Table of Contents
VOLUME XVIII.6 November + December 2011
- Welcome
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Demo Hour
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Demo hour
Frank Vetere, Martin Gibbs, Darren Edge, Stefan Agamanolis, Jennifer Sheridan, Daniel Leithinger, Dávid Lakatos, Anthony DeVincenzi, Matthew Blackshaw, Edwina Portocarrero, David Robert, Michelle Chung, Sean Follmer, Edwina Portocarrero, Ye Wang, Lina Johansson, Claes Ericson, David Karlsson
Jogging over a Distance Jogging over a Distance is a support system for social joggers who live apart or have different abilities but who want to run "together." Headsets allow both conversation and sharing of breathlessness, with the audio sounding like it is coming from ahead, beside, and behind…
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Blogpost
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Minority retort
Joseph Kaye
The enormous intellectual diversity of the HCI community is at the heart of what makes this field an exciting place to work [1]. At the same time, the breadth of this diversity is not without problems. In a blog post, James Landay complained about the raw deal he felt…
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- Departments
- Tribute
- Columns
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Day in the Lab
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Human-computer interaction group University of Konstanz, Germany
Harald Reiterer
How would you describe your research group? Our research group is part of the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Konstanz, which is one of the nine Universities of Excellence in Germany. We are located in the southwest of Germany, an area with a strong…
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Forums
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Open Government 2.0
Alex Howard
In the 1990s, the Internet changed communication and commerce forever. A decade later, the Web 2.0 revolution enabled a new disruption in media by democratizing the tools for publishing. Citizens without specialized technical skills can now easily upload pictures, video, and text to a more interactive Web, where they…
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The phenomenal challenge of designing transparent technologies
Jon Bird
Tangible and embodied interaction is a diverse research field, in terms of both the range of interaction techniques that are explored (such as tangibles, wearables, and body gestures) and the disciplines that are involved (HCI, design, psychology, physical computing, and interactive art). What is common to the majority of…
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Community and conflict
Carl DiSalvo
We often think of communities in terms of their commonalities, defined by common interests, practices, heritage, or locale. We also talk about communities as neighborhoods, or ethnic groups and their associated beliefs and rituals, or communities of developers or researchers or users. But communities are not all about commonalities.…
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Lessons learned in prototyping systems in developing-world contexts
Sena Allen
This article was written by a master's-level student reflecting on his first year of research work in a developing-world project. Captured here is what he wished he had known before starting. We hope it serves to better prepare other students in the same situation. Gary Marsden, Editor Research in…
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Homeless young people and technology
Jill Woelfer, Dave Hendry
Homelessness among young people aged 13 to 30 is a pressing problem with lasting social and economic consequences for the U.S. By one estimate, 3 million young people experience homelessness annually; that is, about 1 percent of the U.S. population is both young and homeless at some point each…
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Measuring fun, trust, confidence, and other ethereal constructs
Dennis Wixon
It has become fashionable to promote the importance of creating interfaces that provide positive affective experiences. Fashionable trends often involve controversy. Self-appointed arbiters of fashion divide objects into the fashionable and the unfashionable. However, if creating positive experiences is so important, then figuring out how to do so should…
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Features
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Shapeshifters in the voluntary sector
Amy Voida
I'd lived in Irvine, California, for six months and never realized that there was a wildlife sanctuary there, tucked in beside the freeway and the miniature golf course, less than a mile from the university. Conducting fieldwork with more than two dozen nonprofit organizations over the past two years,…
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Understanding science
Bonnie Nardi, Nicole Ellison, Cliff Lampe
Science is a specialized practice. In many cases, it takes years of training to be able to interpret findings and see patterns across multiple studies. Those untrained in a scientific specialty (such as members of the general public) may not understand aspects of the scientific process or the outcomes…
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Leading global UX teams
Daniel Rosenberg, Janaki Kumar
In 2006, the April + May issue of interactions was dedicated to the topic of offshoring. At the time, the term "offshoring" referred to moving work to low-cost locations, despite any negative connotations. This description of offshoring no longer accurately reflects how work moves around the world from one…
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Electronic medical records
Harry Hochheiser, Ben Shneiderman
Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) have begun to transform healthcare worldwide. Some small countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, and Israel have built effective systems based on national standards, while in the U.S. dozens of diverse systems are competing for market share. In developing nations local projects can have huge effects,…
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Simplicity and usability
Gerald Douglas, Zach Landis-Lewis, Harry Hochheiser
When it comes to electronic medical records (EMRs), complexity is often perceived as being the enemy of usability [1]. Computer information systems that must support the range of medical specialties, disciplinary perspectives, and administrative and regulatory requirements found in many modern healthcare environments can often become unwieldy and cumbersome,…
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Usability testing EHRs
Art Swanson, Scott Lind
Recently there has been a lot of discussion about the usability of electronic health record (EHR) systems, with many ongoing efforts to standardize usability practices and metrics, and even the user interfaces, of EHR systems. Specifically, the recently proposed NIST Usability Evaluation Protocol (UEP) seeks to standardize summative usability…
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Tragic errors
Ben Shneiderman
The Obama administration's healthcare reform legislation and its $19 billion stimulus support for Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are beginning to have a transformative effect on U.S. healthcare. An important goal will be to use EHRs to reduce the estimated 98,000 deaths and millions of injuries per year from medical…
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- Cover story
