Case Studies

Quick Facts

Important Dates:

• Submission deadline: October 11, 2017, 12pm PDT (3pm EDT, 8pm BST)
• Notification: November 17, 2017
• Publication-ready deadline: January 12, 2018, 12pm PST (3pm EST)
• 30-second video previews deadline (optional): January 22, 2018 (12 noon PST / 3pm EST)

Submission Details:

• Online Submission: PCS Submission System
• Template: Extended Abstracts Format

Submission Format: 2-8 page paper (extended abstract) describing your case study. Must include the following sections:

• Abstract
• ACM Classification
• Author Keywords
• Method: What we did (2-3 sentences minimum)
• Findings: What we learned (1 paragraph minimum)
• Discussion: What it means, how others might use the findings, implications for practice
• Conclusion & What’s next
• References do not count towards page length — i.e., references may spill over onto a 9th page.
• Authors are strongly encouraged to include an illustrative Video (5 minutes maximum, recommended 2-3 minutes) in 1080p H264 mp4 format to better explain what they did and what they learned. Submissions that do not include a video must comprise at least 4 pages of extended abstract.
• Submissions are not anonymous and should include all author names, affiliations, and contact information.

Selection process: Juried

Chairs: Elizabeth Buie & Edward Tse (casestudies@chi2018.acm.org)

Example Case Studies:

• Experiences with collaborative, distributed predictive human performance modeling
• Comparing the Reliability of Amazon Mechanical Turk and Survey Monkey to Traditional Market Research Surveys
• It’s All About Coupons: Exploring Coupon Use Behaviors in Email
• “It’s kind of like an extra screen for my phone”: Understanding Everyday Uses of Consumer Smart Watches
• Using NFC phones to track water purification in Haiti
• Nokia internet pulse: a long term deployment and iteration of a twitter visualization
• The Challenge of Enterprise Social Networking (Non-)Use at Work
• Smart Citizen Sentiment Dashboard
• Impact of location-based games on phone usage and movement
• What Makes a Successful Localized App

Before the Conference: Authors of accepted submissions will also be asked to submit a 30-second video preview summarizing their work; this is optional, but highly encouraged, as it will increase the visibility of your publication before, during and after the conference. Video previews may be compiled together in a promotional video for Case Studies. The deadline for submitting your video preview is 22 January 2018 (12 noon PST / 3pm EST), so authors have additional time to work on them after the camera-ready deadline. Video previews count towards the total submission size of 100MB, so we recommend that the camera-ready submission does not exceed 80MB.

Also see:

• Guide to submitting a 30-second video preview
• Technical Requirements and Guidelines for Videos at CHI

At the conference: Accepted Case Studies will be presented at the conference with other Case Studies. The length of the time slot for presentation and questions will be assigned by the conference committee and depend on the number of accepted papers. Authors should share their video as part of their presentation (up to 5 minutes) and plan to spend roughly half of their time answering questions and participating in discussion about their case study. Authors might be asked to focus on particular aspects of their case study (e.g., surprises, learnings, implications for practice) during their presentation to maximize the benefits of the presentation to conference attendees.

Archives: Extended abstracts; ACM Digital Library.

Message from the Case Studies Chairs

Case Studies provide an excellent means of presenting stories that address practical HCI phenomena — especially in real-world contexts — that are outside the scope of traditional archival research papers. HCI practice can use case studies to help set new standards and forge new paths for the broader field of HCI.

Case studies are not exclusively focused on industry but are specifically crafted to be open to industry contributions and to benefit industry with their findings

We encourage, but do not require, authors to use video to help tell the story. In doing exploratory or innovative practical work, things do not always go to plan. Accordingly, we also encourage the submission of Case Studies that highlight the learnings from practice. We expect the author(s) to have gained a better understanding — perhaps even to have redefined or reframed the phenomenon — through their work and to convey their insights, lessons learned, and new understandings in a way that advances the field. The insights should enable practitioners to improve their practice or inspire further research into practice.

Authors whose videos meet the requirements of the Video Showcase are encouraged to submit them there as well. (Authors who wish to submit only a video should submit to the Video Showcase instead of to Case Studies.)

We look forward to receiving your submissions and seeing you at CHI 2018. Feel free to contact us for any clarification.

Elizabeth Buie & Edward Tse
casestudies@chi2018.acm.org

What is a Case Study?

Case Studies are compelling stories about HCI practice based on real-world experiences that will be instructive and of interest to other members of the community. Based on the concrete cases of research and design, HCI practitioners and researchers will learn how HCI principles and methods can be applied in practical HCI work.

Case Studies should describe how a problem was addressed by HCI work carried out. They should describe the challenges experienced and how they were tackled, reflect on the experience, what could have been improved, and describe why the case study is of importance to the HCI community. Case Studies can also inspire HCI researchers to further investigate issues that arise from practical research and design work. Case Studies can illustrate, explore, report, analyze, summarize, challenge, or simply describe practical HCI work carried out to address a problem. They might focus, for instance, on the following topics:

• Design to support a specific type of experience, discussing its rationale and lessons learned
• Research of a specific domain, user group, or experience, discussing its insights and lessons learned
• Domain-specific topics, especially lesser known but important domains of interest
• Management and strategy of research (either academic research or user research) and design in organizations
• Pilot studies preceding and informing larger-scale investigations
• Application, critique, or evolution of a method, process, or tool
• Innovation through Research or Design (disruptive or otherwise)
• Practical issues associated with HCI Teaching and Learning in education, training, or knowledge sharing

Case Studies differ from archival research papers in that Case Studies do not need to define themselves as part of the potentially longer-term body of academic research. Case Studies are not considered academic archival publications, but can be republished as such, as appropriate. They might not have as extensive a literature review as archival research papers, or might not explicitly add to HCI theory within an academic school of thought.

Best Case Study Award

The SIGCHI “Best of CHI” awards honor exceptional submissions to SIGCHI sponsored conferences. Based on reviewer recommendations, the CHI Case Study chairs nominates submissions for the Best Case Study Award, as appropriate.

Preparing and Submitting your Case Study

A Case Study must be submitted via the PCS Submission System by October 11, 2017. The Case Study submission must have an extended abstract, and can also have supplementary material. We strongly encourage including a video as supplementary material.

1. Extended Abstract (the paper). The primary submission material consists of an extended abstract in the Extended Abstract Format (2-8 pages). The extended abstract should describe the authors’ experience, focusing on the lessons you want readers to take away from the presentation. Your extended abstract must stand alone; readers must be able to understand the Case Study with only this material. References do not count towards page length.
2. Supplementary material. You may augment the extended abstract with additional material. Typical supporting materials include videos, documents (e.g., pictures beyond those included in the extended abstract) or interactive media (e.g., interactive prototypes). Authors who submit supplementary materials should also include a list of the supplementary items in their submission. This should explain the nature and purpose of each item submitted (the list is not part of the extended abstract.)

Case Study Selection Process

The evaluation of submissions will not be constrained by traditional academic expectations, but will be based on the significance of the Case Study’s contribution to the field of HCI practice and on how compelling the story of the Case Study is told. Accepted submissions will be chosen on the merit and contribution of the report, not only on the quality of the outcome that it describes. This means that a valuable lesson learned from a poor outcome is just as acceptable as a valuable lesson learned from a good result.

Submissions will be reviewed by an expert panel of HCI practitioners and practitioner researchers. Authors will receive the reviews of their submissions after the decisions are announced, and should keep in mind that the Case Studies program is a Juried contribution and thus does not follow the strict peer-review process as applied to Papers. In particular, the Case Study review process does not allow authors the opportunity to submit rebuttals.

Specifically, the review criteria will be the extent to which the case study report accomplishes the following:

• tells a convincing story of a real-world experience of HCI practice that will be instructive and of interest to other members of the HCI community
• reflects on the experience, and describes why the case study is of importance
• advances the state of the practice
• clearly outlines any limitations of the report as well as of the activity described.

The extended abstract should contain no sensitive, private, or proprietary information that cannot be disclosed at publication time. Submissions may NOT be anonymous. However, confidentiality of submissions will be maintained during the review process. All rejected submissions will be kept confidential. All submitted materials for accepted submissions will be kept confidential until the start of the conference, with the exception of title and author information which will be published on the website prior to the conference.

On Acceptance of your Case Study

Authors will be notified of acceptance or rejection on November 10, 2017. Notification of accepted submissions will include instructions on how to prepare and submit the publication-ready version. These will be due on January 12, 2018.

At the Conference

Participants will be given a slot for presenting their case study during a scheduled session. Each accepted case study will be given a time slot to for their presentation and questions from the audience. Authors might be asked to focus on particular aspects of their case study during their presentation to maximize the benefits of the presentation to conference attendees.

Please see A Guide to a Successful Presentation for information about standard computing and A/V equipment that will be made available to presenters at CHI 2018. The Best Case Study award will be announced at the conference.

After the Conference

Accepted Case Studies will be distributed in the CHI Extended Abstracts, available in the ACM Digital Library. Videos will be attached.