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OTOinsights’ forthcoming research on user engagement with Google search engine result pages (SERPs) has been accepted to the UPA Boston mini-conference. This research highlights the importance of optimizing media (video, images, etc) on Web pages so they will be properly displayed in Universal Search results. The results of the study along with implications for marketers and user experience practitioners will be discussed. The mini-conference will take place on Tuesday, May 26, 2009, at Bentley University….
Well, CHI is officially over. It was quite the week of interesting presentations. Some gave a 100,000 feet view and some about 50 feet, both of which were great to hear. The HCI community is a great bunch of folks from many different walks of life. Even though there were ~2,000 people in this ridiculously huge building, it still felt intimate. Day 4 had some great presentations and today (not officially a day of CHI), Google, IBM, and Microsoft offered tours of their Cambridge offices. So, without further ado:
Brain Measurement for Usability Testing and Adaptive Interfaces: An Example of Uncovering Syntactic Workload with Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy - Tufts U.
Wow, that title is a mouthful and the presentation was absolutely intriguing. The authors used functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIR) to determine users’ cognitive workload while interacting with an interface. fNIR measures the amount of blood that is flowing through areas of the frontal cortex. The relative change in blood flow in the frontal cortex indicates a working mental load. While using an interface, a person has two sources of workload: using the interface itself and performing the task. They designed a special interface to separate these workloads which are then compared to the workloads during a usability study. There is plenty of work to be done before this type of methodology is mainstream, but I…
It was an interesting, tiring, and rainy day here in Boston. CHI09 (the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction) is being held in the Hynes convention center, which is far bigger than I had anticipated. There certainly seem to be less people at this year’s conference, though I haven’t heard an official attendance number yet. Anyway, I saw many interesting presentations today, so let’s dig on in.
Opening Plenary
Even Small Distance Matters: Social Ergonomics in Collocated and Remote Teams - Judith S. Olson, UC Irvine
Social ergonomics is something that all of us deal with daily, but rarely think about. The most common example of this is ‘personal space.’ When having a conversation, a person will feel different levels of comfort depending on his relationship with the other person and the distance between them (among other factors). For example, a stranger who is conversing very close to you will make you feel uncomfortable, but not if he is further away.
Research shows that when two people are sitting and chatting in the same room, a 90 degree angle is the most comfortable position for the participants. Additionally, in conversations, the taller person typically has dominance. Both of these also hold true for t…