On October 13, SOCHI held our first-ever "Ignite" event, where students were invited to speak for 5 minutes about a topic of their choice. This event was modeled after the official Ignite events, where speakers are given 20 slides and slides auto-advance after 15 seconds, whether they are ready or not! We found that this was a great format for students to keep it short and simple in talking about topics they are passionate about.

We had 9 awesome speakers for the event: some talked about lessons learned during their summer internships (including for several startups), some shared advice with fellow students about job searching and independent studies, one reported on a recent conference, and one gave a rousing talk on affordances. We encourage you to check out them all, as each speaker much to share. Enjoy!

Speakers:
Katie McCurdy: “Most Important Things I Learned at the 2009 Design Research Conference”
Laura Rodrian: “Professional for Hire: Making the Most of Your Job Search”
Noah Liebman: “The Death of Touch: Tactile Affordances in an Age of Multitouch”
Jeremy Canfield: “Phonagle, the Untold (short) Story”
Debra Lauterbach: “Choose Your Own Adventure: Extending Your Learning Outside the Classroom”
Eunice Shin: "Working for a Brand Experience Agency"
Wentao Wang: “HCI Work in Startups”
Jo Pu: “100 Days of Summer at Pitney Bowes” - slides only available on Slideshare
Ami Arnault: “Lessons Learned from Working for an Early-stage Startup” (presentation not recorded)

Playlist of presentations on Vimeo: (or click here to go to Vimeo)

Source: Flickr

Check out the creativity of SI students - the collection of student sketchnotes from danah boyd's talk at the JSB symposium last week is now online!

Sketchnotes are just visual notes - they use pictures, doodles, typography, etc. to represent concepts rather than taking verbatim notes. Studies have shown that this type of visual notetaking actually helps you focus more during a talk, and also helps you remember more of the details later. Sketchnotes have been popularized recently by people like Mike Rohde, whose sketchnotes from SxSW and other conferences have circulated widely on the web.

Participating students (in order of sketchnotes):

* Yang-Chen (Avalon) Hu, Human-Computer Interaction student
* Colleen Theisen, Tailored student
* Katie McCurdy, Human-Computer Interaction student
* Laura Rodrian, Tailored student
* Jeremy Canfield, Tailored student
* Dug Song, local entrepreneur
* Debra Lauterbach, Human-Computer Interaction and Social Computing student
* Elaine Engstrom, Human-Computer Interaction and Library & Information Services alum

Check out the showcase page of the whole collection here.

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.

Source: Flickr

Source: Flickr

Source: Flickr

We held the kickoff meeting for this fall's Mozilla Design Challenge last Thursday night up at Design Lab 1 (or DL1 as we say) on North campus. 26 SI students came to eat some pizza courtesy of Mozilla, sketch ideas relating to browsing history, and then work in small groups to further brainstorm, develop, and whiteboard ideas. The evening was super fun and stimulating, and it was a great chance for HCI types from different years to get to know one another a little better. Jeremy captured some great pictures throughout the evening - check them out on flickr.

Students will now work individually or in groups to develop their ideas a bit further; the next check-in point for the challenge will be on Thursday, October 8th in the DL1 at HCI show and tell. This will be a chance to show off progress and get some feedback from peers.

The challenge will officially end somewhere right around Halloween, and students will submit their designs at that point. The goal is to submit a short video explaining the concept, although some students might take it to the next level and create an animation or prototype. We are really looking forward to seeing what people come up with!

If you missed the first event but want to get on the email list for this challenge, just write sochi-officers@umich.edu.

We are now officially on our way to a great semester! Welcome to all of our new HCI students. Many of you have been asking, "How do I join SOCHI?" We have great news for you: you don't have to do anything! There are no membership dues or official roster list for SOCHI. Just show up at any of our events!

There are a few things that you can do to be sure you catch all of the latest SOCHI news and are informed of our events:

1. Sign up for the SOCHI listserv. Directions can be found at:
http://sochi.cms.si.umich.edu/?q=content/join-mailing-list

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!

All School of Information students, alumni, faculty and staff are invited to get the year started right this Friday, September 11th at Dominick's!

SOCHI has arranged an SI-only gathering at Ann Arbor's favorite backyard patio from 6-9pm. We are looking forward to seeing many old friends and new faces. Stop by anytime! Just look for the section marked off for SI.

If you're new to Ann Arbor, Dominick's is located just South of the Law Quad (or two blocks Southwest of West Hall), on Monroe Street.

Next thursday, HCI graduate students at the University of Michigan School of Information will continue their partnership with Mozilla by participating in this fall's Mozilla Labs' University Design Challenge. This challenge asks students to research and design solutions around browsing history: "How can we make sense of this rich source of data and how do we best present this data to the user?"

The School of Information is one of four schools from three countries that is taking part in this challenge, and each school will take a slightly different approach. In our initial event we'll introduce students to the challenge, brainstorm and whiteboard ideas, and share them with one another. Then students will have individually or in small groups take their idea to the next level; this might be a series of mock-ups, a video, or even a prototype.

Over the past year, Mozilla and the U of M School of Information have worked together to put on several design jam sessions; and several SI students have submitted their work to Mozilla for review by other design challenge participants and the Mozilla Labs team. These experiences have benefitted SI students in a few ways: they've gotten valuable supplemental design practice, they've made themselves more visible in the design and open source community, and they've had the very exciting opportunity to work closely with and receive feedback from members of the Mozilla Labs team.

The following students' mockups, prototypes and video examples are available online:

• The TabViz team, which originated in SI's Information Visualization class, won the 'Best in Class' award at Mozilla's 2009 Summer Design Challenge. Props to SI students Jakob Hilden, Liz Blankenship, and Kerry Kao.
• Katie McCurdy submitted a mock-up and prototype to the Spring Design Challenge to communicate her ideas about being able see elements of different websites at the same time.
• Maureen Hanratty and Ian Tadashi Moore submitted a flash animation to last fall's Design Challenge (link forthcoming).

For more information on next week's event and to RSVP, check out the facebook event. And check out older posts on the design jams and challenges SOCHI has held in the past year.

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.