My Experience Conducting HCI Research
These past nine months, I joined the smart ring research team in Dartmouth’s Human Computer Interaction Lab where I had the opportunity to write a research paper about the use of private gestures for smart rings. The work has been very tedious at times and I spent countless hours conducting doing work for this project but the experience has been worth it! Learning how to write an entire research paper from just an idea to actual writing has been a very rewarding experience and it has given me a better understanding of the world of HCI and how it relates to design.
Timeline
January/February — Brainstorming and Researching Current Literature
March 2018 — Determine Research Topic and Develop First Research Study
April 2018 — Plan and Conduct First Study for Research
May 2018 — Analyze Data from First Study
June 2018 — Plan Second Study
July 2018 — Conduct Study and Analyze Data
August/September 2018 — Write and Edit Paper for Submission
Brainstorming and Research current literature:
In order to come up with a smart ring research topic, we needed to look the current literature and products already released in industry. I in particular looked at various research papers, and looked at products such as:
- Lukasz Piwek’s “The Rise of Consumer Health Wearables: Promises and Barriers”
- Edwin Chan’s “User Ellication on Single-hand Microgestures”
- Jacob Wobbrock’s “User-Defined Gestures for Surface Computing”
- Oura Ring
- Ringly
- NFC Ring
From these items, I started brainstorming potential ideas that we could focus on for our study such as creating a new modular design for smart rings or conducting a user study on a new aspect of smart rings.
Determine Research Topic and Conducting First Research Study
After meeting with the team for several weeks and sifting through the various literature, we came upon Fraser Anderson’s research paper “Supporting Subtlety with Deceptive Devices and Illusory Interactions”.
This intrigued us greatly as a smart ring, due to its small size, has the potential to be used subtly and deceptively. After deciding to write a paper about subtle gestures applied to smart rings, we began to decide how to conduct a study to determine what gestures are subtle.
Me and one of the other members in the team, Allison Chuang, wrote up the study. We looked at various research papers to determine how to conduct the study, from procedures, to framing pre and post survey questions, to acquiring participants.
After creating and tweaking the details of the study, it was finally time to conduct the study. This process took one long week to create the materials needed for the study and then actually conduct the study with participants. It took us twenty hours to conduct the study with all the participants, but it was interesting to see each person’s responses to our questions and tasks.
After conducting the study, Allison and I worked together to analyze the data that we collected.
Conducting the Second Study
After finishing the first study, we as a group decided to conduct a second study in order to confirm and solidify the findings of the second study.
Me and my other research team member, Katie Goldstein, worked to develop the details for the second study. We spent a few hours creating videos that would be used during the study and preparing the pre and post survey questions. After refining the details of the second study, it was time to gather participants and start running the study. The study took two weeks and alot of coordination with Katie to meet up and conduct the study for each participant. It was stressful but was fun conducting the study and slowly seeing how the results would turn out the more participants we studied.
Final Paper
We took the reports from both the studies and combined them to form the final paper. Because of the ten page limit, we were tasked to edit the paper and condense it to fit the required page limit while still being clear within the paper. I specifically was in charge of writing the abstract and introduction to the paper. Once writing my portion of the papers, the rest of the time before the deadline has been spent revising the paper (making sure it sounds coherent, adding details to graphs, etc.)
From all the hours making Skype calls, conducting user studies, analyzing data, and writing the paper, this experience has been very rewarding and I enjoyed every moment of it.