Dissertation Defense - Abdullah Ali
You are cordially invited to join us for the Dissertation Defense of Abdullah Ali, to be held on Monday, August 17th, 2020, via Zoom from 9:00 am to 11:00 am (PST).
Title: Distributed Interaction Design
Abstract:
Creating user interfaces that are natural, guessable, learnable, memorable 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. In this dissertation, I have created an open platform and formulated the Distributed Interaction Design (DXD) process. 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. The thesis I demonstrate in this work is: Using a custom-built platform to conduct Distributed Interaction Design (DXD) studies enables the creation and evaluation of guessable, learnable, and memorable user-elicited interactions from a large pool of online participants in a timely manner.
Zoom link details:
https://washington.zoom.us/j/94529739400?pwd=dGtOdXFKaHkvaHNmV3grYXBoMTRtZz09
Meeting ID: 945 2973 9400
Passcode: 082626
Supervisory Committee:
- Jacob O. Wobbrock, Chair
- Katharina Reinecke, GSR
- Alexis Hiniker
- Meredith Ringel Morris