CS 889

Spring 2014

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.
Project recruiting materials posted here.
Project presentations for Phase 2 can be scheduled here.
Project presentations for Phase 3 can be scheduled here.

Topics Schedule

Date	Assigned Readings	Slides
May 5th	None	Slides
May 7th	Read the first paper below. For the second paper, feel free to just read for interest. No synopsis is necessary. Running an HCI experiment in multiple parallel universes Listening in: practices surrounding iTunes music sharing	Slides
May 9th	Acquisition of expanding targets Human on-line response to target expansion
May 12th	Modeling human performance of pen stroke gestures
May 21st	No synopsis required for this reading. This paper is useful to skim so that you understand the challenges of mobile text input. Text Entry for Mobile Computing
May 23rd	Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful (some of the time)

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 Piazza list.

Exercise 1: Touchscreen typing

Due May 16th

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 the devices and languages. Enter these values into this Google Spreadsheet.

Exercise 2

Due May 26th

See project details below.

Paper Presentations

To start thinking about papers that you might want to present, I'd suggest taking a look at the CHI 2014 proceedings, located here. New! Paper presentations can be scheduled here.

Project Details

For May 26th, please post a less than 2-page description of your project. The project description should include a synopsis of what you would like to do (1/3 - 1/2 page), a pointer to a paper that describes an experiment most related to your project with some brief sketch of the experiment (1/3 page) and a detailed description of your experimental methodology (less than 1 page).

The May 26th synopsis constitutes phase one of your project presentation. Please post so that your project is visible to the entire class.

Between May 26th and May 30th, pick two projects in the class to comment on. Project comments are first-come. Maximum of three commentators for each project. So, for example, say I posted a project by May 26th. Up to three people can add project comments between May 26th and May 30th for my project. The goal of these comments should be to make suggestions. Think carefully before posting. Ask yourself:

What do you like about the project idea?
What seems good about the experimental design?
In what ways could the experimental design be improved, expanded or enhanced?
Is there anything in the project description that is incomplete? For example, is there an obvious aspect of the experiment or study that should be expanded upon, or that was overlooked?

Project recruiting materials have been posted here.

June 20th, 25th, and 27th, project presentations will occur. This is, essentially, a phase 2 presentation where you have either designed your experiment and your data collection method (for empirical experiments) or have conducted one or two interviews (for qualitative work). Present what you have to this point to the class. Each presentation should be approximately 20 minutes in length, 10 for presentation and 10 for discussion. You can schedule your presentations here.

June 25th, 28th, 30th, August 1st, the final project presentations will occur.

August 10th, final project write-ups are due.