CPE/CSC 581-S07 Usability and Knowledge Management UCD and HCI Links

Resources for Knowledge Management

A collection of interesting items that I have encountered over the last few years is available as a Google notebook KM Nuggets. You may find additional material in the respective Google notebooks for the AI and HCI classes: AI Nuggets and HCI Nuggets.

Resources for UCD and HCI

The SLO Chapter of the Society for Technical Communications, in collaboration with Erika Rogers (who taught UCD and HCI courses at Cal Poly earlier), has put together a collection of Web pointers with information that are of interest for this course. You can find it at http://www.slostc.org/topics/usability/resources_list.html. At the same site, you can also find definitions of key terms in usability and HCI; see http://slostc.org/topics/usability/definitions.html.

Online Resources for Academic Research

For research involving academic publications, in addition to the resources available through the library I recommend CiteSeer, http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/, and Google Scholar, http://scholar.google.com. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/ is often a good start, but some of the material can be a bit rough and unbalanced.

Human Subjects in Research

Usability evaluations and similar activities frequently require the participation of other people. While the potential for harm is very low for the types of activities that we typically conduct, it may fall under some constraints and requirements of using human subjects in reaseach. Some relevant documents were assembled by a Cal Poly committee, and are available at http://www.calpoly.edu/~scdavis/human.htm.

If you are planning to conduct activities that involve the participation of human subjects, you need to make sure that you either get the approval from this committee, or that your activities are not subject to that approval. At the very minimum, you need to use an "informed consent" form to explain what you're doing to participants, and get their approval. I know of at least one case where a team of people had to withdraw an accepted publication from a very respected conference because they did not obtain the informed consent from the participants. They were even able to contact all participants afterwards and obtain their consent, but since this was done after the fact, it was not acceptable.