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In this issue:

1. Supriya: Keeping Our People
2. Towards Smart Internet 2010
3. Upcoming Conferences & Calls for Papers
4. Useful Links & References

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1. Supriya: Keeping Our People
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Keeping our people – that has been at the centre of our project this last fortnight. It is an issue that most likely is common to other groups with the SITCRC. To keep our researchers who are on a fixed term contract, we need the extension projects to flow seamlessly, in terms of University processes.

However the SITCRC processes naturally require a multi-layered process of project approval, and then the actual signing of agreements by all parties. But thinking of the issue from the perspective of our young researchers, we have to work out a way within the universities and SITCRC to give them a sense of continuity. These researchers are being moulded by working together across disciplines. They have begun to think of technology, users and design in innovative ways. I hope we can work out a way of keeping them as part of our team.

Supriya

Assoc Prof Supriya Singh,
Project Leader
supriya.singh@rmit.edu.au

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2. Towards Smart Internet 2010
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The annual SITCRC conference will be held in Australian Technology Park in Sydney on 18-19 September 2003. This year the conference is themed “Towards Smart Internet 2010” and will include presentations from a number of SITCRC participants and industry sponsors.

UE researchers will present on day one which of the conference which is open to the public. There have been five expressions of interest from UE researchers for papers to be presented. Three of these are well advanced and two are embryonic.

I suggest we go with the first three:

* Translating from user studies to design: The case study of the Swarm
By Christine Satchell, Supriya Singh and Peter Burrows

* Trust comes in many guises: quantatitive findings
By Ann Knowles

* Content and Context: User Centred reflections on technology mediated interaction
By Robert Cox and Paul Turner

The two to be developed are:

* Thinking outside the digital frame
By Paul Turner

* User Interface for the Intelligent Environment
By Michael Coburn

If people are more advanced than I realise, or if I have missed someone, please let me know and we can include you in the program.

Trevor

Trevor Barr
UE Program Leader
tbarr@swin.edu.au

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3. Upcoming Conferences & Calls for Papers
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* OZCHI 2003

OZCHI is the annual conference for the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group (CHISIG) of the Ergonomics Society of Australia, and Australia and New-Zealand's leading forum for work in all areas of Human-Computer Interaction. The conference will be held on 26-28 November at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.

OZCHI attracts an international community of researchers and practitioners with a wide range of interests, including human factors and ergonomics, human-computer interaction, information systems, software engineering, artificial intelligence, design, social sciences and management.

For further information, please visit: http://www.ozchi2003.itee.uq.edu.au/home/
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* CUU 2003

The 2nd ACM Conference on Universal Usability will be held in downtown Vancouver, Canada from November 10 ?11, 2003. Extended abstracts on late breaking research in Universal Usability are currently being sought.

The organizers are particularly looking for abstracts from the social science, economics, communication, and sociology community in order to build bridges between researchers in these disciplines and interface designers. The deadline for submission is Monday September 22.

For further information, please visit: http://sigchi.org/cuu2003

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4. Useful Links and References
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* Subramony, D. P., “Why Users Choose Particular Websites Over Others: Introducing a “Means-End” Approach to Human Computer Interaction,” Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, Special Issue: Human Factors in Web-based Interaction, 3:3 2002

Gutman's means-end theory, widely used in market research, identifies three levels of abstraction - attributes, consequences, and values - associated with the use of products, representing the process by which physical attributes of products gain personal meaning for users. The primary methodological manifestation of means-end theory is the laddering interview, which it has been claimed generates better insights than other qualitative or quantitative methods. This study asked: Can means-end theory, and its concomitant laddering methodology, be successfully applied in the context of human-computer interaction research, specifically to help understand the relationships between websites and their users? The study employed laddering interviews to elicit data concerning website attributes, their consequences, and user end-values. This data was duly processed and the results were subsequently appraised. Examination determined that means-end chains do indeed characterize the process by which the physical attributes of websites gain personal meaning for their users, thus proving the theory's applicability.

http://www.csulb.edu/web/journals/jecr/issues/20023/paper4.pdf
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* Sutcliffe, A., Fickas, S., Sohlberg, M., and Ehlhardt, L. (2003). “Investigating the Usability of Assistive User Interfaces,” Interacting with Computers, 15:4. pp 577-602.

A prototype e-mail system was developed for cognitively disabled users, with four different interfaces (free format, idea prompt, form fill and menu driven). The interfaces differed in the level of support provided for the user and complexity of facilities for composing e-mail messages. Usability evaluation demonstrated that no one interface was superior because of individual differences in usability problems, although the majority of users preferred interfaces which did not restrict their freedom of expression (free format). In contrast to traditional evaluation studies, no common pattern of usability errors emerged, demonstrating the need for customisation of interfaces for individual cognitively disabled users. A framework for customising user interfaces to individual users is proposed, and usability principles derived from the study are expressed as claims following the task artefact cycle.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0953-5438(03)00051-1
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* Bødker, S. (2000), Scenarios in User-Centred Design – Setting the Stage for Reflection and Action,” Interacting with Computers, Volume 13, Issue 1, September 2000, pp 61-75

This paper discusses three examples of use of scenarios in user-centred design. Common to the examples are the use of scenarios to support the tensions between reflection and action, between typical and critical situations, and between plus and minus situations. The paper illustrates how a variety of more specific scenarios emphasising, e.g. critical situations, or even caricatures of situations are very useful for helping groups of users and designers being creative in design. Emphasising creativity in design is a very different view on the design process than normally represented in usability work or software/requirement engineering, where generalising users' actions are much more important than, in this paper, the suggested richness of and contradiction between actual use situations. In general the paper proposes to attune scenarios to the particular purposes of the situations they are to be used in, and to be very selective based on these purposes.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0953-5438(00)00024-2

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