CHI Conference User Feedback Session

Moderator: Kevin M. Schofield

Microsoft
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052
USA
+1 206.936.3748
kevinsch@microsoft.com (p) Panelists:
Gene Lynch, Tektronix and SIGCHI Vice Chair for Conference Planning
Michael Tauber,University of Paderborn and CHI 96 General Co-Chair
Bill Curtis, TeraQuest Metrics and Software Engineering Institute
Rodney Fuller, Claremont Graduate School
Terry Roberts, USWest and CHI 95 General Co-Chair

© ACM

Abstract

One can think of the annual CHI conference as the HCI community's own piece of "groupware". Since we as a community advocate user participation in the design process, it is fitting that we should devote time during the conference to soliciting feedback from our users. This session will provide an opportunity for conference attendees to critique the conference and to provide suggestions for improving the conference in the future. Panelists will also raise broader issues about the long-term direction of our field and how the conference can best serve that evolution.

Keywords:

TABLE 1 TABLE 1. Attendee answers to the question "Which of the following most closely describes your primary job function?

While the conference evaluation questionnaire is excellent for noting long-term trends and shifts in demographics, and for gathering many suggestions for fixing logistical details, it rarely provides any insight into how the conference might innovate its program. This panel will attempt to provide just such a forum, where attendees may engage in an "open forum" discussion of the larger issues involved in designing a conference.

PANELIST POSITIONS

Gene Lynch

Human-Computer Interaction, as a field, is difficult to define and involves a wide range of people. The CHI conference is designed to provide a structure to nurture all the elements of the field, to bring them together for the exchange of information, and to grow the community and discipline. Both HCI and SIGCHI are relatively young, but have grown at a rapid rate. The growth and evolution of the field has placed a positive strain on the CHI Conference. To meet this diverse demand, the CHI conference has introduced a spectrum of venues. Have we exceeded the limit that is a real service to the community? Do we have the right mix? How do we evaluate the conference relative to each constituency? The SIGCHI Conference Management Committee welcomes open discussions of the goals for the SIGCHI conferences, the criteria by which we should evaluate the success of the SIGCHI conference portfolio, and suggestions for how we can make the CHI and other SIGCHI conferences better.

Michael Tauber

CHI is the conference of the HCI community. Who is the HCI community and what is the field of HCI about? The field of HCI is more than 10 years old and still on a continuous search for its identity. CHI should stimulate and support the recognition, presence, and evolution of the field of "HCI" by providing opportunities and forums for facilitating the absorbing of new paradigms and visions of evolving and potentially drifting away subfields into an integrated new identity of the whole field well balanced services for both the current community of practice in the field and the communities envisioning and prototyping the artifacts of the future information exchange and cooperation between different communities practicing different approaches broadening up the focus to all types of potential users including people with special needs.

Bill Curtis

Every half-decade CHI has to transform itself. When we started CHI at the beginning of the 1980s, we believed that there were many more people who wanted to make the world take notice that computers could be made more usable. Our original projections of 200-300 attendees were swamped when 907 people showed up in Gaithersburg. In the early years, CHI was very much a research conference, and quality of research was stressed over other criteria. Had CHI continued in this direction, it would have shrunk. Fortunately, the CHI officers kept asking, "What would you like out of a CHI conference?"

As we moved through the 1980s CHI started experimenting with an expanded format. As the format expanded the number of people participating in some official capacity at a CHI conference expanded, and many of them were practitioners. As participation expanded, we avoided the problem many conferences have with being controlled by a small clique. At the same time, CHI was the fastest growing SIG in ACM.

In the 1990s the conference has dealt successfully with doubling its size from the 1980s. As we move into the latter half of the 1990s, we need to think again about what face we present to the world to excite the next generation of CHI attendees. We may want to expand the usability dimension of CHI to incorporate interfaces to all types of devices that are now driven by microprocessors. We may want to expand our coverage of the interaction between computing technology and human organizations. We may want to expand our coverage of human interaction with virtual objects or in simulated space. And there are many more topics such as these that CHI must aggressively pursue to refresh itself every half decade. These areas will not come to CHI. We need to proactively invite these communities and make CHI a comfortable home and a source of new and stimulating colleagues. If these communities form outside of CHI, the excitement will be somewhere else, and CHI will wither.

And as for creative formats, the possibilities are endless. Yet before we get too carried away with the technology, we best remember that CHI people like to get together and interact and listen to fun panels like this one.

Rodney Fuller

The CHI conference is most successful in presenting in one event a summary of the new ideas and controversies related to the needs of individuals and groups that use computer artifacts, as well as in identifying the new factors related to the usability of such artifacts. It also seems to be vulnerable to several external and internal factors. The external factors that seem to diminish the success of a CHI conference include: 1) the failure to present a coherent, simple approach to the issues discussed; 2) the "stigma" of the name "Human Factors and Computing" drives many possible participants to seek sources of information that imply either a more meta or micro level of knowledge; and 3) the overall failure to link human factors and computing issues to individual productivity makes it impossible to judge the overall relevance and importance of research and the potential scope and scale of products. The internal factors that divide the CHI conference are that the conference has a history of creating controversy if a deficiency in naturally occurring divisiveness exists, and, perhaps as a result of years of controversy deficiency, CHI fosters deep divisions between CHI participants (groups representing different fields, cultures, and types of employment). Three changes that one can make to improve the CHI experience (presented in order of increasing severity of the consequences) are:

1. 1. To accept that the demographics of the field are changing.
2. 2. Recognize that one of the main reasons why people attend a CHI conference is to build up interpersonal networks.
3. 3. The final suggestion reflects the most radical solution - that SIGCHI would be better served as "SIGUSE" - a professional society that reflects the dynamics of user needs and usability at multiple levels of analysis.

Terry Roberts

CHI'95 took a deliberate stance that the CHI conference should reach out to a wide variety of human-interface constituencies, rather than specializing.

Historically, the conference has been aimed at researchers. We keep this focus with a strong papers program, with highly-specialized workshops, and with integrating the Research Symposium closer to the conference.

There has been a shift in recent years toward attracting more developers of systems with a strong user-interface component. To meet their needs, we explicitly solicit papers describing practical experience, we include demonstrations in the program, and this year we initiated the Design Briefings track.

Specialized subsets of the HCI community are welcome at the conference, people such as visual designers and anthropologists.

People with a wide variety of backgrounds have requested that the CHI conference keep them up to date with the state of the art in user interfaces. To this end, we are working on expanding the Exhibits program. The Interactive Experience also lets people try out cutting-edge interfaces in a hands-on environment. Appealing to a wide variety of audiences has the positive side effect of making both the conference events and the interactions with other attendees a broadening experience. I would like to see this trend continue, while the conference still offers the depth that each constituency needs.