Cambridge Usability Group

Monday 11 April - Tony Russell-Rose - From Search to Discovery

Search user experience has come a long way from just a simple text input field. Faceted search interfaces have become standard on most e-commerce websites and search results help guide users to related and featured content. But how and why have search interfaces evolved so much in recent years?

We are delighted to welcome Tony Russell-Rose, from Endeca Technologies, to talk about how search interfaces can support users in a process of exploration and discovery.

Date:Monday 11 April 2011, Time: 18.30 for 18.45 to 20.00>

Venue: Microsoft Research, Cambridge ( Map & address - note that Cambridge is just 45 minutes from Kings Cross but you will need to get a taxi to get to Microsoft Research, or pack a Brompton).

Registration: The event is FREE and you do not need to be a UK UPA member to attend.Please register to Eventbrite

Abstract

The landscape of the search industry is undergoing fundamental change. In particular, there is a growing realisation that the true value of search is best realised by embedding it in a wider discovery context, so that in addition to facilitating basic lookup tasks such as known-item search and fact retrieval, support is also provided for more complex exploratory tasks such as comparison, aggregation, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and so on. Clearly, for these sorts of activity a much richer kind of interaction or dialogue between system and end user is required. This talk examines what forms this interactivity might take and discusses a number of principles and approaches for designing effective search and discovery experiences.

Biography

Tony is currently Manager of User Experience at Endeca Technologies, a company specialising in innovative solutions for information search and discovery. Before joining Endeca Tony was founder and director of UXLabs, a user experience consultancy specialising in technology innovation and applied R&D. Prior to this Tony was technical lead at Reuters, specialising in advanced user interfaces for information access and search. And before Reuters he was R&D group manager at Canon Research Centre Europe, where he led a team developing next generation information access products and services.

Tony's academic qualifications include a PhD in human-computer interaction, an MSc in cognitive psychology and a first degree in engineering, majoring in human factors. Tony also holds the position of Honorary Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Interactive Systems Research, City University, London.

Tony is currently vice-chair of the BCS Information Retrieval group and chair of the IEHF Human-Computer Interaction group.

Follow Tony on Twitter.

Monday 17th May - Jeremi Karnell and Dr Philip Rhodes - Neuromarketing and HCI/Interaction Design

Ever wondered why e-commerce sites give more space to user reviews than the product? Or how you can study users' emotional and pre-cognitive behaviour, as well as their information processing?

If so, you might want to peek into the back yard of your new neighbours - Jeremi Karnell (left), co-founder of the digital marketing solutions firm One to One Interactive, and Dr. Philip Rhodes (right), MD of OTOinsights, One to One Interactive's new media research division.

Jeremi and Philip will talk about on-line persuasion and how to study it. So attend, and keep up with your Jones's - what better way to resume Cambridge UPA events!

TIME & PLACE
Date: Monday 17th May 2010 Time: 18.30 for 18.45 to 20.00

Venue: Microsoft Research, Cambridge ( Map & address - note that Cambridge is just 45 minutes from Kings Cross but you will need to get a taxi to get to Microsoft Research, or pack a Brompton).

Registration: The event is FREE and you do not need to be a UK UPA member to attend. Please use the Eventbrite service to register.

ABSTRACT

Through the use of new technology, Neuromarketing techniques allow researchers to eliminate cognitive bias and gauge user engagement when exposed to different stimuli.

But how do these research models and techniques help companies to better understand their customers and create better products or communication messages?

This seminar will answer these questions and give a definitive guide to Neuromarketing and how it will impact on HCI and interactive design.

1. Introduction to Neuromarketing
Audience participation with an overview of how the body responds to stimuli. Explaining why the field of Neuromarketing is an important and exciting innovation in the field of research.
2. Unveiling the Method
Introduction to Quantemo(OTOinsights) and how our offering differentiates us from the competition. With detailed insights into the value of our:
• instrumentation
• research software
• engagement indices
3. Demonstration
A sneak peak and demonstration of our equipment and software used to gather readings and analyse data.
4. Examples of our findings
High level findings of Quantemo Studies, which will include our newest research focused on Allergy Websites.
5. Conclusion
A quick review and presentation of ideas about the future of Neuromarketing research.
6. Questions and Answers

Wednesday 17th June - Prof. David MacKay - Hands free writing (and more) - Dasher and Nomon

The problem with polymaths is that they are often extremely busy doing important stuff. We are extremely fortunate that David MacKay, a Professor of Natural Philosophy (Physics) at Cambridge University, has agreed to give us this unusual talk outlining credible and creative tools for entering text without using a keyboard.

David often seems to be on telly and in the media at the moment talking about the topic of his excellent free book Sustainable Energy - without the hot air. Here's an excellent video related to the book called How Many Lightbulbs?. This is a chance to hear him talk about some other cool stuff he has done in the field of Human-Computer Interaction and Accessibility. You can expect an unusual and thought provoking talk. Date: Wednesday 17th June 2009 Time: 18.30 for 18.45 to 20.00 Venue: Microsoft Research, Cambridge ( Map & address - note that Cambridge is just 45 minutes from Kings Cross but you will need to get a taxi to get to Microsoft Research, or pack a Brompton). Registration: The event is FREE and you do not need to be a UK UPA member to attend. Please use the Eventbrite service to register.

ABSTRACT

I'll describe a couple of communication systems based on information theory, both of which allow fast communication with minimal muscle movements.

First, Dasher - over ten years old now - uses a navigational metaphor to embody an idea stolen from data compression, arithmetic coding. Hands-free writing is possible in any language, using head-tracking, gaze tracking, or one or two switches.

Second, Nomon, created this year by Tamara Broderick, provides a general way of using a single switch to communicate, which is faster and requires fewer gestures than standard Grid methods.

(you can get an introduction to Dasher and Nomon on the Inference Group's new Videos web page.

Tuesday 19th May - Caroline Jarrett - Label placement in forms (and other time-consuming controversies)

We are delighted to announce Caroline Jarrett as our next speaker. Caroline is a world expert on Form Design. In this talk, Caroline will use eye-tracking data, and her many years experience of designing and testing forms, to give you ideas of where to put labels on forms and get us thinking about form details such as required field indicators and colons on labels.

Caroline Jarrett started to work with forms when delivering Optical Character Recognition systems to the then Inland Revenue. The systems didn't work very well, and it turned out that the problems arose because people made mistakes when filling in forms. She developed a fascination with the challenge of making forms easy to fill in, a fascination that shows no signs of wearing off over 15 years later. During this time Caroline has worked with the Open University, Cancer Research UK, the Ministry of Justice (HM Courts Service), the Financial Services Authority, the University of Glasgow and the University of Cambridge. Caroline is Co-author of Forms that work: Designing web forms for usability the companion volume to Ginny Redish's hugely popular book Letting go of the words: Writing web content that works. "The humble form: it may seem boring, but most of your website's value passes through forms. Follow Jarrett & Gaffney's guidelines, and you'll probably double your online profits." Jakob Nielsen, Principal, Nielsen Norman Group

EVENT DETAILS

Date: Tuesday 19th May

Time: 18.30 for 18.45 to 20.00

Venue: Microsoft Research, Cambridge ( Map & address - note that Cambridge is just 45 minutes from Kings Cross but you will need to get a taxi to get to Microsoft Research, or pack a Brompton).

Registration: The event is FREE and you do not need to be a UK UPA member to attend. There is no registration but in the unlikely event that we fill 120 seats, they will be allocated on a first come first served basis.

If for any reason we have to cancel the event we will post this information on the Cambridge Usability website in advance (we have not cancelled one yet though).

Our thanks to Microsoft Research Labs for their sponsorship of this event.

Thursday 5th March - Ben Shneiderman - Information Visualization for Knowledge Discovery

We are thrilled to announce that Ben Shneiderman will be presenting on the subject he is perhaps best known for, 'Information Visualization', on Thursday 5th March at the fantastic Microsoft Research facility in Cambridge.

Most people reading this will know Ben Shneiderman. Last year he was recognised as one of the founding fathers of the field of Human-Computer Interaction with a whole special edition of the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction honouring his contribution to the field. This talk is a great opportunity to come along and hear what Ben has to say about Information Visualization. Date: Thursday 5th March Time: 18.30 for 18.45 to 20.00 Venue: Microsoft Research, Cambridge ( Map & address - note that Cambridge is just 45 minutes from Kings Cross but you will need to get a taxi to get to Microsoft Research, or pack a Brompton). Registration: The event is FREE and you do not need to be a UK UPA member to attend. Please use the Eventbrite service to register. Please be aware that there are limited places so registration in advance is essential.

ABSTRACT
Interactive information visualization tools provide researchers with remarkable capabilities to support discovery. By combining powerful data mining methods with user-controlled interfaces, users are beginning to benefit from these potent telescopes for high-dimensional data. They can begin with an overview, zoom in on areas of interest, filter out unwanted items, and then click for details-on-demand. With careful design and efficient algorithms, the dynamic queries approach to data exploration can provide 100msec updates even for million-record databases.

This talk will start by reviewing the growing commercial success stories such as www.spotfire.com, www.smartmoney.com/marketmap and www.hivegroup.com. Then it will cover recent research progress for visual exploration of large time series data applied to financial, medical, and genomic data (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/timesearcher ).

Our next step was to combine these key ideas to produce the Hierarchical Clustering Explorer 3.0 that now includes the rank-by-feature framework (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hce). By judiciously choosing from appropriate ranking criteria for low-dimensional axis-parallel projections, users can locate desired features of higher dimensional spaces. Finally, these strategies of unifying statistics with visualization are applied to network data and electronic health records (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/lifelines2). Demonstrations will be shown.

BEN SHNEIDERMAN (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben) is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/) at the University of Maryland. He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM) in 1997 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001. He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.

Ben is the author of "Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction" (5th ed. March 2009, forthcoming) http://www.awl.com/DTUI/. With S. Card and J. Mackinlay, he co-authored "Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think" (1999). With Ben Bederson he co-authored “The Craft of Information Visualization” (2003). His book “Leonardo’s Laptop” appeared in October 2002 (MIT Press) (http://mitpress.mit.edu/leonardoslaptop) and won the IEEE book award for Distinguished Literary Contribution.

30th January - Informal Get Together

There will be an informal gathering of the Cambridge Usability Group for a chat and a few beers on Wednesday 30th January – starting around 7.30 at All Bar One in Regent Street. Adaptive Path are visiting Cambridge from the West Coast and will be joining us. All are welcome!

Rachel Jones (of Instrata in Cambridge) who many of you will know from her talks for the group has promised to be there early and bag a table...so look for her!

Look forward to seeing you there.

Masterclass in User-Centred Design

29th November, Møller Centre, Cambridge

Instrata is offering a 1-day intensive workshop on user-centred design. You will receive a basic grounding in a variety of techniques such as ethnography, lead users, personas, scenarios, prototyping and evaluation. You will learn when to use the techniques and what their benefits are. Most importantly, you will learn to apply the techniques through a series of exercises to the product or service you bring to the workshop. This could be a software application, or a mobile or web application, or a physical product.

The workshop is aimed at those of you that have taken on a usability or interaction design role within your organisation and wish to learn more.

Cost
Full price: £325 + VAT per person
Two or more delegates from an organisation: £300 + VAT
Members of the Cambridge Network: £300 + VAT

All prices include lunch, refreshments and handouts.

Contact Anita at anita@instrata.co.uk if you wish to register for this event or to find out about future courses.

Dr Rachel Jones is the course leader. Highly experienced, Rachel is at the forefront of people-centred design in the UK. Rachel is involved in mentoring organizations and teams in ongoing innovation programs at the BBC, BT and Reuters where she brings a people-centred approach to the development of new technologies and services. Rachel founded Instrata 6 years ago, which specialises in people-centred design and provides expertise across a broad range of services and products. Clients include Microsoft, Vodafone, Yahoo, Nokia, Proctor & Gamble, Smith & Nephew, Virgin Atlantic, and the Countryside Agency. Prior to starting Instrata, Rachel was employed by two of the foremost pioneers of people-centred design techniques, Xerox EuroPARC and Sapient (formerly E-lab). Rachel has a PhD in Computer Studies, over 40 international publications and has authored 10 patents.

Terms and Conditions:
Bookings are not confirmed until payment is received in full. Once payment is received you will receive the workshop documents. All fees must be paid for in advance. You may cancel your registration up to 14 days before the seminar. Your registration fee will be refunded less a £10 enrolment charge. If you need to cancel less than 14 days prior to the seminar you may send a substitute from your organisation. Cancellations must be received in writing. In the unlikely event of the seminar being cancelled a full refund will be made, but further liability is disclaimed. It may be necessary for reasons beyond the control of Instrata to change the date or the venue.

29th October - "Shaping new mobile services: is it anytime, anyplace, on the move, in the bag or in between?"

We are delighted to welcome back Rachel Jones as the speaker at our next event. Rachel, from Instrata in Cambridge, spoke at the inaugural meeting of the Cambridge group back in March 2005. In this new talk Rachel, a recognised UK expert in people-centred design, will explore ways of thinking about new mobile services as the capabilities of mobile devices continue to grow.

Date: Monday 29th October
Time: 6.30 for 6.45
Venue: Microsoft Research, Cambridge [Map & address]

Registration: Please email cambridge.usability@gmail.com to reserve a place. The event is FREE and you do not need to be a UK UPA member to attend

Shaping new mobile services: is it anytime, anyplace, on the move, in the bag, or in between?

The mobile has moved on from a simple communication tool. It now has many capabilities, many of which are now workable from the user’s point of view. For instance, the quality of the camera is nearly as good as that of a digital camera which it will surely replace; and internet connectivity is on the way to offering acceptable access times. Such capabilities can only improve.

Over these base services, new mobile services are being developed and a variety of dictums are being vaunted for framing and envisaging them. The mobile operators talk about offering services “anytime, anyplace”. For example, the mobile internet allows the internet to become ubiquitous – we can access anything online from anywhere. User experience experts frown at this approach and advocate the importance of “context” – different services are appropriate at different times, at different places, by different people. For example, with people’s position now determinable, we could identify the sort of services people will want to use based on their location.

In this talk, I explore various ways of thinking about new services, including anytime, anyplace, on the move, in the bag and in between. I suggest that each framework both opens up and restricts the way we explore the design space and therefore the way we envisage new services. I propose that we continue to explore new frameworks to help shape our thinking.

About the speaker

Rachel Jones founded Instrata 6 years ago. Instrata specialises in people-centred design and provides expertise across a broad range of services and products, including mobile, web, television, medical, travel, and personal care services. Instrata offerings include strategic innovation, ethnographic research, user requirements understanding, design mapping and design solutions. Clients include Microsoft, Vodafone, Yahoo, Nokia, Proctor & Gamble, Smith & Nephew, Virgin Atlantic, and the Countryside Agency.

Rachel has over 20 years experience in people-centred design and has been involved in mentoring organisations and teams, managing research and design projects, and developing novel methods and tools. Rachel’s specific experience and expertise comes in selecting or developing the appropriate techniques for a project and guiding the process.

Prior to starting Instrata, Rachel was employed by two of the foremost pioneers of people-centred design techniques, Xerox EuroPARC and Sapient (formerly E-lab). Rachel spent four years at Xerox EuroPARC, which is a world leader in understanding the human and organisational aspects of technologies in use, and on reflecting this understanding in novel design. At Sapient, a leading e-commerce consultancy, Rachel was involved in developing major corporate web sites and services for mobile devices. Rachel has a PhD in Computer Studies, over 40 international publications and has authored 10 patents.

8th October - CHI @ Cambridge

Cambridge Usability Group events return after a long summer break with an opportunity to hear two excellent papers presented earlier this year at CHI 2007.

Date: Monday 8th October
Time: 6.30 for 6.45
Venue: Microsoft Research, Cambridge [Map & address]

Registration: Please email cambridge.usability@gmail.com to reserve a place. The event is FREE and you do not need to be a UK UPA member to attend

The first paper and winner in the best paper awards at CHI 2007 is “Capturing life experiences: Software or wetware?: discovering when and why people use digital prosthetic memory” presented by Vaiva Kalnikaité and Steve Whittaker.

Abstract
Our lives are full of memorable and important moments, as well as important items of information. The last few years have seen the proliferation of digital devices intended to support prosthetic memory (PM), to help users recall experiences, conversations and retrieve personal information. We nevertheless have little systematic understanding of when and why people might use such devices, in preference to their own organic memory (OM). Although OM is fallible, it may be more efficient than accessing information from a complex PM device. We report a controlled lab study which investigates when and why people use PM and OM. We found that PM use depended on users' evaluation of the quality of their OM, as well as PM device properties. In particular, we found that users trade-off Accuracy and Efficiency, preferring rapid access to potentially inaccurate information over laborious access to accurate information. We discuss the implications of these results for future PM design and theory. Rather than replacing OM, future PM designs need to focus on allowing OM and PM to work in synergy.

About the speakers
Following an MA at Cambridge, and PhD at St. Andrews, Steve took various research posts either side of the Atlantic - HP Labs Bristol, The Stanford Center, Lotus Boston, Edinburgh University and finally AT&T Labs, New Jersey. In 2003, he returned to the UK to teach and research as Professor in Information Retrieval, Sheffield University. Steve continues to win research grants, file patents and publish widely. His research interests include Computer Mediated Communication, and Multimodal Interfaces.

Vaiva is a PhD student in Department of Information Studies, Sheffield University.

Our second paper, “Usability Testing: What Have We Overlooked?", by Gitte Lindgaard and Jarinee Chattratichart will be presented by Jarinee. This paper was nominated in the best paper awards at CHI 2007.

Abstract
One way to keep down the cost of usability tests is to run an optimum number of sessions - enough to reveal most of the problems, but not so many that later sessions simply duplicate the results of earlier ones. Nearly 15 years ago, Jakob Nielsen (useit.com) claimed the optimum number of users to run was 5, and this magic number was adopted by many organisations. Many empirical studies were conducted but could not overturn or fully support the claim. Many discussion panels at major HCI conferences failed to reach consensus, or close the debate. As Larry Constantine (Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd.) summarised at the last panel (held at CHI'2003), '.usability testing now appears to be a highly variable art in which the results depend on who is testing what by which protocol with which particular subjects'. In this talk, Jarinee will provide evidence that overturns this magic number 5, and suggest a new research direction for improving usability test results.

About the speaker
Jarinee Chattratichart graduated in Computer Science from Imperial College London and her PhD at Brunel University concerned the Usability of Visual Programming Languages. She has subsequently taught and conducted research at Westminster, Guidhall and now Kingston University.

Our thanks to Microsoft Research Labs for their sponsorship of this event.

14th May - "Information Visualization"

The speaker at our next event will be Bob Spence, author of the textbook "Information Visualization: Design for Interaction" and Emeritus Professor of Information Engineering at Imperial College London.

Date: Monday 14th May
Time: 6.30 for 6.45
Venue: Microsoft Research, Cambridge [Map & address]

Registration: Please email cambridge.usability@gmail.com to reserve a place. The event is FREE and you do not need to be a UK UPA member to attend

Our thanks to Microsoft Research Labs for their sponsorship of this event.

"Information Visualization"

"Basically, visualization has nothing to do with computers". This title of an earlier talk by Bob Spence emphasises the fact that visualization tools must be designed to support the formation of an internal model by human users of such tools. Bob will discuss, among other features of information visualization, how the successful realisation of the benefits of visualization depends upon an appreciation of human capabilities: "Forget the technology" will summarise much of his talk.

About the speaker:

From the unlikely schoolboy hobby of telephone exchange design Bob Spence became a designer of electronic circuits. Then, in 1968, he realised the enormous potential that interactive graphics held for engineering design, a realisation that led via research and development to the first (1985) commercially available interactive-graphic circuit design facility. His work in Human-computer Interaction also led naturally into information visualization, and along the way Bob was the co-inventor of the first Focus+Context technique (the Bifocal Display) and the Attribute and Influence Explorers. An influence upon his work in information visualization came from his parallel research into engineering design for mass production, leading to visualization tools such as the Prosection Matrix and the Influence Explorer. Bob is currently Emeritus Professor of Information Engineering at Imperial College London and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He presents courses on Information Visualization around the world: “have course, will travel”. He has just published the textbook "Information Visualization: Design for Interaction" (Prentice Hall, 2007).

5th February - "Selling Usability to Business"

*** NEW DATE ***

We are delighted to welcome Dan Benatan as the speaker at our first event of 2007.

Date: Monday 5th February
Time: 6.30 for 6.45
Venue: Microsoft Research, Cambridge [Map & address]

Registration: Please email cambridge.usability@gmail.com to reserve a place. The event is FREE and you do not need to be a UK UPA member to attend

Our thanks to Microsoft Research Labs for their sponsorship of this event.

An overview:

While it seems that there is an increasing awareness of usability in business, we still have an uphill struggle getting management commitment and finding budgets. It may be that we tend to get in our own way. Our own convictions about the obvious ‘rightness’ of usability work and user-centric design can blind us to the hard-nosed business justification we need. Having held senior executive roles in financial services, Dan had this need firmly in mind when he developed his intranet assessment model. The model specifies a balanced approach to three different aspects; Impact, Usefulness and Usability. The assessment uses inputs from end-user testing, end-user interviews, stakeholder interviews and heuristic review.

Dan will talk about the model with a specific emphasis on those components that help achieve business acceptance.

About the speaker:

Dan Benatan will be familiar to regular attendees. He is now working with LBi – the largest full service digital agency in Europe as a senior business consultant.

Dan has worked in the field of Computer Human Interaction (CHI) since the late 70’s and has designed highly usable applications, largely in call-centre environments, for industry in the UK and abroad. He left IT for a time, spending 12 years at senior level in Financial Services, mostly in product and organization development and communications. Dan established Comprehensive Web Consulting in 2002 to build on his earlier work at Giga Information Group on Web, intranet and extranet effectiveness and usability. Dan has advised several of the world’s leading companies and written on effective e-Business practices, web analytics and applications usability.

14 November 2006: World Usability Day

Nottingham Univeristy is hosting a World Usability Day event - "Usability - different applications; a common purpose". They have some interesting presentations lined up (I'm particularly curious about "Farmer Buckley's exploding trousers"). Full details are on the atttached flyer if you would like to go along...

Midland World Usability Day

9th October - "The Four Pleasures: Usability and Beyond"

We are delighted to welcome Professor Patrick Jordan as the speaker at our next event.

Date: Monday 9th October
Time: 6.30 for 6.45
Venue: Microsoft Research, Cambridge [Map & address]

Registration: Please email cambridge.usability@gmail.com to reserve a place. The event is FREE and you do not need to be a UK UPA member to attend

Our thanks to Microsoft Research Labs and The Technology Partnership plc for their sponsorship of this event.

An overview:

Products and services should bring pleasure to those who use them and profit to those who create them. To do this effectively they must connect with the consumer in a compelling manner. Effective innovation means designing products that meet both our practical and emotional needs. It speaks to our personalities and values — our hopes, fears, dreams and aspirations. If we are to connect fully with consumers then we have to fully understand them. Having a deep and thorough understanding of people is the key to designing the products and services that people will want to buy and that they will find useful and enjoyable.

This presentation outlines a framework for understanding people holistically. It is called ‘The Four Pleasures’.

This framework has been applied to the design and marketing of many of the world’s most successful products and services across all market types and sectors. It is used by many of the world’s leading brands including: Microsoft, Starbucks, Ford, Nokia, Gillette and Proctor and Gamble.

The ‘four pleasures’ divides human experience and motivation into the following four areas:

• Physio-Pleasure: This is to do with the body - pleasures derived from the senses. In the context of products physio-pleasure would cover, for example, tactile and olfactory properties as well as ergonomic issues.


• Socio-Pleasure: This is the enjoyment derived from relationships with others. Products and services may help to enhance or facilitate particular social situations and may confer social or cultural status on the user.


• Psycho-Pleasure: This type of pleasure refers to people’s cognitive and emotional reactions, including their reactions to the products and services that they use.


• Ideo-Pleasure: This concerns people’s values. It is important that the values embodied in products and services are consistent with the values of those for whom they have been designed.

The presentation will be illustrated with many examples of products and services that have been designed using this framework. These have proved to be extremely successful commercially as well as a huge hit with users. By understanding people holistically and designing to meet their needs we can create products and services which will have a significant and positive affect on both individuals and society as a whole. They will be a joy to use and will bring success to those who manufacture and supply them.

About the speaker:

Professor Patrick W. Jordan is an international brand, design and marketing consultant, author and professional speaker. His methods and ideas have influenced the design of many of the products that we find in our homes, cities and workplaces. Pat is Owner and CEO of the Contemporary Trends Institute [CTI], an international trends and branding consultancy. Recent clients of CTI include: Starbucks, Gillette, Microsoft, Proctor and Gamble, Unilever, Nokia, Samsung, Philips Electronics, Masterfoods, Rexam [the world’s largest packaging company] and the US and UK governments.

Pat is a former Vice-President of Symbian, where he was also head of design. Symbian is the world’s largest mobile-communications consortium, jointly owned by Motorola, Samsung, Nokia, Psion, Ericsson, Sony and Panasonic. Prior to that he was Head of the Trends and Identity Group within the Domestic Appliances and Personal Care divisions of Philips, Europe’s largest electronics company.

Pat has over 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals, books and conference proceedings. He has written or edited 6 books, including Designing Pleasurable Products (Taylor and Francis 2000) which has become a standard design and marketing text within both industry and academia and the bestseller How to Make Brilliant Stuff that People Love and Make Big Money Out of It (Wylie 2002).

Pat has a visiting lectureship at London College of Fashion and Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design and a guest lecturer at numerous universities in many different countries. Pat is on the advisory board of Delft University where he reviews and advises on the university’s design research agenda and is a non-executive director of Sense Worldwide a leading international trends bureau. Pat is head of the Trends and Strategy section of the Industrial Designers Society of America and was the youngest holder of the Nierenberg Chair at Carnegie-Mellon University, the most prestigious appointment in US design education.

Posted by cambridgeusability at 11:04 AM

3rd July - “Case Study: Making Tesco.com Accessible”

Our speaker at this meeting will Nick Lansley, IT Manager at Tesco, introduced by Julie Howell from RNIB.

In his presentation, Nick Lansley explores how Tesco.com became conscious of the need to offer its vision-impaired customers a usable and accessible grocery web site, and shows the path the company has taken from the early days of two separate sites (one for sighted customers and one for visually impaired customers) to today’s brand new integrated service with two “skins”.

Date: Monday 3rd July
Time: 6.30 for 6.45
Venue: Microsoft Research, Cambridge [Map & address]

Registration: Please email cambridge.usability@gmail.com to reserve a place. The event is FREE and you do not need to be a UK UPA member to attend

About the speakers:

Nick Lansley is a founder member and IT New Technologies Specialist at Tesco.com. He has been working in IT systems for 18 years and today looks to see how new technologies will make the Tesco.com service better for customers and simpler for staff.

Julie Howell is the Digital Policy Development Manager at the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB). She works with policy makers, information architects, manufacturers and software designers, businesses across all sectors and government agencies to ensure the accessibility to disabled people of digital information products and services. Julie was a founder member of the NHS Care Record Development Board (CRDB), working to ensure the accessibility to disabled people for the forthcoming NHS Care Records Service. She is a member of the NHS Direct New Media Committee. Julie is of Technical Author of a new BSI specification for accessible website design, 'Publicly Available Specification 78: Guide to Good Practice in Commissioning Accessible Websites'. She is the current holder of the New Media Age Effectiveness Award for 'The Greatest Individual Contribution to New Media'.

Posted by cambridgeusability at 03:51 PM

8th May - "Ethnography and how it can inform design"

Our speaker at this meeting will be Louise Ferguson who will look at the nature of ethnography and what it can offer the user experience and design community and their clients. She will briefly discuss what’s involved in 'doing ethnography’ and its relationship to other methods.

Ethnography is on a roll. Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a slew of articles in mainstream business media extolling its merits from the corporate perspective. Meanwhile companies such as Intel have continued to build their teams of anthropologists, all actively engaged in product and system design processes through the application of ethnographic techniques.

This is a repeat of the very popular and over-suscribed talk Louise gave at the UK UPA meeting in London in January - if you missed seeing Louise then, here is your second chance!

Date: Monday 8th May
Time: 6.30 for 6.45
Venue: Microsoft Research, Cambridge [Map & address]

Registration: Please email cambridge.usability@gmail.com to reserve a place. The event is FREE and you do not need to be a UK UPA member to attend

About the speaker:

Louise Ferguson is a user-centred design consultant specializing in user research for design and strategy. Her clients have included government agencies, think tanks, NGOs, and blue chip firms in a range of industry sectors including professional services, telecommunications and financial services. She has contributed to a range of public policy and think tank research and publications, including Getting By, Not Getting On: Technology in UK Workplaces (The Work Foundation, 2003), the report from a major ethnographic research project based on eight UK organisations, and Touching the State (Design Council, 2004), concerning design in the public sector.

Louise is Vice President of the UK chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association. As Director of Design for Democracy’s UK Voting Initiative (a joint venture between UPA and AIGA), she is working with government agencies to improve the design of voting systems in the UK. In July 2005, together with Danny O'Brien and other digital rights activists, Louise co-founded the Open Rights Group, which aims to raise awareness of digital rights issues in the UK. She is currently Chair of ORG. Louise holds a master’s degree in human-centred computer systems, a first degree in political economy, and various postgraduate qualifications in languages.

Posted by cambridgeusability at 04:24 PM

November 28th - "Usability vs Accessibility? No contest"

Our speaker at this meeting will be Donna Smillie, Senior Web Accessibility Consultant at RNIB.

Accessibility and usability are sometimes presented as different things, even as principles which conflict with each other at times, and are often addressed separately in the design process. Many would argue, however, that they are closely linked, and that they ultimately address many of the same issues, albeit from different angles. In this presentation, Donna discusses the overlap between accessibility and usability in web design, and how these specialist areas rely on each other for maximum effectiveness.

Date: Monday 28th November
Time: 6.30 for 6.45
Venue: Microsoft Research, Cambridge [Map & address]

Registration: Please email cambridge.usability@gmail.com to reserve a place. The event is FREE and you do not need to be a UK UPA member to attend

About the speaker:

Donna Smillie, RNIB's most experienced web accessibility consultant, has had a varied career, from writing data analysis programs on early desktop computers in the 1970's to providing technical support to customers of a CD-ROM publishing company in the 90's. A contract post at British Airways then led to her creating and managing several department websites on the company intranet. She has been an enthusiastic user of online systems for over 20 years, and has seen at first hand the positive impact they can have on the lives of people with disabilities. This, combined with her work at BA, made her aware of the barriers that can be created by inaccessible web design. Donna joined RNIB in March 2000, creating RNIB's 'See it Right' accessible website consultancy. In 2001, the 'See it Right' Accessible Website logo was launched, and has been very successful in encouraging companies to improve the accessibility of their websites. Donna is an experienced public speaker, and has given talks about web accessibility at many seminars and conferences in the UK and Europe.

For more information about web accessibility and RNIB's See it Right consultancy, visit: www.rnib.org.uk/webaccesscentre/

Posted by cambridgeusability at 02:08 PM

William Newman’s talk “How can Human-Computer Interaction Research help the User Experience Professional?” 25 July 2005, Microsoft Research, Cambridge

Our thanks to William for a stimulating talk that offered rare insights into the history and development of HCI Research, presented significant challenges, raised the title question and left us with some points to ponder.

I personally have worked in, or close to, the computer industry since 1975. With my inherent interest in the history of the industry, William’s CV is a matter for admiration and some envy. William worked in HCI research with Xerox for twenty years. His work at the renowned Palo Alto Research Center and then in their Cambridge Research Centre put him in the very heart of HCI research and development. Many of the fundamental mechanisms of interaction that we now use every day, were born in these centres. William was able to recount key developments in the history of HCI from the perspective of an insider.

William took us back to the first attempts by Xerox to bring together engineering science with the emerging interactive computing technology. The vision was to develop a formal predictive model of task-oriented human behaviour that could be used to guide the design of interactive processes. In response, Stuart Card and Tom Moran created the GOMS model. William gave the impression that this looked, at the time, to be a very useful contribution to the field until the anthropologist Lucy Suchman (now a professor and co-director of the Centre for Science Studies at Lancaster University) came along and exposed the complications that arise from the fact that human behaviour is contextual; that behaviour changes under the influence of factors external to the man-machine interface.

The next significant milestone William spoke about was the installation by Xerox of Alto computers at everyone’s workstation. These machines used a GUI with icons, menus, mouse and keyboard. They were connected by Ethernet and became the platform for application development by end-users for themselves and to share across the community. This first instance of ubiquitous computing offered prompt user feedback and seemed to signal the start of a shift away from the theoretical approach in the development of HCI to an empirical approach based on usability testing.

William went onto explore the forces that have shaped the subsequent development of HCI research. He proposed that HCI research is being driven, to differing degrees, by four key factors:
· Moore’s Law
· Canned interaction
· Software crafting tools, and
· The requirement to publish.

These forces have led HCI researchers to focus their efforts in
· Developing radical solutions;
· Deriving new heuristics from experimentation, and
· Developing better tools for designers.

All of this supports commercial activity and the requisite volumes of publishing, but as a result much less has been done to enhance existing solutions or develop new models that can be applied more broadly. This was contrasted with engineering research, where most of the work targets the development of new models and theories to support future design activity.

This dearth of pure research links directly to the need for reliable and appropriate metrics. One of the challenges of HCI Research in general and of Usability is the difficulty of providing objective measurements of problems and of improvements. This measurability is an essential component in mobilizing funding and motivating new research and development.

William indicated that these innovative developments and radical solutions tend to give people the ability to do things that we couldn’t do before. He suggested that greater long-term value might be found by working to enhance existing human capabilities, helping us to do what we already can do, but better, more effectively, faster or more cheaply. I found this distinction difficult to apply since most of the technology I work with has simply enhanced our capabilities, allowing us to do the same things faster, at greater distance and without the need to develop all of the specialised skills.

William then raised several good examples of real-world issues such as improving the effectiveness of rescue teams and providing support for carers. Whilst these are clearly worthwhile goals, they don’t necessarily attract the funding needed to support the required research. He also raised examples of more mundane issues that may warrant research. Two key examples were the tendency for writing tasks to overrun (a tendency I have experienced intensely while writing this) and the growing use of laptops in meetings. He suggested that work could usefully be done to address both of these issues. In the first case designing writing tools to help authors avoid overruns. In the second, to explore the causes of the behaviour and to find better ways of addressing these causes that don’t have socially undesirable consequences.

William left us with the thought that it may be our role as User Experience professionals that must expand to address some of these issues. The UX community is actively engaged with existing products and methods and seems more involved in achieving the sort of incremental improvement required. We can look to the HCI Research community for metrics, models and tools, but we need to apply these in our ongoing empirical research and continuous improvement of usability

Posted by danbenatan at 06:31 PM

July 25th - "How can Human-Computer Interaction Research help the User Experience Professional?"

After a short period of inactivity, we are very pleased to announce the next meeting of the Cambridge Usability Group! Microsoft Research have kindly agreed to host the event at which William Newman will be the speaker.

Date: Monday 25th July
Time: 6.30 for 6.45
Venue: Microsoft Research Cambridge [Map & address]
Cost: Please email cambridge.usability@gmail.com to reserve a place. The event is FREE and you do not need to be a UK UPA member to attend (note future events may not be free for non-members).

Here is William's introduction to his talk...

How can Human-Computer Interaction Research help the User Experience Professional?

HCI research focuses largely on designing novel interactive systems and on conducting studies of technologies and contexts of use. In this sense its methods and outputs have much in common with those of UX. Is this helpful to UX/usability practitioners? In my talk I will present some results from past research into the problem of achieving measurable improvements in interactive systems. I'll suggest that there is an opportunity to expand the role that UX professionals play in helping design teams meet performance targets, and that HCI researchers can serve a supporting role in providing relevant metrics, methods and models.

William Newman is a consultant and researcher in interactive system design. His first degree was in engineering, and took him into computer science, focusing first on Computer Graphics and then on HCI. He worked for 20 years in Xerox's labs in Palo Alto and Cambridge. He has co-authored textbooks on Computer Graphics and on Interactive System Design. William is a visiting professor at UCL's Interaction Centre (UCLIC) where he is involved in teaching and research, and is also a part-time researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge. He is support ACM SIGCHI as VP for Publications, leader of the CHI Papers Support Team, and co-chair of the CHI 2006 Engineering Community programme.

Posted by cambridgeusability at 02:37 PM

Bill's talk - Performance by Design

Huge thanks for Bill Buxton (www.billbuxton.com) for his excellent talk this week, the second Cambridge UPA talk. We are setting a precedent for having excellent UPA talks here in Cambridge! Huge thanks too, to Bill and his colleagues at Microsoft for arranging everything including the location for the event (Microsoft Research) and refreshments. This talk drew around 50 people from the local usability community.

My talent for reviewing is rather unworthy when it comes to describing a talk of this quality but here's some of what I took away from it.

Well, firstly I took away a handful of extremely impressed work colleagues for whom Bill's talk has resonated strongly, one in particular will certainly never be the same again!

Bill is clearly a designer with a great passion for his subject and is a top rate speaker - well recommended for any after dinner speaking in my view. His background in music served to emphasise that 'right on' feeling when a user experience is just about perfect, as with his Orange Juicer with a neat camming action to effortlessly squeeze the last from each orange in a moment of almost musical perfection, an excellent story, well told (Juicer Article).

Like others, Bill makes the argument that companies need to take design more seriously. Design needs to be an executive position, with the CEO right behind it. Steve Jobs has proven that this can work, when the 2nd day in the job he announced that he would save Apple through Design. The latest range of Apple products, including the iPod, prove what Design can mean to a company, and yet in many companies, Design is still not an executive post.

Bill talked a lot of the software industries predisposition to n+1 products, we rarely radically innovate and some products here today have been here since the 1980s in a similar form. As we work on these n+1 products, complexity and costs go up but the market for these products goes down. Bill asked the audience how many people were on the latest version of Adobe Acrobat - few were. In fact I just upgraded from version 4, and only because a usability report I wanted to read demanded I upgrade before I could access it!

Bill explained that much software product development begins with a block of engineering, followed by sales (this needs a diagram to explain really and I've just found out, you can find these diagrams online Performance by Design: The Role of Design in Software Product Development). He argued that before the engineering, what is needed is a design stage. And a design stage where early on it is cheap to try out lots of ideas and easy, even preferable, to make mistakes (if you don't, you are not living close enough to the edge). He refined these ideas to suggest that the design phase breaks into 3 pieces, 'pick', 'cull' and 'evaluate'. And even by the time you get to the end of the 'evaluate' phase, your costs are still quite low and at that point, you can have a rational discussion on whether to proceed or not, before you have committed a huge investment. Bill contrasted what we do in software with the motor industry, where, by the end of their design phase, they build a full working model of a car BEFORE they decide to go ahead and build this car for real, and the model is so good, you wouldn't know it wasn't the real thing. Why don't we do this in software? Bill explained in the motor industry, 'forms' are used to capture the essense and shape of a new vehicle and believes this kind of living specification is the way to specify software. He explained that early Apple software Mac Write and Mac Paint were pretty hopeless as bits of software but as mini applications served to convey what other applications should be like.

Bill talked about the need for a "Green Light Process" for designers to work to. Find out up front how they are to be measured and be prepared for their design to be assessed against this Green Light Process, to become accountable for their designs.

Bill then talked about the radical evolution of mountain bike design (a favourite topic of mine too). He showed how engineers came up with the design for Trek's first rear suspension bike, and then how they hired a fairly junior industrial designer who really made it into something you might like to own! At this point in the talk, I think we were too polite to challenge Bill, since he had just said "Design is first" and now he is saying engineering happened first here. At that point he extended his software process description, explaining that R&D, including engineering and Ethnography, were important forerunners of the design phase - and this made a whole lot of sense.

Bill had some firm ideas on what usability people do, stuff involving statistics, and not really designing. Chatting later it was apparent that Bill's 'usability people' were meant as those focussing on usability testing. I explained that in many contexts the 'usability person' is a general term meaning a potential range of skills from ethnography, to design to usability testing - often, a 'usability person' is a software team's best chance as doing some decent design work. We agreed that 'Interaction Designer' or 'User Experience Designer' would be better terms for doing the kind of design work Bill was advocating.

In terms of expectations, Bill explained that when he walks over a bridge he doesn't feel the need to thank Brunel that the bridge didn't collapse, or when flying, doesn't see the need to thank Boeing that the plane didnt fall out of the sky. And similarly with usability, getting it right is a basic expectation it is not something worthy of any kind of praise at all. It's just sad that so often it is an aspect that is lacking. Instead, it was clear from the Juicer example, that what we need to get to are what in other circles are called 'delighters' or 'wow factors'.

Bill provided a good demonstration of the longevity of software and the importance of considering things like Moore's law when you are designing the next big bit of software - you need to predict the change in hardware over the time in which you are developing the software and make sure your architecture deals with it. He was keen to point out that huge, flexible, thin and cheap screen technology will be with us in the near future and we should be planning for it now (only 5-7 years away). Bill's discussion on plasma screens and other predictions for the future can be followed up in his TIME magazine article: "Forward into the Past - Here's a safe bet: the next big thing is already here".

During the questions at the end, Bill explained that back in his days as Chief Scientist at Alias, he thinks he should have spent more time on fixing the organisation to get it structured right to do good design, rather than focussing so much on design himself. He suggested spending 80% of his time on organisational aspects, shaping the people, culture and environment, may have served them better.

Bill is currently a visiting researcher at Microsoft but is returning to Toronto at the end of May, where he has his own consultancy, and can be reached through his web site. He's also writing a book right now, in which he will elaborate further on some of the ideas presented in his excellent talk.

Huge thanks again to Bill Buxton for supporting our Cambridge UPA group and providing us with some excellent thoughts, rants and ideas which will stay with many of us.

Best wishes in your return to Canada Bill!

Posted by carl.myhill at 09:21 PM

April 20th - "Performance by Design: The Role of Design in Software Product Development" - Bill Buxton - at Microsoft Research, Cambridge

Bill Buxton has very kindly offered to make a presentation on, "Performance by Design: The Role of Design in Software Product Development" whilst he is still around in April. Thanks Bill!

Bill recently made an excellent presentation to a packed audience at a meeting of The Cambridge Network, so expect this to be a cracker!

Date: Wednesday 20th April 2005
Time: 6.30 for 6.45pm
Venue: Microsoft Research, Cambridge [Map & address]
Cost:It is essential that anyone wishing to attend reserves a place. To do this, please email cambridge.usability@gmail.com. The event is FREE and you do not need to be a UKUPA member to attend but it would be great if you could join up! Future events may not be free for non-members.

Here's the introduction...

Performance by Design: The Role of Design in Software Product Development

This talk could just as well be titled "What I have learned about software product design in 8 1/2 years of working with some of the best industrial designers and film makers in the world." The underlying premise is that filmmakers and industrial designers approach the design of new products in a fundamentally different way than the software industry. More often than not, software products are green-lighted, and then work begins. With films and product design, green-lighting comes at the end of a front-end process, not the beginning. Stated another way, software projects tend to go directly to development/engineering, leapfrogging over anything that an industrial designer, for example, would recognize as a design process.

Our argument is that our industry’s bypassing such an explicit and formal front-end design (or in film terms, pre-production) process lies at the root of many of our problems of quality, cost over-runs, and late delivery. Furthermore, I would argue that the absence of this front-end process lies at the root of the software industry’s abysmal track record in bringing out successful new (as opposed to n+1) products. To put my argument into perspective, I will briefly summarize the process followed in film and product design, and discuss how it can apply to software product design.

Bill Buxton is an interaction designer and researcher, and Principal of the Toronto-based design and consulting firm, Buxton Design. During the spring of 2005, he is a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, England.

Bill is one of the pioneers in computer music, and has played an important role in the development of computer-based tools for film, industrial design, graphics and animation. As a researcher, he has had a long history with Xerox’ Palo Alto Research Center and the University of Toronto (where he is still an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, and Visiting Professor at the Knowledge Media Design Institute). As well, during the fall of 2004, he was a lecturer in the Department of Industrial Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design.

From 1994 until December 2002, he was Chief Scientist of Alias|Wavefront, and from 1995, its parent company SGI Inc. In 2001, the Hollywood Reporter named him one of the 10 most influential innovators in Hollywood. In 2002 Time Magazine named him one of the top 5 designers in Canada, and he was elected to the ACM’s CHI Academy.

More information on Buxton and his work can be found at: http://www.billbuxton.com

Posted by carl.myhill at 08:28 PM

Brief Write-Up of Rachel Jones’ Cambridge UPA Talk on 16th March 2005 – ‘The Future of User Centred Technology Design’

Before getting started Louise Ferguson, VP of the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) in the UK, did a straw poll of the audience to assess what groups were represented.

Rough Statistics, around 45 attendees made up of:
Academic – 6
Public Sector – 2
Design Agency – 6
User Centred Designers (UCD) – 25+ (approx.)

An excellent turnout, among them some eminent members of the global usability community.

Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) Global Watch Project on User Centred Design – “Innovation through people-centred design”

Rachel quickly explained that the title of her talk was not very appropriate but that she had come to report the findings of DTI Global Watch Project with a mission to,

“investigate the impact of user-centred research in the design process, with a particular focus on new technology including computer hardware and software, mobile phones, and technology services. The group was interested in the ways in which user-centred research becomes integrated into both the product design and development process as well as embedded within organisational culture and long-term strategic thinking.”

Report Summary

Full DTI Global Watch User Centred Design Report

The project involved the team visiting a number of global organisations including Volvo, BMW, Intel, IBM, IDEO, PARC, Microsoft and Nike to help understand the impact of user-centred research in the design process.

The Talk

The first striking thing about Rachel’s talk was the absence of PowerPoint slides and emphasis on having a discussion (Tufte would be impressed!). Rachel talked through the findings of each of the mission team members.

Taking thorough notes is not why I was there but the following rougly-recorded points struck me from the talk and the discussion:

• UCD folks are seeing a need to be made accountable for the designs. Current organisational structures do not make UCDers accountable and this is a problem. Rachel explained that Microsoft has a system of using Smilee faces (and the opposite) to mark up various User Interfaces (UI) to show how popular aspects are. Just one way to begin to be accountable.

• UCD folks are very concerned about showing ROI and their contribution to the business.

• Several UCD specialists are increasing involving executives in their projects since they believe it critical to have a champion at that level (ie CEO level). For some, this is seen as a necessary dimension of a project, eg IDEO I believe.

• There is a belief that UCD activities can play a part in mitigating the risk of new technology innovation

• Companies like Intel are making very impressive use of UCD. They recognise that the future of their business is not through making ever faster chips, because chips have got fast enough for most people’s purposes now. Intel are reinventing themselves and are using UCD to help do that.

• BMW Design works is another company that have clearly impressed Rachel in their use of UCD

• Rachel talked about the lengths that e-bay goes to in order to remain “user driven”, numerous user conferences throughout the year and much discussion with expert users on new features and what they want. This is how companies like this stay ahead.

• The organisational structure of businesses trying to do UCD came up. It was felt that things only really start to happen for UCD when a company has a director of design on the board. Apple is the best example of this but sadly they would not open their doors to the DTI project.

• Microsoft now take UCD more seriously. We were told that Longhorn has 20 UCD professionals working on it.

• Rachel cited some success with simple ‘experience models’, ‘experience frameworks’ and photo stories used in some companies. Some of those are new ideas to me, would be good to see some examples!

• A document describing the redesign of the BBC website came up in conversation but it seems that it is no longer available – anyone know where to get a copy?

Huge thanks to our speaker for the evening, Rachel Jones of Instrata in Cambridge, and also to all those who turned up to make this a most excellent and interesting first Cambridge UPA event.

Posted by carl.myhill at 08:22 PM

Design Museum - 'You are Here' Exhibition

YOU ARE HERE - THE DESIGN OF INFORMATION Ends May 15th

"How can we communicate without words? At a time when we have to absorb more and more visual information to navigate our increasingly complex daily lives, the Design Museum is exploring the history of information design. From 18th century orreries and Florence Nightingale's pioneering use of diagrams to relay information during the Crimean War, to the work of modernist heroes, such as Herbert Bayer and Buckminster Fuller, and totems of daily life like the London Underground map, AtoZ and 1960s British motorway sign system, You Are Here - described as "a wondrous exhibition" by The Times - decodes the ingenious use of visual information that guides us through daily life."

I originally heard about this on Radio 4, the panel didn't like it much and found the exhibit quite badly designed but for people with a particular interest in Information Architecture I thought it might be be interesting.

I actually visited the 'You are Here' exhibition on Saturday. Even though I work in the field of Information Design and the field of Geographic Information Systems I found the exhibition quite disappointing.

The exhibition contains quite a lot of interesting stuff, from early sketches of the London tube map design to funky clocks (which seemed more art than information design and of questionable relevance to the exhibition). There was quite a lot of old stuff there, like old maps of the world, and some of the clever and expressive information design examples Tufte uses such as the diagram showing the troop losses during the Napoleonic Russian Campaign. I was very surprised to see examples of Florence Nightingale's Information Design exploits and to discover she was a pioneer in this field too.

However, on balance I was quite disappointed not to see a chronology of how information design has evolved, right up to modern techniques for visualising information. In particular, I was very surprised to see a severe lack of coverage of the state of the art, for example, the excellent work of Ben Shneiderman'sgroup's work on Visualization of huge amounts of data in novel ways.

No trip to the design museum is complete without noticing how little thought is put into designing the User Experience for the customers! This always surprises me about an organisation devoted to design. The first problem is finding the place from the instructions on the website - not very obvious at all, even though I've been several times before. Another example was the exhibition of the shortlisted "Designers of the year". People were encouraged to vote on which of the four designers they thought best. We really couldn't quickly figure out where the different designers works were in the exhibition nor how to vote for them (though re-reading our ticket on the train later revealed a map). One of those shortlsted was apparently for a multi-media based exhibit, though this was multimedia running on Windows (which I noticed from the error message sitting displayed on one of the terminals which some 'customer' had tried to add a print driver for and failed). Quite ironic to witness such crude errors left on the screen of an exhibit of the works of the shortlisted "Designer of the Year" in the Design Museum. If this is the best it gets, I'm thinking we are not there yet with this User Experience thing. Don't get me wrong, I'm not really seeking to point fingers and sling mud, I'm in this profession too and feel partly responsible and embarassed that this is as good as it gets.

Posted by carl.myhill at 11:22 AM

First Cambridge Event : 'The Future of User-Centred Technology Design'

The first ever Cambridge Usability Group meeting will take place on the 16th March 2005! The main event of the evening will be a talk by Rachel Jones of Instrata on 'The Future of User-Centred Technology Design'. Rachel will be reporting on her experiences as part of the recent DTI Global Watch mission to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. Mission members visited a number of global organisations including Volvo, BMW, Intel, IBM, IDEO, PARC, Microsoft and Nike to help understand the impact of user-centred research in the design process. More information can be found at the DTI Global Watch mission website.

In addition, the meeting will provide an opportunity to find out what the Cambridge Usability Group is all about and hopefully also to meet a few new faces.

Date: 16th March 2005
Time: 6.30 for 6.45pm, followed by drinks at 8-8.30pm in the Old Spring pub.
Venue: GE Network Solutions, 1 High Street, Chesterton, Cambridge CB4 1WR. View map.
Cost: FREE! You do not need to be a UKUPA member to attend. However, it is essential that anyone wishing to attend reserves a place. To do this, please email cambridge.usability@gmail.com.

Posted by at 08:15 AM