This assignment will give you a chance to look into the research/review literature of Interaction Design. You'll be able to learn about topics in a way that goes beyond textbook presentations. You will track down two papers, most likely on the same topic, from a high-quality journal or conference, papers published in the last five years, typically. Pay particular attention to the rules about formatting and handing in your assignment, as described on the introductory Assignments page.
Briefly, your goal is to find and discuss papers that augment topics in our textbook or focus more deeply on topics in the book, or present experimental results on interaction design and users thereof, or papers that disagree with some parts of the book.
Snell Library has hardcopy and/or electronic subscriptions to thousands of journals. In addition, its links to ACM and IEEE publications can lead you to proceedings of conferences, such as the premiere HCI conference called CHI, e.g., CHI '08 has been published by the ACM. If you're not sure how to access the online material, stop by the Reference Desk on the first floor and talk to them. Two other excellent sites are Google Scholar, http://scholar.google.com/ and CiteSeer.IST http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/. Both of these sites allow you to assess the quality of papers based on the number of people who have cited each paper. Picking a topic or a paper mentioned in the textbook will get your started.
Write up your assignment very much in the way you did Assignment #1. But for the most part, there's no need to put figures in your assignment, because typically there will be figures your can and should refer to that are in the two papers you are analyzing. It would be helpful if you emailed Professor Futrelle the locations of the two papers, e.g., URLs.
Hand in your Assignment #2 at the beginning of class, Tuesday, February 17th. You must also hand in hardcopies of the two papers you have written about.
Return to ISU570 Assignments page. or the ISU570 Spring 2009 homepage. or RPF's Teaching Gateway or homepage