Items tagged "hci"

Welcome to Canberra

Saturday, October 17th, 2009 by Nathanael Boehm

My proposal to become UXnet local ambassador for Canberra, Australia was accepted last week so in my first post as ambassador for my city I would like to introduce myself and my local UX community.

I have been working in the web industry for ten years and currently label myself a web user interaction designer - what I consider to be a half-way hybrid between a web user experience strategist and a front-end developer/coder.”Interaction” focusses on the detail of the user interface aspect of experience design, specifically websites and web applications. I recently blogged more about this in “What is a user experience designer?“. You can also read more about me in my professional profile/bio or on LinkedIn.

I’m fairly active in the Australian web industry and have a sizeable professional network of colleagues who I’ve met and connected with at conferences such as Web Directions, Edge of the Web and UX Australia plus BarCampCanberra (which I’m an organiser of), BarCampSydney, Public Sphere, Web Standards Group and many other local and interstate professional & social events.

We were fortunate to have the inaugural UX Australia conference here in Canberra which was nice as most of the good conferences are held in Sydney and Melbourne, with Edge of the Web being held in Perth, although UX Australia will be in Melbourne for 2010.

One of the interesting things about Canberra is that it’s a medium-size city with a population of 320,000 but it’s also the only city in the Australian Capital Territory. So not only does Canberra have its own local government it also accommodates most of the infrastructure and administrative capacity of Federal Government and the Australian Parliament including the Australian Public Service.

So if you live in Canberra as an IT professional or indeed in any number of professions then you’re either working directly for government or working for an agency that’s working for government; my career is a good example of that. 90% of my work over the past decade has been for government.

Another good thing about Canberra is that due to the size of the city and the interconnectedness of such a large proportion of the workforce directly or indirectly engaged with government the web and design community here is quite open and not competitive. I don’t claim to know every user experience design professional in Canberra; there are people who don’t work in my field, who choose not to engage with their local community or just move in different or smaller circles. But of the people I do know I tend to connect with and converse with on a regular basis - plus we all seem to go to the same conferences and events.

I coordinate the local Canberra Twitter Usergroup meetings or rather I used to until I set up a mailing list and convinced others to be proactive and organise events. It’s not really about Twitter any more, it’s just a label for any sort of social event for my community … like today’s picnic down at the Cotter. So that’s a good place to catch up with other web professionals although we’ve had some success in enlarging the scope of it to include non-web people and even non-techs.

There’s other events like Open Coffee and Social Media Club … but the other regular event in Canberra of significance to my community is the UX bookclub, where we meet every month to discuss a book about user experience and design. The events themselves are a great opportunity to discuss some very interesting design, psychology and human-computer interaction topics in detail but I’ve found UXbookclub has been a great excuse to add to my bookshelf.

I try and add all local web events to the Oz IT Calendar hosted by Pollenizer, but if you want to know what’s happening in town then please feel free to contact me: nboehm@purecaffeine.com or follow me on Twitter: @NathanaelB.

We have some amazingly talented people in Canberra who are active in the web and design community, who regularly present at conferences both local and internationally and have been published online and in print. So if you’re a UX professional and live in Canberra, thinking of moving here or visiting and aren’t already connected with our fantastic professional community then come along to one of our events or at least connect with some of our members online:

PS: This list may be amended in future to include people I inadvertently ommitted.

NH UPA April Meeting: Project54 Car Simulator Lab Open House

Sunday, April 5th, 2009 by Kyle Soucy

April 29, 2009
6:30 pm	to	8:00 pm

During our next meeting, held on April 29th on the campus of UNH in Durham, we will get out of our desk chairs and explore usability and human factors from a different perspective. Our meeting will feature an interactive open house at the UNH Car Simulator lab where Professor Andrew Kun will discuss Project54, a research and development project to introduce advanced technologies into the operations of the New Hampshire State Police and other law enforcement agencies. During the open house, meeting attendees will be able to experience the car simulators and eye-tracking devices. Following the tour and open house, Professor Kun will present a short talk outlining the work their lab does on car-speech interfaces, and in cruiser systems that allow troopers to connect with a wide variety of state data networks.

For those of you who work on desktop software and websites, we hope that a different perspective on human factors and experience design will inspire you in your work.

Please note the slightly modified timeframe for the meeting to accommodate the open house portion of the event. Please RSVP to info@nhupa.org if you plan to attend so we can plan appropriately.

Topic: Project54 Car Simulator Lab Open House

When:

Wednesday, April 29th
Open House and Lab Tour: 6:30 – 7:30pm
Presentation: 7:30 – 8:00ish

Where:

University of New Hampshire
Durham, NH
Building, room details and driving directions [To Be Announced]

About Project54

The CATlab project is a collaborative research and development effort between the University of New Hampshire and the New Hampshire Department of Safety and is supported by the U.S. Department of Justice, through the effort and continued support of Senator Judd Gregg. The faculty and students of CATlab work on introducing advanced technologies into the operations of the New Hampshire State Police and other law enforcement agencies.

Today’s cruisers are equipped with digital radios, GPS units, computers, radars, lights, sirens, etc. Dispatch centers have become computerized, and officers on the beat and in offices access a variety of databases on a daily basis. However, these devices are most often not designed to become a part of a system of multiple devices manufactured by different companies–in other words they are not designed with integration in mind.

The integration of devices and systems is the primary interest of CATlab. Most of our work is done on integrating electronic devices in police cruisers. Our integrated Project54 system allows officers to interact with equipment such as lights and siren, radar, etc. using speech input and feedback. The Project54 system also integrates police cruisers into state-wide data networks. Our system integration efforts include work on integrating the radio systems of multiple agencies. Law enforcement, emergency, and other state and federal agencies have radio systems, but they are often not able talk to each other directly. We are creating an Internet-based system that will allow these agencies to use their current radio equipment and have access to other agencies’ radio links.

Project54 Website: http://www.project54.unh.edu

Car Simulator Lab at UNH: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyajRluVOWc&feature=channel_page

Testing Distraction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s00Pq-CxMMs&feature=channel_page

RSVP:
Please send RSVPs to info@nhupa.org so we have an idea of the head count for the venue and refreshments.

***NH UPA meetings are always open to anyone who is interested in attending. Membership to the UPA is NOT required.***

Hope to see you there!

Spider Controls: A New GUI Paradigm (Farmington Hills, MI, USA)

Friday, April 18th, 2008 by Anthony Viviano

May 8, 2008
6:00 pm	to	8:30 pm

The May meeting of the Michigan UPA features Stan Driskell and Spider Controls, a new paradigm for the design of graphic user interfaces (GUIs) based on a universal graphic that displays menu, list/combo box, toolbar, palette, and dialog box options in a common format. This universal graphic makes it easy to embed any type of control, including list boxes, spin buttons, radio buttons, and check boxes. Of the many innovations introduced by Spider Controls, the most consequential are:

The ability to make menu and toolbar selections with less than 0.5 inch of total cursor travel.
The ability to display any item from a list of up to 98 items with less than 0.3 inch of total cursor travel.
The display of all options in easy to scan, vertical columns.
The ability to frequently make two selections with a single cursor traverse.
The ability to toggle a Spider display between single and multiple selection modes.
A display that pops-up at a predictable location abutting but not obscuring the screen area of user interest.
The availability of the unique “Navigation Center” to manage control manipulation.

A prototype version of Spider Controls imposed onto Microsoft Word has definitively shown that these features significantly increase user productivity. Spider Controls also promises to make extended periods of computer usage less painful and potentially less physically damaging. Although the simulation was unable to appraise user comfort, secretaries who participated in the focus groups overwhelmingly commented on reduced tension and strain.

SPEAKER:

Stan started professional life with six years as an economist in Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Sierra Leone lecturing and researching. After a year at the University of Durham in England he then spent six more years as Research Economist with USAID-funded projects in Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand. Between teaching assignments he designed, managed, and analyzed five separate questionnaire surveys of rural households and developed software that generated questionnaires and subsequently detected error in resulting survey data. His experiences convinced him that the design of materials used by modestly skilled people must maximize comprehension while achieving low error rates.

To better understand challenges faced by computer users caused by complex computer technology, Stan returned to graduate school (University of Michigan – GO BLUE!). His UMich studies encompassed human factors with focus on applying minimizing calculus to Fitts’ Law. This led to what Stan calls the Physical Effort Metric (PEM), which he validated via two formal experiments. After completing his PhD, Stan wanted to utilize the PEM to improve computer usability. He hit upon a graphic configuration of intriguing possibilities that eventually morphed into Spider Controls (SC). To make SC easily and inexpensively available Stan spent the past year designing the Spider Controls Toolkit (SC/Tk), which, aside from other employments, will be used to “Spiderize” major applications of Microsoft Office.

WHEN:
Thursday May 8, 2008 6:00-8:30PM
(Food and networking at 6, program begins at 7)

WHERE:
Cengage
27500 Drake Rd.
Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535

COST (includes food and beverage):
$5 Students, $10 UPA members, $20 all others

See Michigan UPA for more information.

NH UPA April Meeting

Monday, April 7th, 2008 by Kyle Soucy

April 17, 2008
6:00 pm	to	9:00 pm

Please join us for our April meeting to take part in an interesting article discussion…

When:
Thursday, April 17th
Refreshments & Networking: 6-7:00 PM
Meeting: 7:00 PM – 8ish

Where:
Fat Belly’s Grill & Bar (http://www.fatbellysgrillandbar.com)
2 Bow Street
Portsmouth, NH 03801

Street Map: http://tinyurl.com/448pk3
Parking Map: http://tinyurl.com/ytsuz8 (street parking is also available)

RSVP:
An RSVP is not required, but it helps us to have an idea of the head count for the venue. Please send RSVPs to info@nhupa.org.

Topic:
~ Article Discussion ~

For this meeting, we’d ask that you read the selected articles ahead of time (don’t worry, they’re short articles, not books), jot down at least one discussion point about each article, then come prepared to discuss. Your discussion point can be a question, an example from your experience, or simply your perspective. We only ask that you keep your points constructive and not overly critical of the article or the authors. We will have two moderators that will help facilitate the discussion.

Thank you for your votes on the articles to read. The three “winners” are:

“Cultures of Prototyping”, Michael Schrage
http://hci.stanford.edu/bds/10-Schrage.pdf

“Getting the Right Design and the Design Right: Testing Many Is Better Than One”, Maryam Tohidi, William Buxton, Ronald Baecker, Abigail Sellen.
http://www.billbuxton.com/rightDesign.pdf

“Feature Richness and User Engagement”, Jakob Nielsen
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/features.html

NH UPA meetings are always open to anyone who is interested in attending. Membership to the UPA is NOT required.