CSE 271: User Interface Design: Social and
Technical Issues
Projects
Your paper should be 10 to 30 pages long, and is due noon on Wednesday of
finals week (22 March). You are expected to adhere to the usual standards of
good academic writing; in particular, you should have a good bibliography,
where each item contains the usual scholarly information (author, publisher,
year, etc.) - do NOT just give a list of URLs. You should provide proper
citations for any theories, methods, or not generally known facts that you
use. Section and subsection titles should be used; use footnotes if they
help; be sure to number your pages. You MUST disclose if your paper
overlaps, or will overlap, with anything submitted to any other course, and
you MUST disclose any other persons who were significantly involved in
its production.
The topic of your paper can be tailored to your interests and talents, but
please note that because this course is about user interface design,
not about implementation, it is not appropriate to undertake a large
implementation project; most of your effort should go into design and/or
evaluation of user interface issues. And of course, the content of
your paper should also relate to the themes of this particular course. You
may wish to form a team in order to make a larger contribution, facilitate
learning, and have an experience more like the (so called) real world. Since
most of your grade will depend on your paper, it should represent a
substantial amount of work and be of a high quality; moreover, if N people
work together, the result should be N times as substantial as a single author
paper.
The following are some suggestions for topics:
- Discuss problems of applying computer technology to education from a CSCW
perspective; do a thorough literature search; if possible, do a case study; at
least, be sure to cite and discuss some recent case studies.
- Study the user interface of some popular system like ICQ or a web search
engine, use the idea of semiotic morphisms to show that various design choices
are suboptimal, and suggest some improvements; you may also argue that some
design choices are good.
- Give a careful discussion of several different bibliographic citation
styles (e.g., by examining several books, papers and journal, or by examining
LaTeX bibliographic style files); give precise descriptions of these style as
sign systems, with attention to their social context. (This study could be
similar to that of representations for time in An Introduction to Algebraic Semiotics, with
Applications to User Interface Design.)
- Study representation issues in detail for some other interesting kind of
information, such as sports scores, or TV listings.
- Use algebraic semiotics to prove that some interesting
representation in some user interface is better (or worse) than some other
representation, by formalizing the relevant parts of the sign systems
involved.
- Design, prototype and (most importantly) evaluate a simple system using
some of the principles in Andersen's Multimedia phase spaces paper.
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Last modified: Sun Apr 2 22:43:12 PDT 2000