Writing your Thesis at HCI Bremen

Tips and tricks for your thesis in the HCI Group. Will guide you through all the important steps of your thesis.

Organisation and Procedure

Basic information every thesis student should be aware of.

Duration

Language (German or English)

General Procedure

If you have questions or need help with any of the following steps, please first talk to your supervisor.

    1. Talk to your supervisor about your ideas
    2. Write an exposé about your thesis and send it to your supervisor
    3. Rework your exposé with the comments of your supervisor
    4. Send the revised exposé to Johannes Schöning
    5. Personal meeting with Johannes and your supervisor about your thesis plan and to get the “good-to-go” for your thesis
    6. Prepare study design in consultation with your supervisor
    7. After more than 70% of the study preparation is ready, second personal meeting with Johannes and your supervisor to get the “good-to-go” for the study
    8. Conduct and analyse your study (if you do one) 
    9. If you do a second study, repeat the last three steps
    10. Register your thesis with Prüfungsamt
    11. write your thesis, get a great mark :-)

Rainer’s Hinweise für gelungene Abschlussarbeiten

Informationen des Prüfungsamtes zu Abschlussarbeiten

 

Finding Literature

Sources

Remember to connect to the university VPN to get institutional access to many publishers.

To find related and connected papers you can use tools like Citation Gecko.

Keeping Track of your sources

Use a proper citation manager

Writing and Formatting

Most students write their thesis either in LaTeX or Word. Most of us are somewhat familiar with Word and find it easy to get started with writing. However, often you will spend significant time - especially when finalising your thesis - in getting the formatting right, e.g. aligning your captions, producing consistent headings and a correct reference list. That's where LaTeX comes in: It is more like writing code, so it takes some time to learn the basics, but thesis templates and strict separation of text and formatting might save you headache in the long run - if you are willing to invest some learning time in the beginning.

LaTeX

Word / Open Office

Referencing LaTeX in Word

  1. Install BibTeX for Word: http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/hp/staff/dmb/perl/index.html
    It only works on PC and not MAC. The website also provides a wiki on how to use the plugin and the offered reference styles
  2. Install a reference manager, which will store your citation details in BibTeX format. I used JabRef and did not run into issues so far.

What You Get (Example):

This is a test reference [1]. Now I would like to add another reference here [2].

[1] Vonne Polanen and Marco Davare. Sensorimotor memory biases weight perception during object lifting. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 12 2015. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2015.00700.
[2] Bernhard Treutwein and Hans Strasburger. Fitting the psychometric function. Perception & Psychophysics, 61: 87–106, 1999.

Wording / Phrases

Need some inspiration for fancy phrases? Academic Phrasebank

APA Publication Manual [Book in Uni Library | PDF]: Ebook with a collection of sample structures, descriptions of what needs to go where in your thesis and much more...

The Elements of Style

Handy Dandy Writing tips (as generically as it gets but still super helpful!):

  1. sentence length: should not exceed 20words
  2. consistency:
    2.1     core terms: write yourself a list with core terms that you use, then stick to those throughout your whole thesis. Yes, it feels redundant sometimes, but it often helps the reader when you do not use several terms for the same stuff, e.g. always use "interface" and not "system", "surface", "App" ; use "participants" and not also "people", "humans", "users" etc.
    2.2 visuals: use the same size, colour, font, structure of captions etc. throughout the whole thesis
  3. no filler words: Fillers are words that add no meaning to a sentence and merely “fill the space". Often, we write as we speak (which is not scientific). To give you some examples of common fillers: "maybe", "also", "actually", "perhaps". To read up more on how to replace fillers: Filler Words
  4. no evaluations: do not write "this is interesting" / "this is valuable"  / "we need to think about" without giving a concrete reason as to _why_ and for _whom_ it is interesting/valuable or without giving a source (if someone else says it is important for HCI to think about this and you cite this, it is okay). Or just rewrite it completely so that your personal opinion is not included.
  5. stay as specific as possible: try not to generalise, assume that your readers know about this topic or that they are forced to read the source by themselves. E.g: instead of writing "There are several ways of evaluating those [Schmidt et al, 2021]" write: "Schmidt et al. [Schmidt et al, 2021] found several ways of evaluating, such as measuring brain activity, skin conductance and pupil dilation."
  6. broad to detailed: each chapter and each paragraph within the chapter should be structured from introducing broader topics then giving more details. E.g.: many related works use questionnaires as evaluation method --> this is done because... --> the ones most often used are a, b and c --> a measures the following, b does something else and c is used for this.
  7. abbreviations: the first time you mention a term (in your introduction) that you want to abbreviate, you need to write it as follows: e.g. Virtual Reality (VR). Afterwards, only use the abbreviation (here: VR).
  8. paragraph length: each paragraph MUST contain at least two sentences. Each chapter needs to have at least one paragraph, also the "big" chapters!
    E.g.: 2. Related Works
    [sentence 1] This chapter will summarise the core findings towards xxx. [sentence 2] It is structured in title_a, title_b and title_c.
    2.1 title_a [only now we can start with the actual sub-chapter]

Human-Computer Interaction: An Empirical Research Perspective

Tools / Software

Statistics

Prototyping

User testing

Evaluating your Prototype / App / Idea

You will most likely conduct some sort of evaluation to test what you developed. This Study Design Document helps you asking the right questions.

Use this template for study Information, data handling and consent.

Standardized Questionnaires

Here is a (German) overview of several HCI methods and questionnaires. There are many standardized questionnaires for various items to measure. Look at related works to find out which ones are used most frequently in your field of work.  Some examples are:

Conducting Interviews and Analysing Qualitative Feedback

Interviews are often used to gather qualitative feedback. Here is a guide what to bear in mind when conducting interviews and with further links attached.

To analyse qualitative feedback, HCI most often uses a Thematic Analysis by Braun and Clarke (how'to and actual paper) or a qualitative content analysis, e.g. by Mayring.

Recruitment of Participants

Which statistical test to use?

To find out which test to use, make sure you know your data

Colloquium Tips

Handy Dandy Presentation Tips

Here are some useful tips for your presentation:

Source: Mattermost #thesis