Projects - ISU570 Human Computer Interaction

Professor Futrelle, CCIS, Northeastern University - Fall 2007

Version of April 5, 2008

Introduction

Your semester project is far and away the most important piece of work you will do in this course. Because of that, the specifications and requirements for the project will be rather detailed. The primary organizing principle for your project is that it should, as much as possible, draw on all of the material in your textbook. The details are described below.

Important instructions as to how to structure your project paper

All the items listed below are required. You will lose points if any of them are omitted. The precise order can be varied, as long as everything is there. Some of the requirements relate to form, some to content. (My hope is that the requirements below can stand you in good stead when writing other papers and reports, in school, and on the job.)

• Your project's title, your name, course, date of handin, my name, and "Northeastern University" must lead off your paper.


• This must be immediately followed by the Abstract of 150 to 250 words which briefly describes your topic, goals, methods, results, redesign, and evaluation.


• This must be followed by an Introduction that gives an overview of what the reader should expect in the sections that follow. Another paragraph might describe how you chose your project.


• Each section, such as the Abstract and Introduction, should be headed by a left-adjusted bolded section title on its own line. It is traditional to label the Abstract with centered text.


• The remainder of your paper must be divided into titled sections, and possibly subsections, each with its own bolded title. Typical divisions would be across your topic, goals, methods, results, redesign, evaluation and discussion. You're welcome to use more informative section titles than those.


• The Discussion section is not the same as Evaluation. Evaluation is how you analyzed your data. The Discussion section puts the whole paper together as a coherent whole, relating all the parts. It is typically one single-spaced page.


• The page counts and wording will vary from section to section, and are summarized below, i.e., "Total: Seven pages of text, 3500 words, plus six figures and seven references. Includes a page-and-a-half devoted to redesign." You'll have to figure out how this word count is distributed across your sections.


• Bibliographic references in the text should be in the form of bracketed numbers, e.g., "[3]", with the numbered references at the end of your paper on a separate page. URLs are secondary - for the most part you'll be referring to published papers and books. The references at the end of your textbook are a good guide to how to format them.


• At least four or your cited works must be discussed - you cannot simply include them without discussion. Some of you have only included web page references. This is not acceptable, because in virtually every case you can (and must) go to Google Scholar, CiteSeer, ACM, or IEEE and you will find scholarly articles about the systems and concepts you are writing about. For example, entering "HCI" into Google Scholar returns 500,000+ hits. Entering "console games" returns over 1,000 hits. That should make my point. Finding, referencing, and discussing scholarly papers is a requirement. Websites/pages can be included in addition, if they are necessary and if they are of adequate quality.


• Be sure to use whatever technical terminology the book or your references use, wherever it is applicable.


• At then end of your paper, include a Summary section, one which assumes that the reader has read through your paper. This needs to be only one or two paragraphs.

Addtional notes on how to organize your handins can be found here.

Project handin schedule - with minimum requirements

• Friday, January 25th by 9pm. A short email, e.g., 100 words or so, should be sent to Professor Futrelle, futrelle@ccs.neu.edu, describing your first ideas about what your project might involve, or possibly two different topics, if you can't decide right away.


• Friday, February 15th at the beginning of class. A hardcopy of Version 1 of your project. Three pages of text, 1500 words, plus two figures and three references.


• Friday, March 14th, at the beginning of class. A hardcopy of Version 2 of your project. Total: Five pages of text, 2500 words, plus four figures and five references. Includes one page devoted to redesign.


• Friday, April 4th, at the beginning of class. A hardcopy of a draft of the final version of your project. Total: Approaching the final requirements: Seven pages of text, 3500 words, plus six figures and seven references. Includes a page-and-a-half devoted to redesign.


• Tuesday, April 15th at the beginning of class (last class). A hardcopy of your final project submission. Total: Seven pages of text, 3500 words, plus six figures and seven references. Includes a page-and-a-half devoted to redesign.

Overview of your project structure and activities involved

This project has some resemblance to your second assignment, "Analyzing and critiquing some artifact". But the project will go beyond that in all dimensions, including experimental design and data gathering and including your own ideas for redesign of the systems you study. A key component will be evaluation - it is easy enough to state your own personal evaluation of systems - it is quite another matter to discover how other people use and evaluate the systems you are focusing on. More than anything, you will need to do extensive and careful reading in your textbook to make sure that you have included as many important concepts and strategies in your project as is practical, within the time and effort you have to devote to it. There will be no further assignments in this course beyond your project. On the other hand, there will be some exams covering a variety of important topics from the textbook.

Your "experimental subjects"

You should do everything you can to enlist people to use the systems you are working with so you can observe them, ask questions, have them fill out user experience forms, etc. You may need to give them some little reward such as taking them to dinner or to a movie to show them your appreciation. You should not name your subjects, just age, gender, occupation (typically "student"), as well as some indication as to whether they are or are not familiar with the system(s) you're studying.

You must describe redesigns for systems you study!

Your project will also differ from your past work, because you will take a more active approach. When you carefully study any system, you'll find deficiencies or awkward, confusing, or annoying design. So an important part of your project, especially in the second and final versions, will be to suggest design improvements, and in addition, describe the types of experiments that could be done to compare the new design with the old - does it produce a more successful user experience?

How many words, pages, figures, and references you'll need

Each successive version will include improved versions of what you handed in previously, plus new material. For each version, state clearly how much is old and how much is new - how many more pages, how many more figures, how many more references. You may throw away or radically revise some older material too. That's often a smart approach. For example, you may find better references or figures and replace the old with the new as well as adding a few more. And remember your audience, the people you'll target your reports at - not Professor Futrelle, but other students who might or might not have taken ISU570 (the latter audience is the best bet). A smart move would be to have your reports read by someone else before you finish the final editing of each version, to see if it reads well and clearly.

The breadth and depth of what you will study in your project

A few examples can help here:

• If you study remote controls, you would need to study at least six different ones, from TV/DVD controls, to game controllers, and even a swipe card.


• If you study a system like the Charlie Card system, you would have to track down and discuss other fare and ticket purchasing systems, such as airlines, Amtrak, and include accessibility provisions. Many major cities, including Boston, New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, and London, have such systems. So part of the task would be to find out as much as you could about them, even emailing for info or having a friend who lives in one of the other cities help you out.


• For online stores, you'd need to compare different sites, as well as meta-sites (that compare prices from many stores), and auction systems. You could focus on a genre, such as building supplies or books, or compare distinct genres and how the approaches differ.


• For human-like agents online, you'd need to find and interact with a number of different ones


• For software systems, such as a drawing system, you would need to compare at least three quite different ones, with special attention to ones that are focused on drawing specific types of things, such as architectural plans, UML diagrams, and network and organization charts.


• For PDAs such as MP3 players, you would need to find people who own and use a variety of them. Devices such as Blackberries are a related category.


• A hybrid system is a self-bagging system such as the ones available at Home Depot and other stores. But you'd need to study more than just one.


• The list goes on and on ....

The literature describing your topic

In virtually every case, there will be literature describing the background, history, and current status of the systems you are studying. Some of it will from the HCI research literature. You'll need to track it down and discuss it. In addition, many systems have user guides and built-in-help that you'll need to discuss. You may need to have a system in front of you and write down what it looks like or explains. For a system such as self-bagging there is always an attendant nearby to help with difficult or confusing aspects of the system, ditto the Charlie Card (at least for now).

The material in the textbook that can be included in your project

In the list below, I list every chapter, with a brief note about how it could contribute to your project.

• Chapter 1: The design must create a successful user experience.


• Chapter 2: You need to describe the underlying design space and how it is conceptualized.


• Chapter 3: How do people see, think, remember, learn, and act when working with an interactive system?


• Chapter 4: Many systems today have a social basis, not just a single, independent user. The systems you study will probably have components of this - even if it's just the Charlie Card attendant, or other users who make suggestions, point out things, or describe problems and solutions in discussions you might have with them.


• Chapter 5: Emotions are crucial in interactive systems. You don't "like" or "dislike" a system on purely logical grounds.


• Chapter 6: Interfaces in computers, PDAs, remotes, and much more are the all-important "face" they present to the user.


• Chapter 7: You will need to gather data for your evaluations, so pay careful attention to this chapter.


• Chapter 8: Once your data is gathered, you'll need to analyze it and present your results and the conclusions you draw from it.


• Chapter 9: This describes the process of design, something you are required to do in your project - typically a redesign of something. Often some modest changes are enough.


• Chapter 10: When you design, you have to have some ideas about what the system is supposed to accomplish, and what the user would like to see.


• Chapter 11: You should consider prototyping your redesigns, at least in drawings and descriptions, since you're typically not building real things. (You're welcome to hand in a 3D model in Lego, clay, cardboard, or whatever ;-)


• Chapter 12: Evaluation is key. Without it, you just don't know whether a system has succeeded in its purpose. (In research proposals we submit, e.g., to the National Science Foundation, if there is no proper section on the evaluation of results, chances are you will not be funded.)


• Chapter 13: DECIDE is a framework to guide evaluation. DECIDE is an acronym for six steps in one standard approach to evaluation.


• Chapter 14: Usability and field studies are an important part of many Interaction Design projects. For example, you could hang out near a Charlie Card station or Home Depot self-bagging checkout location and observe how people do and don't succeed in using the system comfortably. Talk to the attendants about what the problems they've observed that users have most often.

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