SOCHI

Source: Flickr

Source: Flickr

Source: Flickr

This week Jim Laing presented a lunch hour tech talk on Adobe Flex, an open source framework that allows designers to develop rich internet applications. Here are some notes from Jim's talk:

• Flex runs on client not on the server - not really a web technology, really a desktop technology
• Flex competitors - ajax with toolkits like ExtJS; Microsoft silverlight
• Flex enables designer to rapidly prototype applications, allows new user interactions that other technologies don't have
• Flex - content is king - everything is subservient to the content

Today SI Career Services held a panel called "A Day in the Life: HCI Professionals".

The panel included:
Suzanne Chapman, Interface and User Testing Specialist, UM Digital Library
Theresa Maddix, Satisfaction Research Analyst, ForeSee Results
Mike Beasley, User Experiologist, Pure Visibility
Dan Cooney, Independent Consultant, Cooney Information Group, LLC.

Here are the notes from the session:

It's design jam time again! Our last two browser design jams were a
great success, and our events were featured in a Mozilla Labs blog post

WHAT: Prototype or create storyboards for your ideas for improving or
redesigning Firefox
WHEN: Thursday, November 13, 6-8PM
WHERE: Design Lab 1, Duderstadt Center (North Campus)
RSVP: at the Facebook event

We will also be having a vote for the best mockup or prototype. There

We have a winner for the SOCHI t-shirt design contest! 46 of you voted for Ian Tadashi Moore's t-shirt design shown on the right. Congratulations to Ian and all to the designers of the other final t-shirt designs Eric Garcia, Yesook Im, Adam Torres. All the final designs can be found at SOCHI's flickr page.

Look for the t-shirt to be available in December.

The HCI Group Advising session was held this Monday, with Professors Mark Ackerman, Mark Newman, and Mick McQuaid in attendance to answer questions from students. In case you weren't able to make it, here are some notes I took of what was covered.

• Common questions were which classes to take together, and which order to take classes in.

SI 529 (last year was SI 684) is a 3 credit course taught by Professor Paul Resnick. It counts for both the HCI and Social Computing specializations. 529 focuses on studying communities (defined as a group of people who sustain interaction over time) who conduct some or all of their interactions online.

SI 622, Evaluation of Systems and Services, is a required course for the HCI specialization, and will be taught by Professor Mark Newman this term. It focuses on determining usability problems with an existing system. You'll learn how to conduct a full-scale usability test, along with less intensive evaluation methods like heuristic evaluations, comparative analyses, and surveys. It complements SI 682 very well, as you can use the methods you learn in SI 622 to evaluate the designs you come up with in SI 682.

SI-583 is a 1.5 credit course, taught by Rahul Sami, that counts towards the HCI, IAR, ICD and SC specialization. The class focuses on recommender systems like Amazon and eBay that suggest items of interest to the user based on explicit tags, ratings, reviews as well as implicit ratings through user behavior. It is followed by SI-683, reputation systems in the second half of the semester.

SOCHI held our first Tech Talk of the semester this afternoon on Axure, a prototyping tool. We had great attendance - probably 20 or 25 people I would estimate. There are several classes with group projects which could benefit from using Axure, so now is the perfect time in the semester to learn a new tool.

Since I covered so much in my demo, I wanted to post the links to the resources I mentioned so you can check them out for yourself.

Source: Flickr

This past Thursday, October 16, SI students met for the second of our series of Browser Redesign Jams, hosted by SOCHI and SCSI and sponsored by Mozilla and Sourceforge. Our task for this design jam was to take the user stories created at the first design jam, and build them into mockups and sketches.