Resources for HCI students

Communication

Paper writing

Read Strunk and White's The Elements of Style.

Formatting:
  • Use Latex templates when possible

Poster

Patrick Baudisch set up a web page on posters for UIST, it is relevant for any other conference. He wisely suggests to let Google give you some more tips.

Collin Purrington has a nice article on designing conference posters. He also manages the Poster Sessions and Pimp my poster Flickr groups.

On design:

This is an endless topic, but here are some universal tips that would work for any non designer: lessons from swiss style graphic design by Smashing Magazine.

Check this curated list of great infographics, look and get inspired!

Tools of the trade:

The aim of a poster is to convey information clearly in a printed format. The best way to get there is to use software that lets you organize information and print it nicely. So using a software made for detailed page layout, text flowing around images and handling of high-res pictures is best.

  • If you have the Adobe Suite, InDesign is best. Scribus is a good Free Software alternative, LaTex is always here to help if you find a nice template.
  • You can also use a Vector Graphics tool like Illustrator or Inkscape.
  • On Macs, Omnigraffle does a great job and is much easier to learn; Pages comes with some very basic poster templates. On Windows, Power Point is widely used often for worst, it is really worth your time learning Scribus or Inkscape. On Linux go for Scribus, Latex or Inkscape.

Some extra links: more

Evaluation Methods

Quasi-Experiments

I tend to favor those over over lab exp.

Check out Shadish, Cook and Campbell book on Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference.

Controlled lab experiments

Scott MacKenzie set up some useful pages:

LittleStat(alpha) is a great tool to calculate statistics online. It also helps to pick the right statistical tool for your analysis through a simple series of yes/no answers.