Speakers

Elizabeth Churchill

Workshops: Mixing Methods for Innovation and Evaluation

All theories have self-prescribed limits. All models are incomplete. All methods of analysis accentuate one perspective at the expense of others. The real power of any method comes when it is used in conjunction with others. Mixing methods becomes especially important when trying to introduce technology into a real setting. Actual circumstance involving individual idiosyncrasies and collective behaviors brings more complexity than any one method can handle. Artful triangulation across multiple methods can give an efficient handle on that complexity.

In this workshop, we discuss how different user-centered methods can be mixed and merged to drive inspiration, innovation and validation of interactive experiences. We first cover a basic framework of socio-technical design, highlighting areas of active research in the human-computer interaction community.

We will present a number of case studies where we combined methods (ethnographic field work, prototype development and evaluation, focus groups, data mining and field experiments) to derive innovation possibilities and then how we drove the invention process to develop new products. From these case studies, we will illustrate an observation to innovation framework and show how to adapt established methods to address emergent questions. We encourage participants to come to the workshop with their own case studies and/or questions about methods they have used.

We address the following questions of interest to innovators, designers, engineers, marketers, and managers using practical examples:
- What methods are available at the different stages in understanding
a new interactive experience?
- Which of the many meanings of the word ‘prototype’ might work best
in different circumstances, and at what cost?
- How do you identify the blind spots in one method and recognize
alternative ways to illuminate those gaps in understanding?
- How do you undertake conversations across disciplines, each with
their preconceptions, strengths, and limits?

: Understanding and Designing the Everyday Internet: Users, People, Groups and Networks

Since 2006, time spent on the Internet has outstripped time spent watching TV. According to a Harris Interactive poll conducted in late 2009 people spend an average of 13 hours per week online–excluding email. With the increasing penetration of Internet-enabled phones, many people spend substantially more time than that.

Social scientists, designers, user experience professionals, technologists and business entrepreneurs are all intrigued by the changing landscape of media consumption and communication. As a result, many methods and models have been developed to get an understanding of what people are doing, when, how and why. However, analysis methods are often myopic, addressing either on a single applications ("Is it usable?"), what an single person does ("What is the user up to?"), creating aggregated results from many people, or describing what people-as-nodes are doing in a network. In this talk, Elizabeth will talk about a number of projects where she has mixed different design and evaluation methods to try to understand how people's experiences vary, and to illustrate the tensions that exist between overly specific and overly general models of user experience.

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Elizabeth Churchill is a Principal Research Scientist and manager of the Internet Experiences group at Yahoo! Research. Originally a psychologist by training, throughout her career Elizabeth has focused on understanding the ways in which people interact – whether their interactions are primarily face to face or are technologically mediated.

She previously worked at PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center, and before that at FXPAL, Fuji Xerox’s research lab based in Silicon Valley where she led the Social Computing Group. She has worked on the design of cell phone interfaces, textual and 3d graphical environments, interactive digital posterboards, collaborative work applications and embodied interface agents. She has co-designed several products that have been released in the US and in Japan, has co-edited 5 books, has published within the areas of theoretical and applied psychology, cognitive science, human computer interaction and computer supported cooperative work. Elizabeth has a BSc in Experimental Psychology, an MSc in Knowledge Based Systems, both from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Cambridge. She is the current Vice President of the Association of Computing Machinery’s (ACM).