Eric D. Bergman

The audible web: auditory enhancements for Mosaic

Interest in the World-Wide Web (WWW), a collection of hypermedia information distributed across the Internet, has exploded with the advent of Mosaic, a graphical user interface for navigating the WWW. In spite of Mosaic’s popularity, studies have found usability problems in the original interface, especially with regard to feedback, terminology, and adherence to GUI guidelines [2, 4]. This paper reports on a preliminary investigation of auditory feedback as one approach to enhancing Mosaic’s user interface. The Audible Web is Mosaic embedded with nonspeech auditory cues intended to aid user monitoring of data transfer progress, provide feedback for user actions, and to provide content feedback to aid navigation of the WWW.

Information appliance design at Sun Microsystems

In this paper, we outline some of the design considerations driving the approach used by the consumer products user experience team at Sun Microsystems. These include simplification, accounting for the usage domain, and the claim that dedicated devices require dedicated user interfaces.

Universal design: everyone has special needs

Despite high profile discussions of user-centered design in the CHI community, until recently a substantial population of users has been largely ignored. Users who have restricted or no use of hands, eyes, ears, or voice due to environment, task context, repetitive strain injury, or disability constitute a diverse and significant user population, but these users receive relatively little mention in mainstream HCI conferences or literature. Design considerations for users with vision, hearing, or movement impairments overlap with those for the general population across a variety of tasks and contexts (e.g., high workload tasks, automobile systems, phone interfaces). Following on this theme, the panel will promote discussion of so-called “Universal Design” -design for the broadest possible range of users.

Software Ergonomics Comes of Age: The ANSI/HFES-200 Standard

In 1994, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) proposed a software ergonomics standards project to the American National Standard Institute (ANSI), which was approved and designated as ANSVHFES-200. The purpose of this panel session is to review the background, status, contents, and issues relating to the HFES/ANSI-200 proposed standard on software ergonomics. Recent HFES administrations have identified the development of ergonomics standards as a strategic objective of the society. In addition, the considerable success of the ANWHFES100 Standard for the Human Factors Engineering of VDT Workstations and the ongoing software standards ergonomics activity in the International Standards Organization (SO) have contributed momentum for the development of an ANSVHFES software user interface standard.