Spring 2019

Interaction Design Research

Project Abstract (Draft and Final Version)

You will submit two parallel project abstract drafts. Course staff will provide feedback on the drafts to assist in the preparation of a final version (see homepage for deadlines). Submit all work online. Please put your name on the top of the PDF submission. Each abstract draft should fit on 2 pages which means that the entire PDF should be no more than 4 pages long. In case of multiple submissions, please indicate which is the final submission.
For the drafts, complete the sections included in the template. For the final abstract, complete all of the sections, which are included in this template, including the self-evaluation.

This is an example of a good final project abstract. Here is an example of a good draft abstract.

The project abstract should cover the following topics:

  1. Title
  2. Research Question:What would you like to learn about human-computer interaction? The research question section should only contain a one-sentence research question. You are welcome (but definitely not required) to preface this section with a background paragraph.
  3. 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. The hypothesis section should only contain the hypothesis, and the mechanism that explains why.
  4. Related Work: Please describe several pieces of published research, how they inform your project, and where yourpell work trancends this knowledge.
  5. Contribution: What's a real-world design decision that might plausibly change based on your research findings? 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.
  6. 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.
    1. Study design: What are you going to do? Be detailed and precise.
    2. Measures: How will you know you succeeded? What will you measure? How will you measure it? What might your results look like?
    3. 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.
  7. Study Recruitment Plan: 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.
  8. 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, ...)

To help us focus on your ideas, please review your submission for spelling and grammar. Grammar and spelling errors will not negatively impact your score as long as we can easily understand your message. When language impedes our ability to understand your writing, that will have a dramatic negative impact on your score. Both your draft and final versions should fit on a double-sided sheet of paper. 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 each topic in ≤ 1 paragraph -- be concise but concrete in your descriptions. Use of the templates for both the draft and 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 is the grading rubric for the abstracts. Follow this when writing your abstracts.

Every item is worth 1 point.

Title

Research Question

Related Work

Hypothesis & Mechanism

Contribtuion

Method

Study Recruitment Plan

(this section for final abstract only)

Biggest Risk

Coherence