CS6455 User Interface Design and Evaluation

Announcements

March 31.

Revised Schedule

Project Deliverables

If you're interested in Grounded Theory in practice, read this

Getting Approval letters from the IRB

January 19th, Please bring the Sommerville and Anderson articles to class, in addition to your summaries of them. You will turn in the summaries, but we will be discussing those articles as a group and you will find it useful to have them to refer to during the discussion.

January 16th, we have a Swiki

January 11th, I have added course notes from today for Thursday, see the schedule

Schedule

Readings

Overview: Motivation

Qualitative methods such as naturalistic inquiry and ethnography play an important role in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Organisational Information Systems, and Ubiquitous Computing.  Instead of assuming that we can design software that people can and want to use, qualitative methods seek to understand what people want to do with computers and what technology means to them.  Qualitative methods while complementing other empirical approaches to understanding how to design usable and useful computer systems, differ in the type of questions that they can answer and their approach to resolving problems.

This class is intended to be an introduction to qualitative methods.  I will begin by introducing the disciplinary origins of many qualitative methods that came from anthropology and sociology.  By learning about the questions that qualitative methods were originally designed to answer, we’ll learn about how they can best be applied to questions of computer science and system design.  This will be followed by looking at various data gathering and analysis techniques that form the core of qualitative methods.

Methods classes can not proceed without practical experimentation.  In this class we will combine learning about methods through instruction with learning about methods through doing.  Finally, we will compliment our theoretical and practical knowledge with an examination of contemporary qualitative empirical research in Computer Science.

Goals

Students will begin to learn the details of collecting HCI data using qualitative methods.  Methods will include observation, interviewing, writing fieldnotes, and analysis.

Students should also begin to learn when to select different methods, and how to combine a variety of techniques to produce appropriate study designs.

This should help PhD students developing research plans that include empirical work, and Masters students in developing strategies for using qualitative research techniques in the workplace.

General Information