User Systems and Experience Research (USER)

The User Systems and Experience Research (USER) group at IBM Research - Almaden focuses on understanding and improving how people interact with technology. Our goal is to improve the ease-of-use of existing products and explore new paradigms in using computers. We are a part of the Human Computer Interaction Research community at IBM.

Building a good user experience is a problem we explore from many perspectives. We study users in the field and spend time with customers. We design, build, and evaluate technologies, prototypes, and systems that improve people's experiences with technology. The systems we work on range in size from small memory cards to large corporate IT systems. We focus on issues that effect the user's experience: performance, security, usability, design, and more.

Our cross-disciplinary team is comprised of human computer interaction researchers and software engineers with backgrounds in computer science, psychology, social science, design, and user experience.

USER Group Research Areas

Social and Collaboration Research
Smarter Web
Mobile User Experience Research
User-Centered Visual Analytics

Social and Collaboration Research

We are exploring the use of social and collaboration software within and among businesses and their customers, including tools for communities, teams, social networks, and collective intelligence groups.

Understanding social and workplace collaboration: Conducting studies to understand fundamental issues about how people collaborate in companies and how social and collaboration software can help.
User, team, and community modeling: Designing and developing empirical and computational models to characterize individual and group behavior and traits from collaboration tool usage data (e.g., emails, teamspaces, microblogs). We are leveraging these models to improve the user experience and value of these tools.
Engaging social networks to collect hidden information, verify questionable information, or take action. This includes building smart dashboards and automated algorithms to facilitate engagement, and conducting user studies to explore the applications that may be enabled through engagement.

Team: Hernan Badenes, Tara Matthews, Tom Moran, Jeffrey Nichols, Barton Smith, Wei Zhang, Tom Zimmerman

Contact: Tara Matthews (tlmatthe at us.ibm.com)

Smarter Web

The web has become the platform of choice for new applications. The Smarter Web project aims to develop tools for users and developers to improve user experience on the web. How do we make it easier for designers and developers to create, debug, and test web applications? How do we design and deploy tools that enable end users to increase their productivity while using web applications, through automating repetitive tasks, or reusing their knowledge of how to do tasks? Our team combines expertise in HCI, programming languages, machine learning, and open source to create technology that makes the web easier to use.

Team: Julian Cerruti, Allen Cypher, Clemens Drews, Tessa Lau, Jalal Mahmud, Jeffrey Nichols, Pablo Pedemonte

Contact: Tessa Lau (tessalau at us.ibm.com)

Mobile User Experience Research

New Mobile Experiences

The current set of user experiences and user interfaces for mobile devices just scratch the surface. We're interested in exploring new techniques to allow users to interact with smart phones and tablets (particularly new techniques for rich interactions with visualized information) and new use cases and user experiences for mobile devices (particularly how mobile user experiences can effectively integrate with desktop user experiences, either serially or in parallel). We are looking for internship candidates who are interested in pushing the boundaries of interaction for mobile devices to create compelling next-generation experiences. Experience with mobile development, mobile evaluation, or interactive visualization is preferred.

Team: Chris Kau, Jeff Pierce, Christine Robson, Jerre Schoudt

Contact: Jeff Pierce (jspierce at almaden.ibm.com)

User-Centered Visual Analytics

This line of work involves researching and developing visual analytic paradigms, tools, and methodologies to support task and goal-driven decision making. We are addressing several research issues:

Design and develop interactive visual metaphors and tools to transform text collections into a visual representation that helps reveal thematic patterns and locate interesting information.
Devise interactive analytics algorithms and approaches to support guided interactive discovery, visualization, and collaboration on data leveraging data semantics, meta-data, and analytic tasks.
Model, represent, and translate a person's high-level analytic intent to the underlying, operational, analytic steps.

Overall, we aim to support users in their decision making in domains such as retail and healthcare. We aim to do so by a) designing novel visual metaphors and interaction techniques to convey complex text analytic results and make them consumable by average users; b) seamlessly integrating interactive visualization with analytics techniques to drive and guide visual analysis, tailoring the analysis process to a person’s tasks; and c) leveraging data semantics in the representation of and interaction with data, guiding and summarizing visualizations by automatically detecting and explaining interesting observations in plain language.

Team: Eben Haber, Eser Kandogan, Huahai Yang

Contact: Eser Kandogan (eser at almaden.ibm.com)