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Case Studies

Call for Participation

Quick Facts

  • Submission Deadline: 5 October 2012 (5:00pm PDT) using the PCS Submission System. Case studies do not need to be anonymized.
  • Conditional Notification: 2 December 2012 (Case Studies will have a second review cycle before final acceptance)
  • Second Review Submission Deadline: 14 December (Be prepared to quickly modify and resubmit your 2 December presentation based on possible reviewer requests)
  • Notification: 17 December 2012
  • Digital Library-ready Files Deadline: 10 January 2013
  • Submission Format: Case Studies are in a new format in the form of a structured presentation. There is a Prezi version (our preferred), a Keynote,  a PowerPoint as well as a Google Docs version.  If you need help with the Prezi version, we have a webinar available.
    • Feel Free to reuse the visual design but you can also customize the templates’ Visual Design as long as you stick to the structure.
    • By sticking to the structure we mean:
      • keep the same top level sections as you see in the template
      • the supporting slides and supporting files can be customized to your needs to prove your point)
  • Selection process: Juried
  • At the Conference: Accepted Case Studies will be presented at the conference. Case Studies will have a 20-minute slot (17 minutes presentation, 3 minutes for questions). The Award for Best Case Study and honorary mentions will be announced.
  • Archives: Extended Abstracts; the presentations will be hosted in a special archive to be determined. For the time being PDF versions of the presentation will be available as a mobile app, DVD and ACM Digital Library.

Best Case Study Award

The SIGCHI “Best of CHI” awards honor exceptional submissions to SIGCHI sponsored conferences. The CHI Case Study committees nominate submissions for the Best Case Study Award. A separate Case Study Awards Committee then selects one of the nominees as the Best Case Study and a small number for Honorable Mention, as appropriate.

Message from the Case Studies chairs

This year CHI2013 will feature an exciting new format for Case Studies to specifically reach-out to the practitioner communities. This new format will be a digital format not a paper format.

Based on a structured presentation that would allow practitioners to efficiently delineate and express their main points and use embedded objects like reports or interactive objects like prototypes or videos to make the full points.

The advantages of the new format are:

  • Easy to write, review and improve
    • the review cycle will be: submission -> review -> resubmit -> acceptance/rejection
  • Integration with papers program but with:
    • an attractive format for practitioners
    • a clear strong brand differentiation

The publication will be on a multi-platform app that will work on desktop, most tablets and most smart phones. There will be a pdf version but this will be primarily for inclusion in the ACM DL so that the case studies will be searchable.

Mentorship: because this is a new format, we want to help authors succeed. We will offer mentorship to authors who would like help or even a pre-review of their work for conformity to the format. Please do not hesitate to contact us for more details.

We now have three templates and submission example available. The three templates available are Prezi, our preferred format, then a Powerpoint and Keynote template as well. We also have an example of a presentation in both pdf and Google docs formats.

If you need help using the Prezi template we are creating a webinar for anyone interested.

When you go to submit your work in the PCS system be sure to include a link to the web file if using a Prezi template.

We look forward to receiving your submissions and seeing you at CHI 2013.

Case Studies chairs:

Jonathan Seth Arnowitz, Google, Inc.

Michael Arent, SAP Business Objects

Dirk-Jan Hoets, Flipside User Experience

casestudies@chi2013.acm.org

What is a Case Study?

The case studies are examples of HCI best practices in action. Case studies should reflect best practices of one of more of the CHI Communities. A best practice is a research or design method or technique which can deliver repeatably quality results in a given practitioner context. The best practice can be new or a variation on an existing practice. It is important that the case study cover what you learned and why you need to inform fellow practitioners about it. Another alternative approach is to describe a case study where your best practice was based on or inspired by a CHI academic paper, which you were among the first to put into practice. The paper would describe how practice differed from the research paper. You could consider giving a joint presentation with the paper’s original author.

To assure thoroughness, quality and the ability to create a valuable body of knowledge we are requiring the new case study format to follow the current structure:

  1. A real-world project for a company, business, organization or community
  2. Identify stakeholders and how they were supposed to benefit
  3. Multi-dimensional requirements: discuss the tradeoffs that had to be made among
  4. stakeholders
  5. Your HCI best-practice(s) based solution
  6. Your contribution: what you did to navigate around or otherwise solve these problems
  7. Summary: when using best practice X we learned y

Preparing and Submitting Your Case Study — NEW

Authors should submit the following:

Part 1: Case Study Presentation

The primary submission material consists of a presentation. Case Studies presentations should be concise and to the point, with more supporting documentation and examples added as back up slides or embedded artifacts (pdf, interactive prototypes, spreadsheets, documents etc. If embedding movies please use YouTube or other hosted movie solutions as opposed to embedding the entire file into the movies, etc. The required structure mentioned above should touch on the following points:

  1. A real-world project
    • commercial or non-commercial
    • a product/service created (or attempted to be created) for the benefit of a company, organization or community.
    • state what that benefit was or was suppose to be
  2. Identify stakeholders and how they would benefit
    • Stakeholders being: the end users, the organization or business leaders sponsoring the project, the development team
    • Other key stakeholders (e.g. the CEO who wants to pretend he is the reincarnation of Steve Jobs, governmental regulation agencies et al)
    • Discuss the challenge: what was the barrier(s) to achieving the benefit with the current system
    • names (including companies) can be changed to protect the innocent. One method is to use persona’s of characters instead of real people.
  3. Multi-dimensional requirements
    • Explain the requirements from at least three stakeholders , preferably more, including
      • business, marketplace and/or organizational
      • functional
      • technical
      • end user and/or customer
      • salability
    • illustrate how these requirements complemented or contradicted one another
      demonstrate what you did to negotiate the harmonization of these requirements
  4. Your HCI best-practice(s) based solution
    • best practice means what HCI tools, methods, techniques did you use
    • the best practice can be replicative (e.g. personas) or innovative
    • should be able to prove this is a demonstrable best practice (low threshold research: enough references to books, articles, web blogs to prove you know what you are talking about)
      • In personas examples, list the major works on the subject and give the reference for your definition of persona’s as there are many competing ones
    • demonstrate the problems (the gotcha’s) you encountered with using the best practice (names can be changed to protect the innocent)
      • These should be presented in generalizable format so others can watch out for these problems in their own project
  5. Your contribution: what you did to navigate around or otherwise solve the problems described above.
  6. Summary: when using best practice X
    • watch out for 1,2,3,4
    • one solution we found was a,b,c,d
    • consider synergies with w,y, z

Part 2: Supplementary Material

You must augment the extended abstract with additional material embedded or linked from the case study presentation. The submission of any supporting material should take into account the demands of the reviewing process and neither be excessive in length nor require close scrutiny. Typical supporting materials comprise documents (pictures, reports, spreadsheets, etc.) or digital media (e.g., interactive prototypes) that have been produced for other purposes, but which may help the reviewing committee to understand why this work is of interest to the CHI community. Our intent is to allow practitioners to adapt material created during the activity, without the need to completely rewrite it.

Submissions are due by 5 October 2012 at 5pm PDT. Files must be combined into one single presentation document and submitted at a web site we will provide at the end of August.

Case Studies Review Process and Criteria

The Case Studies jury will comprise acknowledged experts in our field from a variety of backgrounds that will be reflected from the CHI communities: design, research, management, etc. They will be evaluated based on:

  1. How valuable is the lesson learned in the case study
    1. Are the results generalizable and repeatable
    2. Is it a novel contribution as opposed to rehashing common practices
    3. Mention advantages as well as disadvantages/limitations
  2. Quality of the written content
  3. Quality of the supporting content
  4. Structure and format compliance

Confidentiality of submissions is maintained during the review process. All rejected submissions will be kept confidential in perpetuity. The presentation and its supporting materials should contain no sensitive, private, or proprietary information that cannot be disclosed at publication time.

Upon Acceptance of Your Case Study — UPDATED

Authors will be notified of conditional acceptance or rejection on 2 December 2012. Authors will have a required revision period to make changes to their presentation, this will also give authors a rebuttal period for those who wish to appeal a rejection notice. Revised presentations are due 13 December 2012
Authors of accepted submissions will receive instructions on how to prepare and submit the final versions. These will be due on 20 January 2013.

Your Case Study at the Conference

Participants will present their report in a scheduled session. The committee will assign reports to talk slots. Please see Standard Technical Support for information about the kind of technical and A/V support that will be provided by the conference. Best Case Study award and any Honorable Mention recipient(s) will be announced at the conference..

Your Case Study after the Conference

Accepted Case Studies will be distributed in a mobile app, and kept in the ACM Digital Library, where they will remain accessible to thousands of researchers and practitioners worldwide. Selected supporting material may also be archived on the Conference DVD and the ACM Digital Library.