Winter 2007
Review, critique, and
compare two research publications in the field of human-computer interaction
(HCI). One of the papers must be from
the "CHI proceedings" (published within the last five years; i.e.,
2001-2006), while the second may be any paper provided it is a legitimate
publication (i.e., not simply material posted on the web). The two papers must have different
authors. Papers that are required
reading for this course or are authored by the instructor (Professor MacKenzie)
are excluded.
The papers should be
similar enough that they can be compared (e.g., two papers on text entry, two
papers on information visualization, two papers on keyboard design, two papers
on evaluation techniques, two papers on user-centred design, two papers on web
page usability, etc.) Here is a
hint: Your task is easier if you choose very similar papers (e.g., two papers
on interaction techniques for manipulating objects in 3D interfaces, two papers
on the usability habits of teenagers engaged in text messaging on mobile
phones, two papers comparing pointing devices in point-select tasks, two papers
on measuring or categorizing errors in text entry tasks, etc.).
Give your review a title,
and include your name and affiliation, as they would appear in a publication in
the CHI proceedings. Your review
should have the following sections:
|
Title of Section |
Content |
|
Abstract |
Summarize your
review. State "what you
did" and "what you found". |
|
Keywords |
Include a few
keywords. Use or expand on the
keywords in the papers under review. |
|
Introduction |
Describe in general terms
the topic area of the papers. A
few sentences will suffice. What
is the topic? Why is it interesting?
What are some issues that merit researching? |
|
First Paper Summary |
Identify and summarize
the first paper, stating the key issues, the research question(s), the
methodology, and the findings. |
|
Second Paper Summary |
Do the same for the
second paper. |
|
Comparison |
Compare the rationale,
objectives, methodology, and findings of the two papers. Don’t hesitate to be critical. Are there issues presented in one
paper or the other that you don’t agree with, were poorly explained, or that
seem inappropriate or misguided?
If so, state the case for your opinion here. |
|
Conclusions and Future
Work |
Briefly conclude your
review and identify and discuss some issues suitable for future
research. Perhaps you can
identify some new, open, or unanswered questions lurking in the findings of
the paper under review. This
section is critical. Your goal
is to identify one or more research topics that could be investigated for the
project component of this course.
|
|
References |
Include the two papers in
a reference list at the bottom.
The list should be formatted as per reference lists in papers in the
CHI proceedings. |
Other points:
Obtaining papers. The full name for the CHI conference is the "ACM
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems". The CHI proceedings have been published
yearly since 1983, and all the papers exist in PDF format. There are several ways to retrieve
them. One is to search the ACM
Digital Library at http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm/
(screen snap).
Another is to search the HCI Bibliography at http://www.hcibib.org/
(screen snap). Or, you can just use Google and see what
you come up with. Papers other
than those published at CHI may be similarly retrieved.
Submission. Submit your review as a PDF or DOC file in Prism using the
command 'submit 4441 a1 a1.xxx', where xxx is either pdf or doc.
Length requirement. There is no length requirement. Probably a few pages will suffice.
Formatting requirements. Please use 12 point Times for the body of your review, and
12 point Arial bold for the section headings. The title will look good in 18 point Arial bold. Single column formatting will be
fine. Feel free to use figures,
captions, tables, equations, etc., as necessary.
