CHI 2014: One of a CHInd

Hendrik Müller
Aaron Sedley
Elizabeth Ferrall-Nunge

Contribution & Benefit: To enable the creation of unbiased surveys, this course demonstrates questionnaire design biases and pitfalls, provides best practices for minimizing these, and reviews different uses of surveys within HCI.

Description: Surveys are a commonly used method within HCI research. While it initially appears easy and inexpensive to conduct surveys, overlooking key considerations in questionnaire design and the survey research process can yield skewed, biased, or entirely invalid survey results. Fortunately decades of academic research and analysis exist on optimizing the validity and reliability of survey data, from which this course will draw.

Attendees to this course will gain a practical understanding of high-quality questionnaire design and the potential negative consequences of lower-quality surveys. The course will demonstrate common questionnaire biases and pitfalls while providing best practices on how to minimize such biases. This course also discusses the role of survey research within HCI by highlighting common applications and by examining frequently used standardized questionnaires measure usability and other aspects within HCI.

The course will combine lecture material with relevant real-world examples; however, a major portion of the course will be dedicated to a group activity during which attendees will apply the learned material to reviewing and revising example survey questions. Attendees will come from a variety of roles in academia and industry, either new to surveys or somewhat experienced but interested in the latest advances, with a common goal of creating unbiased and actionable surveys themselves; however, no formal prerequisites are required.

Jonathan Lazar
Simone Barbosa

Contribution & Benefit: Gives newcomers background in the field of HCI to make their conference experience more meaningful. Provides a framework to understand how the various topics are related to research and practice.

Description: The objective of this course is to provide newcomers to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with an introduction and overview of the field. In addition to introducing basic concepts, the course will provide enough structure to help understand how the advanced material in the CHI 2014 technical program fits into the overall field.

The course material begins with a brief history of the field of HCI, and a discussion of the multiple disciplines that are involved in HCI research and practice. This includes the disciplines at the historic core of HCI, such as psychology, computer science and engineering, and disciplines that more recently have been influential in HCI, such as design, library science, and entertainment.

The course will provide an overview of HCI topics, including user-centered design methods, user interface design tools, user and expert-based evaluations, information architecture, novel interactive technologies, research methods for HCI, and interaction design for diverse users and cultural contexts. Suggested readings for follow-up information will be given.

The intended audience is made up of professionals in information and communication technology-related fields who have not yet had a systematic exposure to the discipline of HCI. This course often includes first-time attendees of the CHI conference.

Instructors' Background: Jonathan Lazar is a Professor of Computer and Information Sciences at Towson University, USA. He has published multiple books, including "Research Methods in Human-Computer Interaction" (co-authored with Feng and Hochheiser), has published primarily on interface accessibility for people with disabilities, and he serves as the Adjunct Chair of Public Policy for SIGCHI.

Simone Barbosa is Associate Professor of Computer Science at PUC-Rio, Brazil. She has co-authored the HCI book recommended by the Brazilian Computer Society for undergraduate programs, "Interação Humano-Computador", and has engaged in several HCI design projects with industry.

Combined, Jonathan and Simone have taught Intro to HCI classes for nearly 30 years and are both still passionate about teaching it.

Jon Kolko

Contribution & Benefit: Provides an overview of the design synthesis process (moving from research to insight, and from insight to design idea), and offers training in specific methods for managing ambiguity

Description: User-centered design research activities produce an enormous quantity of raw data, which must be systematically and rigorously synthesized in order to extract meaning and insight. Unfortunately, these methods of synthesis are poorly documented and rarely taught, and because of the pragmatic time constraints associated with working with clients, there is often no time dedicated in a statement of work to a practice of formal synthesis. As a result, raw design research data is inappropriately positioned as insight, and the value of user-centered research activities is marginalized - in fact, stakeholders may lose faith in the entire research practice, as they don't see direct return on the investment of research activities.

This skills-based course will introduce various methods of synthesis as ways to translate research into meaningful insights. Course participants will learn about how to manage the complexity of gathered data, and through hands-on exercises, they will apply various synthesis methods to elicit hidden meaning in gathered data. This hands-on approach is critical for building both confidence and ability with the various methods.

As a result of completing this course, attendees will:

• Understand how synthesis fits into the larger design and innovation process
• Be able to apply specific methods of synthesis in their respective careers
• Understand how to apply design synthesis methods to a process of sensemaking, to drive organizational alignment around complex and ill-defined ideas
• Develop confidence in utilizing design synthesis in everyday work

Jim Parker

Contribution & Benefit: This will give those unfamiliar with the inner workings of computer games a basic understanding of their design and function. It will illustrate many interaction mechanisms useful to the user experience.

Description: A computer game is a microcosm of the user experience domain. UX and game design share some common aims, praxis, and theory. Although there are differences in perspective between UX designers and game designers, these are not as great as most believe, and it is certain that game designers have knowledge and skills that would be a benefit to UX designers, and vice versa.

This course is intended for those interested in exploring games, either for themselves or as a workbench for exploring new ideas in UX. It features a practical approach, moving from initial design to a 'first playable' implementation. HTML5 is used so as to permit rapid dissemination using the web, and high level tools (EG Processing.js) will speed up the implementation.

The course will be lecture based, but there will be a practical example built during the class, and the audience can play along on their laptops if they choose. Attendees should have experience using Java or C++ and should possess basic design skills.

Jim Parker is a full Professor in the department of Art at the University of Calgary, teaching game design and media art, and before that he taught Computer Science at the same school for 26 years (image processing, game development). He is the author of five books, including a source material for this course The Guide to Computer Simulations and Games, Wiley (2012), and has a new book Computer Game Development Using Processing in development. He has most recently has been conducting research in virtual theatre and in computer games, especially Serious Games. Jim is also the principal designer at MinkHollow Media Ltd, a serious game developer in Canada.

Scott MacKenzie
Steven Castellucci

Contribution & Benefit: This course delivers an A-to-Z tutorial on conducting an empirical experiment (aka user study) in human-computer interaction and writing a CHI paper.

Description: Most attendees at CHI conferences will agree that an experiment (user study) is the hallmark of good research in human-computer interaction. But, what constitutes an experiment? And how does one go from an experiment to a CHI paper? This course will teach how to pose testable research questions, how to make and measure observations, and how to design an experiment. Attendees will participate in a real experiment to gain experience as both an investigator and as a participant. Most notably, attendees will learn how to organize experiment results and write a CHI paper.

The presentation will include PowerPoint slides and real-time demos. In addition, attendees will participate in an experiment conducted during the first session. Working in pairs, attendees will take turns acting both as investigator (i.e., instructing the participant, observing and recording data) and as participant (i.e., performing tasks as instructed). The data collected will be analyzed during the break and the results will be presented in the second session. The second session will also include a demonstration on how to write a successful CHI paper, including pitfalls to avoid.

Attendees require no specific background other than a general knowledge of human-computer interaction as conveyed, for example, through an undergraduate HCI course or attendance at CHI conferences. The main background is motivation to learn about and use empirical research methods in HCI. Knowledge of advanced statistics, such as the analysis of variance, is NOT required.

Terrill Thompson

Contribution & Benefit: This course will explore the state of the art in computer user interfaces for people with disabilities, including techniques for minimizing accessibility barriers and possible solutions when current models fail.

Description: This course will explore the current state of the art in computer user interfaces designed for people with disabilities, and will identify problems in the current models that may warrant alternative strategies. In today's technology landscape, nearly every human has a user interface available that enables him or her to access the computer. This includes people who are unable to see, people with low vision, people with dyslexia and other processing disabilities, the Deaf or Hard of Hearing, and people with little or no use of hands. This course will examine the wide spectrum of user interfaces available to people with disabilities, but will raise questions about the level and quality of access that these individuals enjoy. Their current user interfaces are ineffective unless the software, document, form or website they are trying to access is designed with accessibility in mind.

This problem has resulted in laws being passed that require accessible design, and standards and guidelines being developed that seek to educate designers and developers. But despite these efforts, people with disabilities still face daunting barriers that prevent them from accessing technology. This course will explore this problem in some depth, and participants will brainstorm possible solutions.

William Hudson

Contribution & Benefit: This course covers the theory and practice of card sorting with a particular focus on navigation design. It includes a paper-based card sort activity. Online methods are also discussed.

Description: This half-day hands-on course covers the theory and practice of card sorting. It includes hands-on experience of performing a paper-based card sort and quick data capture using barcode scanners (the techniques are applicable to many other problem domains).

Origins: This is an update of an earlier course ('Innovations in Card Sorting) that has been run for several years at CHI/HCI and usability conferences (HCI 2006 & 2007, CADUI 2008, HCI 2009, CHI 2009-2012). A one-day version of this course was presented as part of Nielsen-Norman Group's Usability Week in 2009. The updated, half-day version appeared at CHI 2011, 2012 and 2013.

Features: On completion of this tutorial you will be able to:

• choose an appropriate card sorting method
• explain cluster analysis and dendrograms to colleagues and clients
• apply appropriate techniques for getting the best information from participants and the resulting data
• perform quick and reliable data capture

Audience: Web and intranet designers, information architects, usability and HCI professionals interested in the practical application of card sorting. No specialist skills or knowledge are required.

Presentation: The course is approximately 60% tutorials and 40% practical card-sorting activities or group discussions.

Instructor Background: William Hudson has nearly 40 years' experience in the development of interactive systems. He is the founder of Syntagm, a consultancy specializing in user-centered design and has conducted more than 300 intranet and web site expert evaluations. William has written over 30 articles, papers and studies including the InteractionDesign.org Encyclopedia entry on card sorting. He was courses co-chair for CHI in 2013.

Website: Further information about the instructor and this course can be found at www.syntagm.co.uk/design

Javier Gonzalez-Sanchez
Maria Elena Chavez-Echeagaray
Robert Atkinson
Winslow Burleson

Contribution & Benefit: This course presents devices and explores methodologies for multimodal detection of affective states, as well as a discussion about presenter's experiences using them both in learning and gaming scenarios.

Description: One important way for systems to adapt to their individual users is related to their ability to show empathy. Being empathetic implies that the computer is able to recognize a user’s affective states and understand the implication of those states. Detection of affective states is a step forward to provide machines with the necessary intelligence to appropriately interact with humans. This course provides a description and demonstration of tools and methodologies necessary for automatically detecting affective states.

Origins: Variations of this course, in time and depth, have been presented in CHI 2012, Austin, TX; IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technology (ICALT) 2011, Athens, GA; Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ; and Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico.

Features: Through this course, attendees will

• Learn about sensing devices that can be used to detect affective states from users: brain-computer interfaces, face-based emotion recognition system, eye-tracking system, and physiological sensors;
• Understand the pros and cons of the diverse technology that is used to detect affective states;
• Learn about the data that is gathered from each device and understand its characteristics; and
• Learn about what it takes to manage (gather, pre-process, and synchronize) data, data analysis approaches, and tools.

Audience: This course is open to researchers, practitioners, and educators interested in incorporating affective computing as part of their adaptive and personalized technology toolbox.

Prerequisites: None.

Presentation: The presentation will be a mix of enthusiastic instruction with demonstrations and interactive exercises, all aimed at helping to make the topic concrete, memorable, and actionable.

Instructors: Javier Gonzalez-Sanchez and Maria Elena Chavez-Echeagaray are Graduate Research Assistants at Arizona State University in the PhD program in Computer Science. Prior to this, they were faculty members at Tecnoloógico de Monterrey.

Dr. Robert Atkinson is an Associate Professor in the Ira A. Schools of Engineering and in the Mary Lou Fulton Teacher’s College. His research explores the intersection of cognitive science, informatics, instructional design, and educational technology.

Dr. Winslow Burleson received his PhD from the MIT Media Lab, Affective Computing Group. He has worked with the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at the Harvard Business School, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, SETI Institute, and IBM's Almaden Research Center where he was awarded ten patents.

Resources: More information about this course could be consulted at http://javiergs.com/?p=1680

Jeff Johnson - UI Wizards, Inc. & Wiser Usability, Inc.

Contribution & Benefit: Explains the benefits of designing a task-focused conceptual model (CM) of an application before designing its UI, and how to create CMs. Provides hands-on experience designing a CM.

Description: A crucial step in designing a UI for a software application is to design a coherent, task-focused conceptual model (CM). With a CM, designers design better, developers develop better, and users learn and use better. Unfortunately, this step is often skipped, resulting in incoherent, arbitrary, inconsistent, overly-complex applications that impede design, development, learning, understanding, and use. This course covers what CMs are, how they help, how to develop them, and provides hands-on experience.

Features:

• What CMs are.
• How they improve software design and development.
• How UIs based on CMs provide a better fit with human learning and cognition.
• Perils of skipping CMs.
• Object/operations analysis (part of a CM).
• Example CMs.
• A hands-on exercise designing a CM for a simple application.

Presentation: Lecture, Q&A, and audience exercises. Most of the second segment consists of hands-on exercises and discussion.

Intended audience: Designers and developers of all levels, as well as Q/A engineers, usability testers, and managers.

Origins: Presented at CHI 2009-2013. Based on presenter's book, Conceptual Models.

Instructor background: Jeff Johnson is Principal Consultant at UI Wizards, a product usability consultancy, and co-founder of Wiser Usability, a consultancy focusing on usability and accessibility for older adults. He has worked in HCI since 1978. After earning B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in cognitive psychology from Yale and Stanford, he worked at Cromemco, Xerox, US West, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun. Since 1996 he has been a consultant and author. He has taught at Stanford, Mills, and the University of Canterbury. He authored (or co-authored) articles and chapters on HCI, and the books GUI Bloopers, Web Bloopers, GUI Bloopers 2.0, Designing with the Mind in Mind, and Conceptual Models.

Web: http://uiwizards.com, http://WiserUsability.com

Jim Parker

Contribution & Benefit: This course will give attendees a clear view of images: how they are constructed/captured, what influences image quality, and what can be done to enhance and extract data from them.

Description: This course is intended for people who wish to know more about image processing and machine vision. The two are, of course, different things, but use many of the same foundational techniques, and both are key aspects of many modern interface designs. Want to recognize a human hand pose to activate a computer response? Need to identify a human face? Need to detect motion or determine whether or not someone is near the doorway? Computer vision is likely a key aspect of a solution, especially now that cameras are inexpensive and simple to connect to a computer.

The course features a practical approach focused on object recognition and classification, which are relevant issues for interfaces. We'll discuss UX applications, Kinect technology, and other special devices. It uses freely available software: OpenCV, Processing, and associated libraries. The course will provide a basic understanding of vision as a key enabling technology, and avoids unnecessary theory. The idea is to give intuition on the methods presented.

Joseph Williams
Betsy Williams

Contribution & Benefit: Applies proven methodologies for randomized experiments to online contexts. Introduces steps for designing meaningful experiments, optimizing contrasts between cases, and avoiding common misunderstandings. Walks through examples with Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Description: This course helps attendees design effective online randomized experiments and A/B tests, in situations from Amazon Mechanical Turk to online course platforms. We explain experimental design principles from the behavioral and social sciences. This course provides an introduction to heuristics for designing good experiments that is intended to be immediately useful and actionable for A/B tests in online software, but grounded in rigorous methodology from cognitive psychology and experimental economics.

1. Evaluate whether a practical, design, or qualitative research question can be informed by an A/B test, and define the concepts and research questions involved.
2. Decide which experimental comparison to make, by choosing how to modify a product (or product feature) to provide two or more different versions. Key concepts include constructing experimental and control conditions, conducting randomized assignment appropriately, and avoiding common mistakes in confounding.
3. Choose and construct outcome measures - which quantitative measures or analytics to collect or analyze, in order to evaluate how these are influenced by the experimental comparison of different product versions. Key concepts include validity and reliability of measures, efficient collection of multiple measures, and common mistakes in interpreting outcome measures.
4. Use intuitive and easy-to-apply concepts from bootstrapping to estimate variability in quantitative measures, determine whether differences in quantitative measures between product versions are reliable or due to chance (statistical significance), and avoid common statistical misunderstandings. Resources are provided for using bootstrapping methods to compute the magnitude of differences (effect size), and how many users are needed (power analyses).
5. A brief guide for cheaply running experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk.

For each topic, we present relevant background concepts, discuss how the topic is applied to a concrete A/B test, discuss experimental design guidelines and heuristics, and provide web resources for future reference or further learning.

Niels Henze
Enrico Rukzio

Contribution & Benefit: This course provides an overview about the state-of-the-art in mobile HCI. It will enable attendees to apply research methods and design guidelines to build effective, efficient and pleasurable mobile interactions.

Description: Interaction with computers is not limited to the interaction in stationary settings anymore. Smartphones, tablet computers and smart watches already replaced PCs as the most successful digital devices. People use mobile devices in all kinds of settings and for a truly broad range of tasks. This makes mobile interaction design not only challenging but also has the potential to have tangible impact.

This course provides an overview about research and development in the mobile human-computer interaction field. We will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the different research methods that are used in the field. It will outline the typical usage contexts in which mobile devices are used today, provides design guidelines for mobile UI design, and presents latest research in the domain.

The course will mix discussion of research with exercises designed to help attendees become aware of the opportunities when designing interfaces to support mobile users, as well as the complexities involved when those interfaces are used in everyday life. Our aim is to empower attendees to build effective and efficient interfaces that are a pleasure to use. We want attendees to leave the course with a fresh perspective on their current projects and inspire them to build the next generation of mobile services.

William Hudson

Contribution & Benefit: This half-day course shows how to integrate User-Centered Design with Agile methods to create great user experiences. It takes an 'emotionally intelligent' approach to engaging all team members in UCD.

Description: This half-day course shows how to integrate User-Centered Design with Agile methods to create great user experiences. It also addresses the new topic of Persona Stories, introduced in an Interactions article by the author in the Nov-Dec 2013 issue (available at www.personastories.com).

The course is a balanced combination of tutorials, group exercises and discussions, ensuring that participants can gain a rich understanding of the problems presented by Agile and how they can be addressed.

Origins: This is an updated half-day version of a popular one-day course that has been well-received within a major UK telecoms operator and at a number of public presentations in London, Brussels and Hamburg in 2010 and 2011. It has been part of the CHI course offerings annually since 2011. It was well-attended at CHI 2013, with 50 places booked and a waiting list.

Features:

• Up-front versus Agile UCD
• Empathy gap, balanced teams and embedded user experience roles
• Design decision styles and minimum viable products (MVPs)
• Personas and the persona myths
• User Stories versus Persona Stories
• Agile usability testing
• Design maps

Audience: Usability, UX and UCD practitioners trying to integrate UCD activities within Agile teams. (Some familiarity with UCD techniques is required.)

Presentation: The course is approximately 60% tutorials and 40% activities or group discussions.

Instructor Background: William Hudson has 40 years' experience in the development of interactive systems. He has contributed material on user-centered design and user interface design to the Rational Unified Process and to Addison-Wesley's Object Modeling and User Interface Design (van Harmelen, 2001). He is the founder of Syntagm, a consultancy specializing in user-centered design and has conducted more than 300 intranet and web site evaluations. William has written over 30 articles, papers and studies. He was courses co-chair for CHI 2013.

Website: Further information about the instructor and this course can be found at www.syntagm.co.uk/design

Duen Horng (Polo) Chau - College of Computing, Georgia Tech

Contribution & Benefit: Learn key data mining concepts and tools, and how to integrate them with HCI methods for big data analytics, through non-technical introduction and case studies, and technical examples.

Description: Learn the key principles behind major data mining and machine learning techniques, and how to integrate them with HCI methods to solve problems in big data analytics.

Features:

• Learn the foundation of data mining and machine learning methods
• Learn how to integrate these techniques into your research
• Learn about practical tools for storing and analyzing large datasets with commodity PCs
• Understand common pitfalls in applying machine learning methods, and how to avoid them, e.g., feature selection, choosing the right algorithms
• Be inspired by exciting research problems and directions in bridging data mining and HCI

Audience: HCI researchers, practitioners, and students. No prior knowledge of machine learning or data mining is required.

Presentation: Lecture and videos.

Instructor Background: Prof. Polo Chau has been working at the intersection of HCI and data mining for over 9 years, to create scalable, interactive tools for big data analytics. Now a professor at Georgia Tech's College of Computing, Polo holds a Ph.D. in Machine Learning and a Masters in HCI, both from Carnegie Mellon. His thesis on bridging HCI and data mining for making sense of large network data won received Carnegie Mellon's Distinguished Computer Science Dissertation Award, Honorable Mention. He teaches the "Data and Visual Analytics" course at Georgia Tech. Polo is the only two-time Symantec fellow. He contributes to the PEGASUS peta-scale graph mining that won an Open Source Software World Challenge Silver Award. Polo's NetProbe auction fraud detection research appeared on The Wall Street Journal, CNN, TV and radio. His Polonium malware detection technology protects 120 million people worldwide.

Jim Nieters
Carola Fellenz Thompson

Contribution & Benefit: Attendees learn how to lead workshops that foster ideation, collaboration, trust, and free expression. These workshops enable intensive brainstorming, purposeful play, design, user testing, and rapid prototyping.

Description: We as researchers and User Experience (UX) designers want to identify and create products that change the world and therefore, we choose to engage in strategic research and design. In the real world though, coming up with a breakthrough idea or transformative design doesn't mean it will automatically be accepted in the research community or get to market. By definition, innovative ideas represent new ways of thinking. Organizations by nature seem to have anti-innovation antibodies that often kill new ideas-even disruptive innovations that could help companies differentiate themselves from their competition. As difficult as coming up with a game-changing idea can be, getting an organization to act on the idea often seems impossible. Perhaps we find ourselves in work routines that do not provide space to think differently. Our experience is that practitioners and academics alike need new tools to meet this challenge-tools that empower UX teams in both business and universities to identify transformative new ideas, and then to get these big ideas and designs accepted. This course proposes rapid design labs-a design-led, facilitative, cross-functional, iterative approach to innovation that aligns organizations and generates value at each step. It provides tools and methods that turn attendees into catalysts, who systemically identify new ideas, and align multi-disciplinary teams around their ideas. Attendees learn how to lead workshops that foster ideation, collaboration, trust, and free expression. These workshops enable intensive brainstorming, purposeful play, design, user testing, and rapid prototyping. Learn how innovative companies and universities, such as Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, the Berlin Technical University, Yahoo!. Mindjet, HP Consumer Travel, and more identify, design, and bring great products to market.

Michael Lyons
Axel Mulder
Sidney Fels

Contribution & Benefit: This theory + hands-on course provides attendees with a practical overview of recent advances in musical interface research and a chance to prototype a new interface for musical expression.

Description: This course provides a general, gentle, and fun introduction to the theory and practice of gestural interface design for creating and performing music. Our intended audience consists of those who are interested in starting projects relating to music technology. Those with a general interest are also welcome. Participants will learn key aspects of the theory and practice of musical interface design by studying case studies and hands-on experience mainly sourced from the leading conference in this area, known as "New Interfaces for Musical Expression" or NIME. Advances in digital audio technologies have led to a situation where computers play a role in most music production and performance. Digital technologies offer unprecedented opportunities for the creation and manipulation of sound, however the flexibility of these new technologies implies a confusing array of choices for musical composers and performers. Some artists have faced this challenge by using computers directly to create music. However, most would agree that the computer is not a musical instrument, in the same sense as traditional instruments, and it is natural to ask "how to play the computer" using interface technology appropriate for human brains and bodies. In two eighty minute sessions we will introduce an approach to the design of musical interfaces. The first session is presented in lecture format with many video demonstrations of musical interfaces. The second session is a hands-on lab where participants will use hardware and software tools (I-CubeX, Max/MSP, Ableton Live) for prototyping their own musical interface. The course is aimed at beginners but more experienced participants will have plenty to explore. Familiarity with basic aspects of interactive media will be helpful, however there are no specific technical prerequisites. No background in music or computer audio is assumed.

David Sirkin
Wendy Ju

Contribution & Benefit: Course is a hands-on introduction to interactive electronics prototyping for people with a variety of backgrounds, including those with no prior experience in electronics.

Description: Course is a hands-on introduction to interactive electronics prototyping for people with a variety of backgrounds, including those with no prior experience in electronics. Familiarity with programming is helpful, but not required. Participants will learn basic electronics, microcontroller programming and physical prototyping using the Arduino platform. Participants will use digital and analog sensors, LED lights and motors to build, program and customize a small "paper robot."

Topics Include:

• Basics of microcontroller architecture and firmware programming.
• Use of potentiometers, light sensors and force sensitive resistors.
• Controlling LEDs, displays and actuators from analog sensor input.

The first session introduces the Arduino environment and basic electronics. The second session applies this knowledge to the task of building an interactive robot. Instructors will share prototyping tools for participants to use, including a variety of LEDs, wires, connectors and sensors to augment the basic robot design.

Presentation: Content is presented as short lectures interleaved with self-guided tutorials. Instructors will answer questions and debug problems on-on-one. At different intervals, participants can share progress and trade ideas, allowing beginners to take their time and ask questions, and more advanced participants to work on creative variations of the basic tutorial.

Instructor Background: Wendy Ju is Executive Director of Interaction Design Research at Stanford's Center for Design Research, and Assistant Professor of Design at California College of the Arts. She has taught physical interaction design in Stanford's EE and Music departments.

David Sirkin teaches interactive device design in Stanford's EE department, and is a researcher at Stanford's Communication between Humans and Interactive Media lab and Center for Design Research.

Resources: Course includes a $50 kit (which participants keep) comprising an Arduino, breadboard, LEDs, analog sensors, actuators, connecting cables and batteries. Participants are required to bring a laptop on which they will install the Arduino software.

Allison Druin - HCIL, University of Maryland
Jerry Fails - Department of Computer Science, Montclair State University
Mona Leigh Guha - HCIL, University of Maryland

Contribution & Benefit: This course will cover technology co-design methods involving children; covering background, practical techniques, roles of adults and children, and practical issues relating to an intergenerational design team.

Description: Children are fast becoming a large user-segment of new technologies. We believe that it is critical that the HCI community continue to lead the way in supporting the best possible design of technology for children. This course will focus on techniques and practicalities of implementing intergenerational co-design.

Origins: A version of this course was taught at CHI 2008 through 2013. The course has been rated highly through the years.

Features:

• Hands-on experiences using techniques for designing new technologies with and for children
• Information about the role of the adult and practical issues of an intergenerational co-design team

Audience: We encourage attendance by industry professionals, academics, and students from a wide variety of communities.

Presentation: Hands-on design activities, small and whole-group discussion, short presentations with slides and video.

Instructor Backgrounds: Allison Druin is a Professor at the University of Maryland's HCIL. Since 1998, she has led interdisciplinary, intergenerational research teams to create new technologies for children. (http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~allisond/)

Jerry Alan Fails is an Assistant Professor in Montclair State University's Department of Computer Science. He has been working with children to design new technologies since 2003. (http://hci.montclair.edu/fails/)

Mona Leigh Guha is a Research Associate at the University of Maryland's HCIL. Since 2002, she has focused on the impacts of technology design processes on children who participate in them.

David Geerts - CUO, iMinds/KU Leuven
Pablo Cesar - CWI

Contribution & Benefit: Will teach attendees how to design and evaluate interaction with online video and television. Provides attendees a pragmatic toolset, including techniques and guidelines, which can be directly applied in practice.

Description: This course will teach attendees how to design and evaluate interaction with online video and television. It provides attendees a pragmatic toolset, including techniques and guidelines, which can be directly applied in practice. The different tools will be contextualized based on current developments, giving participants a complete overview of the state of the art and industry.

Features:

• An up-to-date overview of online video and TV applications
• A framework describing the different aspects of such applications
• Interaction Design principles for TV and online video applications
• User testing tips and heuristics to evaluate these applications
• A plenary exercise applying the design principles and heuristics
• Future outlook on television and online video

Origins: This course builds on the successful CHI2012 course "Social Interaction Design for Online Video and Television". It has been expanded and extensively updated including the most recent evolutions in this fast moving field, and taking into account comments and suggestions from previous attendees. It also draws on previous courses by the instructors at other conferences.

Presentation: Lecture, videos, exercises, plenary discussions

Instructors' Background: David Geerts has a PhD in Social Sciences at the KU Leuven, Belgium where he is Research Manager of the Centre for User Experience Research. David is specialized in user-centered design and evaluation of social TV. He has organized several workshops, SIGs and tutorials at various conferences.

Pablo Cesar has a PhD from Helsinki University of Technology. He is a senior researcher at CWI (The National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science), in the Netherlands. He has (co)authored over 50 conference papers and journal articles about multimedia systems and infrastructures, social media sharing, interactive media, multimedia content modelling, and user interaction.

Stephanie Foehrenbach

Contribution & Benefit: Sketching as a technique to quickly draw ideas is used to explore and communicate ideas. This course introduces basic sketching techniques and a visual language, which participants can immediately apply.

Description: Sketching as a technique to quickly draw ideas on a sheet of paper can be used to document, explore and communicate concepts and ideas. Sketches can help to elicit feedback from stakeholders and users in early project phases and therefore prevent from getting on the wrong track. Sketching can furthermore foster the ability to make more convincing ideas to collaborators, managers or clients. Within the user centered design process sketches can be a mean to quickly and inexpensively explore interaction concepts. They can be used to create storyboards and inform wireframes and prototypes.

However, the task of producing sketches can be challenging, especially if drawing skills are lacking. In this course, participants will be introduced to basic sketching techniques and a visual language, which they can immediately apply in research or practice. It is not a theoretical course but rather a lot of hands-on exercise for the participants.

During the course participants will learn:

• how to communicate visually
• how to visualize ideas just on the spot
• and how to use drawing to organize and refine thinking.

Everybody is welcome to this course and there are no prerequisites. However, it is most valuable for practitioners such as user experience professionals, requirements engineers or product managers, as well as researchers and students in the field of human computer interaction.

The course is given by Stephanie Foehrenbach (M.Sc., Dipl. Inform. (FH)). Stephanie is a usability lead consultant and trainer employed by Zuehlke in Switzerland. She works for clients from various industries.

Cosmin Munteanu - National Research Council Canada
Gerald Penn - University of Toronto

Contribution & Benefit: Learn how speech recognition and synthesis works, what are its limitations and usability challenges, how can it enhance interaction paradigms, and what is the current research and commercial state-of-the-art.

Description: Speech remains the "holy grail" of interaction, as this is the most natural form of communication that humans employ. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most difficult modalities to be understood by machines - despite, and perhaps, because it is the highest-bandwidth communication channel we possess. While significant research effort, in engineering, linguistics and psychology, have been spent on improving machines' ability to understand and synthesize speech, the HCI community has been relatively timid in embracing this modality as a central focus of research. This can be attributed in part to the relatively discouraging levels of accuracy in understanding speech, in contrast with often-unfounded claims of success from industry, but also to the intrinsic difficulty of designing and especially evaluating interfaces that use speech and natural language as an input or output modality. While the accuracies of understanding speech input are still discouraging for many applications under less-than-ideal conditions, several interesting areas have yet to be explored that could make speech-based interaction truly hands-free. The goal of this course is to inform the HCI community of the current state of speech and natural language interaction research, to dispel some of the myths surrounding speech-based interaction, as well as to provide an opportunity for HCI researchers and practitioners to learn more about how speech recognition and synthesis work, what are their limitations, where are they currently used in interactive and multimodal systems, and how they could be used to enhance current interaction paradigms.

Course Info: 2 Units (2 1/2 hrs), open to and suitable for all CHI attendees.

Instructors: Cosmin Munteanu, National Research Council Canada http://nrc-ca.academia.edu/CosminMunteanu
Gerald Penn, University of Toronto http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~gpenn/

Mark Billinghurst - The University of Canterbury
Hayes Raffle - Google

Contribution & Benefit: Attendees will learn to design interfaces for wearable computers like Google Glass through user-centered design principles. They will gain the knowledge to develop prototypes and conduct research on wearable platforms.

Description: Attendees will learn how to design interfaces for wearable computers such as Google Glass through the application of user-centered design principles. Attendees will gain the knowledge needed to develop prototype applications for Glass and other wearable platforms.

Origin: This is the first time this will be taught at CHI. However elements of it have been presented in other courses at CHI, Siggraph, and ISMAR, including:

• CHI 2013: Designing Augmented Reality Experiences
• ISMAR 2010, 2011: Mobile Augmented Reality
• Siggraph Asia 2008: Developing AR Applications

Features: The course will have the following educational goals:

• Provide an introduction to wearables
• Give an understanding of current technology
• Describe key design principles/interface metaphors
• Describe rapid prototyping tools
• Outline future research in wearable computing
• Hands on demonstrations with Glass and other wearables

Audience: This course is designed for people wanting to design applications for wearable computers. The course assumes attendees are able to develop their own software and are familiar with user-centered design. The focus will be on Google Glass, but the principles taught will be relevant to other wearable computers.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites.

Presentation: Lectures with slides and videos, and demonstrations.

Instructor Background: Mark Billinghurst is the director of the HIT Lab NZ at the University of Canterbury. He has nearly 20 years experience of research in wearable and mobile devices. In 2012 he was on sabbatical in the Google Glass team.

Hayes Raffle is an interaction designer working to combine the simplicity of traditional object-design with the flexibility of digital systems. Since 2010 he has been working as at Google[x] and is currently the Interaction Research lead for Glass.

Resources: Glass Developer website: https://developers.google.com/glass/
Glassim website: http://glasssim.com/

Brent Hecht
David Shamma

Contribution & Benefit: Participants should expect to leave the course with a high-level understanding of methods for properly analyzing geographic data and reporting results, the context necessary to better understand the geography literature, and resources for further engaging with geography research and best practices.

Description: Thanks to the rise of ubiquitous computing, location-based services, geotagged content, and related phenomena, geography plays an increasingly important role in the work of HCI researchers and practitioners. Through recent efforts to better integrate the geography and HCI communities like last year's workshop on geographic human-computer interaction, it has become clear that a basic introduction to modern geography would help make the geography literature and geography best practices more accessible to those in HCI. The goal of this course is to provide this introduction in a form that is both highly condensed and focused on topics most relevant to the HCI community.

Specifically, this course will include the following:

1. An introduction to the modern discipline of geography and its various branches, such as human geography, physical geography, human-environment interaction, and geographic information science.
2. Three illustrative "Deep" dives into three specific areas of the geography literature that are particularly relevant to a CHI audience.
3. Pointers for further engaging with the geography literature and identifying best practices.

Participants should expect to leave the course with a high-level understanding of methods for properly analyzing geographic data and reporting results, the context necessary to better understand the geography literature, and resources for further engaging with geography research and best practices. The course, which has no prerequisites, will be primarily lecture-based but will utilize humor and interactivity. Attendees of the course should be prepared to engage with the content in an active fashion (and have a little fun).

Link: http://bit.ly/geohcicourse

Nigel Bevan

Contribution & Benefit: How international standards can provide a sound basis for educational and training, can provide authority for design and development, and are a rich source of guidance and reference material.

Description: ISO standards for HCI contain an authoritative collation of exiting knowledge and good practice that has been contributed by international experts. The course will clarify the value provided by international standards, and their benefits and limitations. In many cases the standards are more comprehensive than any textbook. The course will explain how use of international standards can contribute to:

• Better user interface design: interfaces can be evaluated against the ISO guidelines, which can also provide authoritative evidence to cite if a user interface design decision is challenged.
• How to produce reliable usability test data by following the ISO usability test method and using the ISO format for usability reports.
• Making usability and UX a part of systems engineering: ISO standards show how to integrate usability into the requirements and systems development processes.
• Good practice in user centred design: ISO standards specify all the key elements that need to be included.
• Helping your organisation improve its process. Projects and organisations can compare their activities with the comprehensive and authoritative ISO definition of the processes that are needed to implement user-centered design.
• Documenting information about usability. ISO standards define the essential information that should be included in a user needs report and a description of the context of use.

The potential value of using these standards will be explained for example situations proposed by the audience.

The course will be useful for anyone interested in using international standards to benefit their professional work or activities in their organization, or to use as a basis for educational or training material. Basic familiarity with HCI and usability is assumed.

Janet Read
Panos Markopoulos

Contribution & Benefit: This course is an introduction to the exciting area of evaluation of interactive products for children. The focus is on empowering developers and researchers to do more robust, more appropriate and more suitable evaluations with children.

Description: This course is an introduction to the exciting area of evaluation of interactive products for children. The focus is on empowering developers and researchers to do more robust, more appropriate and more suitable evaluations with children. The presenters have both got experience in this area having written a book on the topic and being bth practitioners in this area. The course will introduce participants to core methods and tricks learned from the application of these methods in numerous studies with children in different countries and in different contexts. The ethics of involving children in evaluation studies will also be explored.

William Buxton

Contribution & Benefit: We explore two aspects of sketching experience and their relationship: constructivist approaches, where we synthesize the sketch, the other, where we take a page from Duchamp's Readymades, and sample the world for (often) non-obvious technologies that serve as the sketch. eBay emerges as a potent a sketching tool as a pencil or foam core.

Toni Robertson

Contribution & Benefit: This course revisits feminist theory to examine the ethical and pragmatic motivations for prioritising the active human body in technology design.

Don Norman

Contribution & Benefit: Reflections on design and HCI: strengths and weaknesses of research versus practice, HCI versus traditional design. An initial presentation moving to interaction led by audience questions and contributions.

Judith Donath

Contribution & Benefit: Social media interfaces embody assumptions about importance and desirability. Through analysis of several sites and a design exercise, this course explores how our perception of people, and culture, is being reshaped.

Ronald Baecker

Contribution & Benefit: Demographic trends and user diversity afford exciting design opportunities and challenges. We shall present two frameworks for envisioning solutions, and illustrate with landmark achievements, promising approaches, and open problems.

Jenny J. Preece
Anne Bowser

Contribution & Benefit: Citizen science supports public participation in scientific research. Increasingly new devices including smartphones, sensors, and technologies for validating and communicating data, are integrated into these practices. We suggest design, privacy and security guidelines.

Susan Dray
Elizabeth F. Churchill

Contribution & Benefit: From studying the neurophysiology of learning, to championing HCI in industry and promoting user-centered approaches to international development, Susan Dray, a 2014 inductee to the CHI Academy, will share key projects and key lessons for HCI from her career.