Choosing a good topic for the HCI project

A good topic is a topic such that:

You have access to representative users of your system ("target users")
You have access to the field for supporting observation and evaluation in situ: intuition and laboratory evaluations are not enough.
The HCI is sufficiently elaborated and/or innovative so that the best design is not obvious. For example, many simple problems are solved with a simple web form and a validation button: these are not good topics for this project. Finding the best design must require to carefully apply the full development process from analysis to rapid prototyping for supporting early evaluation.

The system can be:

An existing system which HCI deserves improvement (for instance, a system for choosing items to order): your challenge is to invent a better HCI. The innovation may consist in a better identification of functions and/or a better presentation. It may also be the support of a new platform: for instance, moving from PC to smartphone to allow mobile usage. The benefit of improving an existing system is to possibly to re-use the functional core.
A completely new system to create from scratch from the idea to its prototyping. The benefit of such topics is that the design is not constrained by users' habits acquired on previous systems.

The system can not be a system which worth comes from the functional core: there would be no UI to create.

You should make reasonable hypotheses about available technologies: for example, that every object is connected, but not that cars are flying.

This year, we are encouraging projects suitable for exploitation. Possible topics are, but not exclusively: