Comparing the cognitive profile of the HCI professional and the HCI educator

Previous research into Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) education has focussed mainly on the curriculum, pedagogy and the gap between education, and little is known about the cognitive profile of the HCI practitioner or educator, or how their individual differences impact upon practice in the field or the classroom. This research intends to address this gap by investigating the cognitive style of HCI practitioners, educators, and those with both roles. 315 professionals responded to a global online survey which captured their individual cognitive style using the Allinson and Hayes Cognitive Style Index (CSI) which tests whether the subject tends more towards an intuitivist or analyst, and the Object-Spatial Imagery and Verbal Questionnaire (OSIVQ) which suggests a three dimensional model of cognitive style – object imagers who prefer to construct pictorial images, spatial imagers who prefer schematic representations and verbalizers who prefer to use verbal-analytical tools. Together, these two instruments provide a profile that matches the skills required to work within the field of HCI. The respondents included practitioners in the field (N=179), educators (N=61), and some who were both practitioner and educator (N=75). A one-way between-groups ANOVA and MANOVA was performed to investigate differences in the role of the professional, and the CSI and OSIVQ profiles respectively, followed by the Welch t-test to compare their OSIVQ scores with the published normative values. The ANOVA comparing the CSI scores for each of the groups revealed a statistically significant difference of F(2, 312) = 3.35, p= 0.38 and post-hoc comparisons using the Tukey HSD test indicated that the mean score for the educators was significantly different from that of the ‘both’ group. The practitioners did not differ significantly from either the educators or ‘both’. This may in some part be explained by the fact that very often HCI is taught by an academic with a computer science background rather than an HCI specialist, but further investigation is needed in this area. The MANOVA used the three constructs of the OSIVQ as dependent variables. No significant difference was found between the groups. However, the t-tests comparing the professional against the normative data revealed that whilst there was no significant difference between the object imager score of the HCI professional and the scientist, there was a difference between the spatial imager score of the HCI professional and the visual artist, perhaps again reflecting the computer science background of many professionals. 24 survey respondents have been interviewed and the resulting data will form the basis of a thematic analysis to extend the cognitive profile, and to identify the predominant technological frames of operation. Applying this concept of technological frames to the domain of HCI, will help to make sense of the adoption and application of knowledge, tools and techniques amongst this community. In order for the curriculum to meet the needs of the market, the educator needs to understand the practitioner in order to produce graduates equipped for the role. Finally, as HCI is delivered in a multidisciplinary environment, should it not also be taught by a multidisciplinary team

Facilitating the take-up of new HCI practices: a ‘diffusion of innovations’ perspective

The workshop Made for Sharing: HCI Stories of Transfer, Triumph & Tragedy focuses on collecting cases in which practitioners have used their HCI methods in new contexts. For analyzing the collected body of cases we propose to apply a framework inspired by the Diffusion of Innovations approach which focuses on what facilitates the adoption, re-invention and implementation of new practices in social systems

Unremarkable AI: Fitting Intelligent Decision Support into Critical, Clinical Decision-Making Processes

Clinical decision support tools (DST) promise improved healthcare outcomes by offering data-driven insights. While effective in lab settings, almost all DSTs have failed in practice. Empirical research diagnosed poor contextual fit as the cause. This paper describes the design and field evaluation of a radically new form of DST. It automatically generates slides for clinicians' decision meetings with subtly embedded machine prognostics. This design took inspiration from the notion of "Unremarkable Computing", that by augmenting the users' routines technology/AI can have significant importance for the users yet remain unobtrusive. Our field evaluation suggests clinicians are more likely to encounter and embrace such a DST. Drawing on their responses, we discuss the importance and intricacies of finding the right level of unremarkableness in DST design, and share lessons learned in prototyping critical AI systems as a situated experience

Methodological development

Book description: Human-Computer Interaction draws on the fields of computer science, psychology, cognitive science, and organisational and social sciences in order to understand how people use and experience interactive technology. Until now, researchers have been forced to return to the individual subjects to learn about research methods and how to adapt them to the particular challenges of HCI. This is the first book to provide a single resource through which a range of commonly used research methods in HCI are introduced. Chapters are authored by internationally leading HCI researchers who use examples from their own work to illustrate how the methods apply in an HCI context. Each chapter also contains key references to help researchers find out more about each method as it has been used in HCI. Topics covered include experimental design, use of eyetracking, qualitative research methods, cognitive modelling, how to develop new methodologies and writing up your research

A Load of Cobbler’s Children: Beyond the Model Designing Processor

HCI has developed rich understandings of people at work and at play with technology: most people that is, except designers, who remain locked in the information processing paradigm of first wave HCI. Design methods are validated as if they were computer programs, expected to produce the same results on a range of architectures and hardware. Unfortunately, designers are people, and thus interfere substantially (generally to good effects) with the ‘code’ of design methods. We need to rethink the evaluation and design of design and evaluation methods in HCI. A logocentric proposal based on resource function vocabularies is presented

The Confluence of Interaction Design & Design: from Disciplinary to Transdisciplinary Perspectives

In keeping with the conference theme of rigour and the authors’ interest in sustainability and interaction design, we describe the confluence of design-oriented notions of interaction design and HCI-oriented notions of interaction design in terms of understanding the present and making choices about possible futures. We comment on the variety of research modes in this confluence and then take up the issue of how disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and interdisciplinarity operate and fail to operate as boundary crossing mechanisms for these research modes. As a complement and extension to disciplinary, multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary practices, we take up the notion of transdisciplinarity and describe how it informs the possibility of values-rich free boundary crossing between research modes in the service of real world issues, while still preserving rigour. Keywords: Transdisciplinarity; Interaction Design; Design Research; Sustainability; Disciplinarity; Multidisciplinarity; Interdisciplinarity.</p

Reviewing and extending the five-user assumption: A grounded procedure for interaction evaluation

" © ACM, 2013. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), {VOL 20, ISS 5, (November 2013)} http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2506210 "The debate concerning how many participants represents a sufficient number for interaction testing is well-established and long-running, with prominent contributions arguing that five users provide a good benchmark when seeking to discover interaction problems. We argue that adoption of five users in this context is often done with little understanding of the basis for, or implications of, the decision. We present an analysis of relevant research to clarify the meaning of the five-user assumption and to examine the way in which the original research that suggested it has been applied. This includes its blind adoption and application in some studies, and complaints about its inadequacies in others. We argue that the five-user assumption is often misunderstood, not only in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, but also in fields such as medical device design, or in business and information applications. The analysis that we present allows us to define a systematic approach for monitoring the sample discovery likelihood, in formative and summative evaluations, and for gathering information in order to make critical decisions during the interaction testing, while respecting the aim of the evaluation and allotted budget. This approach – which we call the ‘Grounded Procedure’ – is introduced and its value argued.The MATCH programme (EPSRC Grants: EP/F063822/1 EP/G012393/1

In pursuit of rigour and accountability in participatory design

The field of Participatory Design (PD) has greatly diversified and we see a broad spectrum of approaches and methodologies emerging. However, to foster its role in designing future interactive technologies, a discussion about accountability and rigour across this spectrum is needed. Rejecting the traditional, positivistic framework, we take inspiration from related fields such as Design Research and Action Research to develop interpretations of these concepts that are rooted in PD׳s own belief system. We argue that unlike in other fields, accountability and rigour are nuanced concepts that are delivered through debate, critique and reflection. A key prerequisite for having such debates is the availability of a language that allows designers, researchers and practitioners to construct solid arguments about the appropriateness of their stances, choices and judgements. To this end, we propose a “tool-to-think-with” that provides such a language by guiding designers, researchers and practitioners through a process of systematic reflection and critical analysis. The tool proposes four lenses to critically reflect on the nature of a PD effort: epistemology, values, stakeholders and outcomes. In a subsequent step, the coherence between the revealed features is analysed and shows whether they pull the project in the same direction or work against each other. Regardless of the flavour of PD, we argue that this coherence of features indicates the level of internal rigour of PD work and that the process of reflection and analysis provides the language to argue for it. We envision our tool to be useful at all stages of PD work: in the planning phase, as part of a reflective practice during the work, and as a means to construct knowledge and advance the field after the fact. We ground our theoretical discussions in a specific PD experience, the ECHOES project, to motivate the tool and to illustrate its workings

A protocol study of novice interaction design behaviour in Botswana: solution-driven interaction design

Think aloud studies and protocol analysis are well-known in the field of HCI, but most often these studies focus on usability evaluations, or on the use of technology. Rarely are they used to investigate the behaviour of interaction designers. In this paper, we report on a protocol study with novice interaction designers in Botswana. Participants had just completed the design section of an undergraduate module on Interaction Design that actively promotes a problem-driven approach to the design of interactive products, yet the participants behaved in a way that is closer to a solution-driven approach. The module emphasizes user-centred design, prototyping methods to support design development, and evaluating design detail. Yet participants suggest solutions before exploring the context of use, use prototyping methods to capture, rather than to develop, designs, and do not produce detailed designs. In a problem-solving context, some of these behaviours are typical of novices, but in a design context they are also seen in experienced designers. The results presented here reveal the detail of the approach adopted by these students, and contribute to the wider debate concerning the internationalization of HCI education