Spring 2015
This seminar covers methods for conducting research in human-computer interaction (HCI). These topics will be pursued through independent reading, assignments, and class discussion. The seminar comprises three assignments that not just apply HCI research methods but push the envelope of what has been done before. The assignments are designed to be meaningful and have the potential to be widely visible or to be published, and each student will participate in writing a group paper for one of the assignments. We will have readings that teach HCI research methods and provide examples of valuable contributions, sometimes reading reviews of those papers as they were evaluated for publication.
The goal of this course is to provide students with the background necessary to perform research in HCI and the skills required to conduct human-centric research. Students who take this course should have a particular interest in HCI research, or wish to learn fundamental skills that will help them with a user interface design or usability evaluation career. Programming experience is highly desirable but not absolutely necessary (students who do not program may have to be especially creative for some assignments). There will be little or no content in this course about interface design, but students will find topics in CSCI 1300 (User Interfaces) relevant. Enthusiastic students who have not taken CSCI 1300 should have independently done some HCI or related work before. The class will meet in room 506 CIT, from 1:00pm-1:50pm MWF.
The course will be capped at 15-20 students; apply on this page for a registration code.
Jeff Huang, 407 CIT, jeff at cs dot brown dot edu
Alexandra Papoutsaki, 409 CIT, alexpap at cs dot brown dot edu
Crowdsourcing assignment Try different crowdsourcing models for collecting data and validating a university faculty dataset.
Personal Informatics experiment Run an experiment on yourself to see the effects of behavior change by tracking your own data.
Fitts' Law study Perform a variant of the classic Fitts' Law experiment on targets with unique shapes.
Reading comments will be 2-4 sentences (see Canvas instructions for detail) and should be entered in Canvas by 11:55pm the night before the Deadine Due date (no comments required for the Jan 23 reading; the first reading comment is due Jan 25 11:55pm). For each reading comment, you will receive a half point for satisfactory comments, and one point for exceptionally thoughtful reading comments, up to a maximum of 15 points.
We will read a few chapters from Ways of Knowing in HCI (WOK) by Olson and Kellogg that you can find online and can read freely if you are on the Brown network (or accessing through VPN). It's recommended that you download a copy while you're on the Brown network so you can read it offline at your leisure.
Please sign and return the Collaboration Policy by February 20th.
Day | Topic | Reading Due | Assignment |
Jan 21 | Overview | ||
Jan 23 | Introduction | Grudin - 3 faces of human-computer interaction Hudson - Concepts, Values, and Methods (Page 69-73 from WOK) |
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Jan 26 | Crowdsourcing | Egelman - Crowdsourcing in HCI Research (WOK) | Crowdsourcing assignment out |
Jan 28 | Crowdsourcing | *Bernstein - Soylent: a word processor with a crowd inside | |
Jan 30 | Crowdsourcing | Marcus - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crowd | |
Feb 2 | Crowdsourcing | Crowdsourcing Models (Lecture/Discussion) | |
Feb 4 | Assignment midpoint | Crowdsourcing assignment mid | |
Feb 6 | Experimental Methods | Gergle - Experimental Research in HCI (WOK) | |
Feb 9 | University closed | ||
Feb 11 | Experimental Methods | Losh - Reliability, Validity, Causality, And Experiments | |
Feb 13 | Experimental Methods | Norvig - Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation | |
Feb 18 | Experimental Methods | *Dell - "Yours is Better!" Participant Response Bias in HCI | |
Feb 20 | Assignment review | Crowdsourcing assignment due | |
Feb 23 | Behavioral Analysis | Analytics for Interaction Data (Lecture/Discussion) | Personal informatics experiment out |
Feb 25 | Behavioral Analysis | Bentley - Health Mashups | |
Feb 27 | Behavioral Analysis | Dumais - Understanding User Behavior (WOK) | |
Mar 2 | Behavioral Analysis | Discussions from online (read in order) [1] [2] [3] [4] | |
Mar 4 | Behavioral Analysis | Hacking smartphone apps (Lecture/Discussion) | |
Mar 6 | Assignment midpoint | Personal informatics experiment mid | |
Mar 9 | Design Research | Tohidi - Getting the Right Design and the Design Right: Testing Many Is Better Than One | |
Mar 11 | Design Research | *Kane - Usable Gestures for Blind People | |
Mar 13 | Design Research | Design Research (Lecture/Discussion) | |
Mar 16 | Design Research | Zimmerman - Research Through Design in HCI (WOK, first 3 pages) Zimmerman - Research Through Design as a Method for Interaction Design Research in HCI |
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Mar 18 | Fitts' Law | MacKenzie - Fitts' law as a research and design tool in human-computer interaction | |
Mar 20 | Fitts' Law | Soukoreff - Towards a standard for pointing device evaluation | |
Mar 30 | Assignment review | Personal informatics experiment due | |
Apr 1 | Fitts' Law | Grossman - Modeling Pointing at Targets of Arbitrary Shapes | Fitts' Law study out |
Apr 3 | Eye Tracking | *Huang - User See, User Point: Gaze and Cursor Alignment in Web Search | |
Apr 6 | Systems | Landay - A Guide to Systems & Applications Research I give up on CHI/UIST |
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Apr 8 | Assignment midpoint | Fitts' Law study mid | |
Apr 10 | Sean Munson visit | ||
Apr 13 | Systems | *Dixon - Prefab | |
Apr 15 | Systems | Olsen - Evaluating User Interface Systems Research | |
Apr 17 | Assignment review | Fitts' Law study due | |
Apr 20 | Group paper | Organize into paper groups and plan | |
Apr 27 | TA Check-in | Meeting to discuss progress of group paper | |
May 6 | Assignment Review | (2pm) Informal presentation and discussion of group paper results | Group paper due |
* We will look at the corresponding reviews in class to see what reviewers liked about them.