Tutorials

HCI 2000 Tutorials

Mary Zajicek Oxford Brookes University

A tutorial for Web page designers, those who would like to attract elderly and/or visually impaired users to their Web site and those who want to know about software that makes the Web accessible to this group. The tutorial will include an overview of the elderly and/or visually impaired user's perspective. Information will be drawn from, research carried out in the Department of Family and Lifespan Studies, School of Health Care, Oxford Brookes University, and from work with elderly visually impaired users of BrookesTalk the Web browser for the blind and visually impaired, developed in the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Oxford Brookes University. It will look at why the majority of elderly and/or visually impaired people do not use the World Wide Web and how this rapidly increasing sector of the population, which has so much potential for Web use can be supported in Internet use. Current software support systems will be discussed with critical appraisal of their strengths and weaknesses together with the Web Access Initiative (WAI) and the Web page checker BobbyTM. The tutorial will also cover research based software solutions to overcome problems created by visual impairment, memory loss and loss of confidence.

Fabio Paternò CNUCE- C.N.R Piza

Model-Based approaches can give useful support to designers by highlighting relevant aspects that they should take into account and providing more logical descriptions of interactive systems. Task-based approaches are becoming part of the current practice. However, there is still a considerable lack of structured methods in using the information contained in task models for designing and evaluating interactive applications. Such methods require expressive and flexible notations, criteria supporting the design, and tool support. The tutorial is intended for anyone interested in understanding the possibilities given by the systematic use of task models in design and usability evaluation. Participants will learn the state of art in this field, main features of notations for task specification (such as ConcurTaskTrees), automatic tool support that can be provided to develop and analyse task models, concepts for model-based design and evaluation methods, current results, problems, and possible future developments. Fabio Paternò is researcher at CNUCE-C.N.R., Pisa (Italy). He is the technical coordinator of two European Projects. He has published over sixty papers in refereed international conferences or journals. He has been member of the programme committee of the main international HCI conferences. He is the author of a book on Model-Based Design and Evaluation of Interactive Applications.

Alistair Sutcliffe UMIST Manchester

This will involve consideration of the basic psychology required to understand multimedia interaction and the design principles based upon it. A design method covering user requirements and information content, media selection, combination and integration, navigation and dialogue control will be presented. Together with guidelines for media integration, directing users' attention, navigation control, dialogue design and scripting.

This tutorial is suitable for everyone who is involved in design of multimedia systems including CDROM authors, Web site, VR and UI designers; HCI researchers and educators and anyone interested in effective use of ISO 14915 standard, part 3: Media Selection and Combination. It is suitable for beginners and seasoned designers.

Alistair Sutcliffe is Professor of Systems Engineering in Dept of Computation, UMIST. He has over 15 years research experience in HCI, 150+ publications including two textbooks, is chair of IFIP TC-13 Working Group 13.2 'Methodology for User Centred Design', member of the IEEE, ACM and BCS, serves on the editorial board of IJHCS and is editor of ISO standard 14915, on Multimedia user interface design, part 3 (Media Combination)

Tom Hewett Drexel University, Philadelphia

This tutorial will present some theoretical underpinnings and practical aspects of how people remember and how they solve problems. It will also indicate how to take advantage of some of the capabilities of the most important interface component: the human mind. This highly interactive tutorial is intended for designers and developers who have not taken courses in cognitive psychology. It is not intended for human factors specialists nor for anyone seeking a state of the art literature review on research in cognitive psychology. Tom Hewett is a Professor of Psychology and Computer science at Drexel University where he teaches courses on Cognitive Psychology, Psychology of Human Computer Interaction, and Problem Solving & Creativity. He has offered variants of this tutorial to hundreds of interface designers at both conferences and in-house training sessions.

Morten Borup Harning Framfab

This tutorial presents a structured method for designing user interfaces, addressing both the visual and the functional aspects of user interface design. Software User Interface Engineering (SUIE) offers a frame of reference for the user interface design process, enabling structuring of the user interface design process. The approach enables usability testing throughout the design process, from the early conceptual design to the final user interface. The method builds heavily on the ideas of direct manipulation, showing how these principles can be applied - even on platforms known not to support direct manipulation, such as interactive web-systems. Another strong influence has been conceptual design.

This tutorial will be of interest to anyone involved in the user interface design process (getting from task analysis and contextual requirements to the final user interface), e.g. information architects, user interface designers and system developers, as well as human factors people in need of a frame of reference of usability testing.

Morten Borup Harning, Ph.D, has been working with user interface design from a practical and research point-of-view since 1989. He has been working on the SUIE project since 1992. He has extensive experience in using the design method, and has taught several interaction design courses based on SUIE at both Copenhagen Business School and the Danish Technical University.

Alistair Edwards University of York

This tutorial, which should be of interest to anyone involved in the design of human-computer interfaces, aims to provide an overview of current practice and research in the field of interfaces for enabling technology. Information and communication technology (ICT) has a vast role to play in the lives of many of those people who are classified as disabled. Rightly a lot of attention is drawn to the positive use of the technology, to its application in overcoming some of the handicapping effects of different impairments. At the same time, though, the introduction of inaccessible technologies can cause the exclusion of certain people. This is beginning to be recognized in legislation, so that it is becoming the case that to provide inaccessible technology may be illegal. This tutorial will outline how the technology can be designed in such a way as to make it accessible to people with disabilities. This is equally relevant to the 'prosthetic' use of the ICT and to the broadening of its use in everyday applications.

Alistair Edwards is a senior lecturer at the University of York, and also its adviser on Disability. He has a long-standing interest in ICT and disability, having completed a doctorate in making graphical user interfaces accessible to blind people.

Bob Spence Imperial College, London

Information visualisation is what happens when you view the graphical presentation of some data and say "Ah Ha, now that is interesting" or words to that effect. Bankers, estate agents, software developers, fraud investigators, supermarket managers - indeed, almost everyone all have volumes of data into which they'd like to gain insight in order to enhance their work in some way. This tutorial will discuss the issues involved and the techniques available by means of a wide variety of examples, and is therefore aimed at a very wide audience - those who have data and wish to gain insight into it. No facility with mathematics is required (only one equation is included and it can comfortably be ignored!); neither is a familiarity with programming, since the implementation of visualization tools is specifically excluded from the course. The presenter is Professor of Information Engineering at Imperial College, London. He is a pioneer of the field of Human-Computer Interaction, and enjoys an international reputation in the field of Information Visualization, the subject a book he has just published and which constitutes the course notes. Professor Spence is regarded as a lively and entertaining lecturer.

Anne Kaikkonen Nokia

Designing applications for mobile devices differs at some points from designing applications for bigger, fixed devices, such as PCs. The whole environment is more difficult to anticipate: displays input methods and networks may vary. To ensure the service usability it is important, that in WAP service development the focus is in the early phase of the design process. The designers need to understand well the users' needs and the use context in order to design the service that matches the needs. Any lack of understanding of the users will result in un-usable services, as size restrictions of the mobile devices will force the designers to use longer interaction paths and deeper hierarchies. Simply converting web-based services directly to mobile services will most certainly fail. Topics covered in tutorial include:

• How does the mobile service usage differ from using the same service built for Web
• How should you select the right features for mobile service
• How to develop easy to use services for mobile use
• How to evaluate the mobile services

Jerry Lohse The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

eCommerce is transforming every aspect of business, sending companies scrambling to cope with the new market realities of doing business online. The promise of electronic commerce and the very survival of firms in a digital economy will depend on the quality of the user interface. Unfortunately most HCI professionals, graphic designers, and IT professionals have little or no formal business training. Many have never had a marketing class. Areas that have been the exclusive domain of marketers such as branding, customer service, online consumer buying and spending behavior, consumer loyalty, pricing strategies, product displays, privacy, and trust now require a detailed understanding of human-computer interaction to maximize the quality of the customer experience. The tutorial provides an overview of four of these topics: forces shaping the digital economy, online consumer demographics, interface design features that impact traffic and sales on Web sites and what makes a Web site sticky.

Jerry Lohse is is the Research Director of the Wharton Forum on Electronic Commerce. He is an international expert on consumer behavior in electronic commerce environments. He has published over 30 articles in leading national and international journals and his comments have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, the Nightly Business Report and others.

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