Does a system act as a smart co-worker or is it just a collection of tools users need to learn to operate? Come to our tutorial on a new usability evaluation method called Collaborative Critique and learn how to design and evaluate systems to achieve true human-computer collaboration instead of a mere interaction.

We will introduce a new usability walkthrough method called Collaborative Critique (CC), first presented at ACM CHI 2012 and inspired by the human-computer collaboration paradigm of system-user interaction. CC is motivated by the need for a usability inspection technique that focuses on the usefulness of the system and is applicable to complex information systems as well as smaller-scale consumer websites and applications. The tutorial will include a detailed description of the CC method, its theoretical foundations, and results from a practical evaluation. The afternoon session will include a hands-on exercise, followed by a discussion.

Tamara Babaian is an Associate Professor of Computer Information Systems at Bentley University. She received her PhD from Tufts University, followed by a Post-Doctorate fellowship at Harvard University. Tamara’s research in intelligent and collaborative systems has been focusing on (1) the design and evaluation of collaborative system-user interactions and (2) the algorithms and representations that support human-computer collaboration. Her HCI work has appeared in proceedings of ACM CHI, Intelligent User Interfaces conference, International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems and other conference and journal publications.