CHI 2007: Day 4
(flickr tag: chi 2007)
CHI is now officially over.
The last day was just as good as the rest. I went to:
- Papers: Usability
- Papers: Usability Evaluation
- Closing Plenary: The Mobile as a Post-Industrial Platform for Socio-Economic Development (Niti Bhan)
There were several really interesting papers presentations in the two sessions I went to, but two of them really stood out for me (both from the Usability Evaluation session). The first was a study that compared several remote usability testing methods against each other and a regular lab method. They had some interesting findings, even though they were not really statistically significant. Remote usability testing is something I’ve been thinking of a lot lately because of how distributed things are at work. The most interesting thing for me was that there didn’t seem to be a huge difference in results from an in-person usability test and from a synchronous remote test (shared desktop/webcams/audio). This is good news because with the exception of webcams, we are pretty much set up for doing tests in this manner.
The second great presentation looked at whether there is a correlation between the number of users and the number of major usability problems found, and if there’s a correlation between the number of tasks users are asked to perform and the number of problems found. The question of how many users you should test with to find most problems is a very common one and there have been lots of different answers. This study showed that the number of users alone doesn’t actually correlate to the number of problems found through usability tests. The range of tasks, however, does strongly increase the number of problems found. This was a very popular talk — people were sitting on the floor in the aisles, standing against all walls and even outside the doors. I think that this will become a commonly cited study because it really shows some interesting results.
This whole conference has been a great experience. Next year, Italy! (right Jeff?) 
p.s. Here’s a cool shot I took this morning from my hotel room:
