CS6455 - User Interface Design and Evaluation

Spring 2002

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General Information

Course meeting time Tuesdays, Thursdays, 12-1:30
Course location College of Computing, Room 101
Class CoWeb http://swiki.cc.gatech.edu:8080/cs6455
Course instructor and contact information Wendy Newstetter
   3301B.1 Institute for Biosciences and Bioengineering
   (404) 931-8586
   wendy@cc.gatech.edu
   Office hours: Tuesday 1:30-3:30
Teaching assistant Michael Terry
   mterry@cc.gatech.edu
   Office hours: Wednesdays, 2-3, Thursdays 11-12 CRB 343
   Online calendar: http://calendar.yahoo.com/soulfry99
Reading materials

Required texts

  • Weiss, R.S.  (1994) Learning from Strangers: The art and method of qualitative interview studies. New York: The Free Press

  • Handwerker, W. Penn (2001) Quick Ethnography. Altamira Press

Optional texts

  • Beyer, H & Holtzblatt, K. (1998) Contextual design: Defining customer-centered systems. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.

Grading Project: 50%

Students will identify a project to work on for seven weeks. The project will require the use of qualitative and contextual design methods for requirements capture or evaluation. Teams of no more than 3 students may work together.

Mid-term, TBA: 25%

Individual written work, participation:  25%

 

Syllabus

Week/Date Topics Readings Assignments
1. 1/10 Technology in the workplace

Introduction to class
  1. Markus, M.L. & Keil, M. (1994) If we build it, they will come: Designing information systems people want to use. Sloan Management Review. pp.11-25.
  2. Sachs, P. (Sept 1995) Transforming work: Collaboration, learning and design, Communications of the ACM. Vol 38, p.227-249
  •  Introduce yourself and create workspaces for the class. Create or link a home page off the class CoWeb.
  • Write a one-page or more summary/ reflection/response to one of the articles. Post on Co-web.
2. 1/15, 1/17 Knowledge in a Community

  1. Brown and Duguid,(1991) Organizational learning and communities of practice. Organization Science 2:1

  2. Zuboff, S. (1988) In the age of the smart machine. Chap. 2.

  3. Forsythe,D.(2001) Engineering knowledge: The construction of knowledge in AI in Studying those who study us.
  • Two reflections
3. 1/22, 1/24 Frameworks for HCI Research

 

  1. The case for Qualitative research

  2. 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.
  • One reflection
4. 1/29, 1/31 Frameworks for HCI Research

  1. Mehan,H. (1975) The Reality of Ethnomethodology.

  2. Suchman, L. (1995) Making work visible. Communications of the ACM. Vol 38.Pgs 56-64.

  3. Heath & Luff. (1996) Convergent activities: Line control and passenger information on the London Underground. In Engstrom & Middleton
  • One reflection

 
5. 2/5, 2/7 Ethnography in Systems Design

  1. Ford, J & Wood, L. (1996) An overview of ethnography and system design. In D. Wixon & J. Ramey (Eds) Field methods casebook for software design.

  2. Hughes, Sommerville, Bentley & Randall. (1993) Designing with ethnography: Making work visible. Interacting with computers. Vol 5:2. pp.239-253.
 
6. 2/12, 2/14 Ethnography in Practice
  1. QE chapter 1
  • Exam
7. 2/19, 2/21 Project Planning

  1. QE Chapter 2

  2. QE Chapter 3
  • Project proposal

 
8. 2/26, 2/28 Interviewing

  1. Weiss 1&2

  2. Weiss 3&4
  • Final project proposal
9. 3/12, 3/14 Doing Field Work    
10. 3/19, 3/21 Contextual Representations    
11. 3/26, 3/28 Doing Field Work    
12. 4/2, 4/4      
13. 4/9, 4/11      
14. 4/16, 4/18      
15. 4/23, 4/25      
May 3rd     Final project due

 

Course Motivation and Objectives

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

  1. 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.
  2. Students will begin to develop skills in collecting qualitative data for HCI development. Specific skills will include conducting ethnographic observations and interviews, writing field notes and modeling observational data for requirements development. 
  3. Students will understand the challenges of designing for both usability and usefulness. The focus will be on mechanisms for developing requirements for computer technologies to support such activity.

Questions/comments? Contact Michael Terry at mterry@cc.gatech.edu