CS 889

Spring 2013

Overview

This is a seminar course in the area of human-computer interaction. As is typical of seminar courses, it will include student presentations and a course project as the bulk of the course work for students.

Announcements

Join the class's Piazza list. You can submit your assignments (except A1) there.
Recuriting materials are available here.

Topics Schedule

Date	Assigned Readings	Slides
May 7th	None	Slides
May 9th	Listening in: practices surrounding iTunes music sharing Wedge: clutter-free visualization of off-screen locations
May 17th: 9:30 - 11:30am	Heuristic Evaluation of Games Also scan for methodology this paper: A Diary Study of Task Switching and Interruptions	Slides
May 21st	Experimental analysis of mode switching techniques in pen-based user interfaces	Slides

Exercises

These small exercises are for weeks 3 - 5 of the course. They are designd to be done with your "group". Note that your group can be either one or two students, so if you are working alone the number of data points needed is smaller. Please post the information by midnight on the due date (Tuesday) so that I can organize the data for Thursday's class. For exercise 1, the information will be posted in a Google Docs spreadsheet. For exercises 2 and 3, the information should be posted on the Course Wiki. You'll need to log in using your campus-wide credentials.

Exercise 1: Touchscreen typing

Due May 21st

Find 2 friends per group member and ask them to type four different paragraphs as follows:

One paragraph in their native language on a computer keyboard.
One paragraph in their native language on a touch screen keyboard.
One paragraph in a language they do not speak on a computer keyboard.
One paragraph in a language they do not speak on a touch screen keyboard.

Note that each of the paragraphs should be different.

Calculate typing speed in words per minute (where 1 word = 5 characters) and error rate ((word errors)/(total words) * 100) for each of th devices and languages. Enter these values into this Google Spreadsheet.

Exercise 2

Due May 28th

Go to a movie theatre and observe people as they use self-serve kiosks. How do they cluster? What do they do? Is there any discussion? Do groups separate or all use on together? Think about the way the use space around the kiosk. Draw diagrams (by hand is fine) to summarize what you see. Think about themes and patterns and what they tell you about optimal spatial arrangement of kiosks.

Summarize your results in 3 slides that you will add to the course twiki (coming soon). Feel free to just snap pictues of your hand drawn diagrams with a smartphone, i.e. don't feel too compelled to be neat on the slides.

Exercise 3

Due June 4th

Find three friends per group member who own cell phones and interview them about their use of cell phones as a communication device. Who do they talk to? Text to? Email/IM/etc.? What are the channels of communication, how often do they use those channels, with whom and for what? Alongside this, explore their attitude toward their cell phone. Is it a utilitarian device? A personal statement? Essentially try to learn something about how they use this communication device and how they feel about it.

At this point in the course, you should be getting comfortable looking for and thinking about themes in the data. Identify three of four themes that you find interesting in what you learned, and share those themes with their related data. Use one slide per theme, describe the theme, and give some supporting data (i.e. quotes) to support each of the themes you found.

Paper Presentations

To start thinking about papers that you might want to present, I'd suggest taking a look at the CHI 2013 proceedings, located here.