The following description was prepared for the CHI 2011 advance program, but for some reason they did not put the full descriptions on the CHI 2011 website. The section below this one provides additional information.

Benefits

People are constantly making small choices and larger decisions about their use of computing technology, such as:

• “Shall I use this new application as a replacement for my current one?”
• “Should I bother to configure the new application to suit my preferences?”
• “Shall I make a contribution to this on-line community?”
• “If so, which of the two available methods should I use?”

The processes by which users arrive at these choices and decisions can take many different forms and depend on a wide range of factors, such as previous learning and habit formation, mental models, values and goals, the current context, social influence, and details of interface design. This course offers a synthesis of relevant research in psychology and HCI that will enable you to analyse systematically the choices made by the users that you study. This type of analysis will be useful in the design and interpretation of studies that involve users’ choices and in the generation of strategies for enabling users to make better choices.

Origins

This is a new course for CHI 2011.

Features

• Discuss, with reference to concrete examples, several types of choice and decision problem regularly faced by users of computing technology.
• Learn how to go beyond current HCI analyses of these problems by applying relevant concepts and insights from psychological research on judgment and decision making, learning and habitual behavior, and strategies for influencing choices.
• Take away supplementary materials that expand on the discussion in the course and help you to apply its analytical framework in your own research.

Audience

HCI researchers and students who want to be able to understand and influence the ways in which users of the systems that they design or study make choices and decisions.

Presentation

Brief lecture segments illustrating general concepts and insights with reference to concrete examples; breakout sessions for structured analysis of examples selected by participants; familiarization with the course notes, which include additional material and worksheets for later independent use.

Instructor Background

Anthony Jameson (PhD, psychology) is a principal researcher at DFKI, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. After having studied specific aspects of users’ choice and decision making processes in connection with user-adaptive systems, recommender systems, and multimodal systems, he recently conducted a 2-year research project to prepare the comprehensive analytical framework presented in this course. He has given numerous tutorials at CHI and other conferences and has written chapters for the Human-Computer Interaction Handbook. He is founding coeditor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems.

1. The course will be held in the morning of Wednesday, May 11th, 2011.

2. As part of the supplementary material, a preprint will be made available to participants of a chapter on the topic of the course that I’ve written for the upcoming 3rd edition of the Human-Computer Interaction Handbook (Taylor and Francis, 2012). This chapter includes about 75 literature references and discussions of numerous points that can’t be dealt with during the course itself.

3. If you have a few minutes of time, you might have a look at the following 10-page paper, which will be presented in the alt.chi track of CHI 2011 on Tuesday morning:

• Brief position paper on the importance for HCI of psychological research on choice and decision making

  If you find this paper stimulating and would like to learn a lot more about the psychological and HCI research that is very briefly summarized in it, then this course may be a good investment of half a day of your time at CHI 2011.