USER INTERFACE STRATEGIES '94
A Live Satellite TV Broadcast
December 14, 1993, Tuesday 11am-5pm EST
University of Maryland Instructional Television
Organized by Ben Shneiderman
Audience: User interface designers, programmers, software
engineers, interface evaluators, managers in the computing and
communications fields, technical writers, human factors
specialists, trainers, marketing personnel.
Overview: Four leaders in the field present their perspectives on
why the user interface is a central focus for expanding
applications of computers in business, science, entertainment,
etc. They offer their visions and suggest exciting opportunities
for the next decade's developments. Demonstrations, new software
tools, guiding principles, emerging theories, and future scenarios
will be presented.
Enrollment: This symposium will be broadcast live by satellite
from the University of Maryland Instructional Television System
and on the National Technological University (NTU) Network.
Contact your organization's training office to
ask if they can arrange a satellite downlink.
For further information, please contact:
Professional Development Assistant
University of Maryland
Instructional Television System (ITV)
2104 Engineering Classroom Building
College Park, MD 20742.
Phone (301) 405-4905 or FAX (301) 314-9639.
The downlink site license for this course is $1600; this includes
permission to videotape. If you cannot watch the broadcast live or
make a videotape; ITV will make a videotape for you for $1800. All
videotape purchases are restricted for internal use by your organization.
Next Generation Graphical User Interfaces
Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland
The wildly popular graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are an
improvement over command languages, but the next generation of
user interfaces is already on the way. The aging GUIs with clumsy
one-window-at-a-time housekeeping will give way to rapid,
coordinated multiple windows. The future will be dynamic,
spatial, 3-dimensional, virtual, ubiquitous, gestural, colorful,
often auditory, and sometimes immersive. The demand for high
resolution multimedia and full-motion video will push the hardware
requirements, absorb network capacity, and challenge the algorithm
designers. How can we balance the desire for innovation with the
need for stability?
Ben Shneiderman is Head of the Human-Computer Interaction
Laboratory, Professor of Computer Science, and Member of the
Institute for Systems Research all at the University of Maryland,
College Park. He is the author of Designing the User Interface,
2nd Edition and Software Psychology, and the co-author of the
hyperbook/disk Hypertext Hands-On!. Dr. Shneiderman is the editor
of Sparks of Innovation in Human-Computer Interaction, on the
editorial board of 6 journals, the author of 150 technical papers,
and the creator of the Hyperties hypertext system. His
consultancies have included Apple, AT&T, GE, IBM, Intel, Library
of Congress, NASA, and NEC.
Usability Engineering
Jakob Nielsen, Bellcore
Usability engineering is the systematic approach to improving user
interfaces by applying a set of established methods throughout the
system development lifecycle. There is a large number of methods
to choose from, but this presentation will focus on a small number
of highly cost-effective methods that can be used by all
development projects. Methods to be covered include heuristic
evaluation for "quick-and-dirty" finding of usability problems at
minimal cost, thinking aloud and user testing for empirical
verification of usability. Across a number of projects, iterative
design to remove usability problems has been found to improve
measured usability by 38% per iteration as the median value.
Jakob Nielsen is a member of the Computer Sciences Department in
Bellcore's applied research area. Dr. Nielsen's earlier
affiliations include the IBM User Interface Institute in Yorktown
Heights, NY and the Technical University of Denmark. Nielsen
coined the term "discount usability engineering" and was the co-
inventor of the heuristic evaluation method. He is the author of
the books Usability Engineering and Hypertext and Hypermedia, and
on the editorial boards of five journals in the user interface and
hypertext fields. Nielsen also was the papers co-chair for the
joint ACM and IFIP INTERCHI'93 international conference on
computer-human interaction.
Groupware: Supporting Group Work with Technology
Judy Olson, University of Michigan
Most of the work we do in organizations is done as members of
groups or teams. A set of software applications is emerging that
is specifically built to support work groups. These include
email, conferencing systems that support structured discussions
among people working at different times and places, meeting rooms
with linked computers and decision support software, video
conferencing in meeting rooms, desktop video connections for both
informal and intense encounters, and remotely linked computers for
distant, real-time work. To capitalize on the benefits of this
new groupware technology and avoid the pitfalls, we have to
understand more about how it changes the quality of work, social
interactions, and organizational processes.
Judith Olson is Professor and Chair of the Computer and
Information Systems Department at the Michigan Business School.
She is a senior researcher in the Cognitive Science and Machine
Intelligence Laboratory, where she conducts research on the
behavior of groups in both face-to-face meetings with technology
support, and in remote offices connected with computers and video.
She has done research on user interface design and was a Technical
Supervisor of human factors in systems engineering at Bell
Laboratories. Prof. Olson is on the General Council of the ACM,
active in the CHI conferences, on a number of editorial boards,
and a consultant at major companies in the US (e.g., IBM, GM, EDS,
Unisys) and Europe (e.g., Netherlands PTT, Rank/Xerox).
Virtual Reality: Where Users Become Participants
Myron Krueger, Artificial Reality Corp.
Virtual reality is the most widely touted technology in memory.
At the same time, there is reason to doubt that many people are
going to be willing to wear scuba gear in the office. However,
the idea of virtual reality works, even if the current technology
does not. It changes how we think about the human interface and
suggests new application domains as well as novel approaches to
familiar problems. This talk will describe an unencumbering
technology that can be used in the near term and a novel head-
mounted display that will be acceptable for everyday use.
Dr. Krueger pioneered the development of unencumbered full-body
participation in computer-generated experiences. His VIDEOPLACE
and VIDEODESK systems redefined telecommunication by placing
remote participants in a shared graphic world in which they could
interact naturally. His books Artificial Reality and Artificial
Reality II (Addison-Wesley 1983 and 1991) were the first on
virtual reality. He has received awards in both art and science,
has given well over a hundred invited talks, and has been widely
covered in the media.