"But I did a user study!" vs "What do you mean I need a user study?"

Or How to address common problems developing and delivering a user interaction semantic web research contribution

Half day tutorial

Hi there.
Does the following sound like you?

You are creating a tool that is supposedly for Real People to use, so you figure, do a user study of some kind and you'll submit it as a paper?

You've tried the above and the paper didn't get accepted - saying "this isn't research; it's just applied user centered design"

You want to validate your tool work with users but you don't have the expertise either to test your idea or prove that it's a user interaction contribution?

You've designed a tool that's a really cool technology - whether users use it or not, you don't care about the user testing, you just want to get the contribution out there, but reviewers say "where's the evaluation"?

If any of the above scenarios sound like you, we feel your pain. But don't worry: we can help.

In this tutorial we'll cover Three Big Wins

- The Litmus Test: what constitutes a user interaction semantic web research contribution (paper gold) vs an application of user centered design (tech report) - and why(not)

- Development: select strategies for stakeholder identification,requirements elicitation, prototyping,  and evaluation approaches.

- Presenting results - to p or not to p (value): that is the (significance) question

Bonus:
How you might inject a little user interaction research into your own upside down A work or related engineering work - to make what you're doing harder, faster, stronger.

Caveats:
Things this tutorial will not do:
make anyone an interaction design researcher (c'mon this is a half day tutorial)

Claims:
Things this tutorial will do:
with these heuristics help you decide if you wish to develop your contribution on your own or collaborate with an interaction researcher.

Special Offers:
Come on and have some fun journeying to another dimension, another time, where users are people too, and where you too will discover the great unexplored possibilities for semantic web research contributions - contributions that will benefit Real People in Real Time.  Really.

It's more fun - and tractable - than you may have guessed.

presented by
dr m.c. schraefel, phd, cscs, etc

co-founder of the international semantic web user interaction workshop series
co-editor of the JWS special issue on user interaction and the sematic web / linked data
advocate of the Semantic Web 10th anniversary conference (this one) as the Year of the Citizen User
and c0-organiser of the Personas for ISWC resource http://personas.mspace.fm

with the assistance of:

Igor Popov, University of Southampton