Invited speakers

Mary Czerwinski

Principal Researcher and Manager, Visualization and Interaction Research Group

One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Wa 98052, USA

Biography

Mary Czerwinski is a research area manager of the Visualization and Interaction Research group at Microsoft Research. The group is responsible for studying and designing advanced technology and interaction techniques that leverage human capabilities across a wide variety of input and output channels. Mary's primary research areas include spatial cognition, information visualization and task switching. Mary has been an affiliate professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Washington since 1996. She has also held positions at Compaq, Rice University, Lockheed Engineering and Sciences Corporation, and Bell Communications Research. She received a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Indiana University in Bloomington.

Lecture

Building a Better World via the User-Centered Design of Technology

Today's information workers are characterized by their ability to easily handle interruptions, multi-task, switch tasks quickly, and make sense of enormous amounts of information in high-pressure situations. Current and future technologies, including various wearables and sensing devices, ensure that robust communications and information transmissions can occur almost anywhere, any time. Our ability to log, collect, and visualize event data has become more sophisticated, allowing us to analyze trends and identify patterns across many areas of individual and group behaviors. How do we use these technological trends to ensure that we are designing tools that improve productivity, insight, and an overall sense of user control? In this talk, Mary discusses her research group's approach to the user-centered design of advanced user interfaces, and she describes several of their research projects.

Regina Bernhaupt

Assistant Professor University of Salzburg

ICT&S Center, Sigmund-Haffner-Gasse 18, 5020 - Salzburg, Austria

Biography

Regina Bernhaupt is currently working as assistant professor at the HCI Unit of the ICT&S-Center, working on her habilitation in the area of usability evaluation methods. She holds a masters degree in psychology and in computer science from the Salzburg University. In 2002 she finished her technical dissertation in computer science in the field of intelligent systems (time coded artificial neural networks). She teaches programming courses, user interface techniques and design and human-computer interaction at the Salzburg University and the applied university of Salzburg. She is leading several projects in the area of home entertainment (interactive TV, games, new ways of entertainment) and is responsible for new forms of usability and user experience evaluation in various contexts like mobile interfaces and ambient technologies.

Lecture

Evaluating Usability and User Experience in Non-Traditional Environments

The keynote will focus on the difficulties of how to evaluate and investigate usability and user experiences in non-traditional environments. Giving examples from living room entertainment, mobile tourist guides, games development and multimodal interfaces for air-traffic control the different challenges in evaluation for HCI researchers are demonstrated. After presenting a more general framework, some solutions on how to adopt methods for these challenges are presented: playful probing, creative cultural probing, in field usability studies, games as tools for evaluation.