CS6455 *User Interface Design and Evaluation * Spring 2000

Announcements

General Information

Course time:   MWF 12:05-12:55 pm
Course location:  College of Computing Room 101

Course Instructor

 
Wendy Newstetter
Office: 131 College of Computing (CCB) 
Phone: 404-894-9219 
Email: wendy@cc.gatech.edu
Office Hours: Monday 11-12 or by appointment
Teaching Assistant
 
Lena Mamykina
Phone: 404-385-1102 
Email: mamykina@cc.gatech.edu
Office Hours: Wednesdays  1pm - 2pm or by appointment
Location: ECL lab, CoCB Room 259a
Grading
  • Classroom presentations  30% ( formal and informal)
  • Project related work:  40%
  • Individual written  work  30%   midterm/2 papers

    •  
    Reading Materials:
     
  • Weiss, R.S.  (1994)  Learning from Strangers: The art and method of qualitative interview studies. New York: The Free Press.
  • Beyer, H & Holtzblatt, K. (1998) Contextual design: Defining customer-centered systems. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
  • Papers to be copied and distributed in class.

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    Course Motivation

    Knowledge communities, or groupings of individuals with common or complementary interests pursuing common or complementary knowledge goals, have always existed in our world. Historically, educational institutions have been the most easily identifiable knowledge communities. Many of our colleges and universities began as groups of people pursuing common understandings around the creation, enhancement or sharing of certain bodies of knowledge.  But knowledge communities exist outside of formal educational settings.  Company boardrooms, chess clubs, soccer teams, quilting bees, cooking classes, manufacturing lines and Weight watchers all represent locales where people are growing skills and knowledge.  A family is a knowledge unit, so is a sorority or a labor  union.  A knowledge community may be formally linked and identified, as in a discipline-specific organization with a governing structure, clearly identified members and activities. Or it may be informal, with loose or constantly changing structure, membership and activities. Whenever people come together to pursue common knowledge goals, a knowledge community is born.

    In the age of the information revolution, knowledge communities are undergoing rapid changes in their existence, in their constituencies and in their methods.  Communications technologies have created the potential for knowledge communities where none existed before. Individuals who were part of a knowledge community for a limited amount of time, say the four years they were on a college campus to earn their undergraduate degree, now find themselves members of a life-long virtual knowledge community via the computer in their home or office. And, freed from the requirements of being physically present to participate, individuals suddenly have the opportunity to be members of many different knowledge communities, constrained only by their interests and available time.  The challenge for the HCI and software communities is to design environments that support and enhance the activities of knowledge building and information use.

    Traditional HCI task analysis and usability inspection methods are not particularly helpful in this endeavor.  That is why a diverse set of qualitative techniques have become increasingly more widespread in the HCI community. Interest in these techniques derives from their inherent focus on situated activity and cognition, that is, the playing out of real goals in real world contexts.  Such methods do not come without foundational assumptions about the nature of the world and of knowledge itself, assumptions that are in counterpoint to the assumptions of computer science   The goal of this course is to make those assumptions explicit, to explore a variety of qualitative methods and to use those methods to grapple with the technological enhancement of knowledge communities.
     

    Course Objectives

  • Students will develop an understanding of the various frameworks/paradigms that currently inform HCI work. Course readings will help to clarify the underlying philosophical assumptions that the frameworks imply including what counts as research, the questions asked, methods for data collection, the kinds of data collected.   This should help Ph.D. students who are beginning to develop research plans.
  • Students will begin to develop skills in collecting qualitative data for HCI development. Specific skills will include conducting ethnographic observations and interviews, writing fieldnotes and modeling observational data for requirements development.
  • Students will understand the challenges of designing for knowledge creation and sustenance. The focus here will be on mechanisms for developing requirements for computer technologies to support such activity.

    • Syllabus (subject to change)

    In fact, guaranteed to change.
     
     
    Week  Date  Topic & Readings Assignments
    1 1/10
    1/12
    1/14    		 Knowledge in the workplace
    Zuboff, S. (1988) In the age of the smart machine. Chap. 2.
    Brown and Duguid, organizational learning and communities of practice In Cohen Sproull Organizational learning. Sage 
    HUGHES    		 Home page, research objectives and current areas of interest
    Questions
    2 1/19
    1/21    		 Technology in the workplace
    Sachs, P. (Sept 1995) Transforming work: Collaboration, learning and design, Communications of the ACM. Vol 38, p.227-249
    Markus, M.L. & Keil, M. (1994) If we build it, they will come: Designing information systems people want to use. Sloan Management Review P. 11-25.
    Cognitive Science Speaker -Technology and Aging    		  Questions for discussion
    3 1/24
    1/26
    1/28    		 Frameworks for HCI Research
    Nielson, J. (1993) Usability Testing.  In Usability Engineering.
    Nardi, B.  (1996) Activity theory and HCI & Studying Context. In Bonnie Nardi (Ed).  Context and Consciousness: Activity theory and human computer interaction. Cambridge: MIT press. 
    Mehan,H. (1975) The Reality of Ethnomethodology. Malabar,FL:Kreiger press.    		 Questions for discussion
    4 1/31
    2/2    		 Usability Testing
    Group formation, web site identification, test plan development
    Test plan presentation and discussion
    Test results and discussion    		 Write responses to two posted questions in the co-web
    Notes from the class on CoWeb
    2/4 Usability guidelines and behavior specifications
    • In class today we will review a fairly hefty list of guidelines for achieving usability. These lists represent HCI work over the last decade or so. We will also look at examples of test protocols that should serve as models or starting point for your studies. 
    • I will pass out the Ecology and Habitats CD to the groups.This quasi-educational production was developed to help children in middle school understand what the Savannah River Plant (nuclear) is doing in terms of the environment. This is the beta version and does not run without manipulation on your part. In the main folder, open program by clicking ecology.exe. It will run as it should but the movies will not load automatically. You need to bring them up in the movies folder. You will need a PC to play them. 
    		 Notes on the CoWeb
    5 2/7
    2/9    		 Developing the test
    • Individually identify usability elements or principles that the test will address. Bring testable behavior specifications and test protocol to present and discuss with the class. 
    • Tuesday-Thursday: Testing in lab 

      • Schedule time with Margaret to conduct you test and enlist a user. (magbeier@cc.gatech.edu ) Class on Wednesday is time you can use for scheduling testing, so we will not meet. 

    2/11    		 Reporting on test 
    • Each group will present their findings to the class and turn in a report identifying problems and making recommendations. 
    6 2/14
    2/16
    2/18    		 Ethnography in Systems Design
    Ford, J & Wood, L. (1996) An overview of ethnography and system design. In D. Wixon & J. Ramey (Eds) Field methods casebook for software design. New York: Wiley.  Suchman, L. (1995) Making work visible. Communications of the ACM. 38:9. Pp. 56-64. 
    Hughes, Sommerville,Bentley & Randall. (1993) Designing with ethnography: Making work visible. Interacting with computers. Vol 5:2. Pp. 239-253.
    http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/cseg/projects/ariadne/docs/talking.html
    Brown, D. The challenges of user-based design in a medical  equipment market. In In D. Wixon & J. Ramey (Eds) Field methods casebook for software design. New york: Wiley    		 Power Point lecture slides
    7 2/21
    2/23
    2/25    		 Contextual Inquiry:  The basics
    Contextual Inquiry Chpts: 1-3;
    LFS 1-2
    CI 4; LFS 3    		  Proposal for project
    8 2/28 Interviewing /data capture Midterm due
    3/1 Discussion About Research Questions Research questions for the CoWeb

    3/2    		 Guest Speaker: Chris Longfield
    Chris Longfield, Intimate Observations: The Mitigation of Objectification
    Schwartzmen, Helen B., Access, Entry, and First Encounters, Ethnography in Organizations, 1993, London, Sage Publications
    9 3/13 Data collection and Interviewing
    Implementing the Naturalistic Inquiry
    3/15 Data collection and Interviewing (cont.)
    Learning from Strangers, Chapter 3
    3/17 Data collection and Interviewing (cont.)
    Learning from Strangers, Chapter 4
    10 3/20 Field Studies School
    Learning from Strangers, Chapter 5
    3/22 Field Studies School (cont.)
    Contextual Design, Chapter 5
    3/24 Field Studies School (cont.)
    Contextual Design, Chapter 6
    11 3/27
    3/29
    3/31    		 Field Studies School (week 2)
    No readings for this week.    		  
    12 4/3 Data Analysis
    Lofland and Lofland. (1995) Thinking Units from Analyzing Social Settings, Wadsworth Publishing Company,.
    Huberman and Miles. (1994) Data Management and Analysis Methods from Handbook of Qualitative Research, Sage Publications,.
    4/5 Data Analysis (cont.)
    4/7 Data Analysis (cont.)
    13 4/10 Data Representation
    Contextual Design, Chapter 8    		  Interim project report
    4/12 Data Representation (cont.)
    Contextual Design, Chapter 9
    4/15 Data Representation (cont.)
    Contextual Design, Chapter 10
    14 4/17 Data Transformation
    Contextual Design, Chapter 11
    4/19 Data Transformation (cont.)
    Contextual Design, Chapter 12
    4/21 Data Transformation (cont.)
    Contextual Design, Chapter 13
    15 4/24
    4/26
    4/28    		 Presentations Final project report & presentation

    Project-Related Deliverables

    Project Overview

    The project goal is for you to understand firsthand the value and difficulty of using qualitative methods in developing design requirements.  To understand the challenges and affordances of such methods you have to practice them, not just read about them.   Over the course of the project you will practice the following:
     


    The project requires you to develop a set of design requirements for a ?system? that will support and potentially enhance the practices of a knowledge community.   The requirements will come out of the qualitative studies you conduct in this community.
     

    Project Phases

    Week 6:   2/14  Identifying a community
    Week 7:  2/21  Getting in/Gaining Access
    Week 8-10:  2/28  Implementing the inquiry
    Week 11 &12 : 3/27  Transforming the Inquiry
    Week 13:  4/10  Consultations
    Week 14:  4/17  Writing up the Inquiry.
    Week 15:  4/24   Presenting the Inquiry

    Last Modified on  .
    Problems? Questions? Corrections? Email mamykina@cc.gatech.edu