Impressions from the HCI2007: Jared Spools keynote

In brief: Never miss a HCI again. It was a well organized conference with very nice and interesting people. The food was better than expected and the English humour lived up to the expectations.

Jared Spool, originally uploaded by xeeliz.

Particular arousing was the keynote of Jared Spool. He acted as an evangelist, a capitalist and a magican. He communicated a very clear vision of what the research challenges in near futures are :

He made a very clear argument on HCI as an engineering discipline (as opposed to a craft). Usability is becoming a mission-critical quality in large-scale ecommerce applications. He suspects , that finding usability effects is still far from being a development activity with reproducable outcome. In his words, the question is not any longer if testing 5 or 8 users suffices to find 80% of the defects. In contrast, companies will ask for a guarantee, that 99% or 99,9% (he was not sure about the counts of nines) of the defects are trapped…

… and resolved. Spool was very optimistic with the concept of usability patterns, which he considers to have design knowledge at hand if an application has to (re)designed.

You can guess that these claims excited me, because I’m doing active research on improving a pattern-based inspection method and on an advanced measurement model for evaluation processes.

Powered by ScribeFire.