User testing is an essential part of Human Computer Interaction work. Social distancing and ethical restrictions that are currently in place have made it challenging to carry out the type of user experiments that we, as a research community, are used to. Despite this, work in the area is still continuing with an example of this being the large number of papers that were submitted to CHI2021.
The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers in the community to discuss the challenges that are apparent due to current restrictions, and to discover solutions to these challenges that have been adopted across research groups. We welcome volunteers to share methods that they have used to continue research work over the last 9 months, with potential topics including:
Facilitating in Person Testing
Facilitating User Group Interaction
Facilitating Remote Testing
https://www.sicsa.ac.uk/events/socially-distant-research-methods-workshop/
My presentation looks at undertaking virtual reality research while in a pandemic for The Scottish Informatics & Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) Socially Distant Research Methods Workshop on January 14th 2021. For our researchers at the UWS Immersive lab to undertake their studies during the pandemic we have identified a couple of ways we can get participants into VR headsets and we have made some guidelines on how to undertake in-person testing on campus safely.