UBC Computer Science - Fall 2003

Research Methods in Computer Science: CPSC 590

HCI Lectures: Dr. Joanna McGrenere

HCI Assignment #0

Date Posted: Friday, September 19th

There are four assigned readings for the two HCI lectures:

Lecture 1 -- Monday September 22nd:

McGrath, J. (1994). Methodology matters: Doing research in the behavioural and social sciences. (BGBG 152-169)

Gould, J. (1988). How to Design Usable Systems, In Helander (Ed.), Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction. North-Holland:
Elsevier, 1988, 757-789. (Excerpt reprinted with some additions in BGBG, p. 93 - 121)

Where BGBG is:
Readings in Human-Computer Interaction: Toward the Year 2000 by Ronald M. Baecker, Jonathan Grudin, William A.S. Buxton, and Saul Greenberg. (A copy of BGBG can be found in the Reading Room in CICSR.)

Lecture 2 -- Friday September 26th:

McGrenere, J., and Moore, G. (2000). Are we all in the same "bloat"? Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2000, 187-196.
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~joanna/papers/gi_2000_bloat.pdf

McGuffin, M., and Balakrishnan, R. (2002). Acquisition of expanding targets. Proceedings of ACM CHI 2002, 57 - 64.
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/503376.503388

For each assigned reading, you must answer the following questions:

  1.  What is this paper about?

  2.  What is the thesis (main point) of this paper?

  3.  What is one weakness of this work?

  4.  What is one strength of this work?

  5.  How does this paper  relate to other papers you've read in class or other research/work that you are familiar with?

  6. What are three questions that you have about this paper?

You should be able to answer each question with at most a short paragraph (except for question #6). Sometimes one sentence will suffice.

Submit your answers to these questions in hardcopy before each class. You might find this template useful.