Project Proposal

Summary: The goal of the proposal is to get you to think about what you want to evaluate and how you will conduct the evaluation. It should help you to prepare for planning your study and submitting an IRB proposal.

Collaboration: Each group will submit one proposal. You may discuss the proposal with anyone you like. If you have any questions about what is expected or how to address a particular concern, please talk with me.

Due: Friday, Feb. 29, 5 p.m.

Assignment

• What site are you studying?
• Who are the users of the site? Identify classes of users and their characteristics. 
• To limit the scope of the project, choose one class of users to focus on. 
• What differing characteristics, if any, will you try to account for in your evaluation? How? (Many evaluation studies pre-screen participants, by asking if they have certain characteristics before including them in the study. Other evaluation studies ask participants to complete a short questionnaire after the study.)
• What is the goal of your project? (At least one project will be an experimental comparison of two different web applications. I expect most projects to evaluate and redesign all or part of a single web site.)
• What questions will the evaluation study address? What data do you need to collect to answer those questions?
• Identify 3-10 tasks that you might include in the evaluation study. Why these tasks? (I just want to see a task goal, as for Investigation 5, not a scenario, use case, or HTA. You will later narrow this down to a reasonable number of tasks to complete in a 30-45 minute study.)
• How will you recruit participants? How many do you hope to obtain? 
• What ethical issues will be of concern?
• How will you collect and analyze data?

I encourage you to contact your "contact person," if your site has one, to get suggestions regarding evaluation questions or tasks to focus on.

You may also wish to address the following:

• Will you try to assess other needs that are not being filled by the current site? If so, how? (One "lightweight" approach is to ask users at the conclusion of a usability study, but you may have other ideas.)
• Are there other practical issues to consider for carrying out the study? (For example, do the suggested deliverables and schedule make sense for your team's goal and approach?)
• Are there other concerns we should discuss?

I would like to see a written narrative, although you may use section headings and bulleted or numbered lists where they seem appropriate.  Please use double-spacing so I have space to write comments. I expect proposals will be around 3-5 pages. (But I may be wrong---let me know if it gets out of hand.)

Turning in your work

Please print your proposal and bring it to my office. You may slide your paper under my door if I'm not there.

I may ask you to meet with me after I have read your proposal. If you know you have concerns you want to discuss, please feel free to set up a meeting with me before the proposal is due.

Assessment

The proposal will be worth 40 points. I want to see (a) that you adequately have addressed the questions above, and (b) that your writing is clear and reasonably concise.

Janet Davis (davisjan@cs.grinnell.edu)