CapCHI Community

This project might be interesting to a local student…

The Linux Foundation (www.linux-foundation.org) sponsors a student of usability, user interface design, interaction design or related to work as an associate interaction architect to shape the printing experience on Linux. The goal is to create a detailed design and UI spec for 7 types of printers. Depending on your location, you will be invited to a meeting with the development and usability team. Otherwise the collaboration will take place via the established channels of OSS development - email, IRC, VoIP, and etc.

The student project is part of Season of Usability, an initiative to get students in touch with FLOSS projects. Projects are sponsored with $700USD. Project work will start in the beginning of February and will take approximately 3 months. An involvement of 15 hours per week is expected.

Read on for the full project opening, or view it on the Season of Usability website:

http://season.openusability.org/index.php/2007/12/10/project-opening-printing-experience-on-linux/

FULL PROJECT OPENING: Open Printing

This project offers the opportunity to work as an Associate Interaction Architect, and to shape the printing experience on Linux.

You can read the whole interaction design history of this project (back to front) here:

<http://mmiworks.net/eng/publications/labels/openPrinting.html>

You will be working with peter sikking, principal interaction architect at m+mi works (www.mmiworks.net). In this phase of the project we will focus on:

- - refining the UI design, based on manufacturer feedback and usability test;
- - detailed design for each of the 7 printer type clusters: <http://wiki.openusability.org/printing/index.php/Printer_type_clusters>
- - prepare a UI spec with which both the KDE and gnome project can work from.

Requirements

Interaction architects need to see from the user point of view, know what makes user interfaces tick, have a mathematical eye for the beauty of the simplest solution, a sense for clean layouts and know what can be developed in practice.

Open printing is an international project, so you need to be able to communicate and write in English.

There are no specific degree requirements. We welcome students from all usability-related backgrounds including communication, media, psychology, interface design or computer science. We know there are no standard university diplomas for interaction architects. So we know you had to define your education yourself, and may not perfectly match all our requirements. Don’t be deterred.

How To Apply

To participate in this project, send your application to students@openusability.org. The application period ends at the 10th of January 2008.

Please send us a short CV (in PDF), a couple of paragraphs about why you want to be an interaction architect, some of your past experiences which have shaped your current skills, and what you expect from this profession in the future.

- ——-
Ellen Reitmayr
Season of Usability Organisation Team

http://season.openusability.org
www.openusability.org

Here is an article with an interesting collection of usability issues, principles, design rules, and psychological phenomena. It is a bit of a unruly list, but it makes for interesting reading. At the least, it reminds us of some things we should be aware of when we design.

30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of

In this article we present 30 important usability issues, terms, rules and principles which are usually forgotten, ignored or misunderstood. What is the difference between readability and legibility? What exactly does 80/20 or Pareto principle mean? What is meant with minesweeping and satisficing? And what is Progressive Enhancement and Graceful Degradation? OK, it’s time to dive in.

Robert Biddle, long-time CapCHI organizer, along with Sonia Chiasson and Paul van Oorschot, have just won the best paper award at the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) taking place in Pittsburgh. This paper, titled A Second Look at the Usability of Click-Based Graphical Passwords, describes user studies of an alternative password scheme that has people click on features within an image to identify themselves, instead of traditional alpha-numeric passwords. The paper, was selected from over 40 contributions to the conference.

You can read the paper at the SOUPS website at http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/2007/proceedings/p1_chiasson.pdf

Here is the abstract:

Click-based graphical passwords, which involve clicking a set of user-selected points, have been proposed as a usable alternative to text passwords. We conducted two user studies: an initial lab study to revisit these usability claims, explore for the first time the impact on usability of a wide-range of images, and gather information about the points selected by users; and a large-scale field study to examine how click-based graphical passwords work in practice. No such prior field studies have been reported in the literature. We found significant differences in the usability results of the two studies, providing empirical evidence that relying solely on lab studies for security interfaces can be problematic. We also present a first look at whether interference from having multiple graphical passwords affects usability and whether more memorable passwords are necessarily weaker in terms of security.

There is a conflict between our orange theme and the latest version of the Wordpress blog software. So I have fallen back to the default theme.

I am looking for volunteers to choose and implement a new theme. Contact me if you are interested.

I participated in a card sorting study this morning and I was favourably impressed with the tool used: OptimalSort is an online card sorting tool. I found it very easy to drag and drop the various “cards” into different “piles”, and to pull a card out of one pile to drop it into another pile. They are in beta at this moment, so you can try it for free until July 2007.

I have just heard of a Google group dedicated to Ajax and user experience designs. It was created for a workshop at UPA, but apparently they are happy to let in other people who are interested in the subject.

Have a look at this event from the Washington DC chapter of the UPA. This is a one-day workshop where members can make short (or long) presentations in a variety of formats. The purpose to share knowledge and experience within the group.

Is this something that CapCHI should be considering for our 2007-8 season? Post your reaction here.

Call for Presentations - User Focus Conference

User Focus, the second annual UPA-DC Metro Chapter conference on usability, will give usability professionals in the Washington DC area the opportunity to make presentations, participate in panels, conduct tutorials/workshops, or give 10-minute talks. The conference will have two tracks spanning the entire day and will include topics for people new to usability as well as for experienced usability practitioners.

I recently joined Facebook and have had an experience similar to the one in this article. My kids are my friends, but at least two out of three think it is weird. How important is it for kids to have an online space of their own? Will Facebook die if the kids move on to somewhere away from their parents?

‘omg my mom joined facebook!!’ - New York Times

I have reached a curious point in life. Although I feel like the same precocious know-it-all cynic I always was, I suddenly am surrounded by younger precocious know-it-all cynics whose main purpose appears to be to remind me that I’ve lost my edge.

Many of these people are teenagers.

Some of them I gave birth to.

One was in a breech position.

…

“You won’t get away with this,” she typed. “everyone in the whole world thinks its super creepy when adults have facebooks.”

Technorati Tags: Facebook, kids, parents, privacy, teenagers

Here is an article from the New York Times on the growing business of online entertainment for young children. It is interesting because of the new markets being introduced, and the opportunities and challenges of providing products and services to this age group.

Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and Play

Presleigh Montemayor often gets home after a long day and spends some time with her family. Then she logs onto the Internet, leaving the real world and joining a virtual one. But the digital utopia of Second Life is not for her. Presleigh, who is 9 years old, prefers a Web site called Cartoon Doll Emporium.

The site lets her chat with her friends and dress up virtual dolls, by placing blouses, hair styles and accessories on them. It beats playing with regular Barbies, said Presleigh, who lives near Dallas.

“With Barbie, if you want clothes, it costs money,” she said. “You can do it on the Internet for free.”

Presleigh is part of a booming phenomenon, the growth of a new wave of interactive play sites for a young generation of Internet users, in particular girls.

Technorati Tags: Internet, children, youth, dolls, play, girls

Following up on a theme that Gitte introduced at our last meeting, here is an article from the New York Times on inventions targeted at the 90% of the world that lives on less than $2.00 per day.

Design That Solves Problems for the World’s Poor

“A billion customers in the world,” Dr. Paul Polak told a crowd of inventors recently, “are waiting for a $2 pair of eyeglasses, a $10 solar lantern and a $100 house.”

The world’s cleverest designers, said Dr. Polak, a former psychiatrist who now runs an organization helping poor farmers become entrepreneurs, cater to the globe’s richest 10 percent, creating items like wine labels, couture and Maseratis.

“We need a revolution to reverse that silly ratio,” he said.

Technorati Tags: invention, design, poor

Over at A List Apart, they are conducting a survey to learn more about web designers. If you are involved with making web sites, please take the survey.

The Web Design Survey, 2007

Designers, developers, project managers. Writers and editors. Information architects and usability specialists. People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?

This article by Christine Perfetti might be of interest. She talks about such techniques as “start testing right away”, “making usability testing part of the everyday culture”, and “finding champions”.

Five Techniques for Getting Buy-In for Usability Testing

For more than seven years, I’ve been teaching and coaching design teams on how to conduct usability tests and gather user feedback early on in the development process. One of the questions that comes up time and time again from clients is, “How can we get buy-in for usability tests from management and other team members?” Through our own research at UIE, and in our ongoing discussions with expert usability practitioners, we’ve identified several proven techniques for getting stakeholders onboard.

Following up on our workshop session on Web 2.0 and accessibility, here is an interesting article from A List Apart, a great web site on web design. This article provides so practical examples of things you can start using now.

Accessible Web 2.0 Applications with WAI-ARIA

Whether you start experimenting with the new attributes immediately or wait until the drafts become standards, you have the opportunity to get ready for them now and become an early adopter

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, accessibility, WAI-ARIA

Maggie Fox is blogging about her session at the Web 2.0 workshop. People who attended the workshop, and those that did not, may be interested in reading and contributing.

The first-ever User Generated Presentation

Today I facilitated what I believe to be the first-ever User Generated Presentation at The Human Web CapCHI workshop in Ottawa. The idea behind it was to bring the principles of social media to the traditional presentation format - rather that having me (or anyone else) arbitrarily decide what information the audience required on the topic of social media, I let them pull what they wanted.

Technorati Tags: capchi, web 2.0, maggie fox, workshop, ottawa

Web 2.0: The Human Web

This Podcast will cover the panel discussion with our presenters from the CapCHI Workshop. Many thanks to our presenters for the day including:

Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path
Maggie Fox from The Social Media Group
Mike Atyeo from NeoInsight
Derek Featherstone from Further Ahead

Thank you as well to our participants, without whom the day couldn’t have been as successful as it was. You can review photos from the days’ event and we will provide links to all of the presentations this week.

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Here is a collection of usability readings that might be of interest…

25 excellent usability/UX articles and resources – Jens Meiert

Today I thought I’d share some of the most valuable usability and user experience articles and resources I currently know, in a somewhat wild mix.

Formal usability testing can be limiting. It is often necessary to get out of the office or lab and examine users in the real world. This article talks about ethnography and “cultural probes.”

Inside Your Users’ Minds: The Cultural Probe

The desire to perform well and the need to please can lead to answers that simply aren’t true. Especially, when there is a cash incentive. We can’t help being nice to people who give us money. Money aside, the artificiality of getting users to step through a series of tasks in a laboratory can lead to behavior that is different to how they would behave if they were in their natural “habitat” doing the same tasks of their own accord. Therefore, wouldn’t it be better if we could probe inside their minds and study user behavior and motivations in a more natural context?

Technorati Tags: usability, ethnography, probes, context

Since there was discussion earlier in the blog, I thought I should mention that I have actually seen and touched a One Laptop Per Child machine. Here is a picture for those of you who are not watching the project. [The actual size of the useful area of the screen is about the same as a paperback book. More details about the project are available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC]

My initial reaction is that those thing had better ship with an eye test preloaded. I imagine that the eyesight of many of the potential users will not have had their eyesight been formally assessed and that these units will prove that many many kids need glasses in addition to the laptop. I also imagine that the little ears will be broken on many a unit shortly after delivery. Finally the keyboard keys are tiny.

If you too would like to see and touch the unit, you will have to come to a Getting Open Source Logic INto Governments (http://www.goslingcommunity.org/) gaggle (a light drinking and food pub event). We are a friendly bunch and meet from 4 pm to at least 6 pm every Friday at the Parliament Pub (Sparks St address but it is easiest to find the entrance from Wellington St as it is beside the InfoCentre). See the website for details and map.

Registration is now open for our Web 2.0 Workshop.

CapCHI is proud to announce our workshop, “Web 2.0: The Human Web“. Please pass along this information on to anyone who might be interested.

This full-day workshop will be held at the National Arts Centre in the Panorama Room on Friday, April 13th, 2007. Our presenters include Peter Merholz, Maggie Fox, Mike Atyeo, and Derek Featherstone.

For more information, see http://www.capchi.org/workshop.html

Here is an interesting article in this morning’s Globe and Mail about the impact of computers and the Internet on society. This is very relevant to our upcoming workshop on Web 2.0, where we will be examining the strategic importance of participating in the new web.

Virtual world ‘more than a geeky escape’

Should world leaders all have blogs? Should big companies shift more of their television advertising budgets to the Web? Is there really any value in the virtual communities now consuming huge chunks of student time? Just 18 months ago, these questions might have been ridiculed. Today, they’re not only legitimate, but the answer to each is “yes,” according to Jeffrey Cole, director of a long-term, international study of the impact of computers and the Internet on society.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, blogging, advertising, web