Joint application development (2nd ed.)
Joint application development (2nd ed.)
User-centered information design for improved software usability
User-centered information design for improved software usability
Contextual design: defining customer-centered systems
Contextual design: defining customer-centered systems
A diary study of information capture in working life
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Rapid ethnography: time deepening strategies for HCI field research
DIS '00 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques
Ethnographically informed analysis for software engineers
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies - Understanding work and designing artefacts
Using while moving: HCI issues in fieldwork environments
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) - Special issue on human-computer interaction with mobile systems
User web browsing characteristics using palm handhelds for information retrieval
IPCC/SIGDOC '00 Proceedings of IEEE professional communication society international professional communication conference and Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM international conference on Computer documentation: technology & teamwork
Extended abstract a field computer for animal trackers
CHI '02 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Computer Analysis and Qualitative Research
Computer Analysis and Qualitative Research
Design of documentation for handheld ergonomics: presenting clinical evidence at the point of care
Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Computer documentation
Pocket PiCoMap: a case study in designing and assessing a handheld concept mapping tool for learners
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The SenseCam as a tool for task observation
BCS-HCI '08 Proceedings of the 22nd British HCI Group Annual Conference on People and Computers: Culture, Creativity, Interaction - Volume 2
Recording Mobile Learning: An Evaluation of the Number of Audio Recorders Needed in an M-Tel Study
International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning
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Observational research has become an increasingly important tool in the technical communicator's toolkit as a way of analyzing audiences, discovering problems with current documentation systems, and envisioning alternate ways to design information. Whether it is used informally, in structured design methods, or in academic workplace studies, observational research is useful for technical communication. Yet collecting, managing, and analyzing data can be laborious, time-consuming, and hard to share among team members. Thus technical communicators sometimes avoid observational research in favor of interviews, focus groups, and usability testing -- methods that have their own strengths, but that are no substitute for observational research.In this presentation, I describe two projects in which I dealt with some of these barriers by using handheld PCs (a Handspring Visor and a Sharp Zaurus) as data collection, management, and analysis tools. Consolidating various techniques to a handheld PC -particularly on the data collection side -- leads to a number of benefits, including a reduction in laborious manual transcription; the easy transfer from raw data to research databases; the elimination of work in digitizing audio and photo data for archiving in a database; on-the-fly analysis of data anywhere, without the need for file cabinets, folders, or other bulky types of data storage; and easy sharing of data among team members. At the presentation's conclusion, I will describe how I plan to further develop this fruitful line of inquiry by developing a crossplatform qualitative research tool.