The NEW Web: An Unconference

The NEW Web: An Unconference

When: Saturday, November 4, from 9 to 5
Where: Talley Student Center on the NC State Campus
Cost: Free to attend
What to bring: Laptops with wireless if you have them, lunch money, an open mind
Who can attend: Everyone!

STC Carolina and NC State STC Student Chapter are hosting our first ever unconference! The idea for this event is to share up-to-the-minute information about new web developments that are both easy and essential right now. We have scheduled sessions, but if there is something else you want to discuss then we can do that, too. The best part of any conference often takes place outside of the formal sessions; learning from and sharing with your peers is just as important and often more useful. That’s the opportunity this unconference provides.

– Abe Crystal

2006 Henderson Lecture: Dr. David Weinberger

What: “Everything is Miscellaneous,” the UNC/SILS 2006 Henderson Lecture
Who: Dr. David Weinberger
When: 2 p.m., Thursday, December 7, 2006
Where: Murphey Hall Auditorium (room 116), UNC-Chapel Hill. A reception will follow.

Abstract
Ever since Aristotle, we have organized knowledge according to some basic principles. By odd coincidence – that is, by no coincidence at all – these are the same principles that guide how we organize objects in the physical world. The most common structure of knowledge is the branching tree, found in everything from books (volumes, chapters, sections…) to the tree of life (animals, vertebrates, mammals…). We’ve assumed that to know a field is to see how everything has its unique place.

Then the digital revolution happened, eliminating the restrictions of physicality. For example, a real world librarian has to put a book on one and only one shelf whereas Amazon files books under as many different categories as possible. And, while traditionally the owners of the information own and control the organization of that information, in the digital realm, the users own the organization.

You can’t make changes in the basic principles of organization without changing the nature of knowledge itself: What knowledge is, who gets to decide, what constitutes a subject or topic, where does knowledge’s authority come from? We are in the midst of this revolution that touches how we organize our businesses, our customers’ control of the information they touch, and the “who” and “what” of trust.

– Abe Crystal

Behavioral Science Associates is seeking a User Interface Manager.

The successful candidate will work in a dynamic and fast growing environment creating the next generation self-service solutions for leading communications service providers. Our client has an integrated suite of hosted speech recognition and data applications that allow their clients to achieve new levels of service effectiveness and their customers to have satisfying user experiences.
Summary
As the Manager of User Interface Design, you will be responsible for the overall quality of both the Voice User Interface (VUI) and Graphical User Interface (GUI). You will manage a team of talented UI designers who are focused on creating user interfaces that are natural and compelling, while meeting our customers’ goals of reducing costs and increasing automation rates.

Responsibilities

• Provide managerial direction to UI Designers, mentoring, performance reviews, resource allocation
• Lead the development of processes and best practices in UI Design
• Work with managers of other groups to ensure good communication, workflow, and overall success
• Help provide estimates for upcoming projects
• Ensure that the groups produces UI Designs that exceed expectations of quality, and are delivered on time

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in User Interface Design
• 5+ years of management experience
• Experience with both Voice User Interface Design and Graphical User Interface Design
• Dynamic and decisive person who creates clear goals, fosters accountability and ownership, leads by example and builds loyalty.
• Team player that works well with other people, both within the UI group and across other groups
• Must be able to communicate effectively, be decisive, pay attention to detail, take ownership, engage on multiple levels across functional groups and follow through.
• Understanding of speech recognition technologies
• Experience with usability testing
• Advanced degree in Human Factors, Linguistics, Cognitive Psychology or related field is preferred.

Work location: Silicon Valley Area, CA

Job Status: Full Time Employee

Salary: Competitive, excellent benefits available

Interested applicants please submit your resume to Jay Messina at jay@bscience.com , or call 908-233-9551. Please put the job title in the subject line of your email response.

Jay Messina

Behavioral Science Associates

908-233-9551

http://www.bscience.com

It’s Time the Right Rail Advertising Bubble Bursts

by Rebekah Sedaca.
–originally published at Capstrat

Way back when the Web first started and before the corporate advertisers caught on to the whole information superhighway concept, Web designers and developers had all of this screen real estate in which we could display functionality, design, content, and information. Literally, we had a plethora of real estate in which to communicate our ideas and information.

Over time, as the heads in those corporate offices turned from their offline advertising to the Web, we saw a flurry of onsite advertising. With varying levels of success, popup ads, spam emails, banner ads and right rail promotions cluttered our minds, inboxes and screens. (The right rail is the rightmost column or section of a Web page that is often used to display advertisements.) With time and technology, tools like spam and popup blockers have diminished the effectiveness of online advertising. This has left advertisers with few online “safe” spaces, one of which is the right rail.

We have sold out the right rail to advertisers to the point that it’s becoming ineffective for even that purpose. User testing shows right rail, or column, “blindness” and it is only getting worse with the likes of Google sponsored links. Info World also recently published an article, “What Users Hate Most About Web Sites”, that lists “invasive advertising” among its top gripes along with a note about “right rail blindness.” There are a number of hypotheses around the root cause of right rail blindness including the western convention of reading from left to right and superfluous advertising.

Rather than surrender the rightmost sections of our screens as useless for containing content and information (and ads, for that matter), we must take back that section of our screens. Web site navigation is one option. User testing on the subject has shown that users perform as well when navigation is on the right side of the screen as on the left. In one study, users were divided into two groups and asked to complete a series of tasks: one group using a left navigation-based site and the other a right navigation-based site. The results showed no significant different in time completion between the two sites.

There is even an argument to suggest that in following with Fitt’s Law, right navigation would be a more effective solution if convention could be ignored, since it is closer in proximity to the scroll bar. (And considering that the Web in its current state is relatively young, how set in stone can convention be?)

Right rail navigation also proved successful for audi.com. The right rail placement not only supported their “innovation in design” brand message, but also proved successful in user testing and rollout to the market. Furthermore, many blogging tools, like Word Press, are using the right rail of pages to capture tags, recent activities and the like. As blogging becomes more and more mainstream, the right rail may be able to rise to its former stature.

So can we change user behavior over time by removing advertising from the right rail and putting navigation and other site essential items there in its place? Only time will tell, but it sure beats the alternative of giving up on the right rail and losing that real estate all together.

I would love to get some feedback from the Triangle User Experience community on right rail usage, testing, and ideas about reclaiming it. Thoughts?

Re: mySpace.com/soc395m

By Lee Cherry

There has been an interesting chain of events happening behind the use of MySpace as an educational teaching tool by one of the professors here at NC State University – MySpace coursework under microscope. It appears, yet again, a new form of technology has far outpaced the policy and administration of technology in a large organization.

I am a big proponent of using “mashups” to create an environment for both blended learning and enhancing an application or web experience – facebook, linkedin, youtube, wordpress, movabletype, meebo, del.icio.us, etc. Integrating functionality of another succesful venture into product can be an added benefit in many instances. MySpace has been on a short list of “what ifs”… I think MySpace has managed to capture a lot of attention and loyalty among its users – of all age groups. Therefore, it was a matter of time before someone would adapt it in other innovative ways for their needs.

Now, I’m not saying MySpace is a silver bullet for any one particular thing, but it is definitely something that has caught a lot of people’s attention and eyeballs – more eyeballs, more audience, more channels for revenue, more chances for change and learning; superficial maybe, time will only tell. I believe we are just scratching the surface for building a business use for presenting something on MySpace. On the other hand, I believe MySpace has a long way to go to correctly implement a more powerful means of adjusting some of the interface and usability issues.

To the University’s credit, it has spent a lot of time and money on developing a series of tools that offer a method and a means to carry out distance education on a large scale – which is both the trend of the consumer education arena and the desire of the University (see more eyeballs statement from before). However, these tools still have a lot of room to grow before they really can address professor and student issues on usability and effectiveness.

I have trained with these distance learning tools and personally used them for classes but have found they can detract from the experience and are difficult to integrate into people’s learning routine. I have also tried talking to the other professors here about utilizing the resources but only to receive bit of pushback. Not only must one have a professor willing to understand how to fit the technology into their traditional (and often entrenched) pedagogy; you must also have to have a technology that can adapt to their needs. However, that’s a whole other debate.

You can spend lots of money, to build a toolset that you expect your users to fully utilize and enjoy; only to discover they are using a more personal and effective means to fulfill their needs. It’s up to your organization if you decide to force the situation and build walls around your application for the sake of efficiency and coherence or work with your users to integrate and adapt the situation to create the most effective and desirable product to surpass their needs.