Assignment P3 -- Project Proposal

Due date: Post on your website before 11:59 PM October 18.

Todos

1. Post your project proposal on the website

We would like you to expand upon your idea that you submitted in P1. In particular, we would like to see the following sections in a writeup that is no more than 1000 words. Make sure your approach and representative tasks are specific. You should look at all past projects from 2005 and other projects from the last few years to see what other people have done and to get ideas for your writing your proposal.

1. Need and Idea - What is the need you are trying to address? What group are you targeting? Is your user group too generic? It is often helps if you target a more specific group of users (firefighters, musicians, physicians, card-game players, etc ...) rather than just "people who use the web."
2. Existing Approaches - What already exists to solve this problem, if any? If it already exists, how is your interaction different?
3. Your Approach - What will your system do? What is the interaction that takes place in your system? Is this interaction interesting? Is there a good back-and-forth? We don't want a simple interaction between the user and the system. For example, the user should have to do more than input information and get some output (such as route planning, where the user puts in two addresses and gets a map). What particular parts of your system will you prototype and test? See the overview for a discussion of how to scope your solution.
4. Representative Tasks (3 total) - Provide three tasks that users should be able to accomplish using the prototype you develop. We want an easy task, a medium task, and a hard tasks. See the overview for some examples of how to pick good representative tasks. In general, they should be varied enough that they let you test several different paths through your system. These tasks should help you gauge the general usability of the system you are designing.