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Nov 2-7

Nov 16-21

Research Update 2008

• Chicago: Sunday, November 2
• Amsterdam: Sunday, November 16

Raluca Budiu
Full-Day Tutorial

In this seminar, we focus on the latest research from academic journals and conferences, and how you can use it to improve your site’s usability. Topics include HCI, human factors, usability, psychology, and computer-supported collaborative work.

Having selected the articles that are most relevant to practitioners, we’ll summarize them briefly, distill key points, and discuss how they can inform and elevate your design and usability practices.

When it comes to research, the ultimate question is “Why should anyone care?” We’ll answer this by showing how you can apply cutting-edge findings to better design and test your websites, intranets, and practical software applications for real-world use.

Rather than sort through the often narrow or irrelevant presentations in the numerous academic conferences and journals, this seminar offers a cost-effective way of keeping you abreast of the latest research.

What You’ll Learn

In this session, you’ll learn:

• The latest, handpicked research in the field, which can help you keep your career current
• New methods and twists on old methods that you can adapt to improve everyday work in your own projects
• Insights into new UI techniques and usability findings that will keep you ahead of the curve
• How to turn academic theory into actionable and profitable business improvements

Course Outline

We discuss 40 articles (approximately 350 pages) published in top conferences and journals. Topics this year include:

• Web 2.0:
• Participation incentives for Web 2.0 systems
• Social Network Sites: user-centric and topic-centric; why people use these sites and what they do there?
• Social Networks in the enterprise
• How to exploit social networks to provide more relevant information to your users
• How to use rewards and status to boost participation on your Web 2.0 site
• Reviews and ratings: why people post reviews; the rise of star reviewers; rating user comments
• Question and answer systems: is it better to pay for answers or to get them for free? What questions get more answers and how expert are "experts" on community Q&A sites?
• How early technology adopters use Web 2.0 systems to make sense of information
• Blog design: the effect of post length
• Security:
• The problem with passwords
• Are graphical passwords better than alphanumeric ones?
• Security questions: when are they safe? How can we use security questions to make access control more user-friendly?
• New usability methods and techniques:
• How to use Mechanical Turk to collect user data reliably and cheaply
• Is remote usability testing better or worse than in-lab testing?
• What's the most efficient web layout of questionnaires?
• How the combination of task coverage, number of users, and participant recruitment impacts the number of usability problem discovered in a system
• Search:
• What do people look at on the search results page? Are longer description snippets better than short ones?
• What kinds of user behaviors do users most often engage on websites?
• What sites get revisited and how often? How do users get to those sites? Problems with the back button
• Why do users monitor websites and what kinds of monitoring tools are most effective?
• Mobile:
• What are the top non-voice activities?
• What is mobile Web used for? What are the information needs of mobile users?
• How people search on the mobile Web
• When and why people watch video on mobile devices
• How to do mobile usability testing

Format

This full-day tutorial includes lectures, discussions, and some exercises. Additional materials (such as videos) may be included for specific papers.

Handouts

Copies of the presentation slides

Who Should Attend?

This course is best suited for designers, usability practitioners, and other usability professionals with some experience in the field who want to keep up with the latest research advances. New professionals who want to understand how research can inform usability practice might also find this seminar a nice addition to more basic usability tutorials.

Instructor

Raluca Budiu, Ph.D. is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. She previously worked at Xerox PARC, doing research in human-computer interaction. At PARC, she built computational models of how people search for information in visualizations of large data structures. She also explored new ways of measuring information scent and conducted research on interfaces for social bookmarking systems and on the cognitive benefits of tagging. Budiu has also been a user researcher at Microsoft Corporation, where she explored future directions and made strategic recommendations for incorporating user-generated content and social web features into MSN. Budiu has authored more than 20 articles and conference presentations on human-computer interaction, psychology, and cognitive science.  She holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.