{"title":"Times of change","authors":"R. Prates","doi":"10.1145/761919.761925","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/761919.761925","url":null,"abstract":"I just briefly wanted to touch on two pieces of SIG-CHI business, both critically important. First: SIGCHI elections will be held imminently. It is essential that you, as a member of SIGCHI, cast your vote so that your voice is heard in deciding the future of the organization. We will be voting for a new set of officers. We will also be voting on approval for a set of changes to the SIGCHI Bylaws that aim to streamline the operations of the organization and give us some much-needed flexibility while still keeping us accountable. Second: it has become clear that the CHI conference , as a whole, is no longer serving the SIGCHI community as well as in the past. The CHI 2004 co-chairs are working with the leadership of SIG-CHI to think through some significant modifications to the conference to bring it back in-line with the core needs of the community. You will hear more about it in the near future, but I want to let you know that this process is underway and that your thoughts and ideas on how we can make CHI a better conference are much appreciated. One last note: this will be my last column as chair of SIGCHI. It has been an honor and a privilege to serve this community. For SIGCHI, 2003 is a year of change. New bylaws are being proposed and the SIGCHI Bulletin that has been distributed to its member for so long, will now go online only. The changes reflect SIGCHI´s growth and development along the years. For SIGCHI Local Chapters CHI 2003 will be the beginning of new times with the discussion of the organization of the Council of Chapters and hopefully its creation. SIGCHI Local Chapters have been growing and developing since the first one was created. Now we have 69 local chapters in 30 countries. Each one of them has different characteristics, different activities and different priorities. However, all of them have a common goal: support the local HCI community. Thus, it has always been useful to hear about success and failure stories other chapters have experienced. The sharing of experiences has always been one of the main benefits of the Local SIGs workshop at the CHI conference, when representatives from all chapters meet to discuss their chaptersáctivities and relevant issues. However, this is not enough since it happens only once a year, and also …","PeriodicalId":7070,"journal":{"name":"ACM Sigchi Bulletin","volume":"53 1","pages":"5 - 5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90976719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Session details: From the editor","authors":"","doi":"10.1145/3262123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3262123","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":7070,"journal":{"name":"ACM Sigchi Bulletin","volume":"55 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88186739","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How to fix an election","authors":"S. Savage","doi":"10.1145/761919.761936","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/761919.761936","url":null,"abstract":"About once a month I join my fellow native Floridians in a massive group cringe as the latest piece of staggeringly shameful Sunshine State news rockets its way around the planet. The latest election embarrassment hit me harder than most Florida fiascos because Human Computer Interaction professionals and journalists were to blame, and I'm an HCI geek and an ex-reporter. We didn't learn a thing when Florida made itself the butt of barroom jokes from Stockholm to Singapore by ruining the 2000 presidential election. We made the same mistakes last week. Let's reflect on this for a moment, before we botch another election. The media overlooked the core problem behind the gubernato-rial election screwup, just as they did in the stories about the presidential-campaign butterfly-ballot screwup. This oversight will not recur if Human Computer Interaction professionals do their job, if they explain to the media and the public the importance of involving users in technology design. Here's the core problem: the vote-handling system in question doesn't work; it fails because it was not designed for the people who use it. Rather than dealing with this, most news stories focus on whether voters and poll workers were trained long enough, whether laws were broken in the handling of votes, how results were analyzed, whether there's a conspiracy afoot to steal the election, and so on. These latter questions are important but they're secondary to the core problem; whether or not you have a conspiracy on your hands, you still have a broken ballot system. The New York Times editorial page echoed most news outlets Sunday in its analysis: \"...it appears that most of the problems were caused by improperly trained workers and by voter confusion .\" This is like saying the World Trade Center fell because the weather got really hot for a few hours in those middle floors. Dade County may have dropped the ball in training poll workers. But when people are expected to undergo 12 hours of training before they can operate a simple ballot machine, something is horribly wrong. Reporters, like the rest of us, expect new technologies to be complicated and difficult to use. After decades of wrestling with the blinking \"12:00\" on the VCR, who can blame them for forgetting the whole point in designing computerized ballot systems: to make them easier to use and less error-prone than their predecessors? Why were the ballot devices …","PeriodicalId":7070,"journal":{"name":"ACM Sigchi Bulletin","volume":"95 1","pages":"13 - 13"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76163802","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"www.designingtherealworld.com","authors":"Lon Barfield","doi":"10.1145/761919.761940","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/761919.761940","url":null,"abstract":"First the bad news; this is the last real-world column in its present form. Now the good news; the column continues in the same bimonthly format on the web at: And the even better news; on the web it will be supplemented with all the columns to date and other interaction design resources. The first addition will be a selection of photos from my interaction design collection; everything from bad navigation in hospitals to ice-cream menus. And now for this month's column; 'saying goodbye', or more accurately; the bringing to a close of interactions. Everybody is familiar with the awful feelings left when an interaction has not been finished properly. Having someone hang-up the phone or or walk out on you in the middle of an argument. Placing an order on a web site and suddenly finding yourself back at the home-page. The worst offenders are film and TV programs. Spinning their perfectly crafted narrative along until, all of a sudden; Bang! It's the interval. Or even worse; Mul-der has finally got through to to the secret room where the alien with the funny head is being kept when all of a sudden; 'to be continued ...' Consideration of saying goodbye is important in interaction design because endings and beginnings are vital parts of any interaction. Also, saying goodbye is an important human interaction and designers of public spaces need to pay attention to how the meeting and departing of people are supported in a public environment. My worst experience of this was the design of a high-speed train that had mirrored windows. I got on, selected my seat and then turned to the window to wave goodbye to my hosts stood outside. The mirrored glass meant that I could see out through a dark-pinkish tinge but from outside it was worse; they could hardly see in at all, and my last impression as the train pulled away was of them waving and staring unseeing in to my carriage like a couple of worried zombies. Another key area is the arrivals hall at an airport. People waiting to meet relatives desperately want the earliest peek possible at the person arriving. Normally, you wait by the arrivals doors leading from the customs routes to the public area outside. I have waited at one international airport where there were small windows off to one side between the public waiting area and the …","PeriodicalId":7070,"journal":{"name":"ACM Sigchi Bulletin","volume":"8 1","pages":"19 - 19"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78524644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An early millennial retrospective","authors":"W. Hudson","doi":"10.1145/761919.761931","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/761919.761931","url":null,"abstract":"Under normal circumstances you might not expect to see a retrospective of the new millennium for at least a few more years (or perhaps a few hundred, depending on your enthusiasm for such things). However, given that this column started in 2000 and that web time is a fairly accelerated phenomenon, it seemed appropriate to pay a brief visit to bygone days for this final print edition of the Bulletin. Our journey begins in the year the internet industry collapse began. The term \"dot bomb\" may have been born in the 1990's but 2000 was its coming of age. Jakob Nielsen wrote an Alertbox in the middle of the year foretelling the death of web design, primarily from a usability perspective. In my first Bulletin article, Web evolution: Is HCI an endangered species , I looked at some of the implications of the dot.com demise and considered the future of web design. Have things changed? In general I believe they have. E-commerce sites in particular have discovered what works and what doesn't in terms of converting visits into sales. Happily, clear consistent navigation based on other successful sites is where the safe money is (and safe money is what counts at the moment). The intervening years have also allowed the industry to mellow a little. What was originally a pitched battle between usability professionals and the design community has receded to the occasional skirmish as cooperation and understanding between protagonists continues to improve. Let's skip forward to the middle of 2001 where I asked one of the perennial questions of usability testing: How many users does it take to change a web site? Jared Spool and his colleagues at UIE had just presented a paper at CHI on their experience of testing with large numbers of users (\"Five users is nowhere near enough\"). The paper reported on a study that failed to find even half of a web site's predicted usability problems with 18 users, compared to Nielsen's recommended five users for discount usability testing. It is a little disconcerting that this question remains largely unresolved even now, especially considering that Nielsen's original recommendation was made in 1989 (later revised upwards in a 1993 paper with Thomas Landauer). In \"How many users…\" I suggested that the complexity of web pages was the culprit-how can you expect to find the majority of a web site's problems with just five users when …","PeriodicalId":7070,"journal":{"name":"ACM Sigchi Bulletin","volume":"23 1","pages":"9 - 10"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86126619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Parting thoughts","authors":"J. Konstan","doi":"10.1145/761919.761921","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/761919.761921","url":null,"abstract":"May/June 2003 3 Last month I wrote about the changes underway with SIGCHI Bulletin. In short, SIGCHI’s \"society news\" will move on-line to a Bulletin section of the www.sigchi.org website; a couple of columns (notably \"HCI and the Web\" and \"Book Reviews\") will become part of interactions magazine, some columns will continue on their own websites, and others are wrapping up as their authors and editors move on to other ventures.","PeriodicalId":7070,"journal":{"name":"ACM Sigchi Bulletin","volume":"321 1","pages":"3 - 4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80257308","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}