Lessons from failures in designing and conducting experimental studies
Matthias Budde, Anja Exler, Till Riedel, Micheal Beigl, Andrea Schankin · 2017
User studies are an important part in the design of socio-technical systems. However, Computer Science students and practitioners in Ubicomp often have not been trained in designing and conducting experimental studies. To help bridging this gap, this paper presents a (very) short tutorial on how (not) to design and conduct experimental studies and analyze the gathered data. This is done through examples of failure from case studies, which illustrate pitfalls, challenges, and some approaches to solving them in an anecdotal fashion. Most of the failures were committed by ourselves or students at our lab, some anecdotes were added from external references or personal conversation.