HCI people

Yelp provides a suite of tools connecting people to local business through community contributed reviews is at the frontier of motivating to users to contribute. They currently boast about 25 million unique hits per month, and growing quickly, thanks in part to the efforts of their Community Managers.

SOCHI was privileged to hold a brown-bag lunch with two such community managers, Mariah Cherem and Colleen Curtis from Yelp.com. Mariah is the current Metro Detroit Community Manager, and Colleen was the Chicago Community Manager. They provided a great view of what's it like to work for one of the country's best known social media companies. They talked about how they foster the sense of community and keep their users happy and reviewing.

Four UX industry leaders came to SI tonight to talk about 'What makes an effective UX professional;' the event was put on by Michigan UPA (MUPA), the Michigan/Ohio chapter of CHI (MOCHI), the Student Organization for Computer-Human Interaction at the School of Information (SOCHI), and the School of Information Career Development Office. Each panelist gave an introduction and some tips, and then the panelists took questions from the audience. Following are some liveblogged notes from each panelist's individual talk as well as a summary of the panel discussion.

Today Tyler Bell, Product Manager for the Geo Technologies group at
Yahoo!, spoke at SI on the subject of Geo Informatics (or as the wikipedia entry puts it, geoinformatics.

Talk Description: Location-Aware Applications are all the rage in today's
technology and start-up scene. Yet understanding location and providing
the best user experience entails much more than simply putting dots on a
map. This short talk provides an overview of how Yahoo! tackles
geographic context and entity recognition to connect our users with the
world around them.

Read on for notes from SOCHI attendees!

Looking for some inspiration or guidance as you are figuring out what it means to be an interaction designer? One great source for advice is designers currently in the field. The blog for the Interaction Design MFA program at the School for Visual Arts recently collected the thoughts of several noteworthy designers and researchers including Jared Spool, Jon Kolko, Whitney Hess, Robert Hoekman Jr, and more in their a post "Video Notes from the Field".

They were all asked to answer the question "So you’re thinking about becoming a designer? If I could tell you only one thing about going into the field, my advice would be _______ ."

Check out the blog post to view their video responses - Kevin Cheng's (Director of UX for raptr and ok-cancel) video is below.

If I could tell one thing to designers-to-be … from Kevin Cheng on Vimeo.

Following UX tweeps is a great way to envelop yourself in the UX community, stay on top of trends, and position yourself as an active and interested UX professional. Elizabeth at Luminanze Consulting recently posted a lengthy (though not comprehensive) list of UX professionals' twitter handles and names on the Luminanze blog.

Overwhelmed? Follow some of the names you recognize, and then look at who those people follow. The real gems are those who tend to share a lot of information, normally via links.

This week Lena Mamykina a PhD candidate at the Human Centered Computing program of the Georgia Institute of Technology spoke about her work creating ubiquitous computing applications for diabetes management. While most research on healthcare monitoring focuses solely on data capture, Mamykina's applications allow individuals to reflect on the data and learn from their experiences, increasing the patient's feelings of self-efficacy.

Andrea Forte is a Ph.D. candidate in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology where she does research on human-centered computing with a focus on social computing and learning sciences. A video of her lecture "Learning in Public: Information Literacy and New Social Technologies in Schools" is a available for SI students and faculty here.

How can technologies enhance the usability, ubiquity and usefulness of computational systems in everyday work? This is the question Stephen Voida posed to SI faculty and students at his lecture "User Interface Design to Support Real-World Information Work Practices" (see the video of the lecture here).

Human Agency was the focus of the talk by Amy Voida, a researcher at the University of Calagary's Interactions Lab, and an HCI faculty candidate at SI (see the video of her lecture here). She spoke about three areas of her research related to human agency:

• the role of agency in constructing the meaning of technology in collaborative console gaming

The School of Information recently had the pleasure of hosting HCI researcher and University of Sheffield Professor Steve Whittaker. If you missed his lecture "The Future of Our Pasts: Digital Memories and Lifelogging" you can watch a recent Google talk he gave on the same subject here: