Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Week 5

Week 6

Week 7

Week 8

Week 10

Week 9 (July 15 - 21)

Due to the confusion over the address, the pilot has been delayed a week, which means more than half of the pilot, assuming it lasts 4 weeks, will continue after the end of my internship. But this shouldn't be a problem since after my internship, I will be in communication with Jen, I will leave instructions and paperwork with Jen, and I will be continuing the research in the fall.

This week I attended the BayCHI Apprenticeship Workshop at Stanford on How to Design a Survey led by Paul Whitmore, who received his Ph.D. in psychology with a concentration in HCI. It's often discussed that the psychology field has done extensive research in survey design and utilizes purposely designed surveys. In what I have found in HCI research, we often design surveys for user studies with very little guidance and design principles. I hoped the workshop would provide good insight on HCI survey design, and it did. I especially found the Tips on Writing Questions helpful and found ways to improve our pre-selection questionnaire. Most notably, I found his suggestion to use meaningful adjectives rather than two anchoring poles for a five point range answers helpful. He suggests that each of the 5 choices should have its own meaning (Very Good, Good, Neutral, Bad, Very Bad), in order for all survey participants to have uniform interpretations and thus more accurate data collection.

I forwarded the link to Whitmore's site to the IO research group (Jen's group) in addition to specific students who couldn't attend the workshop but where implementing surveys. One student asked me to review his survey.

This week we also confirmed a meeting for next week with Prof. Zak Sabry, Professor of Public Health Nutrition in the Berkeley School of Public Health. We had sent him a copy of the paper which has been accepted to UbiCom 2002 and was interested in his feedback about our device and approach. We were very excited about this meeting because we had tried to contact other nutrition professors previously and had been unsuccessful.