UCD Project News Edition 21, May 5, 2004
UCD Project News is a fortnightly e-newsletter devoted to increasing
awareness of user-centred design (UCD) principles and contributing
towards a culture of UCD within the Smart Internet Technology CRC.
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In this issue:
1. Supriya: UCD Activities
2. UCD Involvement in Nymity Project
3. Smart Internet Student Conference Wrap
4. E-Governance Indian Style
5. Upcoming Conferences & Calls for Papers
6. Useful Links & References
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1. Supriya: UCD Activities
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It is always a pleasure to listen to students presenting their work
at the Smart Internet CRC Students’ Conference. They take
for granted the lessons of multidisciplinarity, teamwork and translation
of their academic work for industry and design. These are lessons
that some of us are still learning. Some of them are also professional
in the way they harness technology to present their work using text,
images and sound. These conferences are important for the participants
need to figure out what they want to say and say it in a limited
time. But as with other conferences, I am sure it is the dinners
and the after dinner meetings that will be remembered and become
the source of collegiate support. So thanks Lisette for organising
this year’s conference as well as the last. This year we had
a number of students in the UE program who are close to completion.
May I congratulate Michael Coburn in particular, for a clear and
lucid presentation of his work.
On another note, we had another meeting with Clive Boughton of the
Smart Internet Architecture project in Melbourne, following soon
after the Smart Networks Workshop in Sydney. Though the agenda was
nowhere near completed, the interesting aspect for me was to begin
wondering how UCD could be included in a transparent way in the
SITCRC architecture. In a later more rambling conversation, we talked
of the need to detail what is distinctive about our approach and
how it adds value, compared to other approaches dealing with user
requirements. How do we reflect that our understanding of user requirements
is an evolving process – beginning with the initial user requirements,
spurred on to greater articulation because of the questioning of
the technologists? The refinement continues during every stage of
design as assumptions on the part of the UCD team and technologists
become more apparent. We hope to continue reflecting on these issues
to make a contribution to UCD methodology and software architecture.
Supriya
Assoc Prof Supriya Singh,
Project Leader
supriya.singh@rmit.edu.au
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2. Smart Internet Student Conference Wrap
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The annual Smart Internet Student Conference was held at SITCRC’s
Technology Park headquarters in Sydney on April 29-30. It was an
excellent opportunity for the 40 odd PhD students in attendance
to meet their peers, mingle with a number of interesting guest speakers,
and share their own research with other participants.
This year’s conference included presentations from Smart Internet
CEO Darrel Williamson, Paul Guba from Melbourne University, patent
attorney Kieran Power, Smart Internet SME Director Bob Mounic, Myretsu
(ex Sausage Software) CEO Rob Cumming, and Telstra Research Laboratories.
A particular highlight was the presentation by Paul Gruba who delighted
students with helpful strategies on how to construct a thesis argument
based on a book by the famous Dr Seuss.
On the second day, students presented their own research in more
intimate program settings chaired by an expert in their field. The
workshops gave students an opportunity to seek feedback from their
peers while allowing Smart Internet to hear how its research students
are progressing. Prizes were awarded for the best presentation in
each program and the UCD Project team would like to congratulate
Michael Coburn for picking up the prize for the UE Program.
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3. UCD Involvement in Nymity Project
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The UCD group at RMIT together with Telstra are conducting a user
study for the “Nymity project” A key question in this
user study is: How do people perceive and control personal information
and identity in the context of digital and non-digital communication?
The findings of this study will contribute to the design of digital
technologies, so as to meet the privacy and identity needs of users.
The project has two aspects, qualitative interviewing and a quantitative
survey. Seventeen individual interviews have been conducted and
qualitative analyses are under way. The quantitative survey is in
progress.
The ‘traditional’ view of identity management considers
identity, at best, within a particular, specific context (such as
a bank, or workplace), or at worse, outside any context at all.
There is an often unstated assumption that a person has a single
identity, and that they may like to choose how disclose different
parts of this at different times. Past research emphasises a high
concern about privacy among users.
We consider identity not in isolation, but in the context of relationships
with other people in activity areas such as health care, family
life, telemarketing and entertainment. Identity management is inherently
associated with facilitating communications, transactions, etc.
within relationships. The people, and other entities associated
with such relationships, are essentially linked to identity management
activities.
Preliminary findings from the qualitative study are exciting. We
have discovered that users’ concern about privacy is only
one small part of a much bigger story. People want to control their
personal information in terms of channel, audience, content, and
context, particularly in the areas of personal communication, finance
and health. Users do not want to hold back information to protect
their privacy, as such. Rather they want to share what they want,
with whom they want, when they want. People want control over their
interactions. They want to choose the identities they convey.
For further information on this study, please contact Kylie Cassar-Bartolo
on: kylie.cassarBartolo@rmit.edu.au
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4. Supriya Singh on E-Governance Indian Style
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Supriya Singh recently featured in the guest column of the India-based
ICT Quarterly website to outline her views on e-governance issues
in India and Australia. She outlines some of the challenges facing
both countries and common lessons for best practice.
To view the article, please visit: http://www.skoch.org/new/html/supriya.html
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5. Upcoming Conferences & Calls for Papers
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* ICICS 2004
The fifth International Conference on Information and Computer Science
ICICS’2004 (Formerly WICS) will be held in Dhahran, Saudi
Arabia, on November 28 30, 2004. The theme of this year’s
conference is “Internet and Mobile Computing.”
Papers are invited, but not limited to, the following major topics:
Internet technology, Web services, Internet performance and network
systems, wireless and mobile computing, cryptography, parallel and
distributed systems, and all other topics related to internet and
mobile computing.
For further information, please visit: http://www.ccse.kfupm.edu.sa/icics/
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* MOBIS
The IFIP TC8 Working Conference on Mobile Information Systems (MOBIS)
will be held in Oslo, Norway on September 15 17, 2004.
The objective of the conference is to provide a forum for researchers
and practitioners across the areas of planning, analysis, design,
construction, modification, implementation, utilization, evaluation,
and management of mobile information systems to meet, and exchange
research ideas and results.
For further information, please visit: http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~krogstie/MOBIS.htm
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6. Useful Links and References
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* Brenda Danet and Susan C. Herring, Eds. (2003). “The Multilingual
Internet: Language, Culture and Communication in Instant Messaging,
Email and Chat.” Special issue, Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication, 9(1), November 2003.
This special issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
is entirely devoted to multilingual Internet applications and use.
The contents are listed below:
1) Brenda Danet and Susan C. Herring, "Introduction: The Multilingual
Internet"
2) David Palfreyman and Muhamed Al-Khalil “A Funky Language
for Teenzz to Use:' Representing Gulf Arabic in Instant Messaging"
3) Yukiko Nishimura, "Linguistic Innovations and Interactional
Features of Casual Online Communication in Japanese"
4) Hsi-Yao Su, "The Multilingual and Multi-orthographic Taiwan-based
Internet: Creative Uses of Writing Systems on College-affiliated
BBSs"
5) Dimitris Koutsogiannis and Bessie Mitsikopoulou, "Greeklish
and Greekness: Trends and Discourses of 'Glocalness'"
6) Mercedes Durham, "Language Choice on a Swiss Mailing List"
7) Salvador Climent, Joaquim More, Antoni Oliver, Miriam Salvatierra,
Imma Sanchez, Mariona Taule and Lluisa Vallmanya, "Bilingual
Newsgroups in Catalonia: A Challenge for Machine Translation"
8) Sandi Michele de Oliveira, "Breaking Conversational Norms
on a Portuguese Users Network: Men as Adjudicators of Politeness?"
9) Siriporn Panyametheekul and Susan C. Herring, "Gender and
Turn Allocation in a Thai Chat Room"
The issue can be accessed at no cost at: http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol9/issue1/
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* User-Centred Design Works CD-Rom
The government of the Netherlands funds HCI research in universities
and institutes through its "Innovation Oriented Program on
Human Machine Interaction". In order to strengthen the position
of UCD in industry, it developed a tool for HCI professionals in
the form of a multimedia CD entitled "User Centered Design
Works" in 2002. The CD-ROM is intended to help HCI professionals
to create or improve the appreciation of user centered design, usability
engineering and usability testing within their own organization
or that of their clients. It is available free of charge to HCI
professionals.
To request a copy, please email: jak@senter.nl
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* Ping Zhang and Na Li (2004) “An assessment of human computer
interaction research in management information systems: topics and
methods”, Computers in Human Behavior
20(2) March, pp 125-147.
As an emerging subfield of Management Information Systems (MIS),
Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) or Human Factors studies
in MIS are concerned with the ways humans interact with information,
technologies, and tasks, especially in business, managerial, organisational,
and cultural contexts. To date, few studies have either synthesised
existing studies or drawn an overview of the HCI subfield in MIS.
This paper first provides a framework of broad HCI issues and concerns.
It then reports an assessment of a sample of published HCI articles
in two top MIS journals, MIS Quarterly and Information Systems Research,
over a period of thirteen years (1990–2002). It identifies
the main topics studied, the main research approaches utilised,
the research publication patterns, and the needs for future research
efforts in this subfield.
doi:10.1016/j.chb.2003.10.011
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