I. Scott MacKenzie, York University, CANADA

Email: mack@cs.yorku.ca

Intended audience

Mainly practitioners

Tutorial goals

The tutorial presents techniques for undertaking a program of inquiry to evaluate designs, theories, or models relating to the interaction of humans with technology. The "empirical" aspect refers to the emphasis on observation-based methods where human interaction with technology is observed, measured, and quantified for the purpose of analysis and comparison. The tutorial is given using Power Point presentations combined with real-time demonstrations of software tools for data collection, data analysis, and data presentation. As well, attendees will participate in a real experiment, lasting about 45 minutes, conducted just prior to the lunch break, with full results given in the afternoon session. The experiment and supporting discussions will contain all the components of a full and proper experiment in HCI, and will empower attendees to subsequently conduct experiments on topics of their own interest.

Tutorial outline

• Introduction
  • How to discover and narrow in on topics suitable for research in HCI; how to formulate "testable" research questions; how to design an experiment to answer reserch questions
• A real experiment will be conducted attendees at the tutorial will act as both participants and investigators; tasks will be administered and data collected

During the lunch break, the presenter and his assistant will enter the data into boilerplate applications that will "instantly" summarize and analyse the data collected during the experiment, generating charts, tables, and statistical analyses on the data.

• Experiment results;
  • Presenting the results of an experiment in which attendees have just participated affords a strong opportunity to revisit and expand on the elements of empirical research: within subjects vs. between subjects factors, choosing participants, ethics approval and participant consent, gathering and reporting demographic data on participants, assigning participants to test conditions, choosing levels of independent variables, choosing dependent variables, analyses for main effects and interaction effects, requirements to establish cause and effect relationships, internal and external validity, and so on; how to write a research paper

Instructor

Scott MacKenzie is a researcher in human-computer interaction. His interests are in human performance measurement and modeling, experimental methods and evaluation, interaction devices and techniques, alphanumeric entry, language modelling, and mobile computing. He has more than 80 publications in the field of human-computer interaction (including more 25 from the ACM's annual SIGCHI conference) and has given numerous invited talks over the past 15 years. See http://www.yorku.ca/mack/ for further details.