Reviewing Process

The first round will involve reviewing papers and notes. Within a few days after 28 September, I will send each of you a few titles and ask you to tell me which ones you’d like to review. (You will receive titles targeted to the interests you’ve already communicated to me, to the extent that they match the titles I am asked to manage.) I need to get at least three reviews per paper, so if there are gaps or excessive overlaps in reviewers’ choices, we may have a wee bit of negotiating to do.

Once we have agreed which papers you’ll review, I’ll enter your choices into the CHI reviewer data base, which will take care of sending you the links to download submissions and enter your reviews. (It will also nag you about getting your reviews in.

Reviews of papers and notes will be due to me by 5pm EDT on 25 October.

The CHI review process is described at http://www.chi2010.org/authors/chi-review-process.html.

Criteria

You’ll review submissions according to the guidelines provided by SIGCHI for the authors of submissions. The various types of papers and notes, and the criteria for each one, are described at http://www.chi2010.org/authors/selecting-contribution-type.html. (Although as of this writing I have not yet seen the papers I’ll be curating, I am confident that they do not include any theory papers. )

The most important criterion for CHI papers and notes is that they contribute new knowledge, techniques, or approaches to the field. For practitioner submissions, this often means using established techniques in new ways or in new contexts, or interpreting findings in new ways. It may mean devising a new way of making usability methods more effective or efficient.

Note: The criteria for other submission types are less focused on breaking new ground than are those for papers and notes.

Next Steps

After papers and notes, we will be reviewing submissions for panels and case studies. These are due on October 9, so I expect to have my assignments by about 20 October, which would make your reviews due to me by about 17 November. (I’m just guessing here, as I don’t yet know the exact dates.)

After that, we have alt.chi, SIGs, and works-in-progress. Those submissions are due on 4 January, so I’ll probably be farming them out starting about the 15th and expecting your reviews by about 10 February. Again, just a guess.

User Experience Community Chairs

• Elizabeth Buie (Luminanze Consulting, LLC)
• Susan Dray (Dray & Associates, Inc.)
• Keith Instone (IBM)
• Jhilmil Jain (HP Labs)
• Gitte Lindgaard (Carleton University)

If you have signed up to review — or even if you are just thinking about it — please feel free to contact me with questions. You may email me at ebuie [at] luminanze [dot] com or use my Contact Us form.

Abstract

Free your surveys from the biggest common flaws.

Most of us find ourselves inclined to conduct a survey at least once in a while. Although surveys cannot replace observation, interviews, or empirical usability testing, they can be a cost-effective adjunct to more direct user research if designed and used appropriately. Unfortunately, too many surveys have fundamental design flaws that practically guarantee that they will produce invalid or unreliable results.

This session will begin with a brief introduction to the basic principles of survey design, focusing on the four kinds of variables, the types of scales and questions, and the main sources of bias. We’ll spend the rest of the time in large- and small-group exercises and Q&A;, to give you practice at designing questions and at evaluating questions designed by others. Feel free to bring survey questions from your own experience. either ones you’ve designed yourself or ones you’ve encountered somewhere.

Note: A 40-minute session cannot possibly cover survey design in any real depth; that would take hours if not days. But it can provide the basics and alert you to the most common problems so you can keep your surveys free of them.

Biography

Elizabeth Buie is principal consultant at Luminanze Consulting, LLC. With more than 30 years’ experience in UX, she has done research, analysis, specification, design, development, and evaluation for web sites, web apps, desktop and mainframe apps, and complex systems such as spacecraft control centers.

Elizabeth has master’s degrees in mathematics and in human development — a nice mashup for the psychometrics courses required for the latter and a perfect combination for designing surveys. She has designed and analyzed surveys for clients such as the American Library Association, the US Department of Education, and the American Chemical Society.

Elizabeth co-chairs the CHI 2010 User Experience Community and serves on the editorial board of the UPA’s Journal of Usability Studies.

Title: (Re)Designing Researcher-Practitioner Interaction

Abstract

Do you wish you knew more about what research was available to help guide your interaction design decisions? Do you have the feeling that it’s out there but you aren’t sure where to find it or how to interpret and use it? Do you wish your design education had better prepared you for finding and making use of human interaction research?

Do you feel that research is just irrelevant to what you do?

The HCI community believes that a disconnect exists between research and practice. Over the past 30 years, research into the nature of such problems has been conducted in a variety of disciplines. Some of the studies report that research findings are often couched in jargon, are overly technical in an academic sense, and can be simply irrelevant to practitioners. Some studies attribute the problem to academics’ lack of familiarity with real-world problems and business realities or to the way these are tackled in the practitioner community; others have found that practitioners appreciate and recognize the value of theory-driven research provided its relevance is made clear to them. In their self-defense, researchers point out that aiming research to industry dilutes its academic value and that applied research has no rewards when it comes to salary and promotion.

A full-day workshop (working session) on researcher-practitioner interaction will be held during the CHI 2010 conference in April, where researchers and practitioners will come together in an effort to clarify the issues underlying the apparent misalignment between them and to define an approach to ameliorating it.

This IxD10 discussion will be led by one of the CHI workshop organizers, who will take your comments and feed them into the workshop discussion. Take this opportunity to contribute to the dialog and improve the utility of research to design practice. Make your voice heard.

Biography

Elizabeth Buie is principal consultant at Luminanze Consulting, LLC. With more than 30 years’ experience in UX, she has done research, analysis, specification, design, development, and evaluation for web sites, web apps, desktop and mainframe apps, and complex systems such as spacecraft control centers. Elizabeth’s interests span the researcher-practitioner divide: Although she has always worked as a practitioner, she has long been interested in research and has dabbled in it from time to time.

Elizabeth has master’s degrees in mathematics and in human development. She is a co-chair of the CHI 2010 User Experience Community and an organizer of the CHI 2010 workshop on Researcher-Practitioner Interaction. She also serves on the editorial board of the UPA’s Journal of Usability Studies.

Last night I put up four items, in separate auctions. I use GarageSale, a Macintosh application for eBay, to prepare my auctions off line. When these four were ready, I uploaded them all within a few minutes of each other. Then I linked each of them to the other three. Here’s what one of them looks like:

(The yellow box is just to highlight the area of interest, of course.)

Here’s how to do it:

1. Create in each auction an unordered list that includes the titles of each of the other three auctions. It’ll have to be just a plain-text list at first, because you don’t know yet what the URLs are going to be on eBay. Here’s how that looks in my example:

2. When all four auctions are up on eBay, open each one in its own browser tab, to make the eBay URLs easily available. Here’s what that looks like:

3. For each one, click the “Revise your item” link, which appears at the top of listings that have no bids yet. Once an item has a bid, you can no longer revise it, which is why this has to be done immediately after you start the auction.

4. In the “Revise Item page, scroll halfway down until you see “Describe the item you’re selling”. Initially, this will show the “Standard” view, the graphic view as it appears in your auction, and you will need to switch to the HTML view.

5. Click on the “HTML” tab here, and scroll that area down until you see the code for the list of related items. Around each title paste the tag with the appropriate URL for that auction, which you will get from the other tabs in your browser window.

P.S. Yes, I admit it — in 1967 I was a Monkees fan.