Re: 90 minutes with HCI researchers - what would you discuss?

For some discussion of some SW techniques relating to search, see the
survey that Michiel Hildebrand has started in an earlier posting on this
list.

In addition, I added to
http://www.webscience.org/swuiwiki/index.php?title=How_To#Methodology
some discussion of what HCI techniques mean in the context of Semantic
Web research.  The new text is:

  "In general, HCI methodology has three phases: analyzing your users'
  needs, designing an interactive system that meets those needs and
  evaluating the system you build using this design. While this approach
  typically applies to building specific systems, its role in research
  raises certain issues. One is that research tends, rightly or wrongly
  (or perhaps due to the nature of research), to be more technology
  driven, with researchers wishing to test hypotheses about interactive
  possibilities that specific new technologies enable. Here, the
  challenge is to make sure any solutions explored have a legitimate
  user problem to solve, that is does indeed solve it, and that it
  solves it better than other available solutions for the same
  problem. Thus, even with a particular solution technology in mind, the
  Semantic Web researcher still needs to apply the main three HCI
  phases: finding a user base for their technology and analysing their
  requirements, designing a system that uses this technology to meet
  these requirements and then evaluating how well the technology
  addresses these requirements in real use. In each phase, the
  technology that the research is applying should be compared with other
  available technologies that can address the same problem."

People who are more familiar with HCI than me, please make any
appropriate corrections or additions.

I hope this helps frame discussion of how to perform HCI in SW
research.  Perhaps the "technology driven" discussion is
controversial.

-Lloyd

Hyowon Lee wrote:
> It will be useful at the beginning of the SWUI workshop if somebody
> showed us a list of key SW techniques achieved so far or being
> developed now - for a person like myself who doesn't know SW in
> depth/breadth, and for us to get a summary of SW development.
>
> It will help us to think about and maybe map the kinds of UI & HCI
> elements suitable for the underlying SW techniques.
>
> Hyowon
>
> ----------------------------------------------------
> Dr Hyowon Lee
> Post-doctoral researcher
> Centre for Digital Video Processing
> Dublin City University
> Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland
> Tel: +353 -1 -7005829
> http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~hlee/
> Email: hlee@computing.dcu.ie
> ----------------------------------------------------

Received on Wednesday, 23 May 2007 12:24:17 UTC