Alan Blackwell
Has also published under the name of:
"Alan F. Blackwell" and "A. Blackwell"
About the author:
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Publications by Alan Blackwell (bibliography)
» 2008 «
Myers, Brad A., Burnett, Margaret, Rosson, Mary Beth, Ko, Andrew J. and Blackwell, Alan (2008): End user software engineering: chi'2008 special interest group meeting. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 2371-2374. Available online
“End users create software whenever they write, for instance, educational simulations, spreadsheets, or dynamic e-business web applications. Researchers are working to bring the benefits of rigorous software engineering methodologies to these end users to try to make their software more reliable. Unfortunately, errors are pervasive in end-user software, and the resulting impact is sometimes enormous. This special interest group meeting has two purposes: to incorporate attendees' and feedback into an emerging survey of the state of this interesting new sub-area, and generally to bring together the community of researchers who are addressing this topic, with the companies that are creating end-user programming tools.”
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Morrison, Cecily and Blackwell, Alan (2008): Co-located group interaction design. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 2587-2590. Available online
“This design theatre experience explores the use of choreographic improvisation exercises to reflect on the structures of interaction in a mobile, co-located group. The design technique is motivated by studies of clinical ward rounds, and applies analytic models from Kendon, Garfinkel and Hutchins.”
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Blythe, Mark, Bardzell, Jeffrey, Bardzell, Shaowen and Blackwell, Alan (2008): Critical Issues in Interaction Design. In: Proceedings of the HCI08 Conference on People and Computers XXII 2008. pp. 183-184. Available online
“Computing technology is now so entwined with everyday life that enquiries into human computer interaction (HCI) are also studies of society and culture Cultural and Critical theory is then increasingly relevant to studies of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). It is both timely and important to develop understandings of the strengths and limitations of the various perspectives available within the fractious traditions of cultural and critical theory. This workshop will consider the challenges of making such theory relevant and accessible to HCI and interaction design.”
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» 2007 «
Morrison, Cecily and Blackwell, Alan (2007): Interaction Manifolds: Theory from Experiments. In: Proceedings of the HCI07 Conference on People and Computers XXI 2007. p. 43. Available online
“This poster builds on comparative ethnographic work of a multi-disciplinary medical team using a paper-based and a computer-based patient record system. It describes the design and preliminary results of an experiment aimed to help articulate an analytical construct that would describe the tradeoffs between a technological setup and a group's ability to negotiate an interaction among themselves.”
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Jones, Rachel, Milic-Frayling, Natasa, Rodden, Kerry and Blackwell, Alan (2007): Contextual Method for the Redesign of Existing Software Products. In International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 22 (1) pp. 81-101
“This article is concerned with the problem of improving software products and investigates how to base that process on solid empirical foundations. Our key contribution is a contextual method that provides a means of identifying new features to support discovered and currently unsupported ways of working and a means of evaluating the usefulness of proposed features. Standard methods of discovery and evaluation, such as interviews and usability testing, gather some of the necessary data but fall short of covering important aspects. The shortcomings of these approaches are overcome by applying an integrated and iterative method for collecting and interpreting data about product usage in context. This article demonstrates its effectiveness when applied to the discovery and evaluation of new features for standard Web clients.”
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» 2006 «
Beckwith, Laura, Kissinger, Cory, Burnett, Margaret, Wiedenbeck, Susan, Lawrance, Joseph, Blackwell, Alan and Cook, Curtis (2006): Tinkering and gender in end-user programmers' debugging. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2006. pp. 231-240. Available online
“Earlier research on gender effects with software features intended to help problem-solvers in end-user debugging environments has shown that females are less likely to use unfamiliar software features. This poses a serious problem because these features may be key to helping them with debugging problems. Contrasting this with research documenting males' inclination for tinkering in unfamiliar environments, the question arises as to whether encouraging tinkering with new features would help females overcome the factors, such as low self-efficacy, that led to the earlier results. In this paper, we present an experiment with males and females in an end-user debugging setting, and investigate how tinkering behavior impacts several measures of their debugging success. Our results show that the factors of tinkering, reflection, and self-efficacy, can combine in multiple ways to impact debugging effectiveness differently for males than for females.”
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Blackwell, Alan (2006): The reification of metaphor as a design tool. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 13 (4) pp. 490-530
“Despite causing many debates in human-computer interaction (HCI), the term "metaphor" remains a central element of design practice. This article investigates the history of ideas behind user-interface (UI) metaphor, not only technical developments, but also less familiar perspectives from education, philosophy, and the sociology of science. The historical analysis is complemented by a study of attitudes toward metaphor among HCI researchers 30 years later. Working from these two streams of evidence, we find new insights into the way that theories in HCI are related to interface design, and offer recommendations regarding approaches to future UI design research.”
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» 2005 «
Rode, Jennifer Ann, Toye, Eleanor F. and Blackwell, Alan (2005): The domestic economy: a broader unit of analysis for end user programming. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2005 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2005. pp. 1757-1760. Available online
“Domestic ubicomp applications often assume individual users will program and configure their technology in isolation, decoupled from complex domestic environments in which they are situated. To investigate this assumption, we conducted a two week study of VCR use by eight families. Each household member old enough to write completed a diary, interviews were conducted before and after, and information on demographics and appliance ownership was collected. Our key finding supports the notion of the domestic economy and the trading of programming expertise. We use the Attention Investment paradigm, and discuss how the model fits with multi-user programming situations. We discuss the importance of the parent v/s child roles in VCR use, as well as, the tension between direct manipulation (e.g. pressing record) and programming ahead of time. We propose that future work on end user programming must focus on the household as a domestic system rather than on the individual.”
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» 2004 «
Stringer, Mark, Toye, Eleanor F., Rode, Jennifer Ann and Blackwell, Alan (2004): Teaching rhetorical skills with a tangible user interface. In: Proceedings of ACM IDC04: Interaction Design and Children 2004. pp. 11-18. Available online
“We describe Webkit, an application which uses a large-screen graphical user interface and a tangible user interface to teach children important rhetorical skills. We discuss our evaluation of this application and possible future directions for computer-supported rhetorical applications.”
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Milic-Frayling, Natasa, Jones, Rachel, Rodden, Kerry, Smyth, Gavin, Blackwell, Alan and Sommerer, Ralph (2004): SmartBack: supporting users in back navigation. In: Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference on the World Wide Web 2004. pp. 63-71. Available online
“This paper presents the design and user evaluation of SmartBack, a feature that complements the standard Back button by enabling users to jump directly to key pages in their navigation session, making common navigation activities more efficient. Defining key pages was informed by the findings of a user study that involved detailed monitoring of Web usage and analysis of Web browsing in terms of navigation trails. The pages accessible through SmartBack are determined automatically based on the structure of the user's navigation trails or page association with specific user's activities, such as search or browsing bookmarked sites. We discuss implementation decisions and present results of a usability study in which we deployed the SmartBack prototype and monitored usage for a month in both corporate and home settings. The results show that the feature brings qualitative improvement to the browsing experience of individuals who use it.”
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» 2003 «
Blackwell, Alan and Green, Thomas (2003): Notational Systems - The Cognitive Dimensions of Notations Framework. In: Carroll, John M. "HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks". Morgan Kaufman Publishers pp. 103-133
Rode, Jennifer Ann, Stringer, Mark, Toye, Eleanor F., Simpson, Amanda R. and Blackwell, Alan (2003): Curriculum-focused design. In: Proceedings of ACM IDC03: Interaction Design and Children 2003. pp. 119-126. Available online
“In this paper we describe a technique of Curriculum-Focused Design, and the aspects of our research experience on which the technique is based. Our technique is a variant of Druin's Cooperative Inquiry. Cooperative Inquiry is a well-developed design practice for children, but it has been practised largely outside the classroom. Druin's technique has also been developed in American schools, which have greater curriculum flexibility than English schools, which are highly curriculum-focused. We studied the English curriculum and identified an area that we believed could fruitfully be augmented by technology. Our design approach was novel insofar as our evaluation sessions doubled as lessons for students. Our interdisciplinary design team, including a former teacher with over 10 years' classroom experience, evaluated the interface in a classroom setting, providing strong environmental validity to the design process.”
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Rodden, Kerry, Milic-Frayling, N., Sommerer, R. and Blackwell, Alan (2003): Effective Web Searching on Mobile Devices. In: Proceedings of the HCI03 Conference on People and Computers XVII 2003. pp. 281-296.
» 2002 «
Ward, David J., Blackwell, Alan and MacKay, David J. C. (2002): Dasher: A Gesture-Driven Data Entry Interface for Mobile Computing. In Human-Computer Interaction, 17 (2) pp. 199-228
“Existing devices for communicating information to computers are bulky, slow,
or unreliable. Dasher is an interface incorporating language modeling and
driven by continuous two-dimensional gestures (e.g., a mouse, a stylus, or
eye-tracker). Tests have shown that, after 1 hr of practice, novice users reach
a writing speed of about 20 words per minute (wpm) while taking dictation.
Experienced users achieve writing speeds of about 34 wpm, compared with typical
10-finger keyboard typing of 40 to 60 wpm. Although the interface is slower
than a conventional keyboard, it is simple to use and could be used on personal
data assistants and by motion-impaired computer users. Dasher can readily be
used to enter text from any alphabet.”
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» 2001 «
Blackwell, Alan (ed.) (2001): Thinking with Diagrams. Kluwer Academic Publishers
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» 2000 «
Ward, David J., Blackwell, Alan and MacKay, David J. C. (2000): Dasher -- A Data Entry Interface Using Continuous Gestures and Language Models. In: Ackerman, Mark S. and Edwards, Keith (eds.) Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 2000, San Diego, California, United States. pp. 129-137. Available online
» 1999 «
Petre, Marian and Blackwell, Alan (1999): Mental Imagery in Program Design and Visual Programming. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 51 (1) pp. 7-30
“There is widespread anecdotal evidence that expert programmers make use of visual mental images when they are designing programs. This evidence is used to justify the use of diagrams and visual programming languages during software design. This paper reports the results of two studies. In the first, expert programmers were directly questioned regarding the nature of their mental representations while they were engaged in a design task. This investigative technique was used with the explicit intention of eliciting introspective reports of mental imagery. In the second, users of a visual programming language responded to a questionnaire in which they were asked about cognitive processes. The resulting transcripts displayed a considerable number of common elements. These suggests that software design shares many characteristics of more concrete design disciplines. The reports from participants in the two studies, together with previous research into imagery use, indicate potential techniques for further investigation of software development support tools and design strategies.”
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» 1997 «
Petre, Marian and Blackwell, Alan (1997): A Glimpse of Expert Programmers' Mental Imagery. In: Empirical Studies of Programmers - Seventh Workshop October 24-26, 1997, 1997, Alexandria, Virginia. pp. 109-123. Available online
“There is widespread anecdotal evidence that expert programmers make use of visual mental images when they are designing programs. In this study, expert programmers were directly questioned regarding the nature of their mental representations while they were engaged in a design task. This investigative technique was used with the explicit intention of eliciting introspective reports of mental imagery. The resulting transcripts displayed a considerable number of common elements. These suggest that software design shares many characteristics of more concrete design disciplines. They also provide promising areas for further investigation of software development support tools and design strategies.”
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Whitley, K. N. and Blackwell, Alan (1997): Visual Programming: The Outlook from Academia and Industry. In: Empirical Studies of Programmers - Seventh Workshop October 24-26, 1997, 1997, Alexandria, Virginia. pp. 180-208. Available online
“This paper presents three surveys of beliefs about the cognitive effects of visual programming. One survey examined the visual programming literature for the opinions of academic researchers. The second and third surveys gathered the opinions of the users of programming languages: the second survey questioned professional programmers attending a trade show and the third was a world-wide survey of LabVIEW programmers conducted via the Internet. The first survey revealed speculative, optimistic views of visual programming amongst visual programming researchers. The second found that a broad sample of professional programmers were the most skeptical of the three groups. The third indicates that LabVIEW programmers are confident that the visual programming provided by LabVIEW is beneficial. Taken together, these surveys illustrate the wide range of unanswered questions about the cognitive effects of visual programming languages. In doing so, this research hopes to assist in the process of establishing a more rigorous scientific investigation of these cognitive effects.”
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Mar 21st, 2010
Changes to this page (author)
21 Feb 2010: Enabled abstracts to be shown on Alan Blackwell's author page.12 Jul 2009: Author was edited 09 Jul 2009: Author was edited
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28 Apr 2003: Added the author to the bibliography
