Gems from the 2006 CHI and UPA Conferences July 18, 2006

Gems from the 2006 CHI and UPA Conferences
Panel of conference attendees: Wendy Castleman, Raman Hansi, Kari Sortland

Did you miss this year's CHI and UPA conferences? In April, CHI 2006 was held in Montreal, Canada with the theme, "Interact. Inform. Inspire." UPA 2006 followed in Broomfield, Colorado in June with the prevailing theme, "Usability through Storytelling."

Numerous presentations and workshops covered everything from fresh and controversial trends in the human computer interaction field to more traditional topics.

At this meeting, a panel of CHI and UPA attendees will share their experiences and learnings from the conferences.

Topics will include:
From the CHI Conference
• Agile Development and User Experience
• Personal Information Management

From the UPA Conference
• Using Formative Usability Testing as a Fast UI Design Tool
• Re-positioning User Experience as a Strategic Process
• Overlapping Usability and Market Research: Synergies and Issues
• A Comparison of Methods for Eliciting Post-Task Subjective Ratings in Usability Testing

Biographies:

Wendy Castleman is a Principal User Research Scientist with Intuit. She is a psychologist who has over 16 years of research and teaching experience in the area of human cognition and user research. She has developed robust processes and produced substantial increases in product usability in both large and small technology companies. Wendy previously worked as a user researcher at Remedy Software, Peregrine Systems, Motorola, Certive, Lucent and Philips Consumer Communications. She received her Ph.D. in Cognitive and Perceptual Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin.

Raman Hansi is a Sr. User Researcher in Intuit's Customer Centered Development group. Prior to joining Intuit, she worked at American Institutes for Research's Cognitive Labs and the Human Development and Education group where she provided usability consultation for state, federal, and private technology companies. Raman has also integrated usability methodologies and worked to improve the usability of enterprise level web and windows software at Remedy, Peregrine, and BMC Software.

Kari Sortland is a User Research Specialist at Intuit. She has experience in cognitive science, human factors and usability research. Before joining Intuit, Kari worked with such government agencies as the FAA, NASA and the Department of Defense at New Mexico State University’s Physical Science Laboratory. She has also worked at Oracle Corporation and at the Bauhaus Archives in Berlin, Germany. Kari completed her MA in Engineering Psychology at New Mexico State University.

Official Website: http://www.baychi.org/bof/usability/20060718/