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CapCHI is looking for presenters for the Jan-June 2009 period.

Who would you like to see?

Or do you have an interesting topic you would like to present?

CapCHI meets on the third Tuesday of the month at 7:00pm at TheCodeFactory (246 Queen at Kent).

We have a small budget available to cover travel expenses.

Please send us your ideas by posting a comment here or sending email to announce@capchi.org.

Gord gave a great presentation last night on web navigation. Gord reviewed the trends in navigation techniques being used by major web sites such as BBC, Amazon, and Air Canada. According to Gord, there is a trend away from global, fixed navigation menus towards local, context-sensitive menus that change depending on a visitor’s current location.

Gord also talked about the importance of building task-focused web sites, and showed examples where key tasks are supported right on the home page (e.g., booking flights).

Given that this is Ottawa, Gord also spent a fair bit of time discussing Government of Canada sites, and the restrictions imposed by Common Look and Feel guidelines.

There was healthy discussion throughout the presentation, and it seemed to be a good time for everyone.

Were you there? If so, post a comment and tell us what you think.

Julian Dolce, the Director of Creative Technologies at Fuel Industries will be our guest speaker on Dec. 16. There is an interesting profile of Fuel Industries in the Nov. 11 2008 edition of The Globe and Mail in the “breakthrough” section.

Fairytale ending for tiny Ottawa firm

The folks at Fuel drove people to, and kept them at, clients websites by providing sophisticated, easy-to-play video games. When McDonald’s asked Fuel what it could do for it, Mr. Burns suggested supplementing the traditional kid’s Happy Meal figurine with an electronic toy and video game as well as the figurines or game cards.

This year, we are experimenting with removing our membership and meeting fees. Instead, we will fund our meeting costs from our existing funds.

So, come on out to whatever meetings interest you.

Here is an interesting article from the Google blog about continuous, microscopic usability testing.

Search experiments, large and small

We figure out what works by running experiments - tiny tests for a small number of users which help us determine whether that feature helps or hurts.

Experimentation is a very powerful tool, and we use it very widely to test potential changes to search. At any given time, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments on Google sites all over the world.

Thanks to Alain for passing this one on.

Please complete this poll to help CapCHI plan this year’s events…

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CapCHI sponsored Alain Forget to attend CHI in Florence this year and to compete in the CHI 2008 Student Design Competition. Alain came within a hair’s breadth of ‘standing on the podium’ with his design. We congratulation Alain for his achievement and thank him heartily for giving back to CapCHI on three different occasions thereafter (CHILights, The Algonquin Programming Olympics and CHIStuds). Alain is a PhD student at Carleton University and his supervisor is Dr. Robert Biddle.

CapCHI was pleased to be able to offer $650 in prize money and gifts to three high school teams competing in the Algonquin Programming Olympics. Our winning teams provided very nice user interfaces for a toolkit that assisted end users to decrypt files. The Lisgar team provided the interface that provided the best guidance for users performing this task as well as the best feedback. It also prevented end users from making errors. We were really impressed with the Lisgar team’s design and also the designs of our 2nd and 3rd place winners. Programming as a skill set is alive and well in the Ottawa Valley! Congratulations to the Algonquin organizing committee for organizing such a fun event.

The Internet is constantly changing. BusinessWeek.com spoke to a bevy of experts and distilled the must-follow rules top online designers live by in 2008…

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jun2008/id20080623_750025.htm