you think the answer to your question is? What do you think the causal mechanism is — what's the active ingredient that makes that true? State your hypothesis in terms that you will actually be able to deliver on within the space of a quarter. "We hypothesize that X is the future" is not something you can test in a class. However, having a hunch about the future is wonderful, and you can investigate one aspect as a class project.
Another example: having a technology increase someone's income might be your ultimate goal, but you may not be able to measure income change in 10 weeks. Increasing income is a wonderful motivation, but not a hypothesis. Your hypothesis needs a more proximal measure. - Related Work: Please describe several pieces of published research, how they inform your project, and where your work trancends this knowledge. (You need not have related work in the draft version.)
- Contribution: What motivates you to explore this issue? What leads you to believe this is a problem/opportunity? What will your work contribute to human-computer interaction? How does it differ from prior work? What is the structure of the space of possibilities that your work explores? What are the major decisions from a design perspective and what are their relative merits? If it's helpful, you can use the design space in the Juxtapose paper (Table 1) as a guide.
- Method: Explain your study design, illustrate how the study's results will provide evidence for/against your hypothesis, and how the question, hypothesis, and study all line up. We encourage you to mirror/copy/adapt other researchers methods (e.g. by drawing from the class readings) whenever appropriate (and not when it isn't appropriate).
- There are three major points you should hit here.
- Study design: What are you going to do? Be detailed and precise.
- Evaluation: How will you know you succeeded? What will you measure? How will you measure it? What might your results look like?
- Ecological Validity: Why does your study answer your research question? Why does your evaluation address your hypothesis? Make sure your study, and the variables you're measuring, properly address the question you are asking.
- Study Recruitment Plan: (final only) How many participants? how will you recruit them? For pilot studies, we suggest you recruit from within the class -- "trading" participation with other groups is a great way to learn about what others are doing. For larger studies (e.g. for those not building a system), you need a clear recruitment plan. We have some free credits with User Testing, so this is one platform you may want to use for recruiting subjects (talk to us in office hours for details).
- Biggest Risk: what's the riskiest component of your project? (may not be able to get the hardware you need, robustly implementing the ___ algorithm may take too long, the difference between conditions may not be measurable, ...)
For a guide to the APA format, go to APA Style. Note that the information on the site is possibly too detailed for the abstract. If you want a good example of the detail expected for the final paper, look at Dynamic Speedometer: Dashboard Redesign to Discourage Drivers from Speeding, Manu Kumar and Taemie Kim.
For estimating number of participants, see tutorial slides, or this Psych handout (Please don't redistribute.)
For the draft, we expect you to cover all topics in ~3 paragraphs--be concise but concrete in your descriptions. Include headers for each section being graded for clarity, in both the draft and the final versions.
For the final version, you'll want to go into greater depth (approximately 2 paragraphs for each issue, with the exception of the research question, which should still be be one precise sentence). In addition, your final abstract should address all comments and questions we give on your draft in some way. To help illustrate your evaluation plan, include a sketch of a graph showing what your results might look like. This graph should clearly show your independent variable(s) (x-axis) and dependent variable(s) (y-axis) are, and what effect you expect to find. The bars (or lines or...) of the graph should be your best guess of what you expect to find.
You are not required to keep the same project for your final abstract from your draft. You can change it as much as you see fit. We encourage you to iterate multiple times on this abstract. You are free to change directions after submitting your draft, but the sooner you nail down a direction, the better your project is likely to be. While there is only one formally defined point for receiving feedback from course staff, you should seek out more informal feedback as you work on this. Visit office hours to get feedback from staff, and/or post to Piazza to get feedback from peers. (We aren't able to provide feedback over email.)
The following are the grading rubrics for each version of the abstract. Follow these when writing your abstracts.
The project draft abstract should cover the following topics:
Every grading item is worth 5 points. 1 point will be subtracted if headers are missing.
| Grading item | Weak | Proficient | Mastery |
|---|---|---|---|
| Research Question | Research question is absent or trivial (e.g. answer is obviously "yes") | There's a promising question, but is not clearly stated. May not be answerable as written, at least not in a quarter. | Clearly stated. Has implications beyond just a simple yes/no answer. Can be answered in the scope of a quarter. |
| Hypothesis | Hypothesis same as research question/not present/trivial. | Present, but has a simple yes/no answer. Or it's not clearly stated. Or it is too ambitious. Or it isn't clearly motivated (what makes you hypothesize so?) | Clearly stated hypothesis includes rationale beyond just yes/no that connects the research question to the theoretical contribution. Can be answered in a quarter. |
| Theoretical contribution | Not stated | It's hiding in the abstract somewhere, but isn't clear (try a design space exploration?). Or contribution seems small. | It's a clear, useful, and important contribution. |
| Method | It is unlikely the method can answer your hypothesis/Unstated | Method could work, but is vague (e.g. measures unclear). Or there are obvious better methods. | Method is valid, not overly complicated and well thought through. It's a good match for the research question, and can meaningfully address the hypothesis. |
| Biggest risk | Ungraded separately, since you lose points in Method/Hypothesis if you don't identify risks clearly. | ||
The project final abstract should cover the following topics:
Each item comprises 5 points. 1 point will be subtracted if headers are missing.
| Grading item | Weak | Proficient | Mastery |
|---|---|---|---|
| Research Question | Research question is absent or trivial (e.g. answer is obviously "yes") | There's a promising question, but is not clearly stated. May not be answerable as written, at least not in a quarter. | Clearly stated. Has implications beyond just a simple yes/no answer. Can be answered in the scope of a quarter. |
| Hypothesis | Hypothesis same as research question/not present/trivial. | Present, but has a simple yes/no answer. Or it's not clearly stated. Or it is too ambitious. Or it isn't clearly motivated (what makes you hypothesize so?) | Clearly stated hypothesis includes rationale beyond just yes/no that connects the research question to the theoretical contribution. Can be answered in a quarter. |
| Related work | No citations or just a list of papers | Related work is a description of what the papers say (so you read the papers), but you don't say why it is related. May be missing obvious related work. | Related work is thorough. There's justification that your paper fits in with related work. Note: saying "they did it, but we'll just do it better" with no justification won't fetch points :-) |
| Theoretical contribution | Not stated | It's hiding in the abstract somewhere, but isn't clear (try a design space exploration?). Or contribution seems small. | It's a clear, useful, and important contribution. |
| Method | It is unlikely the method can answer your hypothesis / Unstated. | Method could work, but is vague (e.g. measures unclear). Or there are obvious better methods. No graph is present, or the graph is unclear / does not answer the hypothesis. | Method is valid, not overly complicated and well thought through. It's a good match for the research question, and can meaningfully address the hypothesis. A potential results graph is included, and is both plausible and provides an answer to your hypothesis. |
| Study recruitment plan | No plan, or you don't know how many participants | You have a plan, you know how many people you need. You plan to get them. | Plan exists, is well thought through. You know who you need and how to get them. You say why this is the best participant pool you can get (maybe classmates are all you have access to, thought your project focuses on crises in space-shuttles. That's cool... just say you don't know how to get astronauts.) |
| Biggest risk | You don't state them explicitly, and they can't be inferred clearly | You acknowledge risks, but don't say how to mitigate them. | You know your risks, and have tried to minimize them. |
| Coherence* | Your abstract is not coherent. Individual parts maybe good, but together, it doesn't make sense. (e.g. you have a great, well thought through method, but it just doesn't relate to the research question) | Some sections are coherent, others are not. | Everything fits - your abstract is coherent and the individual parts conceptually well-synthesized. The title aptly describes the contribution. |
*Note that Coherence is not a separate section in your abstract like the other grading items. This is a grade on how coherent the abstract is overall.