Congrats to Crowd Lab Ph.D. student Aditya Bharadwaj for his accepted paper at the upcoming CHI 2019 conference in Glasgow, Scotland, in May. The acceptance rate for this top-tier human-computer interaction conference is 24%. The paper, titled “Critter: Augmenting Creative Work with Dynamic Checklists, Automated Quality Assurance, and Contextual Reviewer Feedback“, was co-authored with colleagues Pao Siangliulue and Adam Marcus at the New York-based startup B12, where Aditya interned last summer. The paper’s abstract is as follows:
Checklists and guidelines have played an increasingly important role in complex tasks ranging from the cockpit to the operating theater. Their role in creative tasks like design is less explored. In a needfinding study with expert web designers, we identified designers’ challenges in adhering to a checklist of design guidelines. We built Critter, which addressed these challenges with three components: Dynamic Checklists that progressively disclose guideline complexity with a self-pruning hierarchical view, AutoQA to automate common quality assurance checks, and guideline-specific feedback provided by a reviewer to highlight mistakes as they appear. In an observational study, we found that the more engaged a designer was with Critter, the fewer mistakes they made in following design guidelines. Designers rated the AutoQA and contextual feedback experience highly, and provided feedback on the tradeoffs of the hierarchical Dynamic Checklists. We additionally found that a majority of designers rated the AutoQA experience as excellent and felt that it increased the quality of their work. Finally, we discuss broader implications for supporting complex creative tasks.
