Workshops
Comparative Structured Observation
What happens when your design concept is already well established and you want to see whether or not your design is on the right track, or which of several design variants makes most sense to users? You are not interested in testing a hypothesis, but instead, you want gather focused, useful feedback from users that either supports your current design direction or helps you decide what to change. This course presents a qualitative method called Comparative Structured Observation (CSO) (Mackay & McGrenere, 2025) which takes advantage of the structure of controlled experiments to generate comparable, ecologically relevant experiences with two or more design variants.
About
Course participants will first learn the basic principles that comprise a Comparative Structured Observation study, with examples from the research literature, and a discussion of what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate study designs. Participants will then work in small groups and, with help from the instructors, to design concrete CSO studies. Participants are encouraged to bring examples of current design concepts that they are struggling to assess, but will also have other examples to choose from. The course will conclude with a discussion of relevant analysis methods.
This website contains handouts, slides, exercises and related course materials that will be made available to registered course participants.
Schedule
The course lasts for one conference session. The exact day, time, and location will be announced.
Places & directions
This course will be presented at CHI'25 at the Pacifico Yokohama Conference center, in Yokohama, Japan.