Dissertation Proposal Defense - Abdullah Ali

You are cordially invited to join us for the Dissertation Proposal Defense of Abdullah Ali, to be held on Tuesday, December 17, 2019, in
Allen Library Auditorium
from 10 a.m. to noon.
Title:
Abstract:
Creating user interfaces that are natural, guessable, learnable, and accessible is a persistent challenge. Involving end users in the design process is a well-established approach to address these challenges, but traditional participatory design has limitations, especially when it comes to scaling beyond the lab and reaching diverse participants. I build on the success of a popular participatory design method called end-user elicitation. Elicitation studies work by presenting the effect of an interaction (e.g., what happens after a user makes a gesture) and asking end-user participants to perform the action that would have caused that effect (e.g., the gesture itself). Despite their success, elicitation studies have important limitations. They typically are confined to a lab setting, limiting the diversity of their participants and the representativeness of their results. Also, analyzing the studies’ results is a laborious process. Furthermore, elicitation studies lack a formal approach to evaluate the quality of their results. My work addresses these limitations by scaling beyond the lab and conducting distributed elicitation studies with online crowds. For my dissertation, I have thus far created an open platform and formulated the Distributed Interaction Design (D.X.D.) process. My proposed work going forward will be to use this platform and process to address aspects of elicitation studies formerly unevaluated, particularly whether 'priming' results in more or less guessable, learnable, and memorable gestures in mixed-reality environments. This work overall contributes methodological extensions to elicitation studies, an open platform for the larger research community, and empirical studies of user-generated interactions such as gestures, voice-commands, and icons.
Supervisory Committee:
Jacob O. Wobbrock, Chair
Katharina Reinecke, GSR
Alexis Hiniker, Member
Meredith Ringel Morris, Member