Notes on Projects - ISU570 Human Computer Interaction

Professor Futrelle, CCIS, Northeastern University - Fall 2007

Version of November 10, 2007

Introduction

The following are my notes based on studying your project handins. I hope you find them helpful. Remember to review the extensive notes about your projects on the Projects home page.

Notes, 11/10/07 on your projects, Version 1

  1. Title your handins, including "Version xx", whatever is applicable.

  2. Organize your paper logically and visually, with sections, section titles, bulleted or numbered lists where useful, etc. Avoid a relaxed and conversational style whenever the issues at hand in more concise writing.

  3. Consider using tables in your general introductions and discussions and in presenting raw data and the analyzed data. As just one example, a table could describe your subjects - age, experience, duration of observation.

  4. Don't get embroiled in trying to automate much of anything. Wizard of Oz experiments are usually fine, e.g., for testing a messaging system.

  5. Don't put references in footnotes. That's common in the humanities, but quite uncommon in scitech fields.

  6. When using URLs as references always include additional material such as title, date, author, website name, etc.

  7. If you're having your subjects compare a number of systems or artifacts, randomize the order for each new subject to avoid sequential biases.

  8. Mixing a number of different objects (systems or artifacts) of study and users with varying experience with the objects can lead to such varied data that it's hard to analyze. Better: Choose one object with varied users or multiple objects with only experienced users or only users who have never used the object before.

  9. Use the appropriate technical concepts and terminology and refer to the relevant chapters, sections, or pages of our textbook.

  10. You should include references to the HCI literature, discussing the relevance of each reference in a minimum of two sentences each. If you have three or so such references, they should be good enough to deserve a short paragraph for each.

  11. Avoid hype about your objects of study. Keep your study objective. You can give an analytic analysis, but the primary evaluative judgments should come from your subjects not you. You can evaluate the results. You can include your opinions, but make it clear that that's exactly what they are.

  12. As a corollary, doing your own evaluation of a product you dearly love would be a big mistake. In such a case it would be more revealing to find someone who does not like the product, or strongly prefers another. Then you might be able to learn about the flaws that some perceive.

  13. Don't do your final experiments with subjects without first laying out an experimental design, data analysis plans, etc. Your approach and results should be more than anecdotal.

  14. A project paper that describes an object in extensive detail, but omits much discussion of your HCI investigation plans is missing too many important things.

Return to ISU570 Fall 2007 homepage. or RPF's Teaching Gateway or homepage