Speakers

April 4th ‘07 event

Lecture 1: Panos Markopoulos (Technische Universiteit Eindhoven): Design for and with children

Designing usable human-computer interfaces is a tough job. Objective usability testing of creative designs for computer systems that are used by adults might be even harder. But what about creative systems that are used by children? While the potential of this product category grows, there’s a lot of uncharted territory for the interaction designer.
Panos Markopoulos is an Associate Professor at the TU/e in the department of Industrial Design. He teaches for the USI post-graduate programme where he is responsible for curriculum affairs. He has worked as a researcher at Queen Mary University of London and Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven. His research and teaching topics are related to user system interaction with ambient intelligence environments and interaction design for children.

 

Lecture 2: Peter Frings (Agfa Graphics): The road to usability is paved…

How to convert a software development team – one that has been creating black-box software and device drivers for eons – into a team that creates a very complex and highly interactive product? Peter will present lessons that he has learned over a period of ten years.
Peter Frings is an Industrial Engineer by education and started work as a field engineer for control systems. After a few years, he moved on to programming control systems, involving green-screen (VT100) user interfaces. He started work at Agfa as a developer of prepress production systems. Since 1997, he’s in charge of designing user interfaces for prepress workflow systems.

December 20 th ‘06 event

LECTURE 1: Introducing human-centered research to games: developing games for and with senior citizens, by Vero Vanden Abeele

Play may well be timeless and ageless, but the average age of consumers for digital games remains between 15 and 35. It appears that senior citizens – an ever increasing segment of the population – are being ignored by the games industry. To prove that those who have reached the age of 65 can be involved actively in the games sector, we launched the Sbox project, the aim of which is to have computer games developed for, and in conjunction with, senior citizens. By using a human-centered approach, combining ethnographically informed research together with participatory design principles, the Sbox project matches the framework of a more people-propelled innovation process to a purely technically propelled innovation process. The methodology employed in the project permitted the identification of the unvoiced needs, wishes and playful dreams of senior citizens and consequently the development of ‘Petanque’: a multi-player console game.

Vero Vanden Abeele is currently an assistant Teacher and Researcher in User Experience & Interaction Design at Group T – Leuven Engineering School. Vero has a Master’s degree in Design Sciences from the Hogeschool Antwerpen (Productontwikkeling). Fascinated by Human-Machine Interaction, she was introduced to Interaction Design at the Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. After gaining professional experience in designing ‘hardware user interaction’ for people with speech disabilities, she returned to the academic world, where she focuses on how to create the optimal user experience in a digital world. Recently, she started her doctoral research in the area of tangible computing and inclusive games.

LECTURE 2: User interface development: craft vs. engineering? by Quentin Limbourg and Adrien Coyette

During the last few years, the area of Human Computer Interaction has been compared to the area of Software Engineering, the former being described as mainly empirical, experience-based, and relying on implicit knowledge as opposed to the latter, notorious for being deliberately structured, principle-based, and relying on explicit knowledge. It is known that User Interface (UI) development involves crafting skills.

Can those skills be integrated in an engineering life cycle? How is the user’s experience taken into account in an engineering perspective? What about the role of the designer? Does the user remain the center of all concerns? The talk will highlight the challenges and shortcomings of engineering methods for constructing UIs as opposed to the need of integrating qualitative knowledge in the UI development cycle. An illustration will be provided by presenting the efforts around transformational development of user interfaces and the UsiXML language (www.usixml.org) developed in the Belgian Laboratory of Computer Human Interaction (BCHI). Tool demos will be presented by Adrien Coyette, member of BCHI and author of SketchiXML.

Quentin Limbourg has been working in the domain of HCI for 8 years. His successive positions were: teaching and research assistant at the Belgian Laboratory of Computer Human Interaction (BCHI), Management School (IAG) of the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL); invited researcher at OO-Method Group, Universidade Politecnica de Valencia (UPV), research consultant for Harmonia Inc. (USA), spin-off of Virginia Tech., creators of the UIML (User Interface Markup Language) language. Quentin currently is IT consultant at the R&D unit of SMALS-MvM, an non-profit organisation in charge of large computer projects in Belgian e-government. He is also invited lecturer in HCI at Université Libre de Louvain (ULB) and Université Mons-Hainaut (UMH). His research has been focused on the application of software engineering methods to user interfaces for building better information systems.
Adrien Coyette has joined the Belgian Laboratory of Computer Human Interaction (BCHI) in 2003. Adrien’s research interests are focused on user interfaces prototyping and especially on the development of SketchiXML.

LECTURE 3 :Is a segmented information architecture the ultimate solution for a user-centered website? by Marc Van de Woestijne

The first advice an information architect (IA) will give you, is that your website should not be structured according to how your organisation is structured, but according the mental model of the users. Still, we see a lot of websites where this did not happen. Did the IA fail? In most cases the IA has meticulously organised the information on the website. But for the definition of the target audiences he has been fooled by the customer segmentation of the organisation. Large organisations tend to segment their customers, so that they can more effectively organise their sales and marketing efforts. This is right for a direct sales approach, but does not work for the website. The customer segmentation of the organisation is definitely not the problem of the visitor of the website, although he is often forced to select his customer segment: am I a medium or a large account? And If I choose ‘medium account’, do I get other products and other prices?

Why do so many website annoy their visitors with segmentation questions? It’s just because this permits them to keep on thinking according their own organisational structure. How can you prevent this as an IA? During the workshop, I will use three cases to illustrate how you can avoid this trap. I will also show that building a consensus within the organisation is a key prerequisite.

Marc Van de Woestijne has a master in sociology and in computer science. He worked most of his career at Microsoft and Oracle. One of his finest achievements was the start-up and development of MSN.be to the most visited portal in Belgium. Since two years, Marc is working as an independent information architect, with customers as FOD Arbeid, Telenet, Belgacom, USG People, IVA Zorg en Gezondheid, Namahn, Fluxys, Vlaamse Uitgeversmaatschappij (now Corelio), De Tijd and Mensura.