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CapCHI Activities
Past Activities 1998-1999
- 1999/06/17 - Highlights of CHI '99! by CapCHI Panel.
- 1999/05/11 - Designing for Adaptation: Ecological Interface Design by Dr. Kim Vicente.
- 1999/04/14 - CapCHI Usability Testing Panel by CapCHI's panel of experts.
- 1999/03/19 - JavaScript for People with Better Things to Do by Michael Kurtz.
- 1999/02/17 - Ethnographic Methods in System Design by Robert MacLeod.
- 1999/01/19 - Introduction to Cascading Style Sheets by Roger Chang.
- 1998/11/18 - Workshop: Improvising the Future by Michael Kurtz.
- 1998/10/16 - UI Prototyping Tools - Why, Which and When? by Dr. Roy Ballantine.
- 1998/09/17 - The Importance of Studying Work: Software Maintenance and Search by Dr. Janice Singer.
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Highlights of CHI '99!
June 17, 1999
Reviewers
- Dr. Roy Ballantine, Cognos
- Scott McEwen, Cognos
- Joey Benedek (student) CURE at Carleton University - Ubiquitous Computing
- Jeff Bos (student) CURE at Carleton University - Designing Usable Web Sites
- Mark Game (student) CURE at Carleton University - Tangible Interfaces
- Adina Rosoga (student) CURE at Carleton University- UI Visualization (The hyperbolic browser; Teddy, an interface for creating 3D graphics)
About the Panel Discussion
At June's CapCHI meeting, several individuals and groups from the Ottawa area who attended CHI 99 conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Pittsburgh presented short conference reviews. Some of the topics discussed at the conference included: What HCI is and why is it important? Globalizing Usability Engineering; Visual Design for E-Commerce and Performance Tools; CSCW; Distance Learning; and many others.
CHI 99, "The CHI is the Limit", poses the questions: What are the limiting factors to the success of interactive systems? How can we enable users to overcome those limits? What techniques and methodologies do we have for identifying and transcending limitations? And just how far can we push those limits?
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Designing for Adaptation: Ecological Interface Design
May 11, 1999
About the Speaker
Kim J. Vicente is professor of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering and of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto, and director of the Cognitive Engineering Laboratory there. He received his PhD in mecanical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1991. He has recently completed the first text book on cognitive work analysis, entitled, "Cognitive Work Analysis: Toward Safe, Productive, and Healthy Computer-based Work", and published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
About the Talk
In the global, knowledge-based economy, there is an increasing need for workers to adapt to change and novelty. Ecological interface design (EID) is a theoretical framework for designing interfaces for complex sociotechnical systems that addresses this need. This modelling effort tries to identify both the low-level physical constraints and the higher-level functional constraints associated with the work domain. EID then tries to present a visualization of that information in such a way as to take advantage of the power of human perceptual-motor skills. An example application of EID for a thermal-hydraulic process control microworld was presented. In addition, the research that has been conducted on EID in other application domains (e.g., hypertext information retrieval, aviation, medicine, nuclear power) was summarized.
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CapCHI Usability Testing Panel
April 14, 1999
The Panelists
- Dr. Dick Dillon (moderator), CURE at Carleton University
- Greg Fleet, Nortel Networks
- Coralie Lalonde, Integra Solutions
- Steve Macko, Cognos
- Dick Penn, Positive Interactions
About the Panel Discussion
Discussion topics included:
- "What's the least amount of usability testing you can get away with?"
- "What do you do when the usability test results are inconclusive or
- conflicting?"
- "When do you stop usability testing?"
- "What are the latest techniques?"
- "How has the web affected usability testing - in terms of users' knowledge and expectations, in remote usability testing techniques, and in subject recruiting, for example?"
- "What are your views on serial testing - ie continuing to bring in subjects until a certain level of significance is reached?"
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JavaScript for People with Better Things to Do
March 19, 1999
About the Speaker
Michael Kurtz received his degree in Industrial Design from Carleton University, which he followed up with a Masters in Ergonomics at Loughborough University, UK. Self-employed as a product design consultant, he has worked with the Corporate Design group since 1991, both in Ottawa and in Harlow, UK. Michael's current role in CDG is as an Interaction Designer working on applications ranging from eCommerce to physical object - digital artifact interrelation.
About the Talk
JavaScript is an easy to use, yet powerful browser scripting language. It can be used to bring new levels of interaction to your web sites, and makes an excellent tool for doing rapid prototyping of product interfaces. The main benefits are that it's fast, flexible, cross platform and requires no plug-ins. This short workshop was intended to provide the user with some basic knowledge of the structure and principles of JavaScript. Topics covered included:
- JavaScript basics
- Rollovers
- Multiple rollover effects
- Controlling Windows
- Controlling Frames
- An introduction to Cookies.
What did you need to know? - A basic knowledge of HTML.....um....and the ability to type.
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Ethnographic Methods in System Design
February 17, 1999
About the Speaker
Robert MacLeod is a Ph.D. student in anthropology from UBC who is currently doing his doctoral fieldwork in a lab at Nortel. He is interested in understanding the importance of social context in accounting for how groups of people work together in complex situations involving a high degree of human-computer interaction. He is particularly interested in the role that communication plays in defining the character of such interaction. He has a B.A. and M.A. in Anthropology from Carleton University.
About the Talk
Because of the sophistication of both computer technology and system design there is a growing need to incorporate the social sciences in the design process. Anthropology, and ethnographic methods are increasingly being applied to this process with great success. Robert described the importance of using ethnographic methods for designing interfaces and discussed the details of such a methodology. Robert hopes that by explaining the relevance of ethnography, designers will be able to apply a sensitivity to general social dynamics to their work even if it is not possible to incorporate a truly anthropological component.
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Introduction to Cascading Style Sheets
January 19, 1999
About the Speaker
Roger Chang is a senior user interface designer and Web UI prime at Cognos Inc., a leading supplier of business intelligence software. He is currently working on designing HTML, DHTML and Java UI's for enterprise reporting solutions. Roger's previous work experience includes usability testing, IT consulting and web administration. He holds a B.Sc. in Psychology from Carleton University.
About the Talk
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) provide a technology that enables designers to efficiently create compelling and dynamic web content. Roger provided an overview of the CSS specifications recommended by the W3C and demonstrated the development of simple CSS applications using Allaire Homesite and Macromedia Dreamweaver. The aim of the talk was to empower web designers with practical CSS knowledge and skills that they may immediately apply to facilitate the creation of browser based user interfaces.
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Workshop: Improvising the Future
November 18, 1998
About the Speaker
Michael Kurtz received his degree in Industrial Design from Carleton University, which he followed up with a Masters in Ergonomics at Loughborough University, UK. Self-employed as a product design consultant, he has worked with the Corporate Design group since 1991, both in Ottawa and in Harlow, UK. Michael's current role in CDG is as an Interaction Designer working on applications ranging from eCommerce to physical object - digital artifact interrelation.
About the Talk
How do you take a user-centred approach to designing novel interfaces? How do you design products which address future needs, which users certainly cannot articulate in the here-and-now? How can you use techniques from improvisational theatre to help design interfaces for new products?
We sure found out, in this 2-hour, highly interactive workshop, where we all experienced how role-playing and 'Improv' techniques could help us tackle these thorny issues, and bring a little fun into our lives at the same time!
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UI Prototyping Tools - Why, Which and When?
October 16, 1998
About the Speaker
Dr. Roy Ballantine has a background in Cognitive Psychology (with an emphasis on Visual Information Processing) and has received degrees from the University of Alberta; the University of South Africa; and the University of Cape Town. He has worked in UI design for 16 years, recently at Nortel and now at Cognos.
Roy teaches a course in prototyping at Carleton University and uses prototypes as an integral part of his UI design method. He takes the position that prototyping is a tool to de-risk elements of an interface as quickly possible and that elaborate and hi-fidelity prototypes are not necessary for most purposes.
About the Talk
Knowing which prototyping tool to use and when is a challenge for many people, even for a seasoned UI designer. In this presentation, Roy spoke briefly about general UI prototyping principles and provided tips for success based on his personal experiences. During this talk, five or six useful prototyping tools were demonstrated with their particular strengths and weaknesses described. The tools reviewed in more detail included:
- Paper Prototyping
- Visual Basic (Windows)
- Delphi (Windows)
- MacroMedia Director (Mac & Windows)
- Visual Café (Windows & Mac)
- MetaCard (Unix, Windows, Mac) - With side discussion of HyperCard and SuperCard (Mac)
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The Importance of Studying Work: Software Maintenance and Search
September 17, 1998
About the Speaker
Dr. Janice Singer joined the Software Engineering Group of the National Research Council in 1995. She currently leads the Empirical Approaches to the Study of Software Engineering (EASSE) group. The focus of her projects is to understand, from a cognitive and human computer interaction perspective, how software engineering is done, and from this understanding lead the design of tools for this unique user group. Dr. Singer received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh and her B.A. in Cognitive Science from UCSD. For graduate studies, she examined the relationship between perception and cognition as the foundation for early mathematical concepts. During graduate school summers, she worked for IBM Yorktown Heights Research Center with John Carroll doing research in HCI. She was the original designer of the View-Matcher. She also worked summers at Xerox PARC in the Institute for Research on Learning looking at CSCW and situated cognition. Before graduate school, Dr. Singer worked at Tektronix doing among other things HCI and Smalltalk programming on the Tek 4401.
About the Talk
This talk discussed experiences studying the work practices of professional software engineers with the goal of designing tools that enhance, rather than displace or replace, these work practices. The rationale being that the tools we build will actually be used because they have been created to mesh with existing behaviour.
Reasons for following this approach were presented, along with description of some details of NRC approach such as the discovery of work patterns, and the use of synchronized shadowing. Dr. Janice Singer outlined several studies currently being conducted in a large telecommunications company and talked about how these studies have influenced the design of a software engineering exploration environment.
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