 Mike Kuniavsky (Adaptive Path)
Reverse the Polarity!
The business of usability isn't not just knowing how to do research and
design, but knowing what to focus on. In their practice as user
experience consultants Adaptive Path have encountered many situations
where it's not the users' experience that impacts the effectiveness of a
product, it's what companies want them to experience. Taking a
page from cheesy sci-fi, Adaptive Path decided to step back
and...reverse the polarity!
In the process, they've developed methods of applying many of the same
research techniques used to understand users to understanding companies.
This has allowed them to conduct more effective, more actionable, more
accurate research and to design products that satisfy not only the
companies' stated desires, but their actual needs.
About Mike Kuniavsky
Mike Kuniavsky is a founding partner of Adaptive Path, the world's
premier user experience consulting company. He is the author of
Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research
(Morgan Kaufmann), and has been developing commercial Web sites since
1994. Clients include National Public Radio, Crayola, McGraw Hill,
Scient, PacBell, Overature, and id Software.
Mike was the interaction designer of the award-winning search engine,
HotBot, and creator of the Wired User Experience Laboratory, where he
served as chief investigator.
He helped develop the second e-commerce site ever to exist: HotHotHot,
which launched two months before Amazon. He then joined the staff of
HotWired, Wired magazine's pioneering online arm, where he served as the
interaction designer for many of their products.
Mike's design work and writing have appeared in many publications,
including The Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, ID Magazine, Wired,
Inc., and WebMonkey.
He is active in the San Francisco fine arts scene, both as an SFMOMA
children's docent and as a working artist. Mike lives in San Francisco
with a growing collection of antique technology.
 Colin Johnson (EyeTools)
Understanding Users Through Their Eyes
Clearly there are a lot of methods for understanding users, and
industry has had some success in trying to pin down what works and what
doesn't, but they've left some questions unanswered. Click-throughs tell
you what people actually click on, but not what happens when they
don't; self-report and opinion surveys only answer what people are
consciously aware of; recall and brand lift tell you the percent
improvement, but leave a lot of guess-work as to why people don't get
the message.
There is a metric that hasn't yet been efficiently tapped -- filling in
the gaps between clicks, opinions, and recall by getting at a stream of
information recorded directly off of human eye-movements as a person
processes the components of a web site. People make decisions,
consciously and unconsciously, and their eye-movements document each
step. Eyetracking has been around for over 20 years, but its only very
recently that the tools have become advanced enough to efficiently and
effectively extract, visualize and analyze how groups of people interact
with and are effected by various presentations.
In the world of the Internet when a single fixation can make the
difference between completing or failing to complete a transaction, the
stakes are much higher. We will discuss some of what we have
discovered about how visual interaction translates into cognitive
interaction, and how understanding both of these, can enable a company
to best capitalize upon customer preference, personalization and
performance.
About Colin Johnson
Colin Johnson - CEO of Eyetools, Inc. - joined the company in August of
2000 to manage the business. With a BA from Stanford University,
an MBA from Columbia Business School and professional experience in the
engineering, marketing, and technology innovation departments of Arthur
D. Little (Boston, MA), Delphi Automotive (Buffalo, NY), and Hewlett
Packard (Tokyo, Japan), the Juran Institute (Wilton, CT) and the
Softnomics Center (Tokyo, Japan) Johnson has continued to grow Eyetools'
customer base of marquee clients despite the recent economic downturn.
 Bonnie John (CMU)
Data collection in support of modeling and other usability techniques
In 1989, I participated in a panel at CHI called "The Role of
Laboratory Experiments in HCI: Help, Hindrance, or Ho-Hum?" with Jack
Carroll, Tom Landauer, John Whiteside, and Cathy Wolf. This year’s
NPUC workshop seems a reprise of these questions: Help? Hindrance? or
Ho-hum? Almost 15 years ago, I argued that human data is a means to an
end: human performance modeling. In this presentation, I will review
the progress of modeling and other usability methods, how they depend
on data collection, and what new questions have arisen that dictate new
needs for data.
About Bonnie John
Bonnie E. John is an engineer (B.Engr., The Cooper Union, 1977; M.
Engr. Stanford, 1978) and cognitive psychologist (M.S. Carnegie Mellon,
1984; Ph. D. Carnegie Mellon, 1988) who has worked both in industry
(Bell Laboratories, 1977-1983) and academe (Carnegie Mellon
University, 1988-present). She is an Associate Professor in the
Human-Computer Interaction Institute and the Director of the Masters
Program in HCI. Her research includes human performance modeling,
usability evaluation methods, and the relationship between usability and
software architecture. She consults for many industrial and government
organizations.
 Genevieve
Bell (Intel)
Lessons from the field: or, how not to do ethnography in 5
easy lessons
In the fall of 2001, I began a two-year
project to gain a better understanding of the lifestyles, aspirations
and habits of the emerging middle classes (including the 'new rich')
across a number of very different Asian countries. In particular I have
been interested in exploring the ways in which information and
communication technologies (ICTs) were being produced, deployed,
consumed and resisted in these middle class lives and domestic spaces.
The project entails multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork across major
urban centers and regional hubs across Asia. Conducting fieldwork
across such a range of different cultural contexts proved
simultaneously to be more challenging and less complicated than it
might appear from the outside.
In this talk, I want to do three inter-related things: firstly reflect
on the fieldwork itself, distilling several lessons about how to and
how not do undertake such a project; secondly, I want to make an
argument for why such projects are important within industry (as well
as the academy), and last but not least, I want to explore the ways in
which we might make sense of the materials collected for a variety of
different audiences.
About Genevieve Bell
Genevieve Bell is a Senior Researcher within Intel Corporation's Intel
Research. She is currently running a 2 year research project focused on
gaining a better understanding of the daily life of Asia's urban middle
classes, with an emphasis on the role of new information and
communication technologies. To date, she has conducted fieldwork in
India, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, China and South Korea.
Since joining Intel in 1998, Bell has conducted ethnographic research
in a variety of consumer spaces, including malls, retail districts, and
museums, as well as within a range of different American households.
Bell has also conducted significant research beyond the US, including a
five-country, strategically situated, ethnographic study of European
domestic spaces.
Prior to joining Intel, Bell taught anthropology and Native American
Studies at Stanford University. Bell received her BA/MA in anthropology
from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. She earned a PhD in cultural
anthropology from Stanford University in 1998.
 Ed H. Chi (PARC)
Validating Information Scent Models with Large Scale User Studies
In the last 5 years, one of the major focus of the User Interface
Research Group has been in understanding how Information Foraging
Theory can be used to explain user optimization behavior on the
Web. My primary research focus has been on developing the
Information Scent Model to describe local behaviors of a group of
users around a Web locality. To validate this model, we have
performed two major user studies-- one on the server end, and the other
on the client end:
- How can Information Scent be used to explain
user movement from page to page by following information cues? For
our study we needed a large amount of user session data paired with
user goals. We performed this study in situ with over 400 subjects
at the client end using a remote user logging program, obtaining
several thousand usable session data.
- How can Information Scent could be used to
perform more accurate Web usage data mining? We wanted more
accurate user profiles and created them by applying Information
Scent principles to Web usage logs. We have obtained several large
scale server logs, of which some sessions are associated with
known user goals. We then built user profiles out of these
logs. We measured the accuracy of our clustering algorithm by
trying to match the user sessions with the known category of the user
goals.
(This is joint work with many people at PARC, including User
Interface Research Group and Advanced System Development Lab)
About Ed Chi
Ed H. Chi is a research scientist at Palo Alto Research Center's User
Interface Research Group. Ed completed his three degrees (B.S., M.S.,
and Ph.D.) in 6.5 years from University of Minnesota, and has been doing
research on user interface software systems since 1993. He has been
featured and quoted in the press, such as the Economist, Time Magazine,
LA Times, and the Associated Press.
His current project is the study of Information Scent --- understanding
how users navigate and understand information environments such as the
Web. His past works include an information visualization project called
"Spreadsheet for Visualization" --- a data exploratory tool using a
'spreadsheet metaphor' that allows each cell to hold an entire data set
with a full-fledged visualization. He has also worked on computational
molecular biology, and recommendation systems. He has won awards for
both teaching and research. In his spare time, Ed is an avid TaeKwonDo
martial artist, photographer, and motorcyclist.
Marissa Mayer (Google)
The science behind Google's UI
Google uses a large number of techniques to shape its user
interface with science and data. My talk will analyze
examples of the data and procedures we use and how it shapes our design
process.
About Marissa Mayer
Marissa Mayer has been with Google since June, 1999. Currently Director
of Consumer Web Products and formerly the technical lead for the
user-interface team, she has spearheaded almost every user-interface
change to Google's website in the past four years. While at Google, she
has worked on search classification, the Google web directory, image
search, Google News. She has also internationalized Google's interface,
and has lead much of the UI design and development effort including
establishing user testing. Several patents have been filed on her
work. Concurrent with her full-time work at Google, Marissa has
taught introductory computer programming classes at Stanford to over
3,000 students and has received both the Centennial teaching award and
the Forsythe award for outstanding contribution to undergraduate
education. Prior to joining Google, Marissa worked at the UBS
research lab (Ubilab) in Zurich, Switzerland and SRI International in
Menlo Park, California.
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