Concrete Hints for Structuring Submissions

Introduction

Initial feedback from potential contributors has indicated that it would be helpful to provide some more specific suggestions about the possible content of a contribution paper.

In the extreme case, you could create a contribution paper by addressing the questions listed below one by one, skipping the ones about which you have nothing interesting to say. A number of fairly concrete subquestions are included to help stimulate your thinking, but you can ignore them if they are not helpful. You can also feel free to change the order, add other types of material, or ignore this web page entirely.

Bear in mind that the ideas and results in a contribution paper are not expected to be necessarily well enough validated to be publishable separately; the criterion is whether it seems as if the contributor will be able to help to advance the discussion before, during, and after the workshop.

Nature of Your Relevant Experience

On what type of experience are the ideas in your contribution paper based?

If the experience concerns a specific study of a specific system: Describe the system and study at least enough so that your answers to the questions below can be understood. Feel free in this section to reuse previously prepared material.

If the experience concerns multiple studies or systems: Describe them separately or together, depending on what seems more natural.

If your ideas are not based on specific work that you have done but rather on more general experience with intelligent user interfaces (e.g., in practical deployment settings), please describe this experience.

Description of the Differences and/or Changes in Preferences

What types of differences or changes in user preferences are involved; and what particular differences or changes did you notice?

Did the differences or changes concern ...

• ... how users subjectively evaluated the system as a whole, or a particular aspect of it?
• ... the ways in which they chose to use the system, when they had a choice?

  (Examples: the choice of input or output modalities; the choice of a method for performing a given task, assuming that more than one method was available; the choice of tasks to perform or contexts in which to use the system.)

Nature of the Available Evidence

How did you become aware of these differences or changes?

• Through systematic observation and/or measurement of users’ behavior?
• Through analysis of users’ responses to direct questions?
• Through informal observation and/or anecdotal evidence?

Do you have data or other concrete information that you could make available for analysis before, during, and after the workshop?

Note: The contributor will retain control over the publication of the results of any such analyses.

• Can you contribute raw data from a study that you have conducted that was not initially intended to yield results about the topic of this workshop?
• Do you have some existing manuscript (published or not) that describes your relevant experience in more detail than you have described it here?

Ideas about Explanation of Difference Among Users

If what you observed were differences among users:

What ideas do you have about how these differences might be explained?

• Might they be a natural consequence of differences among users in terms of their needs, capabilities, and goals?

  For example, a person may prefer not to provide speech input if their speech is poorly recognized or if they use the system in the presence of other people.

• Might they be due to differences in aesthetic preferences, culturally influenced attitudes, or previously formed habits that may have little to do with the goal of successfully using the system?

  For example, some users may be reluctant to interact with the system in one of the intended ways because they feel subjectively uncomfortable doing so.

• Can they be explained in terms of the different ways in which the users got to know the system?

  Did some users hastily learn about the most obvious ways of using the system, while others explored the possibilities more systematically?

  Did some users have especially good or bad luck in their initial attempts to use (part of) the system, which in turn influenced their preferences with regard to future use?

  Were some users’ preferences influenced by the behavior or attitudes shown by other users?

Ideas about Explanation of Changes Over Time

If what you observed were changes in preferences over time:

What ideas do you have about how these changes might be explained?

• Might they be a natural consequence of changes over time of needs, capabilities, and goals?

  For example, as a user’s skill in using the system increases, they may start to choose more ambitious tasks and more complex functionality.

• Might they be due to changes over time in (the effect of) aesthetic preferences, culturally influenced attitudes, or previously formed habits?

  Did an aspect of the system that initially seemed strange or threatening come to be evaluated more positively as it became more familiar?

• Might they be due to changes in the nature of the experience that users have with the system?

  Did some atypical initial experiences diminish in impact once the user acquired more experience with the system?

Questions That You Would Like to See Addressed

Please try to list one or more questions that you would like to see addressed by the workshop participants before, during, and/or after the workshop.

Possible examples:

• Has anyone else seen the sort of phenomenon that I described in Section X above?
• Does anyone have a better idea about how this phenomenon could be explained?
• What do you think of the hypothesis that I formulated in Section Y above?
• Why is it important to be able to understand and predict differences in users’ preferences and their changes over time?