CHI2003 Trip Report

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CHI2003 Trip Report Peter Boersma, Senior
Information Architect, EzGov Peter.Boersma_at_ezgov.c
om
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Overview

• CHI Conferences 5 min
• CHI 2003 set-up 5 min
• CHI 2003 session notes 45 min
• CHI 2004 participation 5 min

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CHI Conferences
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About the CHI conferences

• Organized byAssociation for Computing Machinery
  (ACM)Special Interest Group for Computer-Human
  Interaction (SIGCHI)
• Since 1983, mostly in United States, twice in
  Europe (Amsterdam and The Hague, NL)
• Mix of academics, researchers, practitioners from
  4 continents

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ACM ? SIGCHI ? SIGCHI.NL

• ACM is a union like body (75000 members), working
  on standardizing issues, code of conduct/ethics,
  policy and lobbying. Has an online library,
  publishes magazines, hands out awards, organizes
  conferences, etc.
• Special Interest Groups (34, including SIGCHI,
  SIGGRAPH, SIGDOC, SIGMM, SIGMOBILE, SIGWEB) unite
  professionals, researchers and academics. They
  organize specialized conferences and publish
  their own magazines. SIGCHI organizes CHI and
  publishes Interactions.
• Local Chapters (like SIGCHI.NL) do the same at a
  local (US) or national (rest of the world) level.

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CHI 2003
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CHI 2003

• April 5-12, 2003
• Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA
• 1600 attendees(down from 2300 at CHI 2001 in
  Seattle)
• Themed New Horizons (duh!) with 3 sub-themes
  e-learning, emotion, and mass-communication

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Beach pictures (1/4) (might as well start with
these)
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Beach pictures (2/4) (might as well start with
these)
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Beach pictures (3/4) (might as well start with
these)
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Beach pictures (4/4) (might as well start with
these)
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So, back to CHI 2003
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CHI 2003

• April 5-12, 2003
• Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA
• 1600 attendeesdown from 2300 at CHI 2001 in
  Seattle
• Themed New Horizons (duh!) with 3 sub-themes
  e-learning, emotion, and mass-communication

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Conference set-up (1/2)

• Saturday Monday Pre-conference activities -
  Development consortium, doctoral consortium,
  local SIGs meeting, workshops, tutorials.-
  Closed sessions, selection based on criteria
  (consortia, local SIGs), position paper
  (workshops) or first-pay-first-serve (tutorials)
• Tuesday Thursday Main conference - 3 days, 4
  sessions a day, 7 events per session.- Open
  sessions, walk in and sit down.

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Conference set-up (2/2)

• Types of presentations- opening and closing-
  paper sessions- short talks/demos- panels-
  special interest groups- posters
• Special events- design/usability track-
  special area sessions- interactionary- CHI
  fringe
• PlusConference Reception, Networking Reception,
  SIGCHI Business Meeting, Newcomers Orientation,
  Hospitality Receptions, Highlights, Exhibition,
  Recruiting Boards, Breaks, etc.

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CHI 2003 session notes
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Monday
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Attended Sessions Mix Monday

• I tried to attend a mix of practitioners views,
  User-Centered Design, and e-Government focused
  sessions, plus some general interest ones.
• Monday Evening Tutorial Web-Site Usability The
  Big Picture 2003 (by Jared Spool of User
  Interface Engineering)

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Tuesday
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Attended Sessions Tuesday

• Opening Plenary Neil F. Budde, former Publisher
  Editor of the Wall Street Journal, Racing with
  the wind Publishers Learn to Navigate in
  Multimedia World
• Special Interest Group Measuring Return on
  Investment for User Centered Development ?
• Special Interest Group Making Customer Centered
  Design work in the real world of Organizations ?

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Attended Sessions Tuesday

• Opening Plenary Neil F. Budde, former Publisher
  Editor of the Wall Street Journal, Racing with
  the wind Publishers Learn to Navigate in
  Multimedia World
• Special Interest Group Measuring Return on
  Investment for User Centered Development ?
• Special Interest Group Making Customer Centered
  Design work in the real world of Organizations ?

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Measuring ROI for UCD (1/2)

• To measure return on investment, you must have a
  measurement model in place, that measures- the
  (standardized) activities of the UCD team-
  whether the results of the UCD method meets the
  business goals- which factors influence the
  outcome of projects positively and negatively

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Measuring ROI for UCD (2/2)

• For EzGov, and especially the UID team, this
  means- UID team (responsible for most UCD
  activities) must continue to work on
  standardizing its activities- UCD method should
  include impact of factors on projects- UID team
  should promote its UCD method to other
  departments- Key Performance Indicators are our
  basic measurement model, aligning activities to
  business goals

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Attended Sessions Tuesday

• Opening Plenary Neil F. Budde, former Publisher
  Editor of the Wall Street Journal, Racing with
  the wind Publishers Learn to Navigate in
  Multimedia World
• Special Interest Group Measuring Return on
  Investment for User Centered Development ?
• Special Interest Group Making Customer Centered
  Design work in the real world of Organizations ?

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Making Customer-Centered Design Work

• (This SIG had a very commercial smell the
  presenters were students of the organizers
  course in Contextual Design ?)
• Challenges- Design efforts broken up by feature
  lists- Resourcing broken up by parallel
  projects- No time for data gathering
• Suggestions- UID team works with product
  development- Own the prototype, and prototype
  early- Explore the use of patterns as design
  tools- Be part of the QA process- Teach
  management about usability- Get a team/war
  room- Join product management visits and do UCD
  on the spot

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Attended Sessions Tuesday

• Short Talks/Papers Usability of Large-Scale
  Public Systems ?
• Conference Reception Beach Party

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Large-Scale Public Systems (1/2)

• Four short presentations, pretty practitioner
  oriented.
• Conversation Thumbnails for Large-Scale
  Discussions (IBM Research)- visual thumbnails
  show outline of discussions- users rating more
  important than indentation threading
• Communities of (Design) Practice in e-Government
  (Southern Polytechnic Georgia Technology
  Authority)- teams spend time on learning,
  building trust, setting goals, and mostly culture
  change (80)- teams go through 4 phases form,
  storm, norm, perform

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Large-Scale Public Systems (2/2)

• Usability Issues of Electronic Voting Systems
  (Ben Bederson, University of Maryland)- unpaid
  study because county intended to buy e-voting
  machine and wanted a usability expert review-
  10 of respondents of study were not confident
  about their vote (remember Florida 2000 was
  about 0.02)
• Usability and Biometric Verification at ATM
  interface (NCR)- fingerprint and voice
  recognition dont work in practice- iris
  recognition does, and the implementation is cool!

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Attended Sessions Tuesday

• Short Talks/Papers Usability of Large-Scale
  Public Systems ?
• Conference Reception Beach Party

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Wednesday
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Attended Sessions Wednesday

• Panel The Magic Number 5 - Is it Enough for
  Web Testing? ?
• Panel Voting User Experience - Technology and
  Practice ?
• Interactionary ?
• Paper Session Searching and Organizing ?

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Is 5 users enough for web testing? (1/3)

• Panel with Jared Spool (UIE), Rolf Molich
  (DialogDesign.dk), Gilbert Cockton (co-chair and
  U. of Sunderland), Carol Barnum (Southern
  Polytechnic), Dennis Wixon (Microsoft).Jakob
  Nielsen couldnt make it 5 panels are enough
• Jared 5 users is nowhere nearenough! The curve
  is muchflatter, the 80 mark wasntreached
  before 90 users insome of our studies.But we do
  need a model,to estimate the numberfor our
  tests.

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Is 5 users enough for web testing? (2/3)

• Rolf Molich (dialogdesign.dk) said the number
  depends on the goal of the usability test- sell
  usability ? 3-4 users- drive development ? 5-8
  users- find all problems ? gt100 usersHe warned
  us for two things- quality of testing is
  important (CUE study 7 teams evaluated Hotmail
  site and found many, very different, usability
  problems with very little overlap)- usability
  evaluation alone is not enough you need
  experienced designers too (to prevent errors).

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Is 5 users enough for web testing? (3/3)

• Dennis Wixon (Usability Manager Microsoft)
  argued- it isnt about finding problems its
  about fixing them (duh!).- use our methodology
  called RITE (Rapid Iterative Testing and
  Evaluation) which, upon closer inspection,
  appears to say test until the product is okay
  (duh!).- use ethnographic methods to inform
  design, but also to estimate the severity of
  found problems.- testing and redesigning allows
  you to build design patterns.- commercial
  success counts too (duh! But he did have a
  point).
• The audience argued that we need summative tests
  (for consumers), and somebody mentioned the
  Common Industry Format (CIF, a standard way of
  reporting the setup and results of usability
  tests) developed by the National Institute of
  Standards and Technology.

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Attended Sessions Wednesday

• Panel The Magic Number 5 - Is it Enough for
  Web Testing? ?
• Panel Voting User Experience - Technology and
  Practice ?
• Interactionary ?
• Paper Session Searching and Organizing ?

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Voting User Experience (combining my favorite
subjects!)

• There is 30 million in HAVA (Help Americans
  Vote Act) funds available for research, but no
  requests and no people to judge them.(Eric
  Fischer, Library of Congress)
• Information visualization (e.g. ZUI) is
  necessary to help people understand what they
  vote for. (Ben Bederson, Univ. of Maryland)
• Voluntary, infrequent and ritualized systems
  (like voting) require attention to perceptions of
  design, not just functionality.(Clifford Nass,
  Stanford)
• Large-scale marketing efforts (TV ads etc.) will
  help users familiarize themselves with the
  e-voting UI (Conny McCormak, LA County)

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Attended Sessions Wednesday

• Panel The Magic Number 5 - Is it Enough for
  Web Testing? ?
• Panel Voting User Experience - Technology and
  Practice ?
• Interactionary ?
• Paper Session Searching and Organizing ?

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Interactionary

• Explore the process of designby forcing insane
  timeconstraints, and asking teamsof designers
  to work togetherin front of a live
  audience.(Scott Berkun, Microsoft)
• A game show type format thatallows several teams
  towork on the same designproblem, live on
  stage!
• Teams1st Carnegie-Mellon2nd TUe USI3rd Nokia
  Research

the team with the best shirts
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Attended Sessions Wednesday

• Panel The Magic Number 5 - Is it Enough for
  Web Testing? ?
• Panel Voting User Experience - Technology and
  Practice ?
• Interactionary ?
• Paper Session Searching and Organizing ?

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Papers on Searching and zzzzzzzzz

• Paper sessions are boring! I made a note that I
  lost interest at 1738 exactly.
• Only interesting thing a shortdemo of Flamenco,
  afaceted-metadata interfaceto 35.000 images of
  art.
• System allows user to select apath to dive into
  one of manyhierarchies, while showingexamples
  and giving indicatorsof how much the user
  canexpect to see at the next click.

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Flamenco interface
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Thursday
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Attended Sessions Thursday

• Panel Evaluating Globally - How to Conduct
  International or Intercultural Usability
  Research
• Special Area Session Emotion and the Design of
  New Technology ?
• CHI Fringe ?
• Closing Plenary Donald Norman Emotion Design
  ?

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Attended Sessions Thursday

• Panel Evaluating Globally - How to Conduct
  International or Intercultural Usability
  Research
• Special Area Session Emotion and the Design of
  New Technology ?
• CHI Fringe ?
• Closing Plenary Donald Norman Emotion Design
  ?

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Emotion and the Design of New Technology

• Special Area Session (panel with guest appearance
  by Donald Norman).
• Aaron Marcus (AMA) develop culture bases with
  localized data about emotions, responses,
  rituals, gestures, etc.Use research from other
  fields.
• Kees Overbeeke (TUe) Engagingexperiences
  require thought intoaffordances (Gibson).
• Pieter Desmet (Delft) ProductEmotion
  Measurement instrument,(PrEmo-6) part of PhD.

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Attended Sessions Thursday

• Panel Evaluating Globally - How to Conduct
  International or Intercultural Usability
  Research
• Special Area Session Emotion and the Design of
  New Technology ?
• CHI Fringe ?
• Closing Plenary Donald Norman Emotion Design
  ?

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CHI Fringe

• Potential attendees voted for different
  submissions through CHIplace (www.chiplace.org).
• Result1. demo of cool but utterly useless
  tool Total Recall2. rant on the Tyranny of
  Evaluation3. paper that was rejected twice4.
  pirate showing web bloopers
• All presenters made sure tocritique the CHI
  review process.

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Attended Sessions Thursday

• Panel Evaluating Globally - How to Conduct
  International or Intercultural Usability
  Research
• Special Area Session Emotion and the Design of
  New Technology ?
• CHI Fringe ?
• Closing Plenary Donald Norman Emotion Design
  ?

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Closing Plenary Emotion Design

• In simple words, Donald introduceda new Model
  for Emotion.reflective what people say they
  experiencebehavioral traditionally the focus
  of UI designers researchersvisceral
  immediate, biological response, hard to control

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CHI 2004
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CHI2004 is coming to Europe
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Participate in CHI2004

• How to participate- pick one (or more) of the
  submission categoriesDesign Usability in
  Practice, Development Consortium, Doctoral
  Consortium, Interactionary, Panels, Papers, Short
  Talks Interactive Posters, Special Interest
  Groups, Student Posters, Tutorials or
  Workshops- request funding- find the deadline
  (www.chi2004.org)- request a mentor, it helps!-
  contact the co-chair for more information and
  suitability of your proposal- write your
  submission with a colleague or fellow
  practitioner/researcher- submit according to the
  rules (and in time)- repeat if necessary, but
  also think of fallback opportunities (like
  informal SIGs)
• Good exercise become a reviewer!

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Or, if that is not possible

• Try an even more local event
• SIGCHI.NL conference Netwerk in Beweging (June
  19, SD-meeting).2003/2004 is a lustrum year, so
  there will be others. SIGCHI.NL also organizes
  evening lectures every (other) month.
• HCI 2003, Bath, UK. September 8-12, themed
  Designing for Society.

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Join the fun!
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CHI2003 Trip Report Peter Boersma, Senior
Information Architect, EzGov Peter.Boersma_at_ezgov.c
om