This issue’s theme focuses on usability and user-experience issues of interactive and mobile video, informing us about many new technology developments that make headlines in our daily news media. We all have our childhood experiences of viewing television and of using the phone. What happens when these two media are combined, and the experience becomes…
Interactive Television (iTV) is slowly replacing the traditional “passive” TV platform due to better audio/video quality and interactive services such as electronic program guides (EPG) and communication services, made possible by a set-top box with a return channel. These new interactive services allow viewers to actively participate, and substantially influence, their experience with television and…
I'm excited and grateful for the opportunity to share the work of UPA's Usability in the Enterprise project with the broader usability community.
This issue of UX is the culmination of nearly three years of work by more than 100 members of the UPA family. The objective of our research is also the objective of this…
We know that our profession is concerned with making products and services more usable, useful, and appealing so that end-users have a better user experience.
The same can be said about what we ourselves need to accomplish within our own business environment. We need to learn how to make sure that our clients have a good…
In many countries, newspapers and popular magazines report on the latest products and services to reach the marketplace. In these publications, reporters and reviewers comment on whatever they believe promotes sales, marketplace success, and consumer preference. More so than in years past, however, they talk about user-centered design.
This media focus mirrors corporate interest. Recently, a…
On November 14, 2006, at least 40,000 people were thinking about usability. Clearly World Usability Day was touching something important in many people’s lives. World Usability Day created an opportunity for people to come together and connect with people in other countries with a shared focus—of making things that work better.
Ten thousand volunteers knew that…
Could the founders of the United States of America have envisioned what the Internet, telecommunications, and the PC enable in terms of government organization, publications, and the electoral process? Were they alive today, visionaries like Thomas Jefferson might have been keenly interested in technology that influences education and the electoral process, and Benjamin Franklin might…
This issue focuses on sonification. Some usability and user-experience professionals in medicine, health, music, video, the military, and other realms may consider information sonification and sound in the user experience a regular, typical area for consideration. For many other professionals however, sonification remains more exotic than quotidian, mysterious and elusive, even though sound is an…
Having just completed my first year as editor-in-chief, my thoughts turn to the future, but in a special way—eastward—as the theme of this issue looks at usability in Asia.
In the 19th century, J. B. Soule, in an Indiana newspaper editorial of 1851, urged entrepreneurial folks in the United States to head westward to seek professional…
“User Experience” is a phrase that seems to be catching on in many places. But what does it mean?