The SIGCHI user experience

It is a new year and SIGCHI has a new look....well sort of, we're getting there anyway; though it is a well kept secret. Quietly and with little fanfare SIGCHI has been going about to quietly improving our user experience for our members and other stakeholders. We define our stakehold-ers as in addition to our members: their employers, related educational/public institutions, the press, and other organizations and people who have a stake in our commitment to making technology usable for everyone. Improving our user experience is not just improving our web site, not just improving the experience we offer at conferences , nor is it just getting a logo or getting our visual design act together. Rather it is a multidisciplinary effort to present a uniformed stakeholder experience when interacting with SIGCHI. An interaction can be a web site, attending a conference, reading a journal, in essence every touch point where we interact with our stakeholders. We have been putting together a program of good user experience design where all our communications endeavor to express who is SIGCHI. Now by virtue of the fact that this Bulletin does not use our current user experience guidelines is testament to the fact that this process is very much a work in progress. Furthermore, we do not have enormous resources (money nor full time staff) to allow us to do this in one go. Instead we must invest our own volunteer resources and strategically invest what few monetary resources we do have in order to improve the user experience for our stakeholders bit by bit. In this way we can truly say that we are trying to practice what we preach. This " practice what we preach " movement started with some initial agitation from SIGCHI members and subsequently given a necessary push from the EEC (then) under Marilyn Tremain and Wendy Mackay. Now with Kevin Schofield and Marian Williams, this initiative continues; but, its survival is dependant on the dedication of volunteers , of which there is a desperate shortage of (see Kevin Schofield's article in this issue). To give you an idea of what kind of things you can volunteer for I would like to briefly recount just two of the many projects done so far. One of our first efforts was designing a SIGCHI conference booth. For too long we have had to suffice with a simple Banner which did …