I suggest the following organization, but you may find an organization that works better for your project or want to adjust the relative sizes of different pieces:
Introduction: 100-150 words. Very concise description of the work and its main contributions.
Methods: 200-300 words. What you did with specifics enough to support your contributions.
Results: 200-300 words. What you found out, and what you'd like readers to find out.
Conclusions: 100-150 words. Some recap of the contributions and things that you would like readers to walk away with. What would you like them to "conclude" about the work you are presenting?
For the draft abstract, your work won't be done and parts of this abstract will be fiction. However, it is still a useful exercise (and a class assignment) to write the abstract. Much of the introduction, methods, and conclusions can be derived from your proposals, although the proposal contents will likely need to be distilled some. Make up the rest as best you can. Put some incomplete sentences in the results; i.e., "the graph in Fig 1 shows that users described our visualization method as N times better than method X." Having slots like this to fill in will guide the work that you do. You just need to fill them in. You should write the abstract to represent what you think you will be able to complete in the subsequent 2.5 weeks, since that's when the final version of the abstract is due.
If figures are appropriate, leave empty boxes for them in the draft or put in a hand-drawn placeholder. Think of them as slots to fill in as in the incomplete sentences above. Write the figure captions. What is the figure? What does it show? What should the reader take away from it?
Copyright 2000 David H. Laidlaw