My Experiences at CHI 2008
By Mike SilvaFlorence is a beautiful city. This statement is certainly understated. I’ve visited here several times and each time I can stand in front of the cathedral and stare at the intricate sculptures for an entire hour. It was the home of Leonardo Da Vinci, the ultimate polymath of his time and probably ours too. He is the embodiment of the definitive designer, inventor and artist of all time. Some say that no other person since then has possessed such diverse talents as his. I can count myself as a big fan.
The CHI2008 conference (http://www.chi2008.org/) theme this year is art.science.balance. And this is what usability and user experience is really all about. If I look at our team in Solutions and Analytics we are interesting cross-section of this philosophy. Some of us studied art and worked in the creative fields, some of us are cognitive psychology majors and true researchers and some of us are technical/business oriented with deep domain and technical experience. The conference this year has 2,300 attendees from all over the world and was quite diverse as well.
The opening session was given by Irene Mcara-McWilliam from the Glasgow School of Art and was entitled Renaissance Panel: The Roles of Creative Synthesis in Innovation. Her session focused on a Renaissance object called the Rose Window (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_window) which was often found in churches and was used to remember stories. Although the presentation was an academic one, the primary message was the balance in usability that makes this profession so unique and interesting.
Another interesting aspect of CHI is the CHI Madness session where each presenter of the day in the various tracks gives a 30 second high-speed overview of their presentation. Some were downright hilarious and others were near impossible to understand. I can only empathize with the poor souls in the audience for whom English is a second language and must endure 30 seconds of blitz-schnell colloquial American English. Or even worse, the poor presenters from Asia and other countries where English is difficult and making their pitch in half a minute must be an agonizing affair for them.
The first presentation was called “Don’t Interrupt Me” and was an interesting four-presenter session. Session one was very academic in nature and was concerned with “chains” of interactions (face-to-face, IM, email) and how stress and communication mediums factor in. The next presentation was from the University of Illinois and was more practical. They developed an intelligent notification system that looks at usage patterns of work on a Microsoft Windows platform and determines the best time to notify users of automated alerts. Although there were some flaws in the design, it could be a promising way of reducing unnecessary interruptions, if it can be configured properly. Next was a not-so-interesting paper on teaching webcasts and how to manage instructors paying attention to students. Lastly, was a presentation on the costs of interrupted work with an interesting conclusion. Although the sample size was small and not culturally diverse, work completed by being interrupted was faster and of similar quality of work not interrupted. However, the cost was more stress and frustration to the person interrupted.
Next, I attended an interesting panel discussion entitled Design, Marketing, Strategy? Where does User Research Belong? The panel consisted of: Christian Rohrer, eBay, Inc., USA, Irene Au, Google, USA, Elissa Darnell, eBay, Inc., USA, Shelley Evenson, Carnegie Mellon University, USA and Klaus Kaasgaard, Yahoo!, Inc., USA. Although the title may be misleading, the discussion focused on preparing students as usability professionals and how the three corporate usability groups organize themselves. All of the participants stressed the importance of having a high profile in the organization as well as full support of the executive teams.
The last presentation of the day seemed a bit odd in the naming but it was titled “Visual Synthesis”, However, the first presentation was from Microsoft Labs on a product they are developing called MapSynthesizer. It was an engaging and interesting presentation about how map sites like Google, Microsoft, Mapquest et al only focus on one map which is based on street data. The MapSynthesizer takes the approach that users using map sites need more than street information and often other maps need to be linked to the search. They have an interesting interface for navigating multiple maps by context or time based on user research they conducted. The next presentation was on social network analysis. What threw me off was the fact that they used “statistics” and “visualization” in the same sentence. It was, in my humble opinion, a simple network visualization tool with very little “analysis”. The last presentation’s title almost had me leave the session early; it was entitled “Your place or mine? Visualization as a community component.” However, this one turned out to be spectacular. It was presented by IBM Research and was about a site they have developed called Many Eyes (http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home). It is a collaborative web site that allows users to take their own data and use a canned set of Flash based visualizations to present it in Blog-like fashion. Other registered users can comment on the data and the visualizations giving their own insights to the presentation as well as take some of the uploaded data and visualize it and post it back in the comment. It was also extremely easy to use.
To end the evening, they had a mixer with food and wine from the Tuscany region. I talked to folks from SAP, Google and Accenture. It is always a pleasure to talk to folks in other organizations and compare approaches to UX.
