Objectives
This course is intended for students who are interested in learning about, or refining their skill in, empirical research methods in interactive systems. The course will be of particular interest to researchers (including students) who are striving to develop and evaluate new interfaces or interaction techniques, with the goal of publishing the results in a research journal or conference proceedings. As well as studying methods of evaluation with users, the course includes a focus on building and testing models of interaction, including descriptive, analytic, and predictive models.
Content
The following topics are included in this course:
- What is empirical research?
- What is the scientific method?
- Discovering and narrowing in on topics suitable for research in HCI
- Formulating "testable" research questions
- Modeling Interaction
- Types of models (descriptive, analytic, predictive)
- Examples of models (keystroke-level models, Fitts' law, 3-state model forgraphical input, bimanual control model, etc.)
- How to design a user experiment to answer research questions
- Parts of an experiment (independent variables, dependent variables,
counterbalancing, etc.)
- A real in-class experiment will be conducted (≈30 minutes)
- Experiment results (graphs, correlations, analysis variance, etc.)
- Experiment design issues (choosing between within subjects vs. between subjects factors, internal validity, external validity, control variables, confounding variables, counterbalancing test conditions)
- How to organize and write a successful research paper
About
Scott MacKenzie will be the main course lecturer. His research is in human-computer interaction with an emphasis on human performance measurement and modeling, experimental methods and evaluation, interaction devices and techniques, alphanumeric entry, gaming, language modeling, and mobile computing. He has more than 160 publications in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (including more than 30 from the ACM's annual SIGCHI conference) and has given numerous invited talks over the past 25 years. Since 1999, he has been Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at York University, Canada.
Organisers
- John Paulin Hansen, MAN DTU.
- Henning Boje Andersen, MAN DTU
- Jakob Bardram, Compute DTU COMPUTE
- Jakob Eg Larsen, Compute DTU COMPUTE