Final project: The full audit
The capstone — take Assignment 2's audit and turn it into a complete, standalone case study of a real product's suggestion design
Due: 28 May 2027 · Weight: 40%
The brief#
Take the feature you audited for Assignment 2, and produce the audit you didn’t have time to write the first time.
The final project is not a second, different audit — it’s Assignment 2 done at full depth, on the same feature, informed by everything the second half of the semester added: the forecasting week’s questions about hidden uncertainty, the co-writing week’s questions about disclosure, and week 12’s framework for asking whose interest a suggestion actually serves. A project that switches features at this stage is choosing to start over with three weeks less time than Assignment 2 had, which rarely goes well.
“Full depth” means the audit could be read by someone with no connection to this course and land as a complete, convincing case study — not a course assignment that happens to be long. It should end somewhere Assignment 2 didn’t: a specific proposed change to the feature’s design, argued from the evidence you gathered, not a general wish that the feature were more transparent.
What you submit#
- the complete audit, as a standalone document — expect somewhere in the region of 2,500–3,500 words, though the marking is holistic and a shorter piece that earns its length is not penalised for being shorter
- your evidence base (input lists, screenshots, logs) as an appendix
- a short note, no more than 150 words, on what changed between your Assignment 2 audit and this one, and why
The spec
The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.
- it stands alone — a reader who has not seen Assignment 2 can follow it completely, including the feature it audits and the method used
- it extends Assignment 2's audit rather than repeating it, with either a wider comparison set, a longer observation period, or a deeper mechanism analysis of the same feature
- it applies the week 12 persuasion framework explicitly, arguing whose interest the audited feature's design serves and what evidence supports that claim
- it proposes one concrete, specific change to the feature's design, not a general call for more transparency
How it is marked
The final project is judged as a single piece of work: whether it reads as a complete, standalone audit rather than an extended assignment; whether its claims are backed by evidence gathered using the semester's methods rather than by general impressions of the feature; and whether it engages honestly with the persuasion framework from week 12 rather than treating the feature it audits as neutral by default. A project that is narrower than Assignment 2 but genuinely deeper marks higher than one that is broader but repeats the same kind of finding at greater length.