AMCIS 2006: HCI Track with 10 Minitracks

HCI Education for IS Professionals

Mary Jo Davidson

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A substantial number of information systems (IS) projects now require the design and development of a user interaction component or the enhancement of an existing component. This requires that the project team include a user advocate. In some cases, a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) practitioner fills that role, but especially on small teams, the user advocate may be an IS professional. Even if an HCI practitioner is a team member, the work required as a user advocate may conflict with the roles of other team members.

Exposure to HCI concepts and the development of professional respect for HCI practitioners (and vice versa), via educational experiences, should lead to a shared vocabulary, greater team productivity, and improved project end-results for the user. Any opportunities to increase these three results are of interest in the areas of information systems research and practice.

Potential topics include:

• Another Digital Divide – Not everyone can set the VCR and why that matters.
• Team work – A basis in shared vocabulary
• The role of the user advocate
• Case studies of current HCI education for IS students
• A Timely Discussion – The assumption that everyone is “on the Web” negatively impacted recovery from Hurricane Katrina for many individuals. How could an understanding of users and HCI have helped prevent this?

HCI Models and Issues in Intelligent Information Seeking Engines

Richard E. (Rick) Downing

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For information seeking to be effective, it should perhaps be conceptualized as a problem solving process, rather than a search for key terms. In order to address the problem solving characteristics of information seeking, the user interface in the electronic information seeking environment should be able to provide methods for conducting natural language conversations between the user(s) and the system. Information problems should be addressed incrementally with the system providing feedback that would help the user narrow or broaden the scope of their search or increase domain knowledge regarding the topic of their search. In this way, the user can incrementally enhance their understanding of both the problem and potential solutions. Thus, search engines of the future should conduct an interactive conversation with the information seeker while incrementally narrowing the search with each conversational exchange with the user and providing an incrementally finer description of the type of information sought prior to beginning the search.

Email spam can be greatly reduced through the use of Bayesian spam filters. These innovative agents learn from both spam email and acceptable email, assigning scores to various aspects of the content of each message and determining whether to reject an email message based upon the overall score. Great progress has also been made in the use of both semantic web designs and ontologies. Perhaps it is time to reverse the paradigm from one in which humans query the system to one in which the system queries humans.

Relevance for MIS
The development of intelligent information seeking engines has broad implications for library information systems, knowledge management systems, database systems used in support of decision support and data mining, as well as for general use in Internet searching. We are seeking original research that develops, tests, advances, or applies theory, research, and knowledge to all areas of intelligent information seeking technology. Articles with both strong theoretical foundations and significant practical implications are highly encouraged. Conceptual models, literature reviews, exploratory research, descriptive surveys, methodological studies, applied research, and replications or extensions of past research are of interest if they make an important contribution to human problem solving, intelligent agent, or AI theory, research, or knowledge, and provide insight for academic application or business practice. All types of rigorous methods (quantitative, qualitative, or combination) are acceptable.

Suggested Topics
Some suggested topics are listed below. Questions regarding the suitability of your topic should be addressed to the mini-track chair.

• Human problem solving processes
• Intelligent search agents
• Artificial intelligence and information seeking
• Ontologies and information seeking
• Innovative uses of Bayesian filters
• Cognitive processes (or constraints) in information seeking
• Interactive user interfaces
• Semantic web engines
• Natural language filters

Human Cognition in Computing

Tom Stafford

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HCI research has traditionally viewed behavioral theory as the crux of understanding user perceptions and motivations in computing. Behavioral theory as we know it in HCI research is limited in its exposure to a rich and fruitful school of thinking known as Social Cognition in the psychology literature. Judgments, decision making, and visual perceptions are all well understood and reasonably reliable in testing in the social cognition studies of priming, person perception, and social judgment. Exposing the IT research community to this mature and robust field of reference discipline theory will provide for fresh and important perspectives as we begin to examine computer mediated social interactions, computer persuasion, and user perceptions of the trustworthiness of computer media sources.

Introduction to Minitrack
Increasingly, investigations of HCI are considering issues of perception, judgment, decision making, and attitude formation with regard to the interface and its usefulness to users. The body of literature that we typically draw from has not frequently referenced important areas of inquiry in social psychology related to judgment and decision making, while emerging areas of HCI inquiry have sufficiently broadened to include topics relevant to human cognition as part of the computer system and human perception and judgments about system interfaces. This minitrack would develop expository work based on psychological studies of human thought and judgment, so that we can begin understanding the operation of the human element of information systems from a richer theoretical perspective.

Theme
The theme of the minitrack revolves around understanding how people think, specifically, how users think about computers, with an aim toward developing better conceptualizations of human operators in synergy with their computer systems tools. As research begins to consider aspects of affect, anthropomorphic interfaces, and AI integration into systems that human operators interface with, we are increasingly entering new theoretical territory that is not yet well explained on the basis of our current HCI literature streams. Drawing from social cognition scholarship in judgment and decision making, as well as theories of perception and attitude formation, will enable the community of HCI scholars to better conceptualize the inter-relationship between human thought processes and systems operation.

Significance
Artificial Intelligence advances, coupled with the ubiquity of computing in modern life, present scenarios in which knowledge of perception and judgment processes in human operators takes an increasingly important role in systems design and successful implementation and operation.

Applying human precepts of perception and judgment to the issues of user interfaces permits us to begin investigating, for example, the likely credibility that operators accord to their information systems as sources of information for decision making. In times where computer mediated communication is increasingly promotional in nature, in light of CRM and emerging micro segmentation paradigms of marketing, the ability to effectively diagnose and utilize human perceptual processes as an element of systems interfaces and operation will be critical. Prior literature has delved into these issues at the level of adoption choices, but user response to computer mediated information sources will be important to understand as AI systems begin to provide increasingly more and more important information in support of decision making in both personal and organizational life, as enhanced and supported by computer systems.

Invited Guests
I am inviting Art Graesser, Director of the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the FedEx Institute of Technology at the University of Memphis, to provide a presentation on his development of AI guided anthropomorphic avatars as computer interfaces for computer-mediated learning. I am also asking B.J. Fogg of the Stanford Computer Credibility project to participate in the minitrack, providing his own evolving views of how humans view and judge computers as sources of information important to decision making.

Topical Coverage
It is expected that the topic of Intelligent Avatars and human perceptions of and response to anthropomorphic interface entities will be a key topic of the track; as computers and their interfaces become more human-like in their presentation, the issue of human reactions to human-like computing stimuli will be important. I will also ensure that established reference discipline schools of thought on judgment and decision making will be included so that attendees may begin to examine new and potentially fruitful theoretical perspectives for the study and development of computer interfaces that increasingly serve as sources of information and guidance in human decision making. These literature streams that will be touched on include social judgment, communications theory, and cybernetic psychology.

Social cognition has not yet been introduced to this community of scholars, and some of the most important current developments in computing have to do with human perception, judgment, and decision making with, and often of and about, computers that present human-like visual and audible interfaces. As interfaces continue to more closely emulate the aspects of the human form and behavior (as in AI avatar interfaces), it will be critical to build theoretical perspectives that investigate human perception of computer interfaces as analogies of intelligent peers, rather than powerful user-directed tools.

IT/Systems Accessibility

Deborah Fels
Eleanor T. Loiacono
Scott McCoy

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Accessibility is the ability of persons, regardless of ability, to easily access information, regardless of form, structure, or presentation. Fifty-four million Americans—nearly one in five—live with some form of disability (cognitive, visual, or audio) that makes accessing information difficult. Though great strides have been made during the past decade to accommodate those with special needs (including the development of numerous assistive technologies), there is still much to be done. For example, as the Internet and World Wide Web become an integral component of daily life, Web accessibility becomes more vital.

Accessibility goes beyond making information available for people with disabilities. Increasing accessibility may in turn increase use of systems by users without disabilities as well. Those with less powerful computers or slow Internet connections may find it preferable to purchase from accessible-friendly websites that require less bandwidth. For example, some might find it beneficial to surf the Web with the graphics function turned off, thus decreasing download time.

Given this broad definition of accessibility, a diverse group of research is expected from such areas as information systems, library science, education, computer science, and engineering. In fact, ACM held its first Web accessibility conference, called the First International Cross-disciplinary workshop on Web Accessibility, in New York City. The conference had three sessions and nine papers presented. Another ACM conference, the Fifth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technology held two sessions: Web accessibility and accessible interfaces. Further, a special issue of the Universal Access in the Information Society Journal, edited by the proposed mini-track co-chairs, will be published the first half of 2006 with papers from our minitrack at AMCIS.

Keywords: accessibility, usability, challenges, disabilities, assistive and adaptive technologies

Potential topics and research questions that this Mini-track would address include but are not limited to:

• Accessibility
• Internet and Web accessibility
• Assistive technology
• Adaptive technology
• Accessibility within workforce
• Usability

This topic was offered at the past two AMCIS conferences (2004 and 2005). Over 20 people attended each session in 2004 and 2005 where we organized one session each year. Top researchers in the field, such as Clyde Holsapple, Marilyn Tremaine, and Veda Story, have coauthored papers in our minitrack. The number of papers submitted and session attendees indicates the growing interest in the area which is also demonstrated by the growing number of research papers on this topic. Further the proposed mini-track co-chairs are co-chairing a mini-track on accessibility at HICSS 2006. Our minitrack at HICSS 2005 was very successful, as well.

Potential Authors and Reviewers
We have identified over 200 researchers actively studying Accessibility and have gathered many more names and emails at the AMCIS 2005 mini-track sessions. Given the interest in this area by Information Systems, computer science, library science, education, and engineering researchers, we believe there will be a number of papers submitted.

Personalization Systems

Il Im

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Personalization is one of the new phenomena that the Internet has brought to reality from imagination. As personalized services and products are becoming more common on the Internet, the interest on personalization is growing. Many practitioners and researchers are investigating into various issues of personalization. Yet, there is a lot to be known about personalization technologies and their impacts.

Through this minitrack, we aim to examine technologies for personalization, the impacts of personalization, and better ways for personalizing products and services. We welcome empirical research through quantitative or qualitative methodologies including novel conceptualizations of information systems, analytical modeling approaches, case studies of implementations and experimental or prototyping-based studies.

The following topics are indicative of the areas that are of particular interest:

• Personalization technologies such as recommendation systems and intelligent software
• Theories and models for better understanding of personalization
• Applications of personalization technologies
• Impact of personalization systems on users’ behavior
• The impacts of personalization systems on business
• Identifying and implementing users’ various personalization needs
• Best practices of personalization
• Cross-cultural issues of personalization
• Metrics for personalization success

Emergency Response Information Systems (Co-Sponsored by SIGDSS)

Tung Bui
Murray Turoff
Bartel Van de Walle

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Any aspect of the design, development, deployment, operation, or evaluation of emergency response systems are appropriate for this mini-track provided it focuses on the tools, functionality, and/or interface the system provides to human users involved with emergency and crisis response. Also papers that focus on requirements for this environment and/or the impact or relationship of such systems to the behavior of the individuals or organizations involved are equally welcome.

Papers that focus on the underlying technology or hardware of computers, networks, sensors, mobile devices and their improvements in such areas as throughput, accuracy, and security, should be directed to other appropriate sessions. An exception might be any special purpose input/output device for use by respondents to a crisis situation.

This mini-track is concerned with the functionality that an Emergency Response Information System provides for those involved in:

• Training for a crisis situation
• Planning for the response to a crisis situation
• Responding to a crisis situation
• Evaluating the performance during and after the crises

HCI Issues in Healthcare IT (Co-Sponsored by SIGHealth)

Vance Wilson

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In order to comply with changing regulations and to improve support for office staff, clinicians, and patients, healthcare organizations worldwide are currently undertaking massive transformations and additions to their IT infrastructure. History suggests that the success of the healthcare applications that emerge from this process will depend to a large degree on the ability of people to use them effectively and efficiently. Human-computer interaction (HCI) research can provide valuable guidance to improve the usability of healthcare IT. Potential exists for HCI researchers to apply existing knowledge to improving healthcare IT as well as to formulate new theories and practices specific to the healthcare context. The goal of this minitrack is to provide a focused outlet at AMCIS for HCI researchers in healthcare domains to share and discuss the results of their work. Research is welcomed on any HCI topic relating to healthcare IT.

List of Possible topics:

• Innovative HCI design and/or prototyping methods in healthcare
• Usability engineering for healthcare IT
• UI evaluation methods in healthcare
• Behavioral and cognitive aspects of HCI in healthcare
• Impacts of HCI on success or failure of healthcare IT
• User interface (UI) design practices for reducing errors in healthcare IT
• Application of HCI research to improving telemedicine
• UI development for patient-centered information systems, providing such functions as communication, health records access, and remote monitoring and treatment
• Accessibility and other HCI issues relating to special needs populations, including elderly patients, the chronically ill, and caregivers
• Impacts of regulation (e.g., for privacy and security) on usability
• HCI aspects relating to electronic medical records (institutional and/or personal)
• HCI and mobile devices used in healthcare
• Standards and guiding principles for UI design in healthcare
• Developing and teaching HCI courses for healthcare IT

HCI with Mobile Devices (Co-Sponsored by SIGEBIZ)

Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah
Peter Tarasewich

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Mobile applications are having a profound impact on organizations and individuals. Organizations no longer need to provide every employee with a wired connection to perform their job functions. Individuals can use mobile devices to access the information systems they need anywhere at anytime. But mobility and mobile device use is also adding to problems of information overload. Information management becomes more difficult and complex in mobile environments as well. Since mobile devices can be taken anywhere, the user’s environment can change rapidly from moment to moment. There can also be a significant number of people, objects, and activities vying for a user’s attention aside from the mobile application itself.

Designing effective interaction methods is a challenging part of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and mobile devices make this challenge even greater. Mobile applications require efficient ways to record and access information under circumstances that are often quite different from those where desktop computers are used. The purpose of this mini-track is to provide a forum for examining how people interact with mobile information systems and the devices that are used to access them. Submissions addressing all aspects of HCI with mobile devices are welcome.

Possible Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Novel interaction and interface design for mobile devices (e.g., phones, PDAs)
• Usability testing methods for wireless applications
• HCI security (HCI-SEC) for mobile devices and interactions
• Field tests of mobile information systems
• Case studies looking at the usability of mobile applications
• Formal user studies of mobile device interaction techniques
• Designing privacy into mobile applications and devices
• Notification cues and displays for wearable devices
• Wearable systems and computing
• Input and output methods for ultra-mobile devices (e.g., watches, rings)

This mini-track was part of AMCIS 2005, and is an extension and progression of mini-tracks in the wireless, m-commerce, and HCI fields that both mini-track co-chairs have been successfully running since 2001. Last year there were two excellent manuscripts submitted and accepted to this mini-track, and this year it is expected that there will be at least 4-6 submissions. This area is a growing sub-field of both HCI and wireless information systems that is receiving increasing emphasis from academia and industry. It is being cross-listed with two tracks, and again is being sponsored by two very popular SIGs.

Information Visualization and Decision Support (Co-Sponsored by SIGDSS)

Ozgur Turetken
David Schuff

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The abundance of information available to today’s managers makes it essential to efficiently represent, filter, and present information for effective decision making. The rapid advances in hardware and software development have made it possible to present data visually from multiple perspectives. However, the challenge is the design of visualizations such that (1) they are useful in presenting non-numeric as well numeric information, and (2) they are integrated with other components of existing decision support systems.

From that perspective, the topic of information visualization spans several disciplines, including decision support and human-computer interaction. Specifically, the graphical presentation of information applies to an array of topics such as data modeling, interface design, data mining, and data warehousing.

This track was extremely successful this year at AMCIS 2005. We had three papers presented during the session, which was attended by nearly 40 people. Based on this success, we are confident this mini-track will continue to attract quality submissions that focus on the design, development, and use of information visualization, as well as its ability to function as a tool to aid managerial decision-making.

Keywords: Information visualization, data visualization, decision-making, decision support systems, visual interface development

List of Possible Topics

• Techniques for the organization of information (e.g., clustering)
• Visual presentation of data mining results
• Design of visual interfaces that facilitate decision support
• Evaluation of visual interfaces especially from a decision effectiveness perspective
• Application of animation techniques to the presentation of information

Interface Design, Evaluation, and Impact

Matt Germonprez
Traci Hess
Scott McCoy

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HCI papers that do not fall into any of the above minitracks should be submitted to the HCI minitrack. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• The behavioral, cognitive, and motivational aspects of human/computer interaction
• User task analysis and modeling
• The analysis, design, development, evaluation, and use of information systems
• Guidelines and standards for interface design
• User interface design and evaluation of the Web for
  • B2B, B2C, C2C E-Commerce
  • Group collaboration
  • Negotiation and auction
• Design and evaluation issues for small screen devices and M-Commerce
• Interface issues in the development of other new interaction technologies
• Information system usability engineering
• The impact of interfaces/information technology on attitudes, behavior, performance, perception, and productivity
• Implications and consequences of technological change on individuals, groups, society, and socio-technical units
• Issues related to the elderly, the young, and special needs populations
• Issues in teaching HCI courses
• Other human factors issues related to HCI