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CapCHI Activities

Past Activities 1999-2000

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Usability in Practice: The Design of an Online Community
June 15, 2000 at Nortel Woodline II

About the Speakers

Vidya Shankar Narayan completed her Masters in Architecture (Design and Technology specialization) at Carleton University this spring and is currently embarking on a career at Design Interpretive, Nortel Networks as a Visual Interaction Designer. She received her B.Arch from the University of Bombay in 1996 and is a registered architect in India.

Ben Gianni is the Director of the School of Architecture at Carleton University and the coordinator of the Masters specialization in Design and Technology. He is a strong proponent of the role of architects in imerging media, focusing on issues such as navigation, circulation, orientation, and dynamic information design. He is a partner in the firm "e-magination design" which specializes in Web sites and solutions for institutions and small companies.

About the Talk

In our June 2000 talk, Vidya Shankar Narayan described the development of an online resource for pregnant women. This Web site was developed with a consortium of health care providers who had identified the need for outreach services for their clients. She described some of the challenges she faced including identifying and interacting with users, creating a sense of place, putting information in context, creating thresholds between public and private space, creating a feedback loop to local (physical) communities and usability testing.

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Product Usability: Survival Techniques
May 31, 2000, 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM at The Novotel Hotel, Ottawa

About the Instructor

Jared M. Spool A software developer and programmer, Jared founded User Interface Engineering in 1988. He has over 15 years of experience conducting usability evaluations on a variety of products, and is an expert in low-fidelity prototyping techniques. Jared is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon Institute and teaches seminars on product usability. He is a member of SIGCHI, the Usability Professionals Association, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the IEEE. Jared is a recognized authority on user interface design and human factors in computing. He is a regular tutorial speaker at the annual CHI conference and Society for Technical Communications conferences around the country.

About the Course

In our sold out, full-day workshop, seventy-five participants learned to use rapid iterative design to keep your product or web site on track with continuous measurements. We developed and usability tested a paper prototype to get key feedback before any code is written. We also discussed how to prevent common usability problems by focusing on a few proven design basics. What we learned was how to prevent the majority of usability problems with these proven design basics: Affordances, Mental Models, and Tool Time. To see User Interface Engineering's complete course description, please visit http://world.std.com/~uieweb/pubpust.htm

Sponsored by CITO

Visit CITO...

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Meeting the demand for HCI professionals in Canada
May 23, 2000 at Nortel Woodline II

About the Speakers

Dr. Gitte Lindgaard is the Nortel-Mitel-CITO-OCRI-NSERC Chair in User-Centred Product Design at Carleton University. She recently arrived at Carleton from Australia, has extensive experience in HCI, and is the holder of the first funded chair in HCI in North America.

Dr. Dick Dillon is the co-founder of one of the first graduate programs in HCI in North America.

About the Talk

In our May 2000 talk, Dr. Gitte Lindgaard and Dr. Richard Dillon of the Computer User Research and Evaluation Program at Carleton University discussed the future of HCI in Canada and how Canadian universities, including Carleton, will meet the demand for highly skilled HCI professionals.

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Corporate User Interface Standards
April 12, 2000 at Nortel Woodline II

About the Speaker

Dick Penn is a freelance user interface designer in the Ottawa area. After gaining a B.Sc. in Ergonomics at Loughborough University, he worked as a consultant in the HUSAT reseach group for four years. Moving to Canada in 1978, he worked for 19 years at BNR, (later Nortel Networks) in various roles including management. He is now an independent consultant, designing interfaces, building in-house software tools, and prototyping future products for the UI groups at Cognos and at Nortel. He has also developed software for meeting facilitation which uses wireless voting keypads. And no, it was not his software which counted 1600 votes from 1400 participants at the Reform convention! http://positiveinteraction.com

About the Talk

Our April 2000 talk presented Corporate User Interface Standards. As organizations grow, and as they become more aware of the importance of consistent and industry-compatible user interfaces, the demand for UI design guidance often outstrips the supply which a small UI team can provide. At this point, it becomes essential to provide detailed and authoritative standards at the right time and in the right form for developers to design their own interfaces.

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Developing Your Online Audience
March 15, 2000 at Nortel Woodline II

About the Speaker

Rob Woodbridge is the Director of Internet Solutions at Filament Communications Inc. (previously Animatics Interactive Corp.) - a sort of on-line philosopher king. Rob was one of the first people in Canada to recognize the limitations of mere "brochure-ware" and lead the charge towards dynamic, database-driven Web sites. In 1994, he founded Thunder Road Communications (since merged with Animatics/Filament) and became one of Canada's original ColdFusion developers.

About the Talk

Our March 2000 meeting featured Rob Woodbridge of Filament Communications, who presented Developing your Online Audience. Now that we know that building it isn't enough, how do organizations use their Web presence and supporting Internet tools to build new customer relationships while supporting existing ones.

Topics Covered:

  • Dimissing the buzz: What does Audience Development mean on the Internet?
  • The Internets' scarcest commodity.
  • Finding your place: Words ending in "ographics" - Technographics, Psychographics and Demographics.
  • Specific strategies in use today.

Examining how different approaches to online audience development create trust and lifelong relationships.

  1. The Internet "Conversation".
  2. The Infomediary.
  3. The Startup.

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Making Typography Work For You
February 15, 2000 at Nortel Woodline II

About the Speaker

David Berman trained at the University of Waterloo in computer science and at Carleton University in Industrial Design and Psychology. After a stint in the federal government as a compuer systems analyst he decided to turn his hobby of graphic design into his profession. Now, years later, he is VP of Herrera Berman Communications where he is a graphic designer, communications strategist and type director. He is also on the executive of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada and the Association of Registered Graphic Designers of Ontario. http://www.davidberman.com/.

About the Talk

For February's General Meeting, David Berman opened our eyes to creative ways of increasing awareness for your messages, through the creative and dynamic use of typography. From Gutenberg to Gates, we looked at how letters can delight and democratize, continuing to be our species' favourite medium for mass messaging.

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The New Face of the Internet - Dynamic Web Interfaces
January 18, 2000 at Nortel Woodline II

About the Speaker

Robert Gascho is a Senior Systems Analyst and Interface Designer with Abstract Solutions, an Ottawa-based New Media firm. For the past 4 years, Robert has been researching and developing dynamic web interfaces, and advanced navigation technologies.

About the Talk

The Internet is expanding on a daily basis, at an exponential rate. The challenge in designing for this medium is to build Interfaces which permit rapid and intelligent disemination of these vast quantities of information, while accommodating new technologies as they become available.

Dynamic Interfaces are a user-friendly, customizable and intelligent alternative to traditional Web Interfaces. The talk examined this emerging trend, the technologies that permit it, and the exciting possibilities that it presents.

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CapCHI Xmas Xtravaganza!
Wine, widgets, and web sites! (and food, drink, prizes and good company)
December 07, 1999 at Nortel Woodline II

About the Event

The Xmas Xtravaganza this year challenged participants to surf the Web for prizes. Participants were placed in teams to nominate and justify their best Web site in each category predetermined for the event. Prizes were awarded for the winners of each round! Here were the teams, the URLs, and scores from the competition:

Round 1: The most useless website...

* included serious dialogue box failure!

Round 2: Your favorite website...

Round 3: The most pompous or pretentious website...

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Leveraging Experience: Making Meaning from the Mundane
November 18, 1999 at Nortel Woodline II

About the Speaker

At E-Lab, Carrie Yury is manager of project development, and works with E-Lab's research and design teams to write proposals for new projects. She has done projects for the pharmaceutical industry, and the automotive industry and graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of Chicago

About the Talk

Carrie described the E-Lab model for designing for the user experience. The model asserts that to understand the structure of people's experience in the world, you must understand the relationships between what people Think, what they Do, and what they Use. Using a product development case study, Carrie illustrated how E-Lab helps their clients create innovative products that improve or transform their customers' experience. She showed how design recommendations that are grounded in the real experiences of real people give their clients a competitive advantage: they develop products that better fit their customers' lives, adding business value and building ownership satisfaction and long-term brand loyalty.

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Interactive Shoes for the Cobbler's Children
TeleLearning Tools for the HCI Community
October 19, 1999 at Nortel Woodline II

About the Speaker

Dr. Tom Carey is Director of the Centre for Learning & Teaching Through Technology at the University of Waterloo and co-leader of the TeleLearning Workplace theme in the national research network TL-NCE. He holds faculty appointments at Waterloo, Guelph and the Technical University of British Columbia.

Tom taught his first HCI class in 1980. His contributions to HCI include membership on the ACM SigCHI Curriculum Development Group, co-authorship of the leading graduate text on HCI [Preece et al], and service as Education Editor of the SigCHI Bulletin and numerous other SigCHI activities.

About the Talk

There is an old axiom about the cobbler's children being the last ones to get new shoes. The modern equivalent is that the HCI community is often the last to take advantage of its own technologies: telelearning, interactive case studies, performance support systems, and online community venues. This talk outlines several initiatives underway at the University of Waterloo to build tools for the Canadian HCI professional community. Our goal is to enrich the working lives and enhance the effectiveness of HCI professionals, and to foster the growth and impact of the community.

Amongst the initiatives to be discussed:

  • the TeleCHI 'Eye on CHI' project, to provide updates on applicable HCI research
  • the TeleCHI 'HCI Aerobics', as an online fitness class for HCI knowledge leaders
  • the UCD Guide project, to enhance an online performance support system with links to continuing professional education and community discussion
  • the HCI Design Cases project, to extend the boundaries of HCI knowledge to those currently on the periphery of our community.

TeleCHI link: http://www.telechi.org

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A contextual User Interface for Telemedicine
September 17, 1999 at Nortel Woodline II

About the Speaker

Doris Lamontagne managed her own design consulting studio in Montreal, receiving the 'National Bank Business Award for Service Business', before returning to academia to achieve her Masters in Interaction Design at Carnegie-Mellon University. She then joined Design Interpretive at Nortel Networks, working on a variety of projects, including evaluating Virtual 3-D meeting space using avatars, developing telemedicine and health applications using telephony networks, and integrating speech and visual elements to UI products.

About the Talk

It has been said that "...much research in telemedicine is driven by the possibilities of technology rather than the needs of clinicians and patients." Doris Lamontagne described a recent Nortel project which focused on remote doctor-patient consultation using video conferencing technology. Doris's team researched the situated cognitive and social behaviour in consultations, and Doris's presentation showed how this understanding improved the design of the technology.

  
               
       

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