Top 5 HCI or Usability Research Labs in the Country
1. Human Computer Interaction Lab, University of Maryland
URL: http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/
Project: Mobile Collaboration for Young Children
Social interaction and collaboration are essential to the emotional and cognitive
development of young children. Constructionism is a learning theory where children
learn as they build or construct a public artifact. Creative activities that promote
collaboration, especially those based on principles of constructionism, provide
enhanced learning opportunities for young children. Mobile devices can support the
learning experience as children can create artifacts in various contexts. The proposed
research incorporates collaboration, constructionism, children, stories and mobile
technologies; specifically investigating developmentally appropriate interfaces to
support mobile collaboration for young children.
Faculty:
Dr. Allison Druin, Associate Professor, College of Information Studies, Human-Computer
Interaction Lab.
Paper:
Druin, A., Weeks, A., Massey, S., & Bederson, B. B. (2007). Children's interests and
concerns when using the International Children's Digital Library: A four country case
study. In Proceedings of Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL'2007) Vancouver,
British Columbia, Canada.167-176.
ABSTRACT
This paper presents a case study of 12 children who used the International Children’s
Digital Library (ICDL) over four years and live in one of four countries: Germany,
Honduras, New Zealand, and the United States. By conducting interviews and classroom
observations, along with collecting drawings, book reviews, and work samples, this
study describes how these children were interested in books, libraries, technology and
the world around them. Findings from this study include: these young people increased
the variety of books they read online; still preferred physical interactions with books for
reading, but appreciated the searching tools online; still valued their physical libraries as
spaces for social interaction and reading; showed increased reading motivation; and
showed interest in exploring different cultures.
2. Center for Human Computer Interaction, Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University
URL: http://www.hci.vt.edu/
Project: Digital Government: Modeling Online Participation in Local Government
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To understand how citizens use information technology with each other to participate in
civic life (find information, stay informed, discuss issues, form opinions, deliberate);
To understand how online citizen-to-citizen deliberation links back into local
government decision making;
To improve the capability and functionality of information technology to serve the
interests and needs of citizens and local government for deliberative purposes.
This project has sought to re-focus the digital government discussion around factors
that make for an effective democracy rather than for effective government. Focusses on
citizen participation in local governance -- including local voluntary associations -- and
on better ways that technology can support and facilitate the involvement of citizens
and groups in local governance.
Faculty:
Principal Investigators: Andrea Kavanaugh, Philip Isenhour, Manuel Perez-Quinones,
Daniel Dunlap
Outside Consultants: John M. Carroll, Mary Beth Rosson, Joseph Schmitz
Paper:
Andrea Kavanaugh, Joseph Schmitz, Than Than Zin, John M. Carroll, Manuel PérezQuiñones, Philip Isenhour. When Opinion Leaders Blog: New forms of citizen
interaction , Proceedings of the 2006 Digital Government Conference, May 21-24, 2006,
San Diego, California
ABSTRACT
Web logs (i.e., blogs) provide enhanced opportunities to extend capabilities of
traditional electronic mail and discussion lists, especially in the hands of opinion leaders;
such tools offer greater social interaction and informal discussion, and opportunities for
conversational content production. Because blogging tools are simple, available, and
free, users can easily communicate with others in their social networks, their geographic
communities and the interested public. Blogs represent self-organizing social systems
that can help many persons to: 1) interact collaboratively, 2) learn from each other by
exchanging ideas and information, and 3) solve collective problems. For opinion leaders
– that small percentage of the population that is socially and politically active – blogs
represent another channel to disseminate ideas and garner feedback from members of
their social network. The present research offers findings from a random household
survey of citizens of Blacksburg and Montgomery County, Virginia about citizens’
interests and attitudes towards local government, discussion of political issues, and their
Internet use. They find that opinion leaders who engage in some form of blogging (read
or write) are more likely to be male, extroverted and educated than bloggers who are
not politically active. They score higher than other bloggers on measures of offline and
online political interests and activities, community collective efficacy, and the size and
heterogeneity of their political discussion networks. As such, their use of blogs may
serve as a growing new communication channel to exercise their informal influence.
3. Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon
URL: http://www.hcii.cmu.edu/
Project: Alice
We are developing a tool called Alice that allows novice programmers to author interactive 3D
virtual worlds. By identifying the unnecessary challenges of learning to program (such as syntax)
and removing these challenges, we hope to make the fundamentals of programming accessible
to middle school children.
Faculty: Randy Pausch, Professor, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University
Paper: Jeffrey S. Pierce, Randy Pausch, Comparing Voodoo Dolls and HOMER: Exploring the
Importance of Feedback in Virtual Environments (PDF) , CHI 2002
ABSTRACT
When creating techniques for manipulating objects at a distance in immersive virtual
environments, researchers have primarily focused on increasing selection
range,placement range, and placement accuracy. This focus has led researchers to
create and formally study a series of “armextension” techniques, which dynamically
scale the user’s arm to allow him to manipulate distant objects. Researchers have also
developed representation-based techniques, which allow users to manipulate a distant
object by manipulating a copy of it in a handheld representation. However, researchers
have not yet formally established the relative value of these techniques. This paper
presents a formal study comparing Voodoo Dolls, a best-practice representation based
technique, with HOMER, a best-practice arm extension technique. The results suggest
that researchers should focus on improving feedback for 3D manipulation techniques.
4. DCog-HCI Lab, University of California, San Diego
URL: http://hci.ucsd.edu/
Project: A Multiscale Framework for Analyzing Activity Dynamics (NSF Grant)
Goals are to (a) accelerate analysis by employing vision-based pattern recognition
capabilities to pre-segment and tag data records, (b) increase analysis power by
visualizing multimodal activity and macro-micro relationships, and coordinating
analysis and annotation across multiple scales, and (3) facilitate shared use of our
developing framework with collaborators.
The work proposes to build on the long term commitment to understanding cognition
“in the wild”, developing multiscale visualizations, and recent experience automatically
annotating video of freeway driving. They also propose to extend the theory and
methods developed in their earlier work and integrate them with new web-based
analysis tools to enable more effective analysis of human activity. As initial test domains
they will focus on understanding activity in high-fidelity flight simulators and the activity
histories of workstation usage and the process of writing. They also evaluate a novel
technique to assist in reinstating the context of earlier activities.
Faculty: James D Hollan
Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science
Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego
Paper: Chunyuan Liao, François Guimbretière, Ken Hinckley, and James D. Hollan.
Papiercraft: A Gesture-Based Command System for Interactive Paper , ACM
Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. 14, 4 (Jan. 2008)
ABSTRACT:
Paper persists as an integral component of active reading and other knowledge-worker
tasks because it provides ease of use unmatched by digital alternatives. Paper
documents are light to carry,easy to annotate, rapid to navigate, flexible to manipulate,
and robust to use in varied environments. Interactions with paper documents create
rich webs of annotation, cross reference, and spatial organization. Unfortunately, the
resulting webs are confined to the physical world of paper and, as they accumulate,
become increasingly difficult to store, search, and access. XLibris [Schilitet al. 1998] and
similar systems address these difficulties by simulating paper with tablet PCs. While this
approach is promising, it suffers not only from limitations of current tablet computers
(e.g., limited screen space) but also from loss of invaluable paper affordances. In this
article, we describe PapierCraft, a gesture-based command system that allows users to
manipulate digital documents using paper printouts as proxies. Using an Anoto [Anoto
2002] digital pen, users can draw command gestures on paper to tag a paragraph, email a selected area, copy selections to a notepad, or create links to related documents.
Upon pen synchronization, PapierCraft executes the commands and presents the results
in a digital document viewer. Users can then search the tagged information and
navigate the web of annotated digital documents.
5. Stanford HCI Group, Stanford University
URL: http://hci.stanford.edu/
Project: Juxtapose: Creating Interface Alternatives through Parallel Authoring and
Runtime Tuning
Creating multiple prototypes facilitates comparative reasoning, grounds team
discussion, and enables situated exploration. However, current interface design tools
focus on creating single artifacts. This paper introduces the Juxtapose code editor and
runtime environment for designing multiple alternatives of both application logic and
interface parameters. For rapidly comparing code alternatives, Juxtapose introduces
selectively parallel source editing and execution. To explore parameter variations,
Juxtapose automatically creates control interfaces for tuning application variables at
runtime. This paper describes techniques to support design exploration for desktop,
mobile, and physical interfaces, and situates this work in a larger design space of tools
for explorative programming. A summative study of Juxtapose with 18 participants
demonstrated that parallel editing and execution are accessible to interaction designers
and that designers can leverage these techniques to survey more options, faster.
Faculty: Scott R. Klemmer, Professor, Department of Computer Science
Paper: Hartmann, Björn,Loren Yu, Abel Allison, Yeonsoo Yang, and Scott Klemmer.
Design As Exploration: Creating Interface Alternatives through Parallel Authoring and
Runtime Tuning
ABSTRACT:
Creating multiple prototypes facilitates comparative reasoning, grounds team
discussion, and enables situated exploration. However, current interface design tools
focus on creating single artifacts. This paper introduces the Juxtapose code editor and
runtime environment for designing multiple alternatives of both application logic and
interface parameters. For rapidly comparing code alternatives, Juxtapose introduces
selectively parallel source editing and execution. To explore parameter variations,
Juxtapose automatically creates control interfaces for “tuning” application variables at
runtime. This paper describes techniques to support design exploration for desktop,
mobile, and physical interfaces, and situates this work in a larger design space of tools
for explorative programming. A summative study of Juxtapose with 18 participants
demonstrated that parallel editing and execution are accessible to interaction designers
and that designers can leverage these techniques to survey more options, faster.