Project proposal

This section describes a project milestone. See the schedule for due dates.

A project proposal identifies your users, and their problems or challenges, and captures some desired outcomes from the point-of-view of the user. This document reflects the Understanding Phase of the Design Thinking process.

What to include

This document should be a wiki page in your GitLab project named Project Proposal. Make sure to link this page to the README.md file so that users can easily find it.

You should include the following sections.

1. Empathize

This section should include the following.

  1. A clear statement identifying your users. Be specific about who the group includes, and what specifically what role or tasks you wish to target.

    Tip: it’s often helpful to have tasks in mind that you can use to guide questions. Targeting “CS students who want to plan their courses” is better (more-focused and more usable) than “CS students”.

  2. Interview notes from at least 2 interviews with people that identify with your group. Write down key insights from the interviews (bullet-points of main points is fine; don’t try and transcribe everything that is said).

    Tip: ask open questions either to help you identify some tasks or specifically to understand how they perform some challenging tasks. Make sure to look for things they like/dislike, and try to identify problem areas for them.

  3. One or more personas that describe your users. Include goals, motivations, likes and dislikes in your profile.

    Tip: the format of a persona isn’t that important, as long as you have key information captured. You can create your own layout, or use the template that is provided in the public repository

2. Define

From your interview data, you should produce the following.

  1. User stories. You should be able to list at least 3-4 user stories that describe challenging tasks, problems, or “desirable functionality” from the point of view of your users. These should come directly from the interview data (above).

  2. A problem statement. This should be a short paragraph summarizing the user, their context and the underlying problem you will address. We will use this as the basis of your solution.

    Tip: It may be helpful to think of this as the “underlying problem” that you are addressing. I also like to think of this as the first half of the “elevator pitch” of what your product is/does, that motivates why we need to build a solution. Do NOT attempt to define a solution in detail; that’s done in the next phase.

Where to store this document

Your proposal should be contained in a Wiki page titled Project Proposal, and linked from the README.md file of your GitLab project.

How to submit

When completed, please submit for grading.

Caution

Note that only one person on the team needs to submit team deliverables. The submission will be associated with your team, not the person that submitted it.

Login to Learn, navigate to the Submit > Dropbox > Project Proposal page, and submit a link to your top-level project page.

Proposals must be submitted by the listed time and date.