IS 4800
Empirical Research Methods - Spring 2012
Study proposals and project reports must be
submitted by Blackboard on the due dates. Attendance is required
on the 3 days when students will make presentations.
General
Each project has a 3-4 week duration. Study
proposals should be 2-3 pages long, and should identify the subject
population, sampling method, obtaining informed consent, and how data
will be collected. You may not collect data until the
instructor sends you an email explicitly approving your study protocol.
Your
projects
must
follow
the
Northeastern
IRB
guidelines
for
student
projects
discussed in class. Your final
reports must contain a description of your research methods, the raw
data (as an appendix),
descriptive statistics, visualizations, analysis (statistics), and
discussion (interpretation
& implications).
Presentations
Oral presentations must be at most 12 minutes in length (hard upper bound - you will be cut off if you go over), leaving 3 minutes critique per team. Your talk should encompass the main idea/research question, hypotheses (if appropriate), study design, results, conclusions, and (very important) appropriate visualizations of your results. You can present off of your own laptop, but you must test your laptop with the classroom projector prior to the start of class.
Informed Consent
Team Assignments
I. Brief statement of topic and purpose; what you hope to learn
II. Describe subject population and sampling
inclusion/exclusion criteria; method of sampling or recruitment
III. Consent process
IV. Description of data collection procedures/instruments
First, read the
chapter
by
Jakob
Nielsen on
usability testing. Also look at a short paper describing a usability
study like the one you may decide to work on: An
empirical comparison of the usability for novice and expert
searchers of a textual and a graphic interface to an art-resource
database by Andrew Dillon and Min Song.
Ask 3-5 classmates or friends to help you with a user study. Make sure they have not used the software before. Obtain verbal consent (as discussed in class). Provide a brief description of the software (but not how to use it). Then, give each participant each task and collect data (through observation or measurement) on their attempts to complete it. Do not provide any help. Collect your measures.
Submit a writeup of the software, tasks, test
procedures, performance measures, data collection method(s), and
results of your study. Include
descriptive statistics (and graphs) of your data.
Your writeup should include a Discussion section where you relate your
measures to Nielsen's 5 usability goals, and propose any design
recommendations
resulting from your study.