COMP1710/6780 Report: Semester 1 2024

Submission deadline:

11:55pm Sunday Week 12 26 May 2024

The Report task involves COMP1710/6780 students taking part in two or more Human-Computer Interaction research experiments, and then writing a report on their experiences as experiment participants. In this report the students will

(i)        describe the purpose of each experiment and their personal experience of taking part in the experiment,

(ii)       compare their experiences across the different experiments and

(iii)      write what they have learned about the relevance of participant-focused experiments like

these to the overall process of designing and building a set of webpages.

In the main we are using the Research School of Psychology's experiment management software

(SONA) for you to find and participate in experiments. Some experiments maybe advertised on the Ed Discussion forum.

Report instructions

In the process of developing an interactive computer system, which includes web development, it is essential to conduct user evaluations of those systems. In the activities for this report task you will

be involved as aparticipant in two or more experiments that add up to approximately 2 hours. All

the experiments from Computer Science or from Psychology have strong similarities with the types  of user evaluations that you would conduct for your web development. When you take part in these experiments you are expected to treat them as learning exercises for yourself. You will pay attention to the purpose of the experiment and you will observe what it is like to participate in that

experiment. You will also think critically about the way the experiment is conducted and reflect on what you can learn from that experiment that might be relevant to user evaluations of webpages and web sites.

Writing the report will give you practice in formal writing about your observations, experience and reflections of taking part in these experiments.

Structure

Your report should contain these sections:

A title, your name and unumber and the date of your report.

Executive Summary: This will typically be a ½ page that says what the report is about and

summarises the contents of the report and key points. Write this Executive Summary last so that it actually summarises the report you wrote and the key points you raise.

Introduction: This will explain what the report is about, it will list the experiments in which you took part and it will introduce the contents of the report.

First Experiment*: This has three sub-sections.

•     Summarise the experiment. Here you describe the purpose of the experiment and describe what you were asked to do. Refer to the Information Sheet that the experimenters will have given you.

•    Describe your experience of taking part in the experiment. Were you asked to do specific

tasks? Did you enjoy taking part in the experiment? Did you find the experiment difficult or easy? Did you understand what you were asked to do?

•     Comment on what you thought were the strengths and weaknesses of the experiment. For

example, did you think that the experiment actually met the aims that were stated in the

Information Sheet? Was the experiment well-conducted or was it chaotic and/or confusing? Did you think that the data the experimenters were gathering was reliable?

Second Experiment*: Also three sub-sections, like the first experiment.

Comparison of the two Experiments: Describe in what ways the two experiments (and your

participation in them) were similar or different. Compare how you felt about taking part in each of the experiments. Compare how well you thought the two experiments were run.

Conclusion reflecting the relevance of user-participation experiments to web design and

development: Reflect on and discuss how such experimentation is relevant to user-participation

experiments in web design and development. The broad computer science area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) includes web design, and user-evaluation experiments (similar to the experiments  in which you took part) are really important in the HCI development process. You might like to

look for material about user-evaluation in HCI on the web or in textbooks and include it in this

discussion. Be sure to cite any material that you refer to and include that material in your reference list in the last section of your report.

References: In this section you list any documents or webpages that you referred to in the body of the report. Be sure to list every item that you refer to (including the Information Sheets that the

experimenters give you) and be sure to refer in your report to every item in this list of references. You can use whatever common reference style / reference style version you want as long as you   remain consistent.

Layout and size of your report

Your entire report including references but excluding your title page, will be a maximum of 4 A4 pages, using a 12-point font and approximately 2 centimetre margins. Use headings, sub-headings,  and white space to give visual structure to your report. Break your text into paragraphs, where each paragraph focuses on a particular item or concept. Put page numbers in the footer of your report.

Note:  For any report exceeding 4 pages (excluding title page), only the first 4 pages will be read and marked, the remainder will be ignored.