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.

SIGCHI.be

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Dear Fellow HCI professional,

We’d like to invite you to the eight SIGCHI.be event on Thursday, September 18th at the Namahn library in Brussels.

At this event we will conduct our annual general meeting and hold elections for officers for the following positions:

Chair
Secretary
Treasurer

After a short break, we will repeat our crowd-pleaser of last year, ‘Show and Tell’. It’s a pretty simple concept: You bring something you’d like talk about. This can be a prototype of a new product you’re working on but it might just as well be a slideshow, a book or a picture of your children. For example, last time people brought some interesting stuff to talk about:

a pattern library for websites
a diagram for mental models
smart spaces
eHealth
a cell phone study
a rather ‘intelligent’ laser pointer
Frank Gehry’s DZ Bank Building
and a lot more…

Schedule

17:00 – 17:30 Annual Meeting
17:30 – 17:45 Break
17:45 – 18:45 Show and Tell
18:45 – 19:30 Sandwiches with drinks, HCI networking

Sign up!

This is where you can sign up for the eight SIGCHI.be event: 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

Namahn library, Brussels (http://www.namahn.com/reach )

We hope to meet you there!

the SIGCHI.be board

SIGCHI.be, the Belgian professional association for Human-Computer Interaction, is proud to invite you to a presentation by Bill Verplank on ‘Sketching metaphors’.

During the first half of July, Bill Verplank is teaching at the Technical University of Eindhoven. He was found willing to address SIGCHI.be for an evening. We could only firm up this event a few days ago, which is why you are getting the invitation rather late. Sorry about that.

DATE: Wednesday 9 July
TIME: 19:00 – 21:30
VENUE: Namahn library, Brussels (http://www.namahn.com/reach )

To sign up for this event, please forward the below form to david.Geerts@soc.kuleuven.be . Please do so at the latest on Tuesday evening.

Name: [  ]
Organisation: [  ]
Job title: [  ]
SIGCHI.be member ID: [  ]
Attendance fee: [   euro]

Please transmit the attendance fee to account 210-0718355-25 (SIGCHI.be), clearly mentioning the name of the event ‘Verplank’ and the name of the participant(s).

Bill Verplank

Bill Verplank is an interaction designer, human-factors engineer and visiting scholar at Stanford University. He studied mechanical engineering and product design at Stanford (1960-1965) and returned there to teach “visual thinking” with Robert McKim (1971-1974).

His PhD (1965-1977) is from MIT in man-machine systems with Thomas Sheridan, applying information and control theory to measuring human-operator work-load in manual control tasks. As a graduate student he won MIT’s top teaching award, the Goodwin Medal and built kinetic sculpture at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies.

At Xerox (1978-1986) he participated in testing and refining the Xerox Star graphical user interface. For seven years, he taught “Graphical User Interface Design”, “Graphic Invention for User Interfaces” and “Scenarios for Observation and Invention” as tutorials at the ACM SIGCHI conference and participated in developing the ACM SIGCHI Curriculum recommendations.

From 1986-1992, he worked as a design consultant with Bill Moggridge at IDTwo and IDEO to bring graphical user-interfaces into the product design world; he started calling it “interaction design” instead of “user-interface design”.

At Interval Research (1992-2000), he directed research and design for collaboration, tangibility and music. At Stanford, during that time, he worked with Terry Winograd to establish a studio course on Human-Computer Interaction Design which he taught for five years.

Since 2000, he has been a part-time lecturer at CCRMA, the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, at Stanford, teaching a course on designing input devices. Also, he lectures in Computer Science for the HCI Studio course.

The presentation

In his presentation, Bill will explore some important themes about today’s world of experience design. He’ll look at the systems we create: Are they tools? An extension of our brain? Or, maybe they are a vehicle to achieving a greater goal? Or a type of fashion?

Using a series of live sketches (something you have to see to believe), Bill will explore each of these paradigms, look at how each paradigm helps us see the products of our work a little differently and, perhaps, with new insights we hadn’t seen before.

Bill has always been interested in how we use metaphors in our work: in understanding vocabulary (“kill the program”), in inventing (“cash cows”), for organizing (“desktop folders”), for presenting (“radio buttons”). He’s interested in how we can use metaphor as a creative machine — just attach a crank and churn out a new design.

You’ll hear Bill’s personal view of the history and future of human-computer interaction. Along the way, you might pick up some tricks for sketching, which he calls “thinking with a pencil”.
We’ll see you there!

After a successful new year’s drink, with demos of three different prototyping tools by Emakina, Alcatel-Lucent and Namahn, and a more informal drink last week in Ghent, it’s time for the next full-scale SIGCHI.be event.

Let us know on this evaluation form.

On 22 May 2008 Chi Nederland is having their 12th annual conference in Amsterdam.
People who want to participate can register (until 2 March ‘08) at:

http://www.thewebandbeyond.nl/2008/06/website/?page_id=7

Maybe this would be a nice opportunity to show off your work and together with other SIGCHI.be members help put SIGCHI.be on the map.

Best wishes for the New Year from SIGCHI.be! To start off 2008 on a good note, SIGCHI.be invites you to its first event of the year on
23/1 at “De Ultieme Hallucinatie” in Brussels. We start at 17:00.

This time, it’s demo time!
Instead of inviting speakers we thought it would be nice to lower the threshold for a change and do a demo event.
What does this mean? We will have 4 spots available to anyone who wants to share their experiences on how they and their company embrace HCI in their organizations. Participants will get a space in the event room where they can show off their material (posters, slides, applications, videos …). The idea is that we get informal presentations/discussions at the 4 demo booths by presenters and passers-by. The 4 demo booths will have continuous demonstrations in parallel.

The topic for this event: prototyping tools.
What do you use? visio, powerpoint, flash, fireworks…
How do you use it?
What do you use it for?

If you’re interested in showing us how to use your weapon of choice, send an email to hans.de.mondt@gmail.com and become one of the first sigchi.be demo presenters. Be quick, only 4 booths available! Registration ends on 16 january 2008.

If this trial is succesful, more demo events will follow, so if you’re up for it, make this an event to remember!

Even if you’re not showing a demo, you’re of course very welcome to come and watch the demos, as well as enjoy a new year’s drink and some social networking.

We hope to see you there!

To register, go to our events page

Best regards,

SIGCHI.be

Seminar “Gebruikersgericht innoveren met informatietechnologie” op dinsdag 15 januari van 14.00-18.00 te Hasselt

Het seminarie dat wordt georganiseerd ter afsluiting van het Euregio BMG project VIP-lab geeft u een overzicht van de opgeleverde prototypes. Daarnaast kunt u kennismaken met de voordelen die ICT experience prototyping – de gebruikte ontwikkelingsmethode – kan bieden voor toepassingen binnen uw organisatie.

Partners in het VIP-lab project zijn o.a. de KU Leuven (CUO) en UHasselt

Invitation to the VIP Lab closing event

Het Centrum voor Usability Onderzoek (CUO) van de K.U.Leuven verricht onderzoek naar de
gebruiksvriendelijkheid van ICT en beschikt over speciale usability labs (iLab.u) om gebruikerstesten uit te
voeren. Het CUO maakt deel uit van het IBBT, het Interdisciplinair instituut voor BreedBand Technologie. Wij
zijn op zoek naar:

een RESEARCH COORDINATOR (M/V) en USABILITY ONDERZOEKERS (M/V)

RESEARCH COORDINATOR (M/V)

Als “research coordinator” ben je de centrale contactpersoon van het CUO voor de relaties met externe
financiers zoals het IBBT, IWT, EU,… en de interne centrale diensten van K.U.Leuven.
Je taken:
• Financieel management van de onderzoeksgroep
• Beheer van de resource planning en globale projectplanning
• Budgetcoördinatie en financiële rapportering van Vlaamse en Europese onderzoeksprojecten
• Exploreren van nieuwe en bestaande financieringsbronnen
• Ondersteunen van onderzoekers bij het bemiddelen/oplossen van problemen binnen
onderzoeksprojecten
• Mee bepalen van de strategie van het CUO
Wij verwachten:
• Een universitaire opleiding of gelijkwaardig.
• Ervaring met resource planning en projectplanning
• Een team player met goede people management skills
• Grondige kennis van Microsoft Excel en MS Project
Wij bieden:
• Een flexibele en dynamische werkomgeving binnen een gereputeerde onderzoeksgroep
• Een verantwoordelijke en strategische functie
• Een stimulerend loon

USABILITY ONDERZOEKERS (M/V)
Je verricht contractonderzoek in het domein van usability, human-computer interaction en user interface
design (zie website CUO voor meer informatie i.v.m. de projecten).
Wij verwachten:
• Een universitaire opleiding of gelijkwaardig, bij voorkeur in de Communicatiewetenschap,
(Cognitieve) Psychologie, Cognitieve Ergonomie, Antropologie, Productontwikkeling,
Interactieontwerp of HCI
• Een meer dan gemiddelde kennis van en interesse in ICT
• Interesse in wetenschappelijk onderzoek
Pluspunten zijn:
• Ervaring in het schrijven van wetenschappelijke artikels en rapporten
• Ervaring in het domein van usability
• Ervaring met onderzoeksprojecten
Wij bieden:
• Een flexibele en dynamische werkomgeving in een gereputeerde onderzoeksgroep
• Uitvoeren van en meewerken aan high-tech onderzoeksprojecten
• De gelegenheid om verantwoordelijkheid op te nemen
• Een stimulerend loon
Heb je interesse?
Stuur dan vóór 15 januari je kandidatuur via e-mail naar: dirk.degrooff@soc.kuleuven.be
Meer informatie over het CUO kan je vinden op : http://www.kuleuven.be/cuo/
De coördinaten van het CUO: Parkstraat 45 Bus 3605 – 3000 Leuven. Tel: 016/32 32 09

Overzicht

Unit/divisie

SD WORX is een internationaal HRM dienstenbedrijf waar je werkt in een leuke en uitdagende omgeving. Vanuit ons hoofdkantoor te Antwerpen – met zicht op de Schelde – ondersteunen wij onze klanten. IT is een hoofdactiviteit die onze core business, HRM, ondersteunt. We dienen dan ook een quasi perfecte ondersteuning te geven. Daarom worden er continu grote inspanningen geleverd om de kennis van onze 500 IT-ers te verbeteren door opleidingen en certificaties. Onze sterke groei leidt al enkele jaren tot een brede waaier aan innovatieve infrastructuur-en development projecten, zowel intern als extern, en dit met de nieuwste technologieën.

Binnen de divisie IT Centraal zoekt men momenteel een User Interface Architect. In die functie ben je de centrale verantwoordelijke voor alles wat met user interface design te maken heeft.

Je job

Je takenpakket bestaat uit:

• onderhouden, uitbreiden en uitdragen van de interne GUI stijlgids;
• met raad en daad bijstaan van onze functionele analisten tijdens het ontwerpproces, voornamelijk bij het creëren van paper prototypes & mock-ups, voor zowel Windows als webtoepassingen;
• actief bijwonen van collaboratieve ontwerpsessies met eindgebruikers;
• expertevaluaties uitvoeren op nieuwe en bestaande interactieontwerpen van onze toepassingen;
• organiseren en/of ondersteunen van usabilitytesten met eindgebruikers;
• samen met business analisten & product managers uittekenen van een gemeenschappelijke visie op user experience, gebaseerd op concrete klantenbehoeften;
• integreren van bestaande toepassingen in een gemeenschappelijke UI strategie, en evolueren naar een gecentraliseerd cross-product design;
• opvolgen van externe leveranciers op het vlak van interactie- & grafisch ontwerp;
• opvolgen van de quality assurance voor wat betreft UI design.

Je profiel

We verwachten dat je:

• een universitair diploma of vergelijkbare ervaring hebt op het vlak van HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) of een gerelateerde discipline;
• vertrouwd bent met interactieontwerp, informatiearchitectuur, user-centered design methodologie & gebruikersonderzoek;
• vertrouwd bent met Visio, of ervaring hebt met vergelijkbare prototyping tools;
• inzicht hebt in esthetiek en vormgeving;
• bij voorkeur kennis hebt van Microsoft GUI technologieën en tools, zoals ASP.NET of MS Expression Blend;
• kan samenwerken in een multidisciplinair team van business- & functioneel analisten en software engineers;
• leergierig bent en zelfstandig op de hoogte blijft van nieuwe ontwikkelingen op het vlak van user interface design & usability.

Plaats tewerkstelling

Antwerpen

Goed om weten

Met een job bij SD WORX beland je in een dynamische en vooruitstrevende organisatie. Dat betekent dat je heel wat ruimte krijgt om initiatief te nemen. Door ons succes en jouw inzet is ook je carrière verzekerd. We zorgen natuurlijk voor een passend loon en extralegale voordelen.

Meer info op http://www.sd.be/jobs/