#papershizzle

Phew! It was a rather busy (that’s why I haven’t been posting in a while), but also very successful start into the new year. A total of three full papers have been accepted at various conferences and journals. So basically, I’ve been revising and resubmitting papers since Christmas.

First, our paper about Inuit has been accepted at the 4th International Conference on Design, User Experience and Usability (DUXU), which will be held as a part of HCI International 2015 in Los Angeles, California. Inuit is a new usability instrument for interfaces that has been specifically designed for our concept of Usability-based Split Testing. An instrument of this kind contains a set of observable items that are used to predict a latent (i.e., non-observable) variable—in our case, usability. For instance, a person’s intelligence is a latent variable that can only be assessed with a number of specific questions (or items). Therefore, IQ tests are instruments.

Second, an article that is an extended version of our ICWE 2014 paper about SMR has been conditionally accepted by the Journal of Web Engineering (JWE). SMR is a streaming-based system that allows for the prediction of search result relevance from user interactions. In the extended version, we further elaborate on specifics of SMR’s data processing algorithm and complexity. Also, we describe the integration of our system into a real-world industry setting.

Finally—and probably most importantly—our paper titled “S.O.S.: Does Your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Need Help?” has been accepted at CHI 2015, which is the premier conference on human–computer interaction and will take place in Seoul! What a great success 🙂 . S.O.S. is the abbreviation for SERP Optimization Suite, which comprises two components. (1) WaPPU, which is a tool for inferring usability scores from users’ interactions with an interface. WaPPU was already presented at ICWE 2014 and has been augmented with (2) a catalog of best practices to form S.O.S. That catalog contains potential causes and corresponding countermeasures for suboptimal usability scores. An extension to WaPPU now automatically detects such suboptimal scores and proposes optimizations based on the catalog.

I am very excited about these accepted papers and definitely looking forward to presenting them to an audience of world-renowned experts. As a side note, a revised and extended version of my post titled What is ›Usability‹? has been published as a technical report in the series “Chemnitzer Informatik-Berichte” (roughly translated: “Computer Science Reports of Chemnitz University of Technology”).

So after this very successful start of the year, let’s see what else 2015 will bring. Stay tuned! 🙂