- From: Erik C Hofer <ehofer@umich.edu>
- Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 16:35:03 -0500 (EST)
- To: "Undisclosed.recipients:;"<nobody@umich.edu>
Hi. We are organizing a workshop on "Automatically Evaluating the Usability of Web Sites". This workshop will be held at the upcoming CHI 2002 conference in Minneapolis (www.acm.org/sigchi/chi2002/). We're contacting you because your organization is involved in building tools for web site analysis, and we feel your organization could provide a valuable contribution as well as benefiting from interacting with others in the field. We'd like to invite you or someone in your organization to submit a position paper for the workshop. Please contact us if you have any questions about submitting or how the workshop is organized. Thanks, Erik Hofer and Tom Brinck ehofer@umich.edu, tom@diamondbullet.com Call for Participation CHI 2002 Workshop on Automatically Evaluating the Usability of Web Sites --------------------------------------------------- CHI 2002 Conference Information: www.acm.org/sigchi/chi2002/ Workshop Date: April 21-22, 2002 Location: Minneapolis Convention Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA Submissions Due: January 25, 2002 Participants Notified of Acceptance: February 22, 2002 CHI 2002 Early Registration Deadline: March 7, 2002 CHI 2002 Workshop Fee: $180 --------------------------------------------------- INTRODUCTION Automated tools can help web designers and usability specialists evaluate and improve web sites. With automated tools they can improve usability, save evaluation time and cost, and achieve more consistent, higher-quality results. Examples of automated usability tools include code parsers and evaluators, image analysis tools, usage measurement tools (such as hit log analysis and instrumented browsers), semi-automated tools to aid the human evaluator, design evaluation and advice in web development tools, and automated online surveys. This two-day workshop will examine the variety of techniques for automating usability, establish key requirements for evaluation tools, and examine how these tools fit within an overall web design process. SUBMITTING POSITION PAPERS Participants will be selected to provide a diversity of backgrounds and approaches reflected in their 2-4 page position papers. Your position paper should include a brief biographical sketch and a description of your related experience. If you have a tool or approach for automatic evaluation, we'd like to see a sample of the evaluation results (for comparison, those who are able should use their tool to evaluate microsoft.com). In the position papers, we encourage people to consider addressing one or several of the following topics: (1) Technologies for Automated Evaluation: What technologies are used? What metrics do they use? What are the difficult aspects to automate? What specific features are supported? What are the requirements for such a tool? (2) Usability and Design Process: How do automated tools fit into an overall design process? Where do they save money and provide value? Which aspects should be automated and which should be manual? How do we make automated tools that are easy-to-use, efficient, and helpful to the designer? (3) Application Domains and Design Standards: Where are these tools most useful? What domains can they be applied to? How can they be or have they been particularly successful at solving problems in those domains? What types of design questions are resolved? How do automated tools help establish design standards and help designers apply standards? (4) Overall Frameworks: How do the various methods integrate and how can their techniques inform each other? What are the most promising techniques that haven't yet been tried? What do we still need to learn about design guidelines? What are the hard open problems? Submission should be sent as an attachment to email as an HTML file. Contact the organizers if you have any questions. All submissions are due no later than January 25, 2002. PARTICIPATION Before the workshop, each participant should read all the position papers, which will be available on the workshop web site. A few will be asked to prepare 10 to 15 minute presentations. Those who are able to demo evaluation tools should prepare their demos (however, we will not have technology support at the workshop, so demos should be self-contained). In addition, we hope to be able to prepare a collection of papers based on the workshop for publication. CONTACT Send position papers (HTML formatted) to Tom Brinck: tom@diamondbullet.com Workshop web page: www.usabilityfirst.com/auto-evaluation ORGANIZERS Tom Brinck Diamond Bullet Design 315 W. Huron, Suite 140 Ann Arbor, MI 48103 USA Tel: +1 (734) 665-9307 Fax: +1 (734) 665-9353 tom@diamondbullet.com Erik Hofer University of Michigan School of Information North, 3rd Floor 1075 Beal Avenue Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA Tel: +1 (734) 657-6437 ehofer@umich.edu ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS Tom Brinck is a co-founder and officer at both Diamond Bullet Design, a web design and usability consulting company, and RetroAccess, an online service for automatically evaluating and repairing the accessibility and usability of web sites (www.retroaccess.com). He is also an adjunct faculty member at University of Michigan, where he teaches user interface design and web usability. Tom is the principal author of the book "Usability for the Web: Designing Web Sites That Work". He has worked at Apple Computer, Toshiba, and Bellcore, where he's done research on user interfaces for education, speech interfaces, and groupware. Erik Hofer is a graduate student at University of Michigan's School of Information. He is a research assistant at UM's Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work, where he studies geographically-distributed work. He is also a usability intern at Diamond Bullet Design, where he is investigating web site usability metrics that can be applied in automatic analysis.
Received on Friday, 7 December 2001 16:35:20 UTC