At the Australian HCI conference this year, we had a shortpaper on important factors that influence the sustainability of Wizard-of-Oz tools.
The Wizard-of-Oz method has been utilized to conduct prototyping without programming for several decades. However, a literature review by John Sören Pettersson and Malin Wik (doi: 10.1145/2838739.2838825) reveals that tools supporting the method seem to be decommissioned after just a couple of years.
Dispate the darkness of November, two students from the newly completed User Testing course brought Innovation Park to the university's usability lab.
Picture from the visit: it is Erik Högberg and Joakim Norrman who demonstrates Ozlab for Patrick Standfast from Innovation Park. Erik Högberg works as student expert at Drivhuset which is located at Innovation Park.
Photo: Erik Framner.
Touch, swipe, och adjustments in the user interface for shell builders and wizards - these are things that some students presently are helping the Ozlab group with.
The web-based Ozlab is now in the process of being further developed to match the needs and requirements arising from the use of mobile units, e.g. swiping functionality and other finger gestures on touch screens.
Robert Eklund, Linköping University (before this at Telia Sonera), presented course material and experiences about the methodology used in the development of interactive systems, in particular as regards language-based interaction at a seminar November 06, 2015.
At an extended seminar a whole lot was discussed: the Ozlab group and Eklund went through a 2h guest lecture for students and then the discussions centred around various research problems, not the least the circum
John Sören Pettersson visited Günter Alce and the VR studio in Lund.
Günter Alce, PhD student at Lund University, who gave a presentation in Karlstad in the beginning of the summer about his extraordinary combination of Wizard-of-Oz technique, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality, received Professor John Sören Pettersson when he was visitng Lund on Spetember 22.
After our visit to Hudderfield in May, it was now time for John Bonner to visit Karlstad.
The discussions with John Bonner concerned research activities related to innovation management and interaction design with the use and evaluation of ubiquitous and pervasive computing but also teacher exchange.
Günter Alce, who recently defended a licentiate thesis in Lund, held a seminar June 17, 2015. Günter and advisers at Sony Mobile and Lund University have developed the WozARd system and has received a couple of study visits from us earlier this academic year.
In this seminar, Günter did not only speak about Wizard of Oz for development of Augmented Reality.
After some hectic years during which he has made a long series of research investiagtions and also had time to spend 4 months as an internship at Google in Zürich, did Julio, some time before the planned date, defend his doctoral thesis.
Julio defended a thesis entitled "Designing for Usable Privacy and Transparency in Digital Transactions" which was based on some of his research publications.
Associate Professor John Bonner in Huddersfield developed several Wizard-of-Oz setup together with the then doctoral researcher Andol Li and is now interested in how lectures and other events can be developed with video and sound support.
May 11 Prof. Pettersson and Malin Wik visited Trinity College in Dublin.
Ass. prof. Gavin Doherty, one of the principle investigator of WebWOZ, showed around and presented the utilization of WebWOZ in studies of interaction design. The Irish group has developed this system for Wizard-of-Oz prototyping for language-based applications and has also made a comparative study of such prototyping for other kinds of systems.
At the lunch seminar April 28 at SMART Infrastructure Facility, John Sören Pettersson presented a literature review by him and Malin Wik and the conclusions about why the Ozlab concept has survived for 15 years.
The Wizard-of-Oz method has been around for decades, allowing researchers and practitioners to conduct prototyping without programming.
BA thesis student Oskar Kroon went to Sony Mobile in Lund, Sweden, and had WozARd demonstred by the inventor himself, Günter Alce.
For more on WozARd, see:
https://youtu.be/bpSL0tLMy3w
After giving a speech on “Human Aspects of Security” at the Computer Science department in the morning of February 20th, 2015, Prof. Dr. Melanie Volkamer visited the usability lab to exchange experiences of usability experiments. Malin Wik demonstrated the Ozlab system.
Researchers from örebro university held seminar and visited the lab.
Achim Lilienthal and Martin Magnusson from Mobile Robotics and Olfaction Lab, örebro University, presented the research group and ongoing projects, including a just granted KK project:
http://www.oru.se/Nyheter/Forskningsnyheter/Forskningsnyhet/Manniskans-interaktion-med-autonoma-robotar/ (in Swedish)
Afterwards John Sören Pettersson and Malin Wik showed them the user laboratory and the webbased O
Oskar Kroon is our new internship. He will simplifiy some of the functions in the Shell Builder of Ozlab.
Oskar received some help of internship veterans Jonatan Lidholm and Marcus Nygren the first day on the new job. In parallell with his work in the lab, Oskar attempts to write his Bachelor thesis.
In the beginning of the new year 2015, the usability lab was visited by Jenny Friedl and Lars Eriksson from the Psychology department at Karlstad University. Discussions about collaboration between Psychology and Information Systems in course assignments and students' project works. The meeting started by Prof. John Sören Pettersson and lab assistant Malin Wik visiting the psychologists' lab.
Autumn 2014 students Marcus Nygren (study programme IT-Design) and Jonatan Lidholm (Webb and Multimedia) had their internships at Karlstad University's usability lab. During their internship they have further developed a few functions in the web-based Ozlab system which will facilitate the work of future Ozlab wizards.
Now available for downloading:
Perspectives on Ozlab in the cloud: A literature review of tools supporting Wizard-of-Oz experimentation, including an historical overview of 1971-2013 and notes on methodological issues and supporting generic tools
urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-33617
Students who would like to have a printed copy can collect this in the lab.
