Today is World Usability Day. So we should think harder today (and every other day too) on how we can make things, systems, services … more useful and enjoyable to use.
For my part, I am:

• researching on how to make wireless networking more easy and natural to use
• searching and accessing information more efficient (especially multimedia)

What are you doing?

Information is no longer a scarce resource – attention is. David Rose, a Cambridge, Mass.-based expert on computer interfaces, likes to point out that 20 years ago, an office worker had only two types of communication technology: a phone, which required an instant answer, and postal mail, which took days. “Now we have dozens of possibilities between those poles,” Rose says. How fast are you supposed to reply to an e-mail message? Or an instant message? Computer-based interruptions fall into a sort of Heisenbergian uncertainty trap: it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it – at which point you have, of course, interrupted yourself. Our software tools were essentially designed to compete with one another for our attention, like needy toddlers.

It talks particularly of the issues surroundings notification systems and ambient displays, that I have planned to include in my design.
It features research from Victor M. Gonzalez and Gloria Mark who presented their work at ECSCW in Paris. Mary Czerwinski, a Microsoft researcher, also worked on the subject to help the NASA with managing interruptions on astronauts conducting experiment.

She also collaborated with the HIP group at Microsoft Research that presented on Thursday at Oregon State Univ for a colloquim I had to attend for my Human Computer Interaction class. While their presentation was aimed at helping programmers with learning how to deal with large amounts of code and come to speed quickly on office practice, it could as well been re-used in other environments like general information workers.

The Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) announces the launch of a new publication in the fourth quarter of 2005, the Journal of Usability Studies.
This publication will be a peer-reviewed, on-line journal dedicated to promoting and enhancing the practice, research, ethics, and education of usability engineering.

Authors are invited to submit manuscripts addressing various aspects of quantitative and qualitative usability studies that have a strong generalization value to other practitioners working with any human-interactive product.
This can include (but are not limited to):

• empirical findings of usability studies (but not the full usability
  reports),
• comparative studies between usability methods, approaches, methods,
  and techniques for planning and conducting usability tests
• newly defined and tested usability metrics,
• data analysis approaches,
• academic research that has strong practical and applicable
  implications to design and testing,
• critical or thought/discussion papers challenging and questioning
  practices and proposing innovative ideas and approaches,
• reporting the design and implementation of teaching or training
  approaches,
• descriptions and discussions of automated, computerized tools for
  usability data collection and testing, or
• the empirical development and implementation of usability standards
  and guidelines.

‘Usability studies’ can include:

• experiments,
• laboratory studies,
• field studies,
• contextual inquiries,
• ethnographic studies,
• remote testing,
• expert or heuristic evaluations,
• model-based evaluations
• and other techniques

The journal will appear online quarterly starting the last quarter of 2005

Source: SIGCHI mailing list

I will be attending the workshop “Supporting Appropriation Work: Approaches for the ‘reflective’ user” in addition to presenting a poster (Poster at ECSCW).

The title of my position paper is “Design for appropriation of ubiquity in information systems”.

The title of the poster is “Requirements for design of collaborative applications and systems”. I will try to post a copy here soon.