Table of Contents
VOLUME XIV.3 May + June 2007
-
In this issue
-
In this issue
Jonathan Arnowitz, Elizabeth Dykstra-Erickson
Welcome to the UX Management issue. Dan Rosenberg, senior vice president of user experience at SAP, provides a view of user-experience design in the American enterprise corporation. On the heels of CHI's 25th anniversary, we're pleased to offer a view of how HCI has been institutionalized. Incorporating HCI into…
-
-
Fresh: rant
-
Policies and practices
Jonathan Grudin
A long time ago, before the Internet or at least before the Web, when you heard about an interesting book, how could you order a copy? It helped to know who the publisher was, but you still had to make contact. If you knew where the publisher was located,…
-
-
Fresh: ok/cancel
-
Reporting structure
Tom Chi, Kevin Cheng
©2007 ACM1072-5220/07/0500$5.00 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation…
-
-
Fresh: ask Doctor Usability
-
Hunting for patterns and contradictions
Dr. Usability
Dear Dr. Usability, How can we design an application that works for everyone? People are so different; I'm grappling with the issue of how to design for the perfect user experience. My product manager has asked me to create the iPod version of checkbook-balancing softwaresoftware so sexy it will…
-
-
Fresh: pushing the envelope
-
Sense and accessibility
Fred Sampson
Well into the first decade of this century, we are all, presumably, familiar with the impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, and WCAG2 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2) on the design and implementation of computer hardware and software[1]. Testing our products…
-
-
Forum: under development
-
Can the mobile web bridge the digital divide?
Stephane Boyera
Since its creation by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, W3C's mission has been to lead the Web to its full potential. Defining new, free, and open technologies for the Web; preventing fragmentation; and working toward a single space of communication and exchange, accessible by everyone from every…
-
-
Forum: here's entertainment
-
Guitar Hero
Dennis Wixon
When was the last time you were inspired? When was the last time a product inspired you? When was the last time a history of a company inspired you? At the DICE conference this year, Alex Rigopolis, CEO of Harmonix, gave a truly inspirational talk about the history of…
-
-
Forum: timelines
-
An unlikely HCI frontier
Richard Pew
I left University of Michigan in 1974, in part because I wanted to begin a new research thrust in HCI. At the time, BBN Technologies (then Bolt Beranek and Newman) was an ideal place to accomplish this. It had a renowned staff in both computer science and cognitive psychology…
-
-
UX management
-
Introducing the 360° view of UX management
Daniel Rosenberg
Over the past decade many companies have formalized the role and function of a user experience (UX) team within their corporate structure. At the same time a significant number of user experience team managers have visibly risen on the executive ladder. Today I know of at least a dozen…
-
How to organizationally embed UX in your company
Janice Rohn
Whether UX has been part of the company for 10 days or 10 years, UX managers should continually work on strategies and tactics to raise the awareness of UX and embed it across the company. Rarely is UX considered as crucial to the success of the company as development…
-
Working with c-level executives
Jeremy Ashley
As user experience professionals in management roles, we inevitably need to work with the top executives within our companies. User experience professionals have the skills and tools to contribute a unique and valuable perspective about a company's customers and users, as well as the ability to translate this into…
-
What makes UX successful from the executive perspective?
Kristin Desmond
KD: Mark, tell me about your background in the software industry. MV: I have an M.S. from MIT, where I did research in the Media Lab. I started out in engineering and management roles at Intel, Borland, Red Pepper, and then PeopleSoft, after they bought Red Pepper. At Borland…
-
UCD collaboration with product management and development
Andreas Hauser
Is the working model between your company's user experience, product management, and development teams functioning perfectly? Have you already established a user-centered design (UCD) process that flows smoothly to create excellent products with every release? If you can answer "yes" to both questions, you probably don't need to continue…
-
Defining the user experience function
Jon Innes
The most important decision that design managers make is how to structure their organization. Designs often reflect the structure of the organizations that create them. Unlike "art" or "pure research," when designing a product or service in a business context, the user experience (UX) designer must consider divergent factors…
-
Working with standards organizations
Anna Wichansky
In the late 1990s, I had the good fortune to be part of a significant joint effort between industry and government to create standards for usability testing. This was called the Industry Usability Reporting (IUsR) Project, and it was run by the National Institutes for Standards and Technology (NIST).…
-
Managing UCD within agile projects
Mark Detweiler
The goals of this article are to share some insights from managing user experience (UX) professionals involved in software-development projects that follow an Agile development methodology, and to stimulate thoughts about ways to anticipate and address potential challenges that Agile approaches might pose for a UX director or manager.…
-
-
People: the way I see it
-
The next UI breakthrough
Donald Norman
Want to know what I think the next UI breakthroughs will be? Here are two, both of which can be considered a return to fundamentals: Command line languages Physicality: the return to physical devices, where we control things by physical movement; turning, moving, and manipulating appropriate mechanical devices This…
-
-
People: fast forward
-
Big spaces, big lives, big challenges
Aaron Marcus
Web 2.0 initiatives are growing along the Internet highways like orchids in Hawaii. MySpace.com, the "next-generation portal" built around social networking, provides access to user-generated content for blogs, chat rooms, movies, music, music videos, classified ads, comedy, on-demand TV, and videos, along with access to games, horoscopes, jobs, MySpace…
-
-
People: the well-tempered practitioner
-
Designing useful and usable questionnaires
Chauncey Wilson
Asking good questions and designing useful and usable questionnaires are core skills for usability practitioners. I often find myself disappointed by the poor quality of online, paper, and telephone questionnaires. Part of the problem might stem from a lack of training in questionnaire designa complex topicas well as the…
-
-
Books
-
Review of “Ambient Findability by Peter Morville,” O’Reilly Media, 2006; ISBN 0-596-00765-5; $29.95
Gerard Torenvliet
When I first picked up Peter Morville's recent book, Ambient Findability, I was expectingand hoping fora companion to the earlier book he coauthored with Louis Rosenfeld. That book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, is a landmark in the history of human-computer interaction (HCI) that marks the birth…
-
New & upcoming titles
interactions Staff
A Step-by-Step Guide to Usability Testing Peter P. Mitchell iUniverse, Inc., January 2007 ISBN: 0595422764 $13.95 Enhanced Visualization: Making Space for 3-D Images Barry G. Blundell Wiley-Interscience, February 2007 ISBN: 0471786292 $99.95 Introduction to Human Factors and Ergonomics for Engineers (Human Factors and Ergonomics Series)…
-
-
Rewind
-
NordiCHI 2006: learning from a regional conference
Jonathan Grudin
NordiCHI 2006, Oslo, Octobersomething new was in the air. Smiling, people remarked on it, not sure what it was. Not even the pleasantly surprised organizers could put their finger on it, but HCI research seemed to have changed in some subtle way. Some background information: Most specialized HCI conferences…
-
CHI2006
Robert Jacob, Audrey Girouard, Leanne Hirshfield, Michael Horn, Orit Shaer, Erin Solovey, Jamie Zigelbaum
Is there an emerging next generation of human-computer interaction? Or, rather, are there simply "a thousand points of light" of disparate and unrelated, innovative new developments? A wide-ranging group of top HCI researchers gathered to consider this at CHI 2006 in Montreal for what turned out to be the…
-
BELIV’06
Enrico Bertini, Catherine Plaisant, Giuseppe Santucci
Not every new visualization is useful. How can we better separate the wheat from the chaff, report the thrill or gauge utility? We organized BELIV'06, a workshop about evaluation in information visualization, to answer this kind of question. BELIV'06 was born from an acknowledgment of current methods' limitations, and…
-
-
Event planner
-
Event planner
interactions Staff
May 8-12 WWW2007 16th International World Wide Web Conference Banff, AB, Canada www.www2007.org May 13-15 Pervasive 2007 The 5th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Toronto, Canada www.dgp.toronto.edu/conferences/ pervasive2007/index.phtml May 15-18 XTech 2007 European Conference for Developers, Information Designers and Managers Working With Web and Standards-based Technologies Paris,…
-
-
Rave
-
Web 2.0 and beyond
Jonathan Arnowitz, Elizabeth Dykstra-Erickson
We were recently asked why we remain unexcited about the latest capabilities on the Web-development frontier. It's groundbreaking work! We can do things no one has been able to do before! We're past "[skip intro]" for that Flash front end, and well in to the "real" Web experience. So…
-
