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WEB204 » 01) Proposal of Project & Research Activities

Each team in this Research Methodologies class will need to pick a website to conduct their Research Activities upon. This website should be a medium to bigger sized business that is currently in existence and that you or your teammates are not involved in.

This website that you choose will be the website that you will use to conduct the rest of your Research Activities upon. Therefore, it is important that you choose wisely.

There are a number of key elements that should be included in your research activities proposal:

1. History: This is the section that can give background information of the company or organization that own the website or product that you will be researching. This can and should any business objectives of the company or organization and should also discuss any research (and findings) that has been performed in the past.
2. Objectives: This is where you will discuss what you hope to achieve by conducting this research, including goals and data. This will help define expectations of the project and the activities.
3. Methods: This is where you will detail the methods that you will be using in your study and how you plan to analyze the data. Often times the one reading this proposal (the project stakeholders) may not be familiar with the research activities. Therefore, you will need to give background information on each method you plan to use in your study.
4. User Profiles: Here is where you will need to research and describe the people that will potentially be participating in the study. Be as specific as possible as you will need to recruit the participants at a later date.
5. Recruitment: This is where you will need to describe how many participants you will potentially need, how you will recruit them for your study, and who’s responsibility it is to actually recruit them.
6. Incentives: Because we should not expect anyone to participate for free, we will need to describe how we plan to compensate the participants.
7. Responsibilities & (Proposed) Schedule: As many proposals do, you will need to set a proposed schedule of your activities. This should include assigning roles, responsibilities and deliverable dates. This is incredibly important meow.

Requirements:

• This Project Proposal Shall be written as to describe the motivations for choosing said website project as your test subject to complete the research methodologies in this class.
• Each proposal shall contain but not be limited to: 1) the Name of the Business, 2) the url of the business, 3) a description and history of the business and its business goals, 4) a description of who the potential users of this website are, tasks they may perform and their goals for using this website, 5) a description of what research methodologies you will use and what you hope to accomplish by using said research methodologies and 6) a proposed schedule for said activities.
• Post a link to this assignment in the comments section AND print all of this out and turn in as your Preliminary Project Proposal assignment according to the class Schedule (Spring) or Schedule (Winter).

Tip: Remember who your audience is when writing this proposal. You should write this in a manner that your potential stakeholders will understand. Do not assume that they know anything about usability research methods or what it takes to conduct them. ;-)

Examples: 

• Project Proposal for SugarSync | Mike Sinkula, Shubha Sastry, Ruby Kuo & Jake Sparling
• Project Proposal for Seattle Tilth | Cameron Kunz, Michelle Szwedo, Jeff Reynolds
• Project Proposal for MediaTek, Inc. | Brian Baker, Spencer Echon, Richard Gamino & Patrick Lyons