useit.com CHI97 Workshop on Augmented Conceptual Analysis of the Web Agenda

Session Outline

Sunday Morning (Grounding in Examples). Grounding our discussion with specific examples and phenomena. These might include such phenomena as technological trends and/or particular innovations (e.g., the migration from static to dynamic and interactive web pages via animated GIFs, Shockwave, forms, Java, etc.), social conventions (e.g., providing contact information on a page), design conventions (e.g., site navigation bars, search facilities), and tensions or oppositions among various web players and phenomena (e.g., keywords on or within pages vs. indexers, as described above). We will seed this discussion with key examples raised in the position papers, and expect more examples to surface throughout the discussion.

Sunday Afternoon (First Principles). In the afternoon, we will begin to drive up the level of abstraction, asking what primitive or first-level principles does our corpus of examples suggest? We will attempt to declare what principle (or principles) each is an example of. We expect that other examples may come to mind as we go through this exercise.

Monday Morning (Applying Perspectives I). We will begin the morning session with a short discussion in which we ask participants to bring up any further principles or patterns in the examples considered the first day that have come to light overnight (about a half-hour discussion). After this, we will leave the examples for most of the day, as we change the focus of the discussion to the perspectives developed by participants prior to the workshop. We plan to devote about an hour to a discussion of each perspective, with the discussion being led by one or more participants who were particularly interested in a perspective. In this phase of the workshop, we will attempt to work "top-down" from perspectives towards the examples and Web phenomena, rather than the "bottom-up" work carried out in the first day. We imagine that there will be approximately six different perspectives, meaning 6 hours devoted to this part of the workshop, but we will adjust the schedule prior to the workshop when we see which analytical perspectives will be represented by the participants.

Monday Afternoon (Applying Perspectives II). After lunch, we will continue discussions of the perspectives led by participants. To conclude the workshop, we will devote at least an hour, two if we can get it, to wrap-up and trying to summarize the lessons learned, and the kind of insights provided by various perspectives about the Web. We will seek out volunteers to prepare a poster for the conference (or, if possible, we will create the poster out of some of the materials generated during the workshop discussion).