Usability Community

Co-Chairs:

Carol Righi, Perficient
Janice James, Perficient

Message from Carol and Janice

CHI 2007 is focused on taking the next step forward - reaching beyond the familiar and established research, methods, and technology that have served us well to the new and innovative that provides new insights, experiences, and outcomes. We will strive to collect contributions in the usability field that introduce innovative practices and research that improve the design experience. CHI provides several formats for communicating your work, whether it is an experience report, a panel of industry experts, or a well researched finding presented in a paper. It is our goal as the usability co-chairs to increase the quality and quantity of usability practitioner and researcher submissions with the intent of benefiting both the practitioner and research communities.

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Introduction

Historically, the usability field has thrived on the interdependency between research and practice, leveraging new concepts and working to make our efforts more effective and influential. CHI recognizes that usability is a necessary component of good design to ensure that applications of new and existing technology are practical and meet the needs of their target users. The CHI 2007 Usability Community Co-Chairs will help usability practitioners find appropriate venues for thought- provoking communication, whether the submission is a debate among industry experts, a description of a new method, or another presentation format.

We expect that there will be many related themes and activities offered by the other CHI communities ( Design, Education, Research, Management, and Engineering ) participating in this conference. We strongly encourage you to submit multi-community proposals that look at usability in the context of design, education, engineering, management, or research.

Types of Submissions

The usability community invites practitioners and researchers to submit proposals for Interactive Sessions, Special Interest Groups (SIGs), Interactivity, and Experience reports. Please see the pages for each of these submission types for detailed information on what information is needed. We especially encourage submissions that:

Discuss new methods or approaches
Feature innovative usability methods that save resources without sacrificing the quality of the results
Focus on innovative customizations of an existing method or approach
Compare approaches and results
Demonstrate improvements
Focus on new findings regarding user behavior
Provide evidence of challenges to existing findings or guidelines
Demonstrate integration of usability methods throughout the design life cycle
Showcase new standards
Feature research methods leading to improved usability processes

All submission types fall into the following categories:

The Human-Computer Interaction Archive

These papers and notes document work that makes a lasting and significant contribution to the knowledge and understanding of HCI. All submissions in this category have 'Research' as their primary community, but submitters can identify a secondary community (Usability) if they wish. Submitters in this category should be primarily interested in disseminating their work to a wider audience, while also achieving the standards of a prestigious publication. Important criteria include a lasting contribution, appropriate and reliable research methods and validity of the interpretation.

To submit scholarly work for archival publication, please consider the following submissions:

Contemporary Trends and Experiences

This submission type is oriented toward work that is of timely and broad interest and that is likely to provoke and inspire the CHI audience. An important facet of these submissions is that, over the years, they help to record the history of actual HCI practice.

To submit descriptions of novel work practices and experiences, demonstrations of a method, approach, tool (either live or via video) or other new findings or thought provoking work that would be of interest to others in the usability community or the larger CHI community, consider submitting one of the following:

To submit topics for dialogue and deliberation, consider the following:

To submit ideas for topics that others may wish to learn more about, use the following category:

Courses

Please note that the copyright for entries of this submission type remains with the author. Therefore, entrants are free to use material as they like, including professional portfolios and submitting a paper based on the work to other conferences or journals.

Student Design Competition

This submission type provides an opportunity for students of design to participate in CHI and demonstrate their problem solving and design skills in an international competition against their peers. We encourage students studying all aspects of design to participate; read more here.

Novel Submission Types

We particularly welcome proposals for novel types of submissions not listed above. Please contact the Usability Community chairs ( chi2007-usability@acm.org ) to discuss the best way to submit and present your work; we will work with submitters to shape these novel proposals into activities that will advance exchanges and understanding within the community.

Request a Mentor

CHI 2007 will try to provide mentors for individuals who have not had work accepted at CHI before and would like assistance in preparing their submissions. Please see Mentoring for more information. The deadline to request a mentor for HCI Archive submissions is June 29, 2006 and for Contemporary Trends submissions is July 14, 2006.

Review Process and Criteria

All Contemporary Trends and Experiences submissions will be reviewed based on the clarity of the information and the potential contribution to the potential contribution to the field of Usability and HCI. All "HCI Archive" submissions are reviewed to the standards of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals, by criteria appropriate to human-computer interaction and appropriate to the academic traditions of the design community. The individual submission categories may have additional review criteria (which you can find in the description for each category).

Preparing your Submission

Please see the pages on the HCI Archive and Contemporary Trends for details about what information is needed for each submission category.

Note that "Contemporary Trends and Experiences" submissions from the Usability Community must be submitted in the Extended Abstracts format. This format has a page limit, grid structure, font and font-size requirements, all of which help to make the collected proceedings appear connected and consistent. However, within these constraints your submission can be predominantly pictures, all prose or any combination.

If there is some reason why your work simply cannot be presented in one of these submission types, or in the Extended Abstracts format, then please contact us early, so that we can try to arrange something. Finally, please note that submissions arriving after the deadline will not be considered.

Upon Acceptance

You will be notified of the acceptance or rejection of your submission in late December, 2006. Accepted submissions will be published in the conference Extended Abstracts. The contact person listed in your submission will receive instructions for preparing the final version of the extended abstract and other information about presentation logistics.