June 2008
Chapter Business
Chris started the meeting thanking everyone for the largest turnout to mini-UPA. This was the biggest event with almost 400 participants and over 30 speakers. Our next big thing is in November for World Usability Day in Boston at the Museum of Science. We will be asking for volunteers for new activities as well as ideas for new ways to explain usability concepts. Our goal at UPA is to allow our members to participate and give individuals an opportunity to present and show their talents.
If you're interested in getting involved please let us know. Getting more involved is a great way to connect with the community. One example we allow people to do that is through workshops. We try to hold workshops quarterly. The next workshop will be held on July 19th by Lynn Cherney and Gregory Raiz. The workshop will be on how to be a consultant. Both Greg and Lynn have been consulting for a number of years. The talk will cover both the business side as well as the logistics, how to find business, and working with clients. Additional details of the workshop will be posted on the UPA website.
Our July meeting will be on the 15th, with Will Schreoder from MathWorks speaking at Iron Mountain Digital about "Tool Choice and Tool Switching in Complex Software".
July 22nd we have a cross-group pot-luck. See the Evite for additional details.
Presentation: "Touch me, Tag me, Brand me" presented by MITRE
First Talk - Controlling Robots with Multi-touch Tables - Dr. Jill Drury
HRI - is Human Robot Interaction. You can't apply HCI to HRI because you don't know the state and environment of the robot. Robots have some autonomy and can be doing things that are somewhat unpredictable to the human operator.
The robot that MITRE uses has a lot of sensors and this information is being conveyed to the operator. The robots are being designed to help in rescue situations.
Using a MERL DiamondTouch multi-touch table allows multiple people to use the table at one time. The initial reasearch was to take an interface that was designed for a normal screen with joystick interface and then implement that interface on a multi-touch display to see if there are any inherent advantages to the multi-touch with no optimization on the software. The study used actual firefighters trying to guide a robot through a search and rescue scenario. The results showed no large discernible difference between the devices for success or speed.
During the testing they observed a series of interactions and strategies:
- Gesture magnitude: Users expect the size of the gesture to have a larger impact on the importance of the gesture.
- Gesture alignment:
- On-axis - Finger movement are up and down or side to size.
- Off-axis: Gesture movment in any direction.
- Gesture Sequences: Users were observed doing a series of gestures in a row like tapping or cycling.
What they learned:
- Users employed a mixture of strategies
- Performance didn't degrade, even through they did not tune the interface.
Second Talk - Social Bookmarking - Laurie E Damianos
Social bookmarking is bookmarking with tags and meta-data that is shared across users. They wanted to take the ideas of de.licio.us and other sites and see what would happen if you took that idea and let it work inside the firewall. The problem is that information inside the company gets stuck in email.
They used an open source tool called Scuttle and modified it for internal use. The tool allows for recent bookmarks, popular tags, recently popular as well as corporate collections. They then took the core data and tied this into the corporate phonebook so you could see faces/people, organization info, etc. They also added a link scan feature to find broken links to keep the site constantly current. Support for external sites through de.licio.us was added to allow users to post links to both internal and external resources.
In general they are getting some increase of tagging by users however there are still a lot of people using different spellings plurals/singular so there isn't always consistency across social tags.
Social Bookmarking is useful in:
- Sharing resources for others
- Facilitates info discovery for his team
- Supporting team projects, they use a specific tag to collect data across multiple resource
- Used it to find people with similar interest at the company
- Augments enterprise search with socially relevant info
- Company librarian has the help of the entire company to catalog data
Discovered issues included difficulties in attracting and education and sustaining users over time. The initial stage to get the site bookmarks bootstrapped and started took a while to achieve critical mass. New users are still finding the site three years later. In the future looks to expand and intergrate with enterprise search, recommendation systems, social networking, They are also looking to how the system can be sustained.
Third Talk - I can't code, I can't contribute: Designer mispreceptions of participating in Open Source - Juhan Sonin
Juhan is working as a designer on an open source project called LimeSurvey. Juhan points out that there are over 200,000 open source projects but only a couple hundred are good enough for the enterprise. In fact it's easy for non-coders to participate in these open projects and engage the development team to offer suggestions, designs and offer assistance.
Getting started means building trust. Commit to a simple fix like cleaning up some CSS. Next cleanup some Javascript or something a little larger. You're not just building software you're building trust. Our evolution as designers tends to be more engineering. What many teams need is Design.
Juhan continued the presentation covering many aspects of the project collaboration and how companies can get involved in the open source community.