Informal Tools for Designing Anywhere, Anytime, Anydeice User Interfaces

Speaker
James Landay
Assistant Professor, Group for User Interface Research, University of California, Berkeley

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

We are now entering the era of pervasive computing, an era where people will access information and services anywhere, anytime, and from a wide variety of devices. The challenge for researchers and practitioners is how to support the design of user interfaces that will empower people to engage in these interactions easily and efficiently. Our work has been in creating design tools that support the best practices of user-centered design. Such practices include the informal techniques used during the early stages of design, such as sketching and “faking” interactions using Wizard of Oz techniques to test early designs.

In this talk we will argue that tools with informal user interfaces best support these practices. Informal user interfaces support natural human input, such as speech and writing, while minimizing recognition and transformation of the input. These interfaces that document, rather than transform, better support a designer’s flow state. Unrecognized input embraces nuanced expression and suggests a malleability of form that is critical for activities such as early-stage design. We will illustrate this by examining informal tools we have created for designing information architectures and web sites, speech-based user interfaces, and eventually anytime, anywhere user interfaces that take advantage of a variety of modes of input and output on a range of devices.

Speaker's Bio

James Landay is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the CTO and co-founder of NetRaker, a provider of customer experience evaluation solutions for Web-based applications. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1996. His Ph.D. dissertation was the first to demonstrate the use of sketching in user interface design tools. He has published extensively in the area of user interfaces, including articles on user interface design tools, web site evaluation tools, gesture recognition, pen-based user interfaces, mobile computing, and visual languages.