Chi Recap 2008: List of Presenters

List of Presenters

We had an exciting lineup of presentations for CHI Recap 2008:
Please note that slide decks were only posted with permission from the author(s).

The Science of Fun: One-To-Many Moderated Game Research
Nate Bolt - Bolt Peters
Description, Slide deck (pdf)

International User Research in the Product Development Cycle
Wei Zhou- Oracle, Velynda Prakhantree - Oracle
Shannon Farrington - IBM
Description, Slide deck (pdf)

“What Would You Do with a 1 Million Dollar User Experience Marketing Budget?” Internal vs. External User Experience Evangelism Panel
Peter Heller - Oracle
Description, Slide deck (pdf)

Branding the Feel: Applying Standards to Enable a Uniform User Experience
Mohini Wettasinghe - SAP Labs
Description, Slide deck(pdf)

Longitudinal Usability Data Collection: Art versus Science?
Stephanie Rosenbaum - Tec-Ed Inc.
Description, Slide deck (pdf)

Tag-it, Snag-it, or Bag-it: Combining Tags, Threads, and Folders in E-mail
John C. Tang - IBM
Description, Slide deck (pdf)

They Call It “Surfing” for a Reason: Identifying mobile Internet needs through PC deprivation
Rachel Hinman- Adaptive Path
Description

The Psychological Basis of UI Design Rules
Jeff Johnson - UI Wizards
Description, Slide deck (pdf)

CHI Policy Issues Around the World
Jeff Johnson - UI Wizards
Description, Slide deck (pdf)

Agile and UCD
Melissa Federoff - salesforce.com
Description, Slide deck (pdf)

The Science of Fun: One-To-Many Moderated Game Research Nate Bolt - Bolt Peters
Slide deck (pdf)

Native environments are of particular importance in game research, where findings depend even more than usual on the user's mood and comfort level. Using remote voice chat to moderate game research sessions enables researchers to remove the distracting and discomforting physical presence of the moderator, providing a more convincing native environment. This paper describes the benefits and addresses the methodological pitfalls of this approach.

Nate Bolt, CEO, Bolt |Peters User Experience
Nate is fascinated by the personal, social, and cultural role of technology in our lives, and how research and design can transform those roles. After pioneering and directing the User Experience department at Clear Ink in 1999, which included the construction of Natural Environment and Remote Observation laboratories, Nate co-founded Bolt | Peters. He now serves as president and CEO where he has overseen hundreds of user research studies for Hallmark, Oracle, Time Warner, Levi's, Restoration Hardware, and others. Beginning in 2003, he led the creation of the first moderated remote user research software, Ethnio, which is being used around the world to recruit live participants for research on web sites and applications.

Nate regularly gives presentations on native environment research methods in both commercial and academic settings. Working with faculty at the University of California, San Diego, he created a degree titled "Digital Technology and Society," which focused on the intersection of technology and mass population usage. He also completed a year of communications studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he was jailed briefly for playing drums in public without a license.

International User Research in the Product Development Cycle Wei Zhou- Oracle, Velynda Prakhantree - Oracle, Shannon Farrington - IBM
Slide deck (pdf)

As an increasing number of software products enter the global market, the popularity of international user research is on the rise. Though the concept of studying international users to inform global designs is clear-cut, the actual practice is not. There are many open questions and challenges present, such as, in what stages of the development cycle and using what methods should international research be done? How might different language interfaces be studied?

In this SIG, we reviewed actual case studies focused on international user research and discussed best practices for conducting international user research to maximize global usability and ROI.

Wei Zhou, User Research Lead, Oracle
Wei Zhou has about 10 years experience on HCI field. She has worked UW-Madison, IBM, Siebel and Oracle as user interface designer & developer, human factors engineer, usability engineer and user researcher. She has PhD in cognitive psychology and M.S. in computer science. She has solid background and experience on research methodologies and conducted various user research activities including international contextual inquires, usability tests, and focus groups etc. She has been focusing on customer partnership programs including global customers and exploring the intercultural research strategies in the past a few years.

Velynda Prakhantree, Principle Usability Engineer, Oracle
Shannon Farrington has a Master’s degree in Cognitive Psychology and has 12 years experience in the HCI field. He has worked as a user researcher, interface designer and usability practitioner during this time. He has been very interested in designing products for the target user set. In recent years this has expanded into researching effective ways for gathering feedback from a wide range of users, including users with disabilities and global users.

“What Would You Do with a 1 Million Dollar User Experience Marketing Budget?” Internal vs. External User Experience Evangelism Panel Peter Heller - Oracle
Slide deck (pdf)

User Experience evangelism inside an organization is a frequent topic. Methods for marketing user centered design to internal stakeholders have been analyzed in many papers and on panels. Emerging media and new venues have recently presented an opportunity to reexamine methods and goals for external user experience marketing and evangelism. This interactive panel addressed motivations and brainstormed about discount methods for promoting the role of the human factors profession to the general public, and communicating directly with the end users. This will be contrasted with the position that a well designed product should market itself, and that money is best spent on design and internal evangelism instead.

The panel itself involved 3 parts: 1. Moderator collecting answers to the “What would you do with a 1 million dollar UX marketing budget?” question via index cards. 2. Four panelists presenting short sales pitch proposing what they would do when faced with the same question. 3. Panel discussion focusing on the contributions from the audience and focused on producing two lists. One would include specific user experience marketing venues (targeted bloggers, un-conferences, think tanks, specific ad words, design-friendly printed publications like Business Week, etc.). The second list would focus on goals and of user experience marketing (raising awareness and promoting better image of user experience vs. engineering and other disciplines, increased sales, better brand, recruiting, swaying executives, etc.). The panel continued to live after external publication of the two lists, with new blog installments, comments, and any subsequent and open discussions.

Peter Heller, Oracle
Mr. Heller is a marketing executive at Oracle Corporation with the responsibility of marketing the advanced business practices that can be achieved through the innovative use of business technologies. Mr. Heller has spent his twenty-year Oracle career building and evangelizing Oracle’s business applications. Most recently, he is focused on user experience and the infusion of community and collaboration into enterprise applications.

Prior to marketing, Mr. Heller led several development teams in building the initial products that were the foundation of the Oracle E-Business Suite.

Branding the Feel: Applying Standards to Enable a Uniform User Experience Mohini Wettasinghe - SAP Labs
Slide deck(pdf)

There is nothing more dissatisfying to users than the inconsistent behavior of a particular interaction within or between different software applications from the same company. A company's unified interaction is part of the company brand: the "feel" of look and feel. Many companies throw away their brand when they do not observe interaction consistency across products. However what is precisely meant by consistency and to what level this consistency should be attained is open for debate.

Moreover, user interface designers and developers ignore standards since they assume that complying with standards stifles design innovation. The lack of understanding on what are standards and how they can be effectively applied, results in unnecessarily complicated user interface designs and dissatisfied users.

This panel discusses how there is still much room for design innovation after applying appropriate user interface standards and how application designers can contribute to the creation of standards.

Mohini Wettasinghe, User Experience Architect, SAP Labs
Mohini is a User Experience Architect at SAP Labs LLC, Palo Alto, California. She leads the definition of UI Standards for SAP products. Prior to working on UI Standards she worked on application designs for the Business By Design CRM. Before SAP, Mohini was at Siebel Systems where she was an interaction designer working on Siebel’s self-service and professional application UIs.

Michael Arent, VP User Experience, SAP Labs
Michael is VP of User Experience at SAP Labs LLC, Palo Alto California. He heads the SAP User Experience - Standards and Acquired Applications groups. He is co-author of the definitive book, Effective Prototyping – for Software Makers. Prior to joining SAP Michael has had a distinguished career as a manager and individual design contributor with such major companies as Adobe, Apple, Sun, MetaDesign and Peoplesoft. He will bring a wealth of knowledge and experience in application and standards design from his current and past positions.

Jonathan Arnowitz, User Experience Architect, Google
Jonathan is currently an User Experience Architect at Google Inc. Jonathan Arnowitz has over 20 years experience in designing user experiences. Jonathan started out designing interactive multimedia software. In 1991 Jonathan moved to the Netherlands where he was an Interaction Design Consultant for over 10 years. Recently, Jonathan worked as a Senior Interaction Designer for PeopleSoft and then as User Experience Architect for SAP Labs where he worked on designing, training, and implementing User Experience Patterns for the next generation of SAP Applications. Jonathan is also a volunteer for ACM/SIGCHI where among other things he was the co-founder of the DUX conference (Designing for User Experiences), co-editor in chief of Interactions Magazine and most recently the Design Community co-chair for CHI2008. Jonathan is also the author of the book, Effective Prototyping for Software Makers, published by Morgan-Kaufman.

Longitudinal Usability Data Collection: Art versus Science? Stephanie Rosenbaum - Tec-Ed Inc.
Slide deck (pdf)

Collecting usability data over time is increasingly becoming best practice in industry, but lacks "thought leadership" in current literature; few papers address this topic. This panel debated key questions that arose from the CHI 2007 SIG on the same topic.

Stephanie Rosenbaum, Tec-Ed Inc.
Stephanie Rosenbaum is founder and CEO of Tec-Ed, Inc., a 20-person user experience firm specializing in user research and interaction design. Headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Tec-Ed also maintains offices in Palo Alto, California, and Rochester, New York. Tec-Ed clients include Google, eBay, Cisco Systems, Comcast, Microsoft, the IEEE, VMware, Yahoo!, and a wide variety of smaller firms. Stephanie has presented (panels, workshops, tutorials, and/or SIGs) at every CHI conference since 1990; for CHI 2006, she was co-chair of the Usability Community. A member of the HFES and a charter member of the Usability Professionals' Association, Stephanie is a past vice-chair of ACM SIGDOC and was awarded an IEEE Millennium Medal. She recently contributed a chapter on "The Future of Usability Evaluation" to Maturing Usability (Springer, 2008) from the European COST294-MAUSE usability research community.

Tag-it, Snag-it, or Bag-it: Combining Tags, Threads, and Folders in E-mail John C. Tang - IBM
Slide deck (pdf)

We describe the design of bluemail, a web-based email system that provides message tagging, message threading, and email folders. We wanted to explore how this combination of features would help users manage and organize their email. We conducted a limited field test of the prototype by observing how users triage their own email using bluemail. Our study identified ways in which users liked tagging, threading, and foldering capabilities, but also some of the complex ways in which they can interact. Our study elicited early user input to guide the iterative design of these features. It also involved a user study researcher, designer, and developer in the field test to quickly integrate different perspectives during development.

John C. Tang, IBM
John C. Tang is a Research Staff Member at the Almaden Research Center of IBM Research. John's research interests focus on understanding the needs of users to design new technology to support collaboration. He applies a mix of qualitative (interviews, surveys, video-based observation) and quantitative (usage logs) methods to understand people’s current work practices to design new prototypes for tools to support their work. John received his Ph.D. from Stanford University, and worked on shared drawing prototypes at Xerox PARC and tools to support collaboration and awareness at Sun Microsystems, Inc. before joining IBM.

They Call It “Surfing” for a Reason: Identifying mobile Internet needs through PC deprivation Rachel Hinman- Adaptive Path

In this paper we describe the details of a PC Internet deprivation study used to gather information on Mobile Internet needs. Eight participants in our study used a mobile device as their only means of Internet access for four days. The case study describes details of the research methodology as well as design insights and implications for development of mobile applications and services.

Rachel Hinman, Design Strategist, Adaptive Path
Rachel Hinman is a mobile design strategist for Adaptive Path. She's inspired by talking and spending time with the people who live with the experiences she designs. Rachel applies this empathy for people to create business solutions that are valuable to customers and businesses alike.

Rachel's passion for people, design, and business has been the driving force of her career for the last decade. Prior to joining Adaptive Path, Rachel worked within Yahoo's mobile group, employing user-centered methods to inform the design and strategy of Yahoo!'s mobile products. She has extensive experience leading research studies on mobile phone usage in the US, Europe, and Asia and writes and speaks frequently on the topic of mobile research and design. Recently, she was a featured perspective in Mobile Persuasion: 20 Perspectives on the Future of Behavioral Change, edited by BJ Fogg and Dean Eckles.

Her clients and previous employers have included IDEO, Microsoft, Yahoo, General Motors, Clorox, and Kaiser Permanente.

Rachel received a Masters Degree in Design Planning from the Institute of Design in Chicago.

The Psychological Basis of UI Design Rules Jeff Johnson - UI Wizards
Slide deck (pdf)

This course was basically Psychology 101 for UI Designers and Usability Professionals, compressed into 1.5 hrs. Many people currently in UI and Usability positions come from graphic design, software development, or technical writing. They lack an education in cognitive and perceptual psychology. Applying UI design rules effectively requires determining their applicability (and precedence) in specific situations, and requires balancing the trade-offs when design rules appear to contradict each other. By understanding the underlying psychology for the design rules, designers and evaluators enhance their ability to design and evaluate user interfaces. Conveying an essential kernel of that knowledge was the goal of the course. The CHI Recap talk won't present the course; it will only summarize it.

Jeff Johnson, President and Principal Consultant, UI Wizards
Jeff Johnson is President and Principal Consultant at UI Wizards, Inc., a product usability consulting firm that offers UI design, usability reviews, usability testing, and training (http://www.uiwizards.com). He has worked in the field of Human-Computer Interaction since 1978. After earning B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale and Stanford Universities, he worked as a user-interface designer and implementer, engineer manager, usability tester, and researcher at Cromemco, Xerox, US West, Hewlett-Packard Labs, and Sun Microsystems. He has taught at Stanford University and Mills College. In 2006, he was an Erskine Teaching Fellow at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch New Zealand. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on a variety of topics in Human-Computer Interaction and the impact of technology on society. He frequently gives talks and tutorials at conferences and companies on usability and user-interface design. He is the author of GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Dos for Software Developers and Web Designers (2000), Web Bloopers: 60 Common Design Mistakes and How to Avoid Them (2003), and GUI Bloopers 2.0: Common User Interface Design Don'ts and Dos (2007).

CHI Policy Issues Around the World Jeff Johnson - UI Wizards
Slide deck (pdf)

While public policy is a recognized important topic within human-computer interaction, previous attention to policy issues within SIGCHI has focused on public policy in the USA. This panel at CHI 2008 focused on CHI policy issues around the world. After an overview of HCI-related U.S. public policy issues in the U.S., panelists from Italy, Canada, South Africa, and the UK described CHI-policy issues and efforts in their home countries. The main issues discussed were: privacy, voting, accessibility, and universal access.

Agile and UCD Melissa Federoff - salesforce.com
Slide deck (pdf)

This presentation summarized two sessions from CHI 2008 that focused on strategies for achieving UCD within Agile development environments. The first session was a workshop for Agile practitioners lead by Desiree Sy and Lynn Miller of Autodesk entitled "Optimizing Agile User Centered Design". The second session was a panel entitled "Extreme Usability: Adapting Research Approaches for Agile Development" moderated by Melissa Federoff. Attendees of the session learned proven strategies for success employed by practitioners in the industry working in Agile environments. The good news is - it is possible to achieve UCD in Agile development!

Melissa Federoff, Senior Usability Analyst, salesforce.com
Melissa is a Senior Usability Analyst at salesforce.com, the leader in on-demand Customer Relationship Management. At salesforce, Melissa leads the research efforts for all things Platform which includes tools that enable developers and administrators to customize and build new features and applications. All of the teams she supports have been using Agile for over a year and a half. Since the roll-out of Agile to the Research & Development department, the salesforce.com User Experience team has been adapting both design and research approaches to be able to maintain a user-centered process despite the tight timelines dictated by Agile development.

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