Usability, Tools, Data Collection, Laboratory, Testing, Logging, Video, Analysis
This Special Interest Group (SIG) will be an update to panels and SIGs from previous conferences including CHI and the Usability Professionals Association. The intent of the SIG is to provide a forum for the exchange of new ideas and technologies in the area of usability laboratory tools. Experts in the area will meet to discuss and demonstrate recent developments in tools and talk about future plans. Topics for discussion include event logging, observation logging, video tape analysis, digital video, highlight tape production, remote usability testing, and other new techniques/technologies. Anyone involved or interested in usability testing is invited to attend.
Many companies and organizations have developed customized usability lab tools. They range in complexity and features and are becoming more and more common in the usability environment. Therefore, there is a greater need for information exchange between the various labs.
Starting with the panel held at INTERCHI'93, which featured representatives from Apple, Compaq, IBM, Microsoft and Sun, it became apparent that the interest in usability lab tools was widespread among conference attendees. While most of the tools discussed by the panelists were computer-based and internally developed, one of the interesting developments in the ensuing breakout session was the interest in low- fidelity and commercially available tools. In a follow-up panel at the Usability Professionals Association 1993 conference, new panelists from Lotus and the National Physics Laboratory brought fresh insights into the topic of low- fidelity and commercially available tools. Again the interest in the topic was large and several side discussions followed. Additional forums on lab tools have been held at CHI'94 (SIG) and UPA'94 (Panel discussion). Each time new discussants and new techniques/tools have generated a large amount of interest from the audience.
Over the last year in discussions between usability professionals interested in lab tools, the focal topic has again been on new technologies and techniques that lend themselves to conducting usability tests. Topics discussed include the use of remote testing technologies as a mechanism for reaching specialized user populations, the use of peer-to-peer video and other conferencing tools, utilization of digital video for data recording and presentation, and PDA-based data logging. These new capabilities continue to broaden the potential participant base, open up opportunities for more unobtrusive data collection, and support more salient and engaging reporting techniques.
Over the course of the past year, conversations between past panelists and others interested in the topic area have confirmed that several new and interesting developments have occurred. The opportunity to share and build upon these new developments and discuss future plans would be beneficial to the growing number of professionals interested in the area.
In the past, participants have come from a variety of industrial and academic settings and have discussed the costs and benefits of the various types of tools they have used for usability testing. Participants will share key lessons learned regarding the development, acquisition, and utilization of various tools and the impact these tools have had on present day usability techniques.
Copyright ACM The documents contained in these directories are included by the contributing authors as a means to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work on a non-commercial basis. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other copyright holders, notwithstanding that they have offered their works here electronically. It is understood that all persons copying this information will adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.
auditory interfaces, speech interfaces, multimodal interfaces, sound, acoustic displays, sonification, auditory perception
A workshop entitled The Future of Speech and Audio in the Interface [1] was held at CHI '94 with the goal of further defining the emerging area of sound in user interfaces and applications, and exploring applications, research areas, and interaction techniques that use audio in the interface. The focus of the workshop was on the "CHI perspective" of using speech and sound to exploit the audio channel for the user's benefit. This SIG is designed as a follow-on to that workshop; the focus of the workshop will provide the focus for this session as well.
During the discussions at last year's workshop a number of relevant issues were raised. We have chosen some of these as topics for further discussion this year, including
How should speech interfaces handle the problem of "What can I say?"
How can music, symbolic sounds, and everyday sounds be combined in an interface?
When should sound be used instead of graphics?
What is the best way to integrate speech, non-speech and graphics an a user interface?
This session should be of interest both to practitioners in the field and to those unfamiliar with the topic who are interested in learning more about incorporating speech and/or non-speech audio into an interface.
The SIG will be structured as informal discussions, moderated by the session leaders. Informative hand- outs will be available for those that are new to the field. Compiled meeting notes will be made available to SIG attendees following the conference.
1. B. Arons and E. Mynatt, The Future of Speech and Audio in the Interface, SIGCHI Bulletin, 26, 4, pp. 44-48, October, 1994.
Copyright ACM The documents contained in these directories are included by the contributing authors as a means to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work on a non-commercial basis. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other copyright holders, notwithstanding that they have offered their works here electronically. It is understood that all persons copying this information will adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.
design process, contextual inquiry, customer-centered design, ethnography, usability, team design, domain analysis
Contextual techniques, which ensure good system design by taking the designer out into the users' world, are revolutionizing the way organizations approach design. But since the techniques are still new and unfamiliar, practitioners still wrestle with the problem of marrying this new way of working to traditional development. This SIG gives practitioners the chance to hear others tell how they successfully overcame this challenge, to share their experience, and to get help and perspective on the specific problems they face. The SIG will interest practitioners and researchers concerned with gathering and using of field data in design, whether they do this now or would like to do it in the future.
Contextual techniques include field research techniques such as contextual inquiry, ethnographic techniques, and participatory design techniques. They also include methods such as Contextual Design, which address the full design problem from gathering data about the customer in the field through developing and testing a coherent design based on that data. This SIG addresses the use of these techniques in their organizational context how to put together a design team, how to get to the customer, how to keep a design team focused on customer data, and how to transition designs successfully into standard engineering practice.
This SIG mixes presentation of experience with discussion to give participants a feel for what is being done to make contextual techniques part of real development, who is doing it, and how they have brought their design and development teams along. Participants should leave with a good sense for the stability and usefulness of the techniques, and some clear pointers on what they can do in their own jobs to take advantage of them.
Brief orientation to the problem what contextual techniques are, and typical problems teams have using them in a traditional development organization. One or two experience reports. Practitioners from Novell/WordPerfect and Glaxo, Inc., who have successfully used contextual techniques to produce products or systems in their own jobs, tell what they did and how they overcame organizational barriers to feed the data into the development process. Questions and group discussion follows each presentation. Participants share their own successes, problems, or issues. Group discussion gives perspective or suggests solutions.
The proposed SIG follows on the SIG War Stories and Experience Designing with Contextual Techniques offered at CHI '94. At that time we were urged to make this an annual event to support a continuing conversation among practitioners in which they could share experience and problems.
In this year's SIG, we propose to focus on the problem of creating a project team that uses contextual techniques. Introducing any new process into an organization is hard, and introducing contextual techniques (indeed, any qualitative technique) is especially hard because they are very different from the way many organizations are used to working. People struggling to make the approach real at different organizations need to learn
It is possible-others in industry are successfully introducing these techniques; Approaches for dealing with the organization-how others have gotten permission to start working this way, have created cross-functional design teams, have used the data to affect designs, and have moved the organization to adopting these approaches as standard practice;
How to apply the techniques to the specific problems of their organization.
We plan to structure the conversation as follows
We introduce what contextual techniques are, and talk about principles of handling teams and organizations. This ensures that everyone knows what we are talking about, and gives a common ground for comparing different approaches.
Two practitioners share their experience senior engineers from Glaxo's Information Technology department and from Novell's WordPerfect division. Each has been successful using contextual techniques to ship systems furthering the primary mission of their organization developing new product versions, and an important internal application. Each has been successful fitting the contextual work into the overall development process of their organization.
Each will talk for about 15 minutes, after which there will be time for questions and discussion.
Participants in the SIG will have the opportunity to share their successes, problems, or issues. Each will have about five minutes to tell their story or explain their problem, and other participants will respond.