Leonardo's Laptop is Ben Shneiderman's book that puts universal usability at the heart of his vision for the future of computing.

• Buy at Amazon.com
  
• Offical book site (MIT Press)
  

With a name like The good, the bad and the irrelevant, how could you not want to attend this conference?

"The user and the future of information and communications technology," September 3-5, Helsinki. Organized by COST Action 269.

The goal is to bring together technology developers, designers, policy makers, social scientists (and others) to talk about a human-centric point of view to technology.

The programme lists topics such as diversity, design for communities, democracy, users as designers, and usability studies.

讲故事已经进行了几千年；这是一个与他人愉快相处的极好方法。故事情节并不是很直接或是关于某个人，但是它们会传达一些信息，可以解释其它世界观。各式各样的讲故事的方法，比如电影、小说和戏剧等已经成为了反映文化理念的巨大的娱乐事业的一部分。宗教通常使用故事书来传达道德理念，比如圣经。所以在HCI领域发展了许多叙述形式不足为奇，这些叙述形式将与人们生活有关的故事和信息传达给其它的世界听到。

Usability through storytelling, the theme for the UPA 2006 conference, was examined from many angles. Presenters looked at how stories fit into our work, throughout the entire user-centered design process.

I made a "last minute" decision to attend the UPA conference in Colorado in a few weeks. Like we did at the IA Summit, I'd like to meet with other IBMers while I am there. I have blogged this internally and emailed a few people who I saw on the program, but sometimes it is easier to reach you here.

Plans so far: an "IBM table" at lunch on Wednesday, June 14.

If you are an IBMer who is attending and I have not contacted you yet, please email me or leave a comment here. Thanks!

The 2nd ACM Conference on Universal Usability is seeking Doctoral Consortium applicants, and extended abstracts on late breaking research in Universal Usability. The conference will be held in downtown Vancouver, Canada from November 10 –11, 2003. See http://sigchi.org/cuu2003/ for conference details. Special rates for early conference registration are available until October 13, 2003.

The CUU 2003 Doctoral Consortium provides an ideal opportunity for doctoral students to explore their research interests in an interdisciplinary workshop, under the guidance of a panel of distinguished research faculty. The Consortium will be held on Sunday November 9, 2004. Ten (10) students will be invited to attend and discuss each student's work in turn. Student participants will have a poster of their work exhibited at the main conference. Students will receive complimentary conference registration, and reimbursement of travel, accommodation and food. The deadline for submission is Monday September 22, 2003, 5:00 p.m. (1700) Pacific Standard Time.

The Second Conference on Universal Usability is seeking extended abstracts on late breaking research in Universal Usability. We are particularly looking for papers from the social science, economics, communications and sociology community in order to build bridges between researchers in these disciplines and interface designers.

The CUU conference is focused on understanding and guiding those elements of human-computer interface design that affect the ability of a universal collection of people to effectively use and gain benefit from computer applications. Thus, the conference accepts papers in universal accessibility such as interface designs that support screen readers for the blind, but it is also keenly interested in the social nature of accessibility. For example, CUU would like to attract research from those individuals working on the digital divide, in particular, details on the ways in which different socio-economic groups find it difficult to have access to computers and to the Internet. Computers are currently designed for the western knowledge worker with an assumption of infrastructures that support complex exchanges and a robust power supply. A cultural and cost-based redesign has the potential of bridging the digital divide. Thus, research on the nature, extent and characteristics of this gap are solicited. The conference is also interested in research on how different groups respond affectively to various interfaces and how specific applications leave users disturbed about potential invasions of privacy or control – enough so that usage is avoided or limited. A key belief in hosting this conference is that software and computers are cultural objects that have embodied in their design a set of features that clearly state “who” the software and computers are designed for. The focus of the conference is thus, to develop an understanding of how to create these cultural objects so that they speak to a universal audience.

Suggested topics for universal usability abstracts include the following:

1. Digital divide issues in Africa, Indonesia, Poor America, etc.
2. Affective or Emotional Computing
3. Designing interfaces for multiple languages and cultures
4. Trust issues in networked applications
5. Computer training for the computer illiterate
6. Gender differences in responses to computerization, e.g., the automobile

Prepare a two-page extended abstract of your research in the ACM Conference Publications Format, including: title, author information, abstract, keywords, research summary, and references. E-mail this abstract in PDF format to cuu2003-lbr@universalusability.org by the deadline of Monday, September 22, 2003, 5:00 pm (1700) Pacific Standard Time (PST). Accepted abstracts will be available as part of the Proceedings on the conference website. They will not be published in the print Proceedings. At least one author from each accepted abstracts will be required to present the paper at the conference in November. Presenting authors must register for the conference.

See the call for extended abstracts for more information.

Shari Trewin
CUU2003 Publicity Chair

Leave it to Ohio to apply the term "Blue Collar" to information technology. The Ohio Supercomputer Center has a program called Blue Collar Computing. Some quotes about it:

The complexity of current HPC [High Performance Computing] hardware and software creates a substantial "barrier to entry" for both scientists and engineers. Without proper HPC tools many of our modern research problems range from extremely difficult to impossible to solve. In short, we are losing opportunities for innovation due to an incomplete national HPC infrastructure.

The most formidable barrier of HPC adoption is the lack of simple and cost-effective tools available for use. Just as the graphical user interface (GUI) made desktop computing accessible, and web browsers made networking popular, the right tools are needed to make HPC widely effective.

That is, supercomputers are too hard to use for most businesses.

OSC lists some good next steps to make Blue Collar Computing happen, like public-private collaborations, training and better tools, but one focus is clearly missing in my view: focus on the total user experience by utilizing user-centered design methods. A focus on reducing complexity, usability, understanding user needs, iterative design, etc. is what has made the GUI and the web what they are today. It is long overdue for supercomputers to catch up.

Writing at Clustermonkey, Stanley Ahalt and Kathryn Kelley (from OSC) sum it up well in their article HPC for the Rest of Us. The biggest barrier is: "Hard to use means hardly used – at least by the broader community".

The other news is that this may be going national. USACM reports that legislation for a similar effort has been introduced. About the bill:

• OSC press release
• Blue Collar Computing and Business Assistance Act of 2006 (the bill, from the Library of Congress)
• DeWine press release

We shall see if this catches on at the federal level. And if "blue collar" joins "user friendly" as another way to say "easy to use".

Do you know the feeling when your wife/husband/significant other/whatever meets and spends time with a former girlfiend/boyfriend/spouse/whatever?

That was the initial feeling I had as I read Mike Moran's report on Peter Morville's talk at the Enterprise Search Summit.

Mike is my 2nd line manager at ibm.com; I worked closely with Peter for 2 years at Argus (1999-2001). Nice to have my new "wife" saying good things about my former "wife".

不管我们是否愿意，“外包项目”都是一个不得不说的话题。“是不是要外包、什么时间开始”已经不再是关注的焦点，人们谈论的中心变成了“多少钱”——我们可以为外包项目付出多少，更确切地说，我们能坚持外包多久？UX（User Experience用户体验）从业者已经走了很长一段路来使自己与软件设计和已知的UX设计不同。当外包项目到来的时候，我们还能够继续坚持这种不同吗？