Advanced User Interface Meeting Notes
February 21, 1996

Here are minutes from the first meeting. Note that others are welcome to come next week (Raven? Bill Aylesworth?...) Let me know if you want to be on the umdl.aui (advanced user interface) mailing list. (Subsequent mailings will not go to umdl.all)

I. Attending

• Sam Rauch - new CS grad student doing programming and design
• Stephen Markel - School of Information grad student, doing task analysis, design, evaluation
• Gene Alloway - Digital Librarian on the grant, has contacts in professional user community, undergrads too
• Greg Peters - professional programming staff, working on various parts including the UIA, Elliot's version 1 user interface for high schools
• Jonathan Klein - near-grad in "HCI", with 12 years professional graphics design, educational software, student of elliot's working on version 1
• George Furnas - Professor SofI, human computer interaction, visualization...

*User centered design of a state of the art information access and structuring environment.

• visually rich
• richly interactive
• direct manipulation (of course!)
• multiscale (Pad++)
• integrated with task environment
• synergy of browsing and search (navig and querying)
• magic lenses, lined views
• user centered design of "informatin centered" workspace
• flexible across tasks types and complexities

*high end - longer term project, more sophisticated interactions, tasks, users, higher end hardware than elliot's group

*research effort in its own right

III. Readings to know about (i'll make these available)

• state of the art in information access, e.g.,
• info visualizer papers from PARC
• incl butterfly paper
• dynamic queries paper
• portals and magic lenses
• information centered workspaces
• sensemaking and information foraging
• the realities of human information access (e.g., Robin Jeffries and Vicki O'Day)
• tcl/tk/pad++ (problem sets from the 613 class
• Graphical user interface design and evaluation book
• UMDL scenarios from InfoViz course, current course

• Why
• It makes all the difference in whether something is useable and work the trouble (e.g., DOS vs the Macintosh)
• Info tech often provides no return on investment (i.e., not worth it, despite its cool-ness) because, despite cool new functionality, not useful and usable enough; it incurs too much overhead in learning, errors, mismatch to task, setup, support.... (cf, Macs 3-8 times cheaper in support costs than PCs)
• Steps (its a spiral really)

Went a bit thru the Version 1 candidate design and talked about some visualization aspoects.

Need to talk to Gene about getting users for task analysis.

Comments or questions may be sent to: UMDL.INFO@umich.edu