Student Posters

Guide to Successful Submissions

Student Posters will be reviewed on the basis of the two-page paper and the one page visual sketch of the poster, using a high standard of content and presentation.

You should have something new and significant to say and you should state it very clearly because of the restricted space available.

Student poster submissions will be evaluated on the basis of:

• originality,
• importance of the contribution,
• soundness of rationale or demonstration,
• quality of written and visual presentation, and
• adequate citation of the most relevant literature.

All submissions should describe the context, contribution, content and consequences of the work with adequate focus on the problem you address.

Context

Context is the subject area and the perspectives of you and your intended audience.

• domain of HCI: the task being done, the class of users doing it and the technology being used
• author perspective(s): e.g. researcher, developer, user, manager
• audience perspective(s): e.g. researcher, developer, user, manager

Contribution

Contribution is the relationship of this work to similar work in the field.

• background and related work: who has studied this before and from what perspectives
• lessons learned: how does this go beyond what has been done before, and from what perspectives
• innovation: what are the new ideas of this work

Content

Content is your central message and why you and the audience ought to believe it.

• claims: what is the question or issue that you are addressing
• description: what was done and by which method
• justification: given the author's perspective, why should the audience believe the author's claim; this support for your claims is a central part of your submission; the author's perspective will determine the established standards for these justifications (e.g., experimental psychology requires statistical proof, implementations require resource usage statistics, field experience might use videotape analysis or questionnaires, design ideas require some form of usability testing)

Consequences

Consequences are the practical implications of the audience believing the content.

• action: what should the audience do differently if and when they have accepted your message
• directions: what are the directions for future work based on this work (new questions, next studies, new experiences)

Common Mistakes

Some typical mistakes reported by reviewers of submissions from previous conferences:

• the work did not compare and contrast the author's work with important work as recorded in the published literature of the human computer interaction field
• the author did not demonstrate a good understanding of the state- of-the-art as documented in the literature (e.g. CHI proceedings from previous years) and in industrial products (e.g. a "new" idea should not already be available in some two-year old commercial product)
• the work did not draw conclusions or focus the lessons learned for the reader
• the work did not state the research results, but merely provides background information and discussion on the importance of the topic
• the author made unsupported claims; the conclusions were beyond the results of the work reported
• a practice and experience oriented work did not describe the lessons learned; the more general the lessons learned the more important for the conference; the lessons learned must advance over existing knowledge in the field
• the work contained too many unexplained or unnecessary technical terms; the HCI field includes many areas of work, therefore define terms from a subfield for the overall audience

Final Advice

Due to the two page restriction, avoid too general statements and too long introductory discussions. Be as precise as possible to show the value of the work presented. Do not try to describe everything. It is better to focus on specific and most important parts of the solution.

A general piece of advice is to have the submission reviewed by somebody outside the group that did the work. If they have some problems with it, then the reviewers will probably not understand it either.