Project Written Report Guidelines
This outlines some minimal requirements for producing a written report to describe your project. The goal of this document is not to be completely prescriptive. Each project is different and will require different sections or different type of presentation. These guidelines provide some minimal content, formatting, and structural requirements.
Content Requirements
First and foremost, the content of your report must completely describe the work that you did in each phase (or intervention). This includes, but may not be limited to; objectives, methods utilized, steps or process employed, prompts designed, architectural designs, results and insights gained.
Formatting Requirements
The main body text should be single-spaced using a serif font of at least 12 point. All titling, headings and subheadings should be a sans-serif font at least 12 point size. The page left margin should be 1.5 inches and all other margins should be 1 inch. Each page of the report body should include a footer with the last names of the project team members left justified and a page number right justified. The report should be printed single sided on US Letter sized paper (8.5” x 11”).
Required Structural Components
Your project report will have the following structure in the order provided here.
Title page
The title page should include the project name/title, the names of the project group, the academic quarter and submission date.
Abstract
The abstract is a single page that consists of the project title (center justified), a 300 word statement and a set of keywords for your project. The 300 word statement should describe the problem addressed by your project, a description of the work completed and a summary of any findings or lessons learned. Below the abstract should be a line with the word “Keywords:” followed by a list of up to 5 terms that you would use to describe your project.
Table of Contents
You should create a table of contents for your report. This should contain titles and page numbers for the main sections and first level subsections of your report. The table of contents should include entries for any appendices in your report.
Report Body
There is no specific requirement as to the number of sections for your report. The main requirement is that you will need to structure the report so that it is clear and structured in a way that makes sense. Grammar and spelling count. The first page of the report body should be page 1 of your report.
Appendix
Appendices should be used for all additional supplementary materials. For example, you should use an appendix for survey data, interview summaries, oversized diagrams, or exemplary design materials. You should use an appendix for any supporting materials which you will want to reference in the body of your report, but which cannot be placed directly in the body. Individual appendices are lettered (e.g. Appendix A, Appendix B, etc.). Pages in the appendices should have a footer, just like all other pages in the body of the document (i.e., names of the project team members left justified and a page number right justified). Any oversized pages should be folded to fit inside the bounds of the US Letter size of the document body.
References
You are responsible for appropriately citing material and methods that you use. Some projects are directly based on prior literature. If your project relies on prior literature, then you need to cite the related work. If your project relies on some existing software or some specific tool, you need to appropriately indicate that and cite the sources for the software or tool. For example, if you require a version of Flash, or if your system used some bit of open-source software; state that and cite your sources. Except for the most rudimentary methods (e.g. interviewing, wire frames, paper prototyping, etc.), you should cite methods that you use in each phase. In the body of your document, you should cite references using either a number in brackets (e.g., [3]) where the number represents the ordinal position of the cited work in an alphabetical listing by the first authors’ last name, or using the author-year (e.g., (Frackas 1997)) convention. In the references section, references should be in a numbered list, ordered alphabetically by the last name of the first author. References should be formatted using the Chicago Manual of Style format (this is the same as that used for many ACM publications). You can find a brief version of the Chicago style at http://www.lib.washington.edu/research/wri.html. If you are uncertain what needs citation, then you should check with a TA or the instructor.