The celebration continues: HCIL 98 trip report

Another cake, another candle, another year! The Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HClL) at the University of Maryland-College Park celebrated a year of research and scholarly activity on May 29th, 1998 at the 15th Anniversary Symposium and Open House. Led by Dr. Ben Shneiderman, director of the HCIL, the symposium offered the 220 attendees a showcase of presentations, demonstrations and one-on-one discussion around two central themes-information visualization and the design of learning tools. The Symposium reflected the breadth and depth of HCI expertise across the University with participation from departments, colleges and institutes including: Trivista Corporation and Apple Computer along with software donated by Microsoft Corporation provided a solid foundation for a high degree of technological synergy across these departments. Symposium participants arrived on campus to experience the buzz of excitement generated by leading experts in the field of Human Computer interaction (HCI) including and many others. After morning coffee and danish, Dr. Shneiderman welcomed a nearly full Tyser Auditorium with enthusiasm and anticipation of the day's events. The presentations that followed included a wide range of HCI topics including: Multiple The day was both entertaining and educational and provided something interesting for the many different types of participants present at the Symposium. For instance, it was a perfect day for researchers to witness activity at another educational institution with a strong HCI presence. Persons from the business community could sample the types of applications available and consider their applicability within their respective domains. Students could absorb the wealth of knowledge offered by a lab of experts dedicated to the improvement of user interface design. A Few Highlights Ben Bederson, a new faculty member at the University, showed PadPrints, an application that he and others created at the University of New Mexico and that builds on his prior work with Pad++. PadPrints allows an Internet user to maintain a graphical hierarchical history of visited web pages. It allows the user to zoom into a single page or zoom out to see the overview of pages. The practical application of this technology is amazing. The tree metaphor for Web navigation , with a series of pages as its "branches", dramatically increases the usability of the Internet. Empirical study of PadPrints indicates that users experience improvements in time to perform tasks, number of pages accessed and subjective satisfaction when using PadPrints compared to Netscape Navi-gator's history feature. Allison Druin, also joining the University of …