<p>Well, “Design a better GUI” sounds more like a development problem (especially in software engineering). A CS research I think, should be scientific and investigative in nature. For instance, the research I could be doing the following summer is related to cryptography, something with a more well-defined problem and requires long term experimentation and problem solving. On the other hand, at MS, I probably will just be coding up solutions all the time, to problems that are pretty implementation based. That is, using existing technology plus problem solving.</p>
<p>Personally, I would prefer the MS position. However, I hope such experience won’t be neglected by grad school, because it’s not research at all, which is what many people claim here.</p>