Winter 2011
Monday and Wednesday, 10:30 to 11:50
EEB 031
Provides an introduction to several major areas of HCI research. This course is a combination of readings, small labs at the beginning of the term, and a term project.
The reading component of this course will require preparing reports on a combination of historical and recent papers. This will help you examine what the HCI community considers a meaningful contribution across a variety of problems, thus preparing you to make contributions in these and other areas of HCI.
This course is explicitly not focused on the methods used in HCI practice. The initial labs will introduce heuristic evaluation, but the focus of this course is on research. The course does not assume a strong background in HCI (i.e., there is no prerequisite).
The project component of this course will require hands-on experience with HCI research. You can choose to design and implement a new piece of HCI technology or to design and execute an appropriately compelling study with HCI research implications.
There are several research papers to be read for each day of class. This course will be based on those readings, several small labs, and a term project.
Class discussions should be informal and enjoyable, as it is important that everybody feel comfortable commenting and offering their insight. The participation component of grading in this course will be based on active participation in discussion throughout the course.
Grading will roughly correspond to 50% project, 25% reading reports, 15% labs, and 10% class participation.
I will expect you to have read and thought carefully about each reading. To help you out, I will require participation in a reading report forum.
Unless otherwise noted, you must post 300 to 500 words related to the readings for each day of class, in the appropriate part of this forum:
https://catalyst.uw.edu/gopost/board/jaf1978/19846/
You can start a new discussion, participate in an existing discussion, or do a bit of both. You can discuss all of the assigned readings, or focus on a portion of the reading that you found most interesting. You can put all of your 300 to 500 words in one post, or spread them out across several.
The important part is that we can see an intellectual effort in your forum participation, not just simple summaries of papers. Your participation in each day's forum discussion will be graded on a scale from 0 to 3. You get a 0 if you do not participate. You get 1 if your participation seems weak and does not convince us that you understood the readings. Most grades will be 2, if your participation shows that you clearly read and understood the papers and had something interesting to say. 3 is reserved for especially insightful participation.
In discussing readings, note that it is generally easy to find something to criticize in any piece of research, but that focusing exclusively on this is typically not productive. You will generally find it more intellectually worthwhile to focus on what aspects of a piece of work are particularly well done, what new ideas are prompted by a piece of work, or what you might have done differently if you conducted the research. This will also lead to much more valuable discussions.
Potential topics for discussion are:
Participation will only "count" if posted by 3:00 AM before each class meeting. This ensures that the day's discussion coordinator has ample time to review discussion the next morning. Feel free to continue a discussion thread after this time (and even after class), but know that you need to post before then in order to get discussion credit.
There will be several short labs at the beginning of the term. The first will focus on designing and prototyping an interface, the second will focus on evaluating an interface made by somebody else, and the third will focus on simple regression analyses.
Term projects will be a major focus of this course. You will form groups, submit a proposal, present at the mid-term, and present at the end of the quarter.
Projects can be studies or implementations. Brainstorm amongst yourselves, talk with other people, or otherwise come up with a great idea for a project. I intend to be highly available to meet and discuss potential projects.
We will use this DropBox for most submissions:
I encourage you to feel comfortable discussing any aspects of this class with both myself and the TA. I am also happy to provide a mechanism for anonymous feedback:
Date |
Reading |
Presenter |
Assignments |
January 3 [slides] |
Overview I No Reading Assigned Paper Prototyping Information (related to Lab 1): Gomoll, Kathleen. (1992). Some Techniques for Observing Users. From The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, 85-90. [local pdf] Rettig, Marc. (1994). Prototyping for Tiny Fingers. Communications of the ACM (CACM), 37(4), 21-27. [local pdf] Snyder, Carolyn. (2003). Paper Prototyping, Chapter 4. [local pdf] Nielsen Norman Group. Paper Prototyping: A How-To Video. [local mov] [local wmv] |
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January 6 [slides] |
Overview II Bush, V. (1945). As We May Think. Atlantic Monthly. [available online] Heuristic Evaluation Information (related to Lab 2): Nielsen, J. Heuristic Evaluation. [available online] |
Lab 1 Due |
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January 10 [slides] |
Design of Everyday Things Design of Everyday Things, Chapters 1 to 7 |
Lab 2 Due |
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January 12 [slides] |
Experimental Design and Statistics No Reading Assigned |
Project Groups Due |
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January 17 |
No Class (Martin Luther King Day) |
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January 19 [slides] |
On Appropriate Evaluation Greenberg, S. and Buxton, B. (2008). Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful (Some of the Time). Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), pp. 111-120. [local pdf] Olsen, D.R. (2007). Evaluating User Interface Systems Research. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2007), pp. 251-258. [local pdf] |
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January 24 [slides] |
Projected Interaction Wellner, P. (1993). Interacting with Paper on the DigitalDesk. Communications of the ACM (CACM), 36(7), pp. 87-96. [local pdf] Kane, S.K., Avrahami, D., Wobbrock, J.O., Harrison, B., Rea, A.D., Philipose, M., and LaMarca, A. (2009). Bonfire: A Nomadic System for Hybrid Laptop-Tabletop Interaction. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2009), pp. 129-138. [local pdf] |
Intel Labs Seattle |
Final Project Proposal Due |
January 26 [slides] |
Software Design Weiser, M. (1982). Programmers Use Slices When Debugging. Communication of the ACM, 25(7), pp. 446-452. [local pdf] Ko, A.J. and Myers, B.A. (2009). Finding Causes of Program Output with the Java WhyLine. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009), pp. 1569-1578. [local pdf] |
Information School |
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January 31 |
Large Scale Log Analysis Jaime has asked that you focus on the large-scale analysis method within these papers Jansen, B.J., Spink, A., and Saracevic, T. (2000). Real Life, Real Users, and Real Needs: A Study and Analysis of User Queries on the Web. Information Processing and Management. 36(2), pp. 207-227. [local pdf] Tyler, S.K. and Teevan, J. (2010). Large Scale Query Log Analysis of Re-Finding. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2010), pp. 191-200. [local pdf] Kohavi, R. and Longbotham, R. (2007). Online Experiments: Lessons Learned. IEEE Computer, 40(9), pp. 103-105. [local pdf] |
Microsoft Research |
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February 2 [slides] |
Human Performance MacKenzie, I.S. (1992). Fitts' Law as a Research and Design Tool in Human-Computer Interaction. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), 7(1), pp. 91-139. [local pdf] Zhai, S., Hunter, M., and Smith, B.A. (2002). Performance Optimization of Virtual Keyboards. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), 17(2&3), pp. 229-270. [local pdf] Optional Additional Material: Fitts, P.M. (1954). The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 47(6), pp. 381-391. [local pdf] |
Information School |
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February 7 [slides] |
Persuasive Technology Fogg, B.J. (1998). Persuasive Computers: Perspectives and Research Directions. Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 1998), 225-232. [local copy] Consolvo, S., McDonald, D. W., and Landay, J. A. (2009). Theory-driven Design Strategies for Technologies That Support Behavior Change in Everyday Life. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009), 405-414. [local copy] |
Human Centered Design & Engineering Information School |
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February 9 |
In-Progress Project Presentations |
In-Progress Project Presentations Due |
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February 14 [slides] |
User Interface Tools Myers, B., Hudson, S.E., and Pausch, R. (2000). Past, Present, and Future of User Interface Software Tools. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 7(1), pp. 3-28. [local pdf] Dixon, M. and Fogarty, J. (2010). Prefab: Implementing Advanced Behaviors Using Pixel-Based Reverse Engineering of Interface Structure. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2010). [local pdf] |
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February 16 [slides] |
Information Visualization Heer J., Viégas F.B., Wattenberg M. (2007). Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Information Visualization. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI 2007), 1029-1038. [local pdf] Segel, E. and Heer, J. (2010). Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (InfoVis 2010), 16(6), 1139-1148. [local pdf] |
Jock Mackinlay Tableau |
Lab 3 Due |
February 21 |
No Class (President's Day) |
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February 23 [slides] |
CSCW and Social Computing Grudin, J. (1994). Groupware and Social Dynamics: Eight Challenges for Developers. Communications of the ACM (CACM), 37(1), pp. 92-105. [local pdf] Bigham, J.P., Jayant, C., Ji, H., Little, G., Miller, A., Miller, R.C., Miller, R., Tatrowicz, A., White, B., White, S., Yeh, T. (2010). VizWiz: Nearly Real-Time Answers to Visual Questions. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, 333-342. [local pdf] |
Microsoft Research |
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February 28 [slides] |
Direct Manipulation Hutchins, E.L., Hollan, J.D., Norman, D.A. (1985). Direct Manipulation Interfaces. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), 1(4), pp. 311-338. [local pdf] Dragicevic, P., Ramos, G., Bibliowitcz, J., Nowrouzezahrai, D., Balakrishnan, R., and Singh, K. (2008). Video Browsing by Direct Manipulation. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), pp. 237-246. [local pdf] |
Microsoft |
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March 2 |
Alternative Notions of "Impact" in HCI Preparatory work sent by email. |
Microsoft Research |
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March 7 [slides] |
Accessibility Bigham, J.P., Cavender, A.C., Brudvik, J.T., Wobbrock, J.O., and Ladner, R.E. (2007). WebinSitu: A Comparative Analysis of Blind and Sighted Browsing Behavior. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2007), 51-58. [local pdf] Bigham, J.P., Jayant, C., Ji, H., Little, G., Miller, A., Miller, R.C., Miller, R., Tatrowicz, A., White, B., White, S., Yeh, T. (2010). VizWiz: Nearly Real-Time Answers to Visual Questions. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, 333-342. [local pdf] Optional Additional Material: A. Cavender, S. Trewin, V. Hanson. General Writing Guidelines for Technology and People with Disabilities [available online] |
CSE |
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March 9 |
Final Project Presentations |
Final Project Presentations Due |
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March 16 |
Final Project Report Due |