How do design and evaluation interrelate in HCI research?

Presented at DIS 2006, the Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems, the 6th ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems, University Park, PA, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1142405.1142421Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is defined by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) as “a discipline concerned with the design, evaluation, and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and with the study of the major phenomenon surrounding them” [18]. In HCI there are authors that focus more on designing for usability and there are authors that focus more on evaluating usability. The relationship between these communities is not really clear. We use author cocitation analysis, multivariate techniques, and visualization tools to explore the relationships between these communities. The results of the analysis revealed seven clusters that could be identified as Design Theory and Complexity, Design Rationale, Cognitive Theories and Models, Cognitive Engineering, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Participatory Design, and User-Centered Design

Development and Specification of Virtual Environments

This thesis concerns the issues involved in the development of virtual environments (VEs). VEs are more than virtual reality. We identify four main characteristics of them: graphical interaction, multimodality, interface agents, and multi-user. These characteristics are illustrated with an overview of different classes of VE-like applications, and a number of state-of-the-art VEs. To further define the topic of research, we propose a general framework for VE systems development, in which we identify five major classes of development tools: methodology, guidelines, design specification, analysis, and development environments. Of each, we give an overview of existing best practices

Prototyping Considered Dangerous

In this paper, we argue that prototypes can hinder, rather than aid effective communication. The dangers are: (1) prototypes may contain hidden assumptions which might surface too late; (2) obtaining feedback in the context of use is prohibitively expensive and rarely done; and (3) partly as a consequence of these problems, prototypes cause a focus on displays and other surface features of computers, not on the more difficult problem of how people function in their environments to solve problems. We propose design intent which specifies how a system will fit in and interact with the environment in which it is placed and expectation agents which monitor the system in use and detect uses counter to the intent as ways to alleviate these dangers