Individual Project Proposal

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Due: before class on September 11, 2006

20 Points

Contents

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Overview

Your assignment is to propose an idea that could form the basis of a course project for this semester. Your design should be based on consideration of a real group of users and their needs. This is an individual assignment. However, we will use it to match-make the project groups. If you already have others you would like to work with, you should turn in related, (not identical!) ideas. i.e. start with the same idea, but brainstorm on it individually.

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Project Requirements

The theme for this semester is Digital Pen-and-Paper Interfaces. This is a very open theme and should give you plenty of room to come up with a topic that is personally exciting to you. In addition to the Anoto digital pen and paper that we will provide, your application can incorporate both back-end services and interfaces from a normal PC or the web (e.g. maps, calendars etc.).

Don’t be too ambitious. You have limited time to work on the project and the goal of the course is to iterate, test and improve users’ experience of your design, not to produce the longest list of features.

Try to think out of the box. Do a web search of your idea to make sure there isn’t already a company (or several) already doing it. Think about what people care about, their everyday activities in which pens and paper are used, and how you might improve them, no matter how slightly. That will give you a much better chance of a novel, useful, new idea. Talk to some potential users to understand their needs.

Make sure you’re realistic. This is an exercise in prototyping apps that could eventually be built, not in science fiction. Brainstorm! Your initial idea might be lame-looking, but a refinement of it might be a killer. Give every idea a chance, no matter how strange at first.


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Writing Guidelines

You will submit a project plan including both text and sketches (the proposal should be at most 4 typewritten pages in length). Your plan should follow the outline below and will be graded using the writing guidelines that follow:

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Creativity (5 pts)

The proposal should address a real user need. It doesn’t necessarily have to be work related, it could also cover health or lifestyle needs, or recreational needs. We will give extra points for new ideas that are not already being developed by other companies and groups. You should do a web search before submitting your idea. Make sure you include URLs for any project you find on the web that you think is related (even if it not exactly the same) as your proposed idea.

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Writing (3 pts)

The writing must clearly present the important facts and be terse and concise. The nitty-gritty details aren’t needed at this point. The organization should follow the outline, and it’s encouraged (but not necessary) to use the outline bullets as section headings.

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Target User Group (3 pts)

Your target user group should be sensible (people you have access to) and not trivial (CS undergrads is not a challenge). Describe the user group in enough detail that you can easily separate the group from other types of people. Then include details about their needs and wants?

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Problem Description (3 pts)

The problem description should be short and specific about the high-level goals of the project. The problem should be described in terms of user activities and situations where the problem occurs, and what aspects of the situation might be improved with a technical solution. Avoid describing or suggesting a solution at this stage that will hamper your design thinking when you actually start solving the problem.

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Problem Context and Forces (3 pts)

The analysis section should give more background for the problem. What aspects of the situation might influence the problem solution? Think about location, time, environmental factors etc. Then think about aspects of the user group, their education, available time, motivation, values etc., What related or complementary solutions exist already?

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Solution Sketch (3 pts)

Give a very brief sketch of the kind of solution(s) you are considering. Since your problem has barely been specified and you haven’t done any user interviews, you probably don’t have enough information to make many design choices. So your solution sketch should be very general. This is an excellent place to make use of real sketches (drawings) as well as text.

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Submission

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Creating a Wiki Page for this assignment

Begin by creating a new wiki page for this assignment. Go to your user page that you created when you made your account. You can get to it by typing the following URL into your browser:

http://vis.berkeley.edu/courses/cs160-fa06/wiki/index.php/User:FirstName_LastName

Replace FirstName and LastName with your real first and last names. This will take you to the page you created for yourself when you created your wiki account. If you have trouble accessing this page, please check that you created your wiki account properly.

Edit your user page to add a link to a new wiki page for this assignment. The wiki syntax should look like this:

[[ProjectProposal-FirstNameLastName|Project Proposal]]

Again replace FirstName and LastName with your name. Look at my user page for an example. Then click on the link and enter the information about your assignment. Be sure to clearly address everything mentioned in the writing guidlines above.

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Uploading Images

To upload images to the wiki, first create a link for the image of the form [[Image:image_name.jpg]] (replacing image_name.jpg with a unique image name for use by the server). This will create a link you can follow that will then allow you to upload the image. Alternatively, you can use the "Upload file" link in the toolbox to upload the image first, and then subsequently create a link to it on your wiki page.

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Add Link to Your Finished Assignment

One you are finished editing the page, add a link to it here with full name as the link text. The wiki syntax will look like this: *[[ProjectProposal-FirstNameLastName|FirstName LastName]]. Hit the edit button for this section to see how I created the link for my name.


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