Designing an experiment is another very important aspect to think about before jumping right away into the possible available ones. As most of the aspects of HCI design is not based on quantitative evaluation but rather concise qualitative variables that represent corresponding measurement parameters.
One possible technique can be the use of dependent and independent variables. During the experiment one can change and see the effect of these variables on the result found out. The variable is intentionally varied is referred to as independent variable and that which is measured is dependent variable. In HCI, these changes might be to interaction design, interface features, participant knowledge and so on. [1] The value of dependent variable depends on value of independent variable. There might be multiple dependent variable (e.g. time to complete the task, error rate etc) within one experiment, but there should normally be only one independent variable (this is applicable to only for simple experiments).
The failure to prove the null hypothesis provides evidence that there is a casual relationship between independent and dependent variable.
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[1] Card, S., Moran, T. and Newell, A. 1983: The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
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