Team Project Work Plan

CMSC 434/828 Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems
University of Maryland, Deptartment of Computer Science, Spring 2000
Dr. B. Shneiderman

Proposal (Week 3)
One page: project title, list of team members (2-4 people), paragraph or two describing your project, list of independent variables (and treatments for each) and dependent variables (usually performance variables such as time or errors, plus subjective ratings), your hypotheses, and number plus source of subjects.

Materials (Week 5)
The first draft of the full set of materials you will need to run your experiment. These may include instructions to the participants, background surveys, questionnaires, task lists, programs, etc. If possible provide me a disk of your experiment or do a demo at my office.

References (Week 6)
Hand in a one page list of 5-12 references to the literature related to your experimental project with a sentence or two of how each relates to your project. These should be as specific as possible and include previous experimental studies.

Pilot results (Week 7)
One page: report how many pilot subjects you tested (should be at least 1-2 per experimental treatment), list the changes you made to your materials, and give the planned times for each phase of your experiment (beware of too short or too long).

Statistics (Week 8)
Create fake data that you would like to get from your experiment and format it properly for processing by a statistics package, spreadsheet, or programs you create. Generate the statistical analysis, produce the tables (means, standard deviations, ranges, etc.) and figures (plots, bar charts, etc.) that you will use for your final report. Bar charts should show standard deviation bars. When you have your actual data it should be easy to simply re-run your analysis programs to generate your actual final report. You are welcome to use whatever statistical package you like (SAS, SPSS, Excel, etc.) and get whatever statistical assistance you can find on campus or elsewhere.

Raw Data (Week 9)
Should be a small number of pages, preferably one, with the raw data from your experiment.

Draft Introduction (Week 10)
First cut at your Introduction and Experiment description sections. I will provide feedback to help you improve. Do your best to develop your theory and present your hypotheses.

Final Project (Week 13)
This is it! No excuses, no delays. Everyone prepares their project on the class website. Class presentations of results - 10 minutes per project using PowerPoint slides.

Student Critiques (Week 14)
Students sign up to read one other project and send an email note (to the professor and the project team) with one paragraph of supportive comments and one paragraph of suggested improvements. The project team uses this feedback to revise their web presentation.

Department of Computer Sciences: Direct questions and comments to the student editorial team