Welcome

Indiana University is really putting together a strong showing at CHI in Florence. Tonight we learned of the acceptances of papers by the following IU authors.

alt.chi
Shaowen Bardzell and Jeff Bardzell
Tyler Pace

Research Landscapes
Shaowen Bardzell, Tyler Pace and Jeff Bardzell

Work in Progress
Richie Hazelwood, Kevin Makice, Kay Connelly and Youn-Kyung Lim
Shaowen Bardzell and Shruti Bhandari
Shruti Bhandari and Youn-Kyung Lim

Research Competition
Will Odom
Kayce Reed

This in addition to the design competition finalists and the full paper acceptances below.

Kristin Hanks, Dave Roedl, Will Odom and Eli Blevis
Erik Stolterman and Markus Jakobson

Go IU!

My team is one of the 12 semifinalists in the CHI student design competition. We are one of 4 make that 5 teams from Indiana University.

I am excited to present in Italy in April along with my aSister teammates Kshitij Gupta, Adwait Joshi and Nigel Vaz.

I also congratulate our other Indiana University teams:

Rajasee Rege, Jenny Allen, Eric Drewski
James Pierce, Ashley Engelhardt, Jungyoun Yim
Susan Coleman Morris, Augusto Alves
Hillary Elmore, Eugene Chang, Junyoup Kim, Xi Zhu

When I left the journalism industry two years ago not many people were thinking about the usability of their websites. Within the past few weeks I have seen a few things that make me believe that maybe they are starting to come around.

With the spike in online newspaper readership last year, thinking about the user seems to have started to become a priority.

A few weeks ago the Atlanta Journal Constitution posted a job to the CHI jobs list seeking Usability Engineer/Analyst. I also found it interesting that they posted to the CHI jobs listserv and not the typical places you would post journalism jobs. The CHI jobs listserv is one of the locations for people who are interested in the area of user centered design and usability to look for jobs.

I have seen some papers that have done some usability testing on their own without a position like this. A recent online journalism review article talked about a small paper in Alabama that conducted usability testing on their website. This article reminded me of some of the papers I read from the mid to late 90 that discuss usability testing like this on software and other websites outside of the journalism industry.

This is a very positive step for the industry as a whole. Hopefully usability testing will lead to user centered design techniques throughout the industry.

Today I launched a capstone blog to keep track of where my research is currently. I'll be importing a few posts regarding capstone into that blog.

http://www.jamiemcatee.com/capstone

I have also posted my research competition paper there.

I will still post major capstone updates here but all updates will be found on the capstone blog.

Tonight I posted aSister the CHI 2008 student design competition submission that my team submitted today. This year's topic deals with homelessness.

Earlier this week I posted a final project from the end of last semester, Experience the Buskirk Chumley Theatre. It took me a little while to gather all of the pieces of this submission to put online.

In the next few days I hope to post my research competition entry which deals with my capstone project.

Please visit my portfolio to view these new items.

My team is working our CHI student design competition submission. Once it has been submitted I will post the paper and summary in the portfolio section. I think we have an interesting take on the competition and hope we will be selected.

I am in an analysis/planning of my next steps area of my capstone research. Over break I looked through the results of my international student survey. I found some interesting results and I have an idea for a paper. I have a bit of it written but I am not sure if I will make the CHI deadline with this one due to the concentration on the design competition.

Selvan Thandapani, another HCI student, and I are working on a research paper with Professor Erik Stolterman. The paper looks at tools and models practitioners use. We are waiting to hear back as to whether the abstract has been selected for a conference this summer.

Many of you have probably noticed a slight site revision. For blog readers it is a pretty major change for those of you looking at my portfolio site it is a header change and some content tweaks.

I decided to put my blog as my homepage since it was easier to post updates about my current research and other topics I find important.

I believe I have all of the bugs worked out but if you spot anything please send me a note.