On Design Thinking

According to Patnaik (2009), Design Thinking is "any process that applies the methods of industrial designers to problems beyond how a product should look." The term was already used as early as 1987 by Rowe in his eponymous book in an architectural context and has lately become popular through research done at Stanford University and the Hasso Plattner… Continue reading On Design Thinking

The U Score: Redesigning Usability Testing

Usability testing is often perceived as cumbersome and time-consuming and therefore not thoroughly applied. This was one of the key observations leading to the topic of my PhD thesis. Particularly conducting tests with actual users is often omitted, which results in the release of suboptimal products and websites. In my thesis, I tackle this problem through more… Continue reading The U Score: Redesigning Usability Testing

Enabling Industry 4.0 with HoloBuilder

At this year's INFORMATIK conference held by the GI in Cottbus, I had the chance to present a research paper (full text here) about HoloBuilder—officially titled "Enabling Industry 4.0 with holobuilder"1—that I wrote together with my colleagues Kristina Tenhaft, Simon Heinen and Harry Handorf. In our paper, we examine HoloBuilder from a research rather than… Continue reading Enabling Industry 4.0 with HoloBuilder

The Search Interaction Optimization Toolkit – The Essence of my PhD Thesis

My PhD thesis introduces a novel methodology that is named Search Interaction Optimization (SIO) and is used for designing, evaluating and optimizing search engine results pages (so-called SERPs). As a proof-of-concept of this new methodology, I've developed a corresponding SIO toolkit, which comprises a total of seven components1 (most of which have already been introduced in previous… Continue reading The Search Interaction Optimization Toolkit – The Essence of my PhD Thesis

INUIT: The Interface Usability Instrument

As one of the building blocks of my PhD thesis, I have developed a novel instrument for measuring the usability of web interfaces, which is simply called Inuit—the Interface Usability Instrument1. This was necessary because a usability instrument that is suited for the automatic methods for Search Interaction Optimization I have developed in my PhD… Continue reading INUIT: The Interface Usability Instrument

S.O.S. Receives Best Paper Honarable Mention Award at CHI ’15

Our paper "S.O.S.: Does Your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Need Help?"—co-authors are Dr. Andreas Both (Unister) and Prof. Martin Gaedke (TU Chemnitz)—has been awarded a Best Paper Honarable Mention Award by ACM SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group on Computer–Human Interaction of the Association for Computing Machinery. According to Wikipedia, ACM SIGCHI is "the world's leading organization in… Continue reading S.O.S. Receives Best Paper Honarable Mention Award at CHI ’15

#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… Continue reading #papershizzle

ICYMI: This is a motherfucking website and I wrote a motherfucking conference article about it

(Disclaimer: motherfuckingwebsite.com was not made by me!) The post in which I review motherfuckingwebsite.com and propose some changes to make it even more perfect (see here) is the most widely read post on my blog by far. To date, it has received 8,715 views, with the front page of my blog being in second place having… Continue reading ICYMI: This is a motherfucking website and I wrote a motherfucking conference article about it

What is ›Usability‹?

Earlier this year, I submitted a research paper about a concept called usability-based split testing1 to a web engineering conference (Speicher et al., 2014). My evaluation involved a questionnaire that asked for ratings of different usability aspects—such as informativeness, readability etc.—of web interfaces. So obviously, I use the word “usability” in that paper a lot;… Continue reading What is ›Usability‹?

Survey: Search Engines – Perception, Usage & Expectations

In the context of my PhD thesis in Human–Computer Interaction, I currently conduct a survey concerning the use of search engines. With the help of this survey I hope to better understand how you perceive and use search engines and which expectations you have towards them. In particular, I focus on the use of search… Continue reading Survey: Search Engines – Perception, Usage & Expectations