Preparing Your Submission

You must use the online submission process at the UPA web site. If problems occur during the submission process, please contact the appropriate chair-person before resubmitting. Updates to materials after submission should be coordinated with your chair-person.

During the submission process, you will need to answer several questions about the content and focus of your proposal. Please review these questions below before submitting your proposal.

In addition, please be ready to answer questions about any restrictions or special requirements.

 Target Audiences

During online submission, you will be asked to indicate the audience for your submission.

•  Basics for People Who Are New to Usability
  Sessions designed for people who are new to usability should assume little or no prior knowledge or experience with usability concepts and techniques. These sessions should focus on bringing new people up to a minimum competency in a subject area as quickly as possible, so that they may take advantage of a broader range of sessions at this same conference. UPA will attempt to schedule these sessions early in the conference week.
•  Topics for People who are Experienced in Usability but New to the Topic
  These topics teach new skills to current practitioners, enhance existing skills, share knowledge and experience to broaden one’s knowledge of both craft and business, and build the usability community. Experienced practitioners are the people most likely to encounter new problems and issues (beyond basic skills), and need to have knowledge of both techniques and resources that will help them cope with any challenge.
•  Topics for People who are Experienced in Usability and in the Topic
  These topics teach advanced skills and knowledge in established subjects, and provide experienced practitioners with an opportunity to enhance existing skills. These sessions provide insight into the evolution of established practices, and provide an opportunity to share successes and failures in ways that help practitioners evaluate and improve their performance in ongoing projects and environments.
•  In-Depth, Specialized, or Research Topics
  In-depth, specialized, and research topics require a broad and deep experience base. These topics explore, define, or validate standards and practices. Many of these topics look into the future to guide and direct the profession in the directions it needs to go. These may include unsolved problems, as well as re-shaping the field and the community at any level from vision to methodology. Broadly speaking, these topics address issues at the leading edge of usability, and build the intellectual foundations of the profession.
•  Leaders and Mentors
  The essence of leadership is accomplishing work through others. This can cover a wide variety of roles, including teamwork, management, leadership, situational leadership, interdisciplinary work, teaching, mentoring, publishing, advocacy, and evangelizing, as well as related areas such as marketing, product management, or project management when usability professionals work in or with these functions. Effective leadership is essential for bringing usability into the mainstream in product design and development.
•  Friends and Allies
  Friends and allies may be anyone outside the usability profession who is committed to the goals and practice of usability, and who actively works for the advancement of the field, such as graphic designers, developers, technical writers, etc. These “usability advocates” tend to have a strategic viewpoint, focusing on direction and deployment rather than technical details. They may also bring in topics from related fields.
•  Anyone
  Some sessions are of interest to everyone involved with usability, regardless of experience level or profession. These sessions should be of broad interest, non-technical, and focused on current and future interests to the field as a whole.

 Presentation Information

During online submission, you will be asked to provide information that describes your proposal.

 Presentation Strategy:

Business case study
How-to discussion
Overview of concept, philosophy, or methodology
Presentation of design or design guidelines
Other (please indicate)

 System, Product, or Project Focus:

Web
Computer software
Emerging interfaces
Documentation or online assistance
Hardware
Handheld and wireless
Consumer products/Living environments
Embedded or pervasive systems
Other (please specify)
No specific system, product, or project orientation

 Topic Category:

Enhancing general usability skills
Usability method implementation or adaptation
Building usability within the organization and the product life cycle
Issues and strategies for experienced usability professionals
Outside the box topics (topics not directly related to usability, but that could have indirect application)

 Keywords:

Accessibility and disability
Change management
Cognitive walkthroughs
Combining methods
Comparative studies
Conceptual Design
Consulting
Consumer designs
Contextual inquiry
Cost-justifying usability
Cross-cultural challenges
Data collection and analysis
Design communications
Designing and testing with children
Experimental design and statistics
Field and ethnographic research
Focus groups
Having fun with customers
Heuristics and guidelines
Information Architecture and Design
Interaction design
Metrics
Managing a usability group
New methodology
Organizational issues
Paper prototyping
Patterns in analysis and design
Participant recruiting
Participatory design
Perception of quality/user satisfaction
Product lifecycle and usability
Professional development
Project management
Prototyping
Remote testing
Results reporting
Role of usability engineer
Selling usability
Standards and/or guidelines
Strategic usability
Support tools and software
Surveys and questionnaires
Task analysis
Tools
Training and education
Usability (lab) testing
User interface design
User interface inspections
User-centered design
User experience

 If you are accepted

There are a limited number of presentation slots and submissions are very carefully selected for balance and appeal to attendees. If your presentation is accepted, you are expected to fulfill your professional obligations and present so that we do not disappoint the attendees who expect to attend your session. If you are accepted, you will be asked to confirm your participation. Once you confirm, you are expected to give your presentation, or arrange for an equivalent substitute presenter.

You will need to provide materials for the proceedings as described in the submission guidelines. Further information will accompany your acceptance notification.

You are also expected to provide handouts for session attendees. Please see the submission guidelines for any benefits. Please note that we are unable to pay travel, accommodations or registration fees except as noted in the submission guidelines.

 Quality Guidelines for Presentations and Papers

When submitting or reviewing UPA proposals, quality is one of several issues to consider as part of the overall value of the submission. Adding quality to the list of issues for UPA submitters and reviewers is expected to ensure that the submissions UPA accepts are methodologically sound, and are grounded in reasonable assumptions, as well as in the existing body of usability knowledge.

Quality can be defined as thoroughness, care, precision, and accuracy. At the same time, UPA recognizes that much practical field work, as well as the use of rapid, iterative processes, may be at odds with the classical more rigorous constraints of statistical and academic studies. Submissions that focus on qualitative techniques and analysis, or which focus on rapidly evolving requirements and designs, will be evaluated in realistic and practical terms. However, submissions that focus on statistical reliability and validity should be free from data analysis problems and will be evaluated on the quality of experimental designs.

The level of rigor expected from authors will vary with the particular type of proposal. For example, if the proposal describes an experiment, UPA expects to see an abstract of an appropriate experimental design, a reasonable sample size, and a description of how participants were chosen. The submission should clearly describe the independent and dependent measures and any threats to internal and external validity. Results should be accurate and the strength of conclusions should reflect the strength of the experimental design. If the experiment does not meet any of the above criteria, the submission proposal should state this up front and identify the implications of it. For example, an experiment with a very small sample size means that the results may not extend to a broader population. The audience should be informed of this.

Submissions that are not experiments should also meet expectations for quality, though the criteria may be very different. For example, a submission that discusses usability guidelines for E-commerce should carefully describe how the guidelines were derived, what other research supports those guidelines, and how valid these guidelines would be across different circumstances (external validity). Submissions which describe field work should be well grounded in established practices for ethnography, contextual inquiry, or task analysis, as appropriate. Submissions which focus on business issues should be well-grounded in management, teamwork, financial, or other business practices, as appropriate for the topic.

It is always helpful to provide references or citations, as appropriate, to connect your submission to existing knowledge, current practices, and prior work.

Comments, suggestions, or problems? Please contact the UPA webmaster at webmaster@upassoc.org

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