Last event of 2008 – 11 Dec. 08 at CUO!

First of all, happy World Usability Day to all of you!

We’d like to invite you to the last SIGCHI.be event of 2008, on Thursday 11 December at CUO, Mediacentrum K.U.Leuven. We have a nice mix of presentations for you, from both sides of the language border, including an academic view on invisible interfaces from the LUCID lab of the Université de Liège, and a practitioner’s view on measuring KPI’s in information architecture.

Schedule

17:00 – 17:15 Introduction
17:15 – 18:00 “To measure is to know” – Erik Verdeyen
18:00 – 18:30 Break
18:30 – 19:15 “Invisible computing” – Stéphane Safin
19:15 – 20:00 Food and drinks, HCI networking

Abstracts

“To measure is to know” – Erik Verdeyen (Information Architects)

Measuring has become more and more important to the job of the information architect.
We need to measure the KPI’s of our projects to assure we meet our customers’ business objectives.
•    We need to measure the usage of the site to assure its effectiveness.
•    We need to measure the users’ behaviour on the site so we can optimize the information architecture to meet their needs.
•    We need to measure business parameters such as sales numbers, conversion rates, … and compare them to the traffic analysis.
Measuring becomes essential to define what we do but also to define why we do it. We need to justify and document the effect our work has on the overall business. A new generation of tools allows us to integrate data from traffic analysis, CRM, ERP, with our traditional work of defining navigations, taxonomies, content organization, etc. Most usability tests only include a small sample of users. Meanwhile there is data available on all of our visitors’ behaviours. We need to exploit this data and use it to define and refine the overall user experience of our online projects.

“Invisible computing” – Stéphane Safin (LUCID-ULg)

The talk will be about main researches in the LUCID-ULg (Lab for User Cognition and Innovative Design). This multidisciplinary HCI lab – gathering competencies from software engineering, building engineering and design, and psychology- is specialised in the development of CAD tools for early stages of (architectural) design. Given the creative nature of the preliminary design activity to be supported, the lab has developed innovative pen-based environments, based on the “invisible computer” paradigm. The speech will present the main prototypes, discuss our user-centred methodologies and raise some issues linked to the invisible computing for a collective discussion.

Bios

Erik Verdeyen has a masters degree in business engineering and a strong background in economics. He has been a full time internet professional for over ten years. He was involved in a wide variety of projects fulfilling a range of roles including webmaster, information architect, strategic consultant, team leader and management consultant. Erik’s experience includes anything from the operational to the strategic aspects of projects for medium to international organisations, in government and private sector including customers such as Agfa Gevaert, Sony Europe, SmalS-MvM (portal of the social security in Belgium), Tractebel, VDAB, The prime minister’s office, The employment agency of the Federal government and the province of Antwerp. He founded Internet Architects with David De Block in early 2006.

Stéphane Safin is a work psychologist – ergonomist. In the framework of the LUCID-ULg he manages the participative design approaches and the usability testing for the development of modelling softwares and pen-based environments mainly in the domain of architectural design. He also leads researches in design cognition, about the role of external representations in the architectural design creative process, and the mechanisms of design collaboration. These research projects are oriented towards the development of innovative tools to support preliminary design.

Sign up!

This is where you can sign up:   http://sigchibe.wordpress.com/events/

- SIGCHI.be members: 15 euro
- Non SIGCHI.be members: 30 euro
- ACM members that are not SIGCHI.be members: 20 euro
- Students that are not SIGCHI.be members: 20 euro

The venue

Centre for User Experience Research (CUO)
Mediacentrum K.U.Leuven
Parkstraat 45
3000 Leuven

Route description: http://soc.kuleuven.be/com/mediac/cuo/contact.htm

We hope to meet you there.

SIGCHI.be is the Belgian chapter of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI) of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). We bring together individuals living in Belgium, having a keen interest in Human-Computer Interaction, Usability Engineering, Experience Design and User-Centered Design, to exchange ideas, learn from and get to know each other.

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