General News (From UsabilityNews)

By James Temple


Shortly after Carol Bartz took over as chief executive of Yahoo Inc. early last year, she met with Prabhakar Raghavan for an overview of the Sunnyvale Web giant's research division. As the head of Yahoo Labs ran through the catalog of computer scientists on staff, Bartz turned to him and asked: "Where are your psychologists?"

Raghavan was stunned the newly installed CEO had so quickly gotten to a question he'd been asking for years. His answer was they didn't have enough.

On March 8, as the world celebrates International Women’s Day, all eyes were on 31-year old Indrani Medhi when she stepped up to the podium at Emtech 2010 to receive her honour as a technological trendsetter.

Medhi, an Associate Researcher at Microsoft Research India, is the only woman in the sought after India TR35 roll of honours, a list of 20 promising young innovators under 35 handpicked by an eminent jury selected by Technology Review India. The 111-year old technology magazine from MIT unveiled its list at the emerging technologies conference EmTech in Bangalore.

Technology that could see an end to the bane of many commuters - people talking loudly on their mobile phones - has been shown off by researchers. The prototype device could allow people to conduct silent phone conversations.

GUR-SIG is the worlds first group dedicated to supporting the needs of games user researchers. Its members include researchers from the major platform holders, large publishers, smaller developers, consultancies and individual researchers.

Infragistics, experts in user interface (UI) development tools and the User Experience (UX) market, has just launched Quince Pro, a private, secure and organized way to collaborate, communicate and cultivate private UX design libraries to ensure consistent user experiences across teams, departments and companies. Quince Pro is primarily targeted at UX experts, UI designers and interaction designers as a tool for them to formalize and better collaborate and communicate with implementation teams.

This issue includes an invited essay by Daryle Gardner-Bonneau who provides us with her perspective on the increasing complexity of technology which is unfortunately not accompanies by increased usability.

In addition, this issue includes two peer-reviewed articles: one is on using eye movements data to reflect self-awareness in usability testing, and the second on the usability of random keypads as one of the possible ways to increase the usability of PIN-related interaction.