"On March 15-16, 2007, a forum entitled HCI 2020: Human Values in a Digital Age, was held in Sanlúcar la Mayor, Spain, just outside Seville. Its purpose was to gather luminaries in computing, design, social sciences, and scientific philosophy to discuss, debate and help formulate an agenda for human-computer interaction (HCI) over the next decade and beyond.

The event—facilitated by Microsoft and convened by Richard Harper and Abigail Sellen of Microsoft Research Cambridge, Tom Rodden of the United Kingdom’s Nottingham University, and Yvonne Rogers of the Open University—resulted in a detailed report, released April 2 2008, called Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the Year 2020.  This report is for anyone interested in the ramifications of our digital future and in ways society must adjust to the technological changes to come.  It is also for those of us who work in the field of Human-Computer Interaction and who are concerned that our research agenda stays relevant in the years to come."

More information is available from this website - http://research.microsoft.com/hci2020/

This is a copy of a presentation that Marilyn Tremaine gave to the New Jersey UPA chapter in February 2008.  A 4-part MP3 recording of the presentation is also available from the UsabilityNJ website.

"This talk addresses an issue that has been skirted both by the Usability Community and the Corporate Community, that is, what value do efforts in usability and user experience design provide to the overall corporation, and what coMPetitive advantage might the skills and activities performed by usability personnel give to business operations? The talk is therefore not just concerned with the return on investment that might be achieved in various focused areas of usability, but also in areas such as:

• the redefinition of business processes
• the development of new markets
• the creation of new products and services
• the capture of unique information, the building of brand loyalty
• the use of service engineering that ties a product with its service infrastructure
• the better management of knowledge throughout the corporation
• the use of HCI in developing successful corporate strategies

The talk will cover what types of Competitive advantages have been identified for corporations and then give specific exaMPles where HCI has been or can be used to gain a company one of the competitive advantages identified."

In this article, the authors describe how to bridge the disciplines of usability and software engineering. Usually, both fields are made up of very distinct populations, talking different languages and using different tools. In the paper, the authors present an agile approach that could provide a basis for collaborative, interdisciplinary user interface engineering. The paper was presented and published at HCI International 2007 in Beijing.

This Boxes and Arrows article is a review of a new book on Interaction Design called Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction.  This book is being released at a time when acceptance of Interaction Design as a discipline is reaching a critical mass.  Clifton concludes "Interaction Design, the book, presents many valuable approaches and background on the industry. Still, one should realize that learning this material is like learning to play the piano."

Usability Day Director, Elizabeth Rosenzweig, is interviewed in this podcast from the User Experience Podcast.  She provides some details behind the annual World Usability Day.

The UX podcasts can be found at this link.

In this whitepaper presented at the CHI 2007 conference, Microsoft researcher Edward Cutrell and University of Washington professor Zhiwei Guan review the results of their study on eye-tracking for information usage in web search.

"Web search services are among the most heavily used applications on the World Wide Web. Perhaps because search is used in such a huge variety of tasks and contexts, the user interface must strike a careful balance to meet all user needs. We describe a study that used eye tracking methodologies to explore the effects of changes in the presentation of search results. We found that adding information to the contextual snippet significantly improved performance for informational tasks but degraded performance for navigational tasks. We discuss possible reasons for this difference and the design implications for better presentation of search results."

They conclude that "the future of Web search interfaces probably will be very different from what we see today. Studies such as those we have outlined here can help to inform what those interfaces will look like. In addition, we would like to perform similar studies in other search domains to see whether our findings apply outside of Web search (e.g., search in corporate intranets, medical databases, personal desktop indices, etc.)."