Student Projects
Our HCI/d programs are based on the educational philosophy that students must be involved in challenging work that stimulates intellectual development, enhances collaborative and communicative skills, and develops design competence. The students are involved in design projects in courses, in individual or team based independent studies, and in research projects with faculty.
Our masters students have been very succesful in the CHI Student Design Competition. This year, 2008 and last year, 2007, out of 12 teams who were selected for the finals, five teams came from our program! The years before, both in 2006 and in 2005, one of our student teams won first place!!! We are proud and happy that our students finish over top schools such as Georgia Tech, Michigan, Savannah College of Art, and Carnegie-Mellon University. At the conference CHI 2004, held in Vienna, Austria, IU Informatics teams took second and fourth place. In 2008 our students also won the CHI Student Research Competition and the Microsoft Imagine Cup. |
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The capstone project is a two-semester activity required by master’s degree HCI/d students before graduating. These projects are challenging and inventive, and showcase the talents of students enrolled in the HCI/d program. All these projects form over time a research and design portfolio that students use when applying for work.
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Chat Communication in Massively Multiplayer Online Worlds (MMOs): The Tale of Ystle Massively Multiplayer Online environments (MMOs) are social worlds, yet the ability to communicate within these worlds is inhibited by clunky and outdated chat interfaces. Newcomers to these worlds can be frustrated by the experience of trying to socialize with other participants. With this in mind, an evaluation of these interfaces paired with an understanding of what people are talking about in MMOs can lead to insights about ways to improve the chat communication interfaces in MMOs. |
Nick Quagliara Spring 2007 |
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HCI at work: User-centered design for collaborative innovation Companies are realizing the advantage of HCI design principles applied to the products and services they sell. However, an HCI approach is largely missing from the design of organizational processes and systems. Without a user-centered approach, critical organizational processes such as information sharing are prone to error and inefficiencies. A contextual inquiry of an R&D lab's information sharing processes uncovered significant process issues and led to insights for addressing them. A new idea management system, Ideate, was designed to address one of the needs observed in the lab. The design is based on user-centered principles, insights from the contextual inquiry, and the lab's innovation culture. |
Breanne Kunz Spring 2007 |
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ionianStory ionianStory was designed to improve emotional connections between people. Improvement of these connections occurs by bringing greater meaning to the relationships which connect people together as friends, family or acquaintances. As humans we base these relationships on the shared experiences we have with others. The memories we develop based upon these experiences are what we as humans use as the building blocks for emotional connections. The application invites individuals or groups of people to build experiences in a graphical work space by sequencing together actual series of events based upon persons, place, activity and relative time. As experiences are developed on the individual level, others who are knowledgeable of the event(s) have the ability to improve the series in a community setting by connecting their experienced events to other's. |
Craig Birchler Spring 2007 |
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Security Substrates: Document Content Control Based On User Profiles With the proliferation of email as a delivery mechanism for electronic documents, there has been a corresponding increase in the risk of information being made available to unauthorized people. To address the possible spread of unauthorized information access, we propose the use of security substrates, which provide user-defined security access definition and control for portions of documents. A fully working prototype system was developed to explore the problem space and to serve as a test-bed for detailed user studies. A controlled user study was performed to empirically measure the general feasibility of our approach, as well as the specific efficiency, effectiveness, and user satisfaction of such a system. Results show that our system is more efficient, equally effective, and more satisfying than conventional approaches. |
David Kintgen Spring 2007 |
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This paper is a synthesis of many diverse ideas. It draws from seemingly unrelated sources to construct a story about a failed project. The project started as a normal capstone, intended to result in a usability tested, user-centered interface design. Our client was a non-profit group in Santa Cruz, Guatemala named Enlace Quiché. The goal of the project was to integrate a language translation algorithm into a language learning application that students of Enlace Quiché could use. The project failed because my expectations of the client and the clients expectations of our involvement were incompatible. This capstone is a reflection on this failed project specifically and the concept of failure in the field of Human-Computer Interaction Design in general. Methods and concepts for dealing with failure are introduced. |
Jesse Beach Spring 2007 |
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Towards a framework for interaction designers in rural villages in developing countries For a couple decades, the field of HCI has concerned itself with how to design user-centered artifacts and interfaces. However, this “user” has often come to imply users not vastly different from the designers themselves. There is a rich history of attempts and methodologies derived in the field of HCI which aim to bridge cultural gaps and reconcile designers’ and users’ models of problem spaces. Unfortunately, an exhaustive review of these methodologies, theoretical frameworks, design principles and optimal design qualities will expose a recurring theme that HCI practitioners are operating within an exclusive user base and environment. HCI has of course been concerned with computer-users which have, up until the last decade, included only the upper 20% of the world’s population. Additionally, the environment which these users operate within can be classified as ‘modern’, urban or industrial societies. But, technology is getting cheaper and computers are extending beyond the desktop and into the world of everyday activity. As a result, it is vital for HCI practitioners to begin understanding how we can operate beyond the classical environments and populations. What methods can be adapted for this area? Will current methods and theoretical frameworks be suitable? What qualities should design artifacts and interfaces exhibit in rural villages? I explore these questions in deriving a practical framework centered on principles of transparency, adaptive capacity, sustainability, and culturally- and community-centeredness. |
Christian Beck Spring 2007 |
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The Virtual Lab: Evaluation and Redesign of a Computer Assisted Learning Resource The Virtual Lab is a supplemental resource used by students of A215 Basic Human Anatomy at Indiana University. This project involved assessing the existing Virtual Lab along qualitative and quantitative criteria in order to gather data that would be used in redesigning the resource. Once this assessment was complete, the process of redesigning the Virtual Lab occurred, drawing from research in the areas of computer assisted learning, cognitive load theory, and affective design. A Flash-based prototype of the redesign was constructed and then assessed along the same criteria as the existing Virtual Lab. Results from this assessment illustrated a significant improvement over the existing Virtual Lab in both the qualitative and quantitative areas. |
Eldridge Doubleday Spring 2007 |
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