Brinda Dalal

What a to-do: studies of task management towards the design of a personal task list manager

This paper reports on the results of studies of task management to support the design of a task list manager. We examined the media used to record and organize to-dos and tracked how tasks are completed over time. Our work shows that, contrary to popular wisdom, people are not poor at prioritizing. Rather, they have well-honed strategies for tackling particular task management challenges. By illustrating what factors influence task completion and how representations function to support task management, we hope to provide a strong foundation for the design of a personal to-do list manager. We also present some preliminary efforts in this direction.

The bloodhound project: automating discovery of web usability issues using the InfoScentπ simulator

According to usability experts, the top user issue for Web sites is difficult navigation. We have been developing auto-mated usability tools for several years, and here we describe a prototype service called InfoScent™ Bloodhound Simula-tor, a push-button navigation analysis system, which auto-matically analyzes the information cues on a Web site to produce a usability report. We further build upon previous algorithms to create a method called Information Scent Absorption Rate, which measures the navigability of a site by computing the probability of users reaching the desired destinations on the site. Lastly, we present a user study involving 244 subjects over 1385 user sessions that show how Bloodhound correlates with real users surfing for in-formation on four Web sites. The hope is that, by using a simulation of user surfing behavior, we can reduce the need for human labor during usability testing, thus dramatically lower testing costs, and ultimately improving user experience. The Bloodhound Project is unique in that we apply a concrete HCI theory directly to a real-world prob-lem. The lack of empirically validated HCI theoretical model has plagued the development of our field, and this is a step toward that direction.

Persuasive Encounters: Ethnography in the Corporation

In corporate settings, ethnographic methods are challenged routinely by managers who confront ethnographers with a set of typical objections that question the validity and effectiveness of ethnographic methods, findings, and recommendations. This article offers a series of steps toward overcoming this impasse by laying out a set of arguments for legitimizing ethnographic work. We discuss ways of responding to a variety of problematic encounters, involving some relatively quick answers to challenges of that sort but also acknowledging that the different worldviews of managers and ethnographers can be reconciled only in a long-term educational effort. In the last analysis, embedding ethnography in corporations is an exercise in culture change that almost always relies on rephrasing questions and reformulating metaphors to resituate our practice.

Fault lines of user experience: the intersection of business and design

One of the central challenges of the User Experience discipline has always been how early in the development cycle it can exert any degree of influence. The challenge that our field is facing today more pronounced than ever is how to influence the decision makers that give directions guiding individual product development. And vice versa, this early decision making process can benefit from user experience approaches that help ground its direction in user research, and inform its decisions creatively through concepts and design thinking -- see for example the concept of Business Design™ (as taught by the Rotman school of management, with similar approaches being the foundation of successes such as design consultancies like IDEO). The goal of the panel will be to draw together a community of experts and interested audience members in this topic and initiate a discourse on its key issues and opportunities.