Education and Design: Using Human-Computer Interaction Case Studies to Learn

Computers are essentially an ever-present tool that can be used in almost any discipline to make work faster and easier. Creating these programs, however, such that they fulfill the needs of the customer is a challenging process given the uniqueness of the discipline and circumstance. Thus, the use of a programming design methodology can enable the computer program designer to create a better system that meets the needs of the customer. Teaching this process, or in essence how to design, is the focus of this work. In this paper we present how using case studies in Human-Computer Interaction, and more specifically displaying the evolution of a case study, increases a designer’s ability to learn and then apply this knowledge. We investigate how to use this design evolution within case studies and the effects it had on application, while also exploring how case studies can be used in educating computer scientists

CA 3: Collaborative Annotation of Audio in Academia

We present a collaborative tagging tool for audio streams. We discuss two case studies using this tool: The first case study demonstrates the usefulness of simple tags as metadata. The second case study elaborates issues discovered while allowing students to tag events during a classroom lecture, and methods for aggregating and displaying the collected tags. We conclude with insights into collaborative tagging for data retrieval in content streams

Facilitating and Automating Empirical Evaluation

Through the automation of empirical evaluation we hope to alleviate evaluation problems encountered by software designers who are relatively new to the process. Barriers to good empirical evaluation include the tedium of setting up a new test for each project, as well as the time and expertise needed to set up a quality test. We hope to make the evaluation process more accessible to a wider variety of software designers by reducing the time and effort required for evaluation through the use of a wizard-like system that does not require expertise in evaluation techniques. Implementation is accomplished by utilizing a library of design knowledge in the form of claims to focus the evaluations. User tests were performed to evaluate receptiveness to the software tool as well at the performance of the underlying methods. Results were positive and provide a justification for further research into this area as well as exposing problem areas for improvement

From Personas to Design: Creating a Collaborative Multi-disciplinary Design Environment

This paper describes the use of personas in a multi-disciplinary academic setting to identify collaborators and tailor an integrated design and knowledge reuse environment to their needs. Our environment, LINK-UP, is an emerging web-based system that aids designers in the creation of notification systems—systems that deliver information of interest in a parallel multitasking approach. LINK-UP allows designers to access and/or create reusable design knowledge from a repository. Realizing that a knowledge repository can afford different outcomes to different people, depending on their goals, we sought to better understand the kinds of collaborators and how to meet their goals. This affects the structure of claims—the basic design knowledge unit and how each user group accesses and uses it. Engaged in this analysis, we reflected on the qualitative research technique of persona development that we relied on in the early brainstorming of LINK-UP. We also compare the use of personas in an academic setting with typical persona use in a commercial setting. Our results suggest some new directions for methodological enhancement of persona development, and we offer our new insights on supporting the needs of multi-disciplinary design stakeholders.