Courses

C02 1 unit – Six Steps to Successful UX in an Agile World unit 1/1:
Hugh Beyer, Karen Holtzblatt

C03 3 units – Rapid Design Labs—A Tool to Turbocharge Design-Led Innovation unit 1/3: Jim Nieters, Amit Pande, Carola Fellenz

C04 1 unit – Body, Whys & Videotape: Applying Somatic Techniques to User Experience in HCI unit 1/1: Thecla Schiphorst, Lian Loke

C06 2 units – Agile User Experience and UCD unit 1/2: William Hudson

C03 (cont) – Rapid Design Labs—A Tool to Turbocharge Design-Led Innovation unit 2/3: Jim Nieters, Amit Pande, Carola Fellenz

C07 2 units – Speech-based Interaction: Myths, Challenges, and Opportunities unit 1/2: Cosmin Munteanu, Gerald Penn

C06 (cont) – Agile User Experience and UCD unit 2/2:
William Hudson

C03 (cont) – Rapid Design Labs—A Tool to Turbocharge Design-Led Innovation unit 3/3: Jim Nieters, Amit Pande, Carola Fellenz

C07 (cont) – Speech-based Interaction: Myths, Challenges, and Opportunities unit 2/2: Cosmin Munteanu, Gerald Penn

C09 2 units – Choice and Decision Making for HCI unit 1/2:
Anthony Jameson

C10 2 units – Cognitive Crash Dummies: Predicting Performance from Early Prototypes unit 1/2: Bonnie John

C11 2 units – Analyzing Social Media Systems unit 1/2:
Shelly Farnham, Emre Kiciman

C09 (cont) – Choice and Decision Making for HCI unit 2/2:
Anthony Jameson

C10 (cont) – Cognitive Crash Dummies: Predicting Performance from Early Prototypes unit 2/2: Bonnie John

C11 (cont) – Analyzing Social Media Systems unit 2/2:
Shelly Farnham, Emre Kiciman

C13 2 units – Expert Reviews – For Experts unit 1/2:
Rolf Molich

C14 2 units – Make This! Introduction to Electronics Prototyping Using Arduino unit 1/2: Wendy Ju, David Sirkin

C15 2 units – Card Sorting for Navigation Design unit 1/2: William Hudson

C13 (cont) – Expert Reviews – For Experts unit 2/2:
Rolf Molich

C14 (cont) – Make This! Introduction to Electronics Prototyping Using Arduino unit 2/2: Wendy Ju, David Sirkin

C15 (cont) – Card Sorting for Navigation Design unit 2/2: William Hudson

C17 2 units – Interactive Walking in Virtual Environments unit 1/2:
Frank Steinicke, Yon Visell, Jennifer Campos, Anatole Lécuyer

C18 3 units – Designing with and for Children in the 21st Century: Techniques and Practices unit 1/3: Allison Druin, Jerry Fails, Mona Leigh Guha, Greg Walsh

C17 (cont) – Interactive Walking in Virtual Environments unit 2/2:
Frank Steinicke, Yon Visell, Jennifer Campos, Anatole Lécuyer

C18 (cont) – Designing with and for Children in the 21st Century: Techniques and Practices unit 2/3: Allison Druin, Jerry Fails, Mona Leigh Guha, Greg Walsh

C20 2 units – Designing Augmented Reality Experiences unit 1/2:
Mark Billinghurst, Henry Been-Lirn Duh

C18 (cont) – Designing with and for Children in the 21st Century: Techniques and Practices unit 3/3: Allison Druin, Jerry Fails, Mona Leigh Guha, Greg Walsh

C21 2 units – Interaction Design for Social Development unit 1/2:
Gary Marsden, Matt Jones

C20 (cont) – Designing Augmented Reality Experiences unit 2/2:
Mark Billinghurst, Henry Been-Lirn Duh

C21 (cont) – Interaction Design for Social Development unit 2/2:
Gary Marsden, Matt Jones

C23 2 units – HTML5 Game Development unit 1/2: Jim Parker

C24 2 units – Storyboarding for Designers and Design Researchers unit 1/2:
Pieter Jan Stappers, Gert Pasman

C25 2 units – Designing Search Usability unit 1/2: Tony Russell-Rose

C23 (cont) – HTML5 Game Development unit 2/2: Jim Parker

C24 (cont) – Storyboarding for Designers and Design Researchers unit 2/2:
Pieter Jan Stappers, Gert Pasman

C25 2 (cont) – Designing Search Usability unit 2/2: Tony Russell-Rose

Program Description:

Benefits: This tutorial aims to help user interface designers and developers to understand the issues involved in multi-device interactive applications, which can be accessed through mobile and stationary devices even exploiting different interaction modalities (graphical, vocal, …). It will provide a discussion of the possible solutions in terms of concepts, techniques, languages, and tools, with particular attention to Web environments. The tutorial will deal with the various strategies in order to adapt, distribute, and migrate the user interface according to the context of use.

Origins: This tutorial is an updated and more extended version of a tutorial given at CHI 2012, Mobile HCI 2010, and INTERACT 2011

Features:

• Issues in multi-device interfaces
• The influence of the interaction platforms on the suitability of the possible tasks and their structure
• Authoring multi-device interfaces
• Model-based design of multi-device interfaces
• Approaches to automatic adaptation
• How to address adaptation to various platforms with different modalities (graphical, vocal, …)
• Distributed user interfaces
• User interfaces able to migrate and preserve their state

Audience: The tutorial will be interesting for interactive software developers and designers who want to understand the issues involved in multi-device interactive applications and the space of the possible solutions. In addition, other researchers who would like to have an update on the state of art and research results in the field will find the tutorial of interest.

Presentation: Lectures, demonstrations, exercises, videos, group discussions

Instructor background: Fabio Paternò is Research Director at CNR-ISTI, where his main research interests are in user interfaces for ubiquitous environments, model-based design and development, tools and methods for multi-device interactive applications, migratory interfaces. In these areas he has coordinated several projects and the development of various tools.

Program Description: 

Agile methods are now part of the landscape in many companies. UX groups need concrete techniques to work within the new Agile project framework. This means that old ways of working will have to change—the UX designer needs new techniques and skills to contribute to an Agile team. In this session, we discuss six key skills:

1. Bring a user focus to “Phase 0” activities to help define the right user stories.
2. Write and prioritize user stories to deliver the most important user value while accommodating development needs.
3. Work out low-level design details with users within the constrained timeframe of a sprint.
4. Gather real user feedback on the code developed in each sprint and incorporate changes into the development process.
5. Maintain a coherent picture of the UI across user stories and sprints.
6. Be a full member of the development team, having real collaboration with developers throughout the development process.

Features: Attendees in the course will:

1. Learn specific techniques for enhancing the voice of UX in Agile development
2. Understand how these techniques strengthen the development process from both Agile and UX points of view
3. Practice writing user stories to leverage iterative development most effectively
4. Audience: UX professionals working with Agile teams

Presentation: Lecture and practice

Instructors: Background Hugh has over 25 years of experience building and designing applications, systems, and tools. Hugh was one of the pioneers working with Agile teams to bring a strong user interaction design focus to Agile development efforts. Hugh is the author of User-Centered Agile Methods. Karen Holtzblatt has been a leader in the design community for 25 years. She and Hugh co-founded InContext, a company bringing user-centered design to teams since 1992. Karen was recognized with the CHI Lifetime Practice Award in 2010.

Program Description: 

We as researchers and User Experience (UX) designers want to identify and create products that change the world and therefore, we choose to engage in strategic research and design. In the real world though, coming up with a breakthrough idea or transformative design doesn’t mean it will automatically be accepted in the research community or get to market. By definition, innovative ideas represent new ways of thinking. Organizations by nature seem to have anti-innovation antibodies [1] that often kill new ideas [2]—even disruptive innovations [3] that could help companies differentiate themselves from their competition. As difficult as coming up with a game-changing idea can be, getting an organization to act on the idea often seems impossible. Perhaps we find ourselves in work routines that do not provide space to think differently. Our experience is that practitioners and academics alike need new tools to meet this challenge—tools that empower UX teams in both business and universities to identify transformative new ideas, and then to get these big ideas and designs accepted. This course proposes rapid design labs—a design-led, facilitative, cross-functional, iterative approach to innovation that aligns organizations and generates value at each step. It provides tools and methods that turn attendees into catalysts, who systemically identify new ideas, and align multi-disciplinary teams around their ideas. Attendees learn how to lead workshops that foster ideation, collaboration, trust, and free expression. These workshops enable intensive brainstorming, purposeful play, design, user testing, and rapid prototyping. Learn how innovative companies and universities, such as Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, the Berlin Technical University, Yahoo!. Mindjet, HP Consumer Travel, and more identify, design, and bring great products to market.

Program Description: 

How can HCI designers and practitioners incorporate a somatic perspective and sensibility within interaction design? This course will enable participants to develop an understanding of how somatic experiential techniques can be used to support design and evaluation of user experience methods within HCI. It will provide multiple examples using case studies, video and in-class exercises that illustrate somatic application to design of technology. The course contextualizes the history of somatic methods within HCI, highlighting the relationships between user experience and the application of somatic principles. It illustrates the benefits and challenges of integrating somatic approaches to experience design in a technological context. Participants will be encouraged to explore somaesthetic strategies and apply them to research. The course addresses differences in epistemological assumptions through contextual practice, discussion and case studies with a strong emphasis on multi-modal examples.

Course-Benefits

• Introduces the value of incorporating somatic techniques to HCI design strategies.
• Provides a contextual history of somatic techniques incorporated within HCI design and evaluation.
• Discusses the challenges of articulating and incorporating Somatic Practices in HCI design processes.
• Encourage participants to consider somatic approaches they can apply to interaction design.
• Provides a rich media set of case studies, video examples and experiential practices and techniques to ground the discussion of issues, including a take-away course website, and DVD of material examples and practices (a tool-kit for participants to work with in their on-going research).
• Reflects on somaesthetics, movement and body-based practices represented at CHI2013, including methods of valuation and evaluation.
• Encourages participants to develop an agenda for applications of somatic techniques to research based on the tools the course.

Other Keywords: Somatics, Somaesthetics, Bodily Experience, Movement Awareness, Attention, Somatic Connoisseurship, Somatic Facilitation, Bodyweather, Laban Movement Analysis, Art/Design installation, User Experience, Embodiment, Design Process, Qualitative Methodologies, Phenomenology

Program Description: 

Benefits: If you don’t measure it you can’t manage it. Usability analysis and user-research is about more than rules of thumb, good design and intuition: it’s about making better decisions with data. Is Product A faster than Product B? Will more users complete tasks on the new design? Learn how to conduct and interpret appropriate statistical tests on small and large sample usability data then communicate your results in easy to understand terms to stakeholders.

Origins: This course was given at CHI 2012 and CHI 2011 and Usability Professionals’ Association 2012. It is based on material from Measuringusability.com and a number of papers published by the presenters including the recent book: Quantifying the User Experience: Practical Statistics for User Research published by Morgan Kaufmann.

Features

1. Get a visual introduction or refresher to the most important statistical concepts for applied use.
2. Be able to compare two interfaces or versions (A/B Testing) by showing statistical significance (e.g. Product A takes 20% less time to complete a task than Product B p <.05).
3. Clearly understand both the limits and data available from small sample usability data through use of confidence intervals.

Audience: Open to anyone who’s interested in quantitative usability tests. Participants should be familiar with the process of conducting usability tests as well as basic descriptive statistics such as the mean, median and standard deviation and have access to Microsoft Excel.

Presentation: The presentation will be a mix of enthusiastic instruction, with movie-clips, pictures, demonstrations and interactive exercises all aimed at helping make the abstract topic of statistics concrete, memorable and actionable.

Program Description: 

Benefits: This half-day course shows how to integrate User-Centered Design with Agile methods to create great user experiences. The course builds on the instructor’s research into empathizing skills and takes an ‘emotionally intelligent’ approach to engaging all team members in UCD. The course is a balanced combination of tutorials, group exercises and discussions, ensuring that participants gain a rich understanding of the problems presented by Agile and how they can be addressed.

Origins: This is a half-day version of a popular one-day course that has been well-received within a major UK telecoms operator and at a number of public presentations in London, Brussels and Hamburg in 2010 and 2011. It was part of the CHI 2011 & 2012 course offerings.

Features:

• Up-front versus Agile UCD
• Empathetic design
• User & Persona Stories
• Agile usability testing
• Adding value to the Agile team
• Design maps

Audience: Usability, UX and UCD practitioners trying to integrate UCD activities within Agile teams. (Some familiarity with UCD techniques is required.)

Presentation: The course is approximately 60% tutorials and 40% activities or group discussions.

Instructor Background: William Hudson has 40 years’ experience in the development of interactive systems. He has contributed material on user-centered design and user interface design to the Rational Unified Process and to Addison-Wesley’s Object Modeling and User Interface Design (van Harmelen, 2001). He is the founder of Syntagm, a consultancy specializing in user-centered design and has conducted more than 300 intranet and web site evaluations. William has written over 30 articles, papers and studies. He is an Adjunct Professor at Hult International Business School.

Web Site: Further information about the instructor and this course can be found at www.syntagm.co.uk/design

Program Description: 

Speech remains the "holy grail" of interaction, as this is the most natural form of communication that humans employ. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most difficult modalities to be understood by machines – despite, and perhaps, because it is the highest-bandwidth communication channel we possess. While significant research effort, in engineering, linguistics and psychology, have been spent on improving machines’ ability to understand and synthesize speech, the HCI community has been relatively timid in embracing this modality as a central focus of research. This can be attributed in part to the relatively discouraging levels of accuracy in understanding speech, in contrast with often-unfounded claims of success from industry, but also to the intrinsic difficulty of designing and especially evaluating interfaces that use speech and natural language as an input or output modality. While the accuracies of understanding speech input are still discouraging for many applications under less-than-ideal conditions, several interesting areas have yet to be explored that could make speech-based interaction truly hands-free. The goal of this course is to inform the HCI community of the current state of speech and natural language research, to dispel some of the myths surrounding speech-based interaction, as well as to provide an opportunity for HCI researchers and practitioners to learn more about how speech recognition and synthesis work, what are their limitations, and how these could be used to enhance current interaction paradigms.

Other Keywords: Automatic Speech Recognition, Natural Language Processing

Program Description: 

High quality user experience (UX) has become a central competitive factor of products in mature consumer markets. Improving UX during product development and research requires evaluation, but traditional usability testing methods are not adequate for evaluating UX. The evaluation methods for investigating how users feel about the tested system are still less known in the HCI community.

Since 2008, the instructors have been collecting a comprehensive set of 80 UX evaluation methods both from academia and industry, which is now available at www.allaboutux.org/all-methods. During this course, we will present an overview of the set of methods and present some methods in more detail.

By the end of this course, you will be able to choose suitable methods for your specific user experience evaluation case. You will understand the difference between UX evaluation and traditional usability evaluation methods, as well as the variety of UX evaluation methods available.

This course will cover the following topics:

• the general targets of UX evaluation
• the various kinds of UX evaluation methods available for different purposes (an overview)
• how to choose the right method for the purpose
• the basics of a sample of UX methods of different types
• guidance on where to find more information on those methods

Our target audience consists of researchers and practitioners who want to get acquainted with user experience evaluation methods. The participants should have basic understanding of the user-centered design process, and preferably experience on usability studies.

The course was well-attended at CHI’12 – do not miss it this year!

Other Keywords: User Experience Evaluation Methods

Program Description: 

Benefits: People are constantly making small choices and larger decisions about their use of computing technology, such as: – "Shall I use this new application as a replacement for my current one?" – "Which privacy settings are best for me? – "Shall I make a contribution to this on-line community?" – "If so, which of the two available methods should I use?" The ways in which users arrive at these choices and decisions can take many different forms and involve a wide range of processes. This course offers a synthesis of relevant research in psychology and HCI that will enable you to analyse systematically the choices made by the users that you are interested in.

Origins: This course was introduced at CHI 2011 and presented again at CHI 2012.

Features:

• Discuss, with reference to concrete examples, several types of choice and decision problem regularly faced by users of computing technology.
• Learn how to go beyond current HCI analyses of these problems by applying relevant concepts and insights from several relevant areas of psychological research.
• Take away supplementary materials that expand on the discussion in the course and help you to apply its analytical framework in your own work.

Audience: HCI researchers, practitioners, and students who want to be able to understand and influence the ways in which users of the systems that they design or study make choices and decisions.

Presentation Lecture segments with interspersed structured discussion.

Instructor Background: Anthony Jameson (PhD, psychology) is a principal researcher at DFKI. He has given numerous tutorials at CHI and other conferences and has written chapters for the HCI Handbook, including a recent chapter on the topic of this course.

Further Information: http://dfki.de/~jameson/chi13-course-jameson

Other Keywords: Choice and Decision Making

Program Description: 

Prototyping tools are making it easier to explore a design space so many different ideas can be generated and discussed, but evaluating those ideas to understand whether they are better, as opposed to just different, is still an intensely human task. User testing, concept validation, focus groups, design walkthroughs, all are expensive in both people’s time and real dollars.

Just as crash dummies in the automotive industry save lives by testing the physical safety of automobiles before they are brought to market, cognitive crash dummies save time, money, and potentially even lives, by allowing designers to automatically test their design ideas before implementing them. Cognitive crash dummies are models of human performance that make quantitative predictions of human behavior on proposed systems without the expense of empirical studies on running prototypes.

When cognitive crash dummies are built into prototyping tools, design ideas can be rapidly expressed and easily evaluated. This course reviews the state of the art of predictive modeling and presents a tool that integrates rapid prototyping with modeling. Participants will bring their own laptops and learn to mock-up an interactive system and create a model of skilled performance on that mock-up. The course ends with a review of other tools and a look to the future of predictive modeling.

Audience: Designers, usability professionals and software developers who want to evaluate alternative designs alternatives. No prior knowledge of prototyping, psychology or predictive human performance modeling is required.

Instructor: Dr. Bonnie E. John has more than 25 years experience in HCI. A CHI Academy member now at IBM Research, Dr. John was head of CMU’s Masters Program in HCI for a dozen years, researches both human performance modeling and software engineering, and has consulted regularly in government and industry. She has taught CHI courses since 1992.

Program Description: 

The goal of this course is to provide practical instructions for collecting and analyzing social media data. Course attendees will gain insights into how to collect, structure, and analyze data to create meaningful inferences out of the chaotic mess that is social media. We will use two data sources as examples (So.cl and Twitter) of either instrumenting your own system or using a public social media source. We will describe analyses using common tools (SPSS, NodeXL) or our custom Querying Human Activities (QHA) tool, which we provide for analysis of social media trends. Participants will walk away with sample data, sample analysis scripts, and access to our QHA system.

• Getting Started. First we will discuss how to operationalize social constructs from behavioral or conversational data, whether instrumenting your own system or collecting data from public systems such as Twitter.
• Processing Data. We will then describe how to collect, format, and clean your data for various forms of analysis, including usage analysis, social network analysis, and sentiment analysis.
• Analyzing Social Data. We will illustrate in detail using case studies the use of three tools — SPSS, NodeXL, and QHA — for usage analysis, network analysis, and content analysis. We will discuss common pitfalls in analyzing social media data and provide tips for avoiding them.

This course is for social scientists or computer scientists with a basic understanding of data analysis, but are new to social media data.

Shelly Farnham has a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Washington, with many years of experience analyzing behavioral and social networking data in social systems. Emre Kiciman has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, experienced with data analysis in social networking, content analysis, and information retrieval. They are both currently researchers in Microsoft Research.

Program Description: 

Benefits: Usability analysis and user-research is about more than rules of thumb, good design and intuition: it’s about making better decisions with data. Did we meet our goal of a 75% completion rate? What sample size should we plan on for a survey, or for comparing products? Will five users really find 85% of all problems? Learn how to conduct and interpret appropriate statistical tests on usability data, compute sample sizes and communicate your results to stakeholders.

Origins: This course was given at CHI 2012 & 2011 and Usability Professionals’ Association 2012 and is based on material from Measuringusability.com and a number of papers published by the presenters including the recent book: Quantifying the User Experience published by Morgan Kaufmann.

Features:

1. Determine your sample size for comparing two designs, a benchmarking study, survey analysis or finding problems in an interface.
2. Determine if a usability test has met or exceeded a goal (e.g. users can complete the transaction is less than 2 minutes).
3. Get practice knowing what statistical test to perform and how to interpret the results (p-values and confidence intervals).

Audience: Open to anyone who’s interested in quantitative usability tests. Participants should be familiar with the process of conducting usability tests as well as be familiar with major statistical topics such as normal theory, confidence intervals and t-tests. Participants should also have access to Microsoft Excel to use the provided calculators.

Presentation: The presentation will be a mix of enthusiastic instruction, with movie-clips, pictures, demonstrations and interactive exercises all aimed at helping make the abstract topic of statistics concrete, memorable and actionable.

Last Year Attendee: "It’s a great and essential course that is long overdue! You can’t get this info anywhere else, and stats classes in grad school are too theoretical and not applicable for usability testing."

Program Description: 

Benefits: Expert reviews, such as heuristic evaluations and other design inspections, are the second most widely used usability method. Nonetheless, they’re often conducted with poor or unsystematic methodology and thus don’t always live up to their full potential. This course teaches proven methods for conducting and reporting expert reviews of a user interface design.

Origins: The instructor presented a similar course at CHI 2007, where 37 participants rated it 6.54 on a 7-point scale in response to the question "The course was worth my time." It is an updated version of two 90-minute sessions in the instructor’s popular full-day course “Expert Reviews – For Experts”, which has been highly rated by several hundred attendees at Nielsen-Norman Group conferences.

Features:

• A survey of commonly used expert review techniques and resources accompanied by a discussion of their strengths and weaknesses.
• Two practical exercises in expert reviews. Participants do an expert review of a dialog and build consensus with their peers. Participants match their review skills with their peers and learn from them.

Audience: Usability professionals who have usability testing experience and who have conducted some expert reviews. Although this course is not intended as an introduction to expert reviews, past participants with no expert review experience have rated it highly.

Prerequisites: Basic understanding of usability and the benefits of usability evaluation.

Presentation: Interactive lectures and exercises. The exercises takes about 50% of the total course time.

Instructor Background: Rolf Molich owns and manages DialogDesign, a small Danish usability consultancy. Rolf coordinates the Comparative Usability Evaluation (CUE) studies where more than 100 professional usability teams tested or reviewed the same applications. He is the co-inventor of the heuristic inspection method (with Jakob Nielsen).

Program Description: 

Benefits: Course is a hands-on introduction to interactive electronics prototyping for people with a variety of backgrounds, including those with no prior experience in electronics. Familiarity with programming is recommended, but not required. Participants will learn basic electronics, microcontroller programming and physical prototyping using the Arduino platform. Participants will use digital and analog sensors, LED lights and motors to build, program and customize a small “paper robot.”

Topics include:

• Basics of microcontroller architecture and firmware programming.
• Use of potentiometers, light sensors and force sensitive resistors.
• Controlling LEDs, displays and actuators from analog sensor input.

The first session introduces the Arduino environment and basic electronics. The second session applies this knowledge to the task of building an interactive robot. Instructors will share prototyping tools for participants to use, as well as a variety of LEDs, wires, connectors and sensors to augment the basic robot design.

Presentation: Content is presented as short lectures interleaved with self-guided tutorials. Instructors will answer questions and debug problems on-on-one. At different intervals, participants can share progress and trade ideas, allowing beginners to take their time and ask questions, and more advanced participants to work on creative variations of the basic tutorial.

Instructor Background: Wendy Ju teaches physical interaction design in Stanford’s EE and Music departments. She also teaches at UC Berkeley’s Architecture department, and is academic coordinator for the Cal Design Lab.

David Sirkin teaches interactive device design in Stanford’s EE department, and is a researcher at Stanford’s Communication between Humans and Interactive Media lab and Center for Design Research.

Resources: Course includes a kit (yours to keep) comprising an Arduino, breadboard, LEDs, analog sensors, actuators, connecting cables and batteries. Participants are required to bring a laptop, on which they will install the Arduino software.

Other Keywords: Mechatronics, Electronics Prototyping

Program Description: 

Benefits: This half-day hands-on course covers the theory and practice of card sorting. It includes hands-on experience of performing and evaluating a paper-based card sort of an e-commerce site (although the techniques are applicable to many other problem domains).

Origins: This is a major update of an earlier course (‘Innovations in Card Sorting’) that has been run for several years at HCI and usability conferences (HCI 2006 & 2007, CADUI 2008, HCI 2009, CHI 2009-2012). A one-day version of this course was presented as part of Nielsen-Norman Group’s Usability Week in 2009. The updated, half-day version appeared at CHI 2011.

Features: On completion of this tutorial you will be able to

• choose an appropriate card sorting method
• explain cluster analysis and dendrograms to colleagues and clients
• apply appropriate techniques for getting the best information from participants and the resulting data
• perform quick and reliable data capture

Audience: Web and intranet designers, information architects, usability and HCI professionals interested in the practical application of card sorting. No specialist skills or knowledge are required.

Presentation: The course is approximately 60% tutorials and 40% practical card-sorting activities or group discussions.

Instructor Background:: William Hudson has nearly 40 years’ experience in the development of interactive systems. He is the founder of Syntagm, a consultancy specializing in user-centered design and has conducted more than 300 intranet and web site expert evaluations. William has written over 30 articles, papers and studies including the InteractionDesign.org Encyclopedia entry on card sorting. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Hult International Business School.

Web Site: Further information about the instructor and this course can be found at www.syntagm.co.uk/design

Other Keywords: Card Sorting

Program Description: 

Sci-Fi and CHI in Movies and Television will summarize and analyze the past 100 years of human-computer interaction as incorporated into science-fiction cinema and video, beginning with the advent of movies in the early 1900s (Melies’ "A Trip to the Moon," which was recently referenced in the movie "Hugo").

For many decades movies have shown technology in advance of its commercialization (for example, video phones and wall-sized television displays, hand-gesture systems, and virtual reality displays). In some cases mistaken views about what is usable, useful, and appealing seem to be adopted, perhaps because of their cinematic benefits. In any case these media have served as informal "test-beds" for new technologies of human-computer interaction and communication.

The course will explore issues of what is "futuristic" and what is not, gender-role differences, optimism/pessimism, and user-centered design characteristics in more than about two dozen films and a half-dozen television shows. Examples from China, India, and Japan also will be referenced.

Participants will be quizzed informally about their recognition of the media examples shown. Discussion with participants throughout the presentation will be encouraged.

Program Description: 

In recent years many advances have enabled users to more and more naturally navigate large-scale graphical worlds. The entertainment industry is increasingly providing visual and body-based cues to their users to increase the naturalness of their navigational experience.

However, so far none of the existing solutions fully supports the most natural ways of locomotion through virtual worlds, and thus techniques and technologies have to be considered, which take advantage of insights into human perceptual sensitivity. In this context, by far the most natural way to move through the real world is via a full body experience where we receive sensory stimulation to all of our senses, i.e., when walking, running, biking or driving. With some exciting technological advances, people are now beginning to get this same full body sensory experience when navigating computer generated three-dimensional environments. Enabling such an active and dynamic ability to navigate through large-scale virtual scenes is of great interest for many interactive 3D applications demanding locomotion, such as video games, edutainment, simulation, rehabilitation, military, tourism or architecture.

In this course we will present an overview about the development of interactive locomotion interfaces for computer generated virtual environments ranging from desktop-based camera manipulations simulating walking, and different walking metaphors for the entertainment to state-of-the-art hardware-based solutions that enable omni-directional and unlimited real locomotion through virtual worlds. As the computer graphics industry advances towards increasingly more natural interaction, human-computer interaction researchers and professionals will benefit from this course by increasing their understanding of human perception and how this knowledge can be applied to enable the most natural interaction technique of all, i.e., navigating through the world by walking.

Other Keywords: Natural Locomotion, Virtual Walking, Immersive Exploration

Program Description: 

Benefits: The CHI community has acknowledged children as important users by featuring a “Child-Computer Interaction” community. This course will offer a balance of traditional lecture and hands-on design activities, and will cover techniques that balance the voices and contributions of adults and children.

Origins: A version of this course was taught at CHI 2008 through 2012. In CHI 2008 the course received the highest survey ratings of any CHI course and has been rated highly in subsequent years.

Features:

• Historical overview of co-designing with children
• Overview of child development in relation to technology design
• Hands-on experiences using techniques for designing new technologies with and for children
• Information about the role of the adult in co-design processes with children and practical issues of beginning a co-design team

Audience: We welcome and encourage attendance by industry professionals, academics, and students from a wide variety of communities. No prior experience is necessary.

Presentation: Hands-on design activities, small and whole-group discussion, short presentations with slides and video.

Instructor Backgrounds: Allison Druin is a Professor at the University of Maryland’s HCIL. Since 1998, she has led interdisciplinary, intergenerational research teams to create new technologies for children. (http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~allisond/)

Jerry Alan Fails is an Assistant Professor in Montclair State University’s Department of Computer Science. He has been working with children to design new technologies since 2003. His current focus is on technologies that support children and families. (http://hci.montclair.edu/fails/)

Mona Leigh Guha is a Research Associate at the University of Maryland’s HCIL. Since 2002, she has focused on the impacts of technology design processes on children who participate in them.

Greg Walsh is an Assistant Professor in the University of Baltimore’s Division of Science, Information Arts and Technologies. He focuses on creating new design techniques that include more voices in the design process. (http://research.gregwalsh.com/)

Program Description: 

Benefits: Attendees will learn how to conduct empirical research in human-computer interaction (HCI). A "user study" is an experiment conforming to the norms for empirical inquiry and the scientific method. It is founded on observation, measurement, and posing and answering testable research questions. This Course delivers an A-to-Z tutorial on conducting a user study and demonstrates how to write a successful CHI paper.

Features:

• An overview of the definition, purpose, and method of empirical research
• A detailed description of experiment components, and their design
• Research questions will be posed and refined to highlight important characteristics
• Experiment design issues will be addressed
• Methods for data analysis and reporting will be outlined -Participation in a real experiment
• Attendees will work in pairs and take turns acting as both participant and investigator
• A demonstration on how to write a successful CHI paper, including pitfalls to avoid
• Presentation: PowerPoint slides, real-time demos, group participation

Instructor Backgrounds Scott MacKenzie’s research is in HCI with an emphasis on human performance measurement and modeling, experimental methods and evaluation, interaction devices and techniques, alphanumeric entry, language modeling, and mobile computing. He has more than 135 HCI publications (including more than 35 from the SIGCHI conference) and has given numerous invited talks over the past 20 years. Since 1999, he has been Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at York University, Canada.

Steven Castellucci is a PhD student and research assistant in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at York University, Canada. His research interests include gesture-based text entry, mobile text entry, and remote pointing techniques. In addition to having SIGCHI publications, he has lectured university courses on user interfaces and HCI, and has served as course director.

Program Description: 

Benefits: Attendees will learn how to design and develop effective Augmented Reality (AR) experiences through user-centered design principles. It will enable HCI practitioners to enter the fast growing area of AR application development and will teach existing AR developers’ valuable design and evaluation skills.

Abstract: AR is technology that is rapidly becoming mainstream through the development of mobile and web-based platforms. Although the underlying technology is robust enough for everyday use, many AR experiences are poor. Applications are being developed by engineers without an understanding of key design principles, or designers who don’t understand how techniques from other areas should be adapted to work with AR technology. This course will use examples from successful AR experiences to teach key design principles, and how user-centered design process can be applied. Attendees will also learn how AR experiences can be evaluated using a range of qualitative and quantitative measures, and which technologies under research may significantly improve future AR experiences.

Features:

• Key design principles for desktop and mobile AR experiences
• Theoretical frameworks and models for AR applications
• Evaluation methods for AR experiences
• Hands on demonstration with AR applications

Presentation: Lecture style with slides and videos, and demonstrations.

Instructor background: Mark Billinghurst is the director of the HIT Lab NZ, a leading AR research center. He has nearly 20 years experience of AR research, producing over 250 publications, and has developed many innovative applications.

Henry Duh is co-director of the Keio-NUS Joint International Research (CUTE) Center. He has degrees in psychology, industrial design and engineering, and is one of the leading researchers in interaction design and AR, with more than 80 papers in HCI, AR and design.

Program Description: 

This course is aimed at researchers or practitioners who wish to design solutions appropriate to the developing world. To meet this goal we present techniques and methods allowing attendants to design for people from different contexts, cultures and literacies. We also present case studies reporting successes and failures, along with reflections, insights and lessons to be learned. Finally, we discuss open design and ethical questions of doing this type of work in developing contexts.

Other Keywords: HCI4D

Program Description: 

Benefits: After attending this class, participants will:

• Know the benefits of designing a conceptual model before designing the UI.
• Understand the components of a conceptual model, and how to create them.
• Have experience designing a conceptual model.

Origins: Expanded from a tutorial presented at CHI 2009 and 2010. This two-part version was presented at CHI 2011 and CHI 2012. It is based on the presenter’s book, Conceptual Models.

Features: An important early step in designing a user interface for a software application is to design a coherent, task-focused conceptual model. Unfortunately, this step is often skipped in software development. Many designers jump right into sketching and prototyping the UI before they understand the application at a conceptual level. The result is incoherent, overly-complex applications that expose concepts irrelevant to users’ tasks. The course covers:

• What conceptual models are, and how they can improve UI design,
• Perils of not designing a conceptual model,
• Object/actions analysis,
• An example conceptual model,
• Outputs of conceptual analysis,
• A hands-on exercise in performing Object/Actions analysis for an app.

Audience: Software designers and developers, Q/A engineers, usability testers, and managers.

Presentation: Lecture, Q&A, class small-group exercise.

Instructor: Jeff Johnson is Principal Consultant at UI Wizards, a usability consultancy. He also founded Wiser Usability, focusing on usability and accessibility for seniors. He has B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in cognitive psychology from Yale and Stanford. He has worked at Cromemco, Xerox, US West, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun. Since 1996 he has been a consultant and author. He has taught at Stanford, Mills, and the University of Canterbury. He has authored articles and chapters on HCI, and the books GUI Bloopers, Web Bloopers, GUI Bloopers 2.0, Designing with the Mind in Mind, and Conceptual Models (with Austin Henderson).

Websites: http://UIWizards.com, http://WiserUsability.com

Program Description: 

A computer game is a microcosm of the user experience domain. UX and game design share some common aims, praxis, and theory. Although there are differences in perspective between UX designers and game designers, these are not as great as most believe, and it is certain that game designers have knowledge and skills that would be a benefit to UX designers, and vice-versa. This course is intended for those interested in exploring games and gamification, either for themselves or as a workbench for exploring new ideas in UX. It features a practical approach, moving from initial design to a ‘first playable’ implementation. HTML5 is used so as to permit rapid dissemination using the web, and high level tools (EG Processing.js) will speed up the implementation.

The course will be lecture based, but there will be a practical example built during the class, and the audience can play along on their laptops if they choose. Attendees should have experience using Java or C++ and should possess basic design skills.

Jim Parker is a full Professor in the department of Art at the University of Calgary, teaching game design and media art, and before that he taught Computer Science at the same school for 26 years (image processing, game development). He is the author of five books, including a source material for this course The Guide to Computer Simulations and Games, Wiley (2012). He has most recently has been conducting research in virtual theatre and in computer games, especially Serious Games. Jim is also the principal designer at MinkHollow Media Ltd, a serious game developer in Canada.

Program Description: 

Origins: This workshop builds on earlier versions given at various locations, mainly to product design and interaction design audiences.

• 2AD, Bristol, UK, 2004.
• design methods courses, TU Delft, 2004-2012 (800 students)
• IASDR 2009, Seoul,
• CHI 2010, Atlanta.
• CHI 2011, Vancouver

Educational Goals: The course conveys a mix of theory, guidelines, and practical exercise so participants

• understand storyboarding within a communication framework
• see the connections to other design tools
• start applying the technique in their work
• see directions to explore improving their skills
• experience how storyboards bridge communication gaps and draw attention to important design aspects.

Audience: The course is aimed at the general CHI audience, previous experience is not needed. Researchers, designers, usability professionals, design managers will benefit from the mixture of theoretical principles, reflection on cases from industrial practice in Europe, and practical guidelines. Presentation The introductory presentation covers theory and examples; participants then perform ‘photoboarding’, a simple, but highly effective technique to quickly create visually rich scenarios of use. On the basis of this exercise, participants discuss with instructors how they can use the techniques in their work. A second presentation gives guidelines for further development.

Instructor Background: P.J. Stappers is professor of design techniques, and leads a research group on supporting designers in the conceptual phase of design. Stappers is an experienced teacher and researcher, having published over 100 conference and journal papers on design techniques.

Gert Pasman is assistant professor of design techniques with a special focus on tools and methods for interaction design education. He has over a decade of experience in teaching interaction design at various levels of expertise.

Program Description: 

Search is not just a box and ten blue links. Search is a journey: an exploration where what we encounter along the way changes what we seek. But in order to guide people along this journey, we must understand both the art and science of search usability.

This course will provide an introduction to the basic principles of search usability with a focus on holistic solutions that integrate information seeking theory with the user interface design practice. Participants will:

• Explore the fundamental concepts of human-centered design for information search and discovery
• Learn how to differentiate between various types of search behavior: known-item, exploratory, lookup, learning, investigation, etc.
• Understand the dimensions of search user experience and how to apply them to different contexts
• Explore design patterns and other key resources and their role in solving practical design problems

The course will include both presentations and group work to enable delegates to analyse, evaluate and improve the effectiveness of search applications within their own organisation.

Tony Russell-Rose is founder and director of UXLabs, a research and design consultancy specialising in complex search and information access applications. Before founding UXLabs he was Manager of User Experience at Endeca and editor of the Endeca Design Pattern Library. Prior to this he was technical lead at Reuters, specializing in advanced user interfaces for information access and search. And before Reuters he was Group Manager at Canon Research Centre Europe, where he led a team developing next generation information access products and services. His academic qualifications include a PhD in human-computer interaction, an MSc in cognitive psychology and a first degree in engineering, majoring in human factors. He is also author of Designing the Search Experience: the Information Architecture of Discovery (Morgan Kaufmann, 2012).