Community / Article 10. (Republished from CAUE 2008 Proceedings) Dec. 2008, HCI Vistas Vol-IV Author: Dr. Dinesh Katre

Conference on Advances in Usability Engineering (CAUE) 2008

Transition from informal gatherings to a formal conference

Usability practitioners in Pune have witnessed World Usability Day seminars during 2006 and 2007. Learning from the experience of both these events, the need was felt to elevate its standard by adopting to a typical conference format, with open invitation for research papers and peer review process for selection. This approach is chosen so as to give fair chance to beginners as well as experienced practitioners. This dream has come true due to the initiative of Vishwakarma Institute of Information Technology (VIIT) to organize the national level Conference on Advances in Usability Engineering for our community. The bold initiative of an academic institute like VIIT must be appreciated, as presently usability engineering is gaining popularity mainly in the IT industry. Kudos to VIIT!

World Usability Day, Pune 2008

Gratitude to Dr. Donald Norman

This year€™s World Usability Day at Pune has become very special due to CAUE. It has become even more significant as both events are blessed by none other than Dr. Donald Norman, who was recently awarded with Benjamin Franklin Medal for his seminal contributions to the knowledge of usability in everyday life. I am very grateful to Dr. Norman for honouring my request and sending a very inspiring message for usability practitioners in India on this momentous occasion.

WUD 2008 Message from Donald Norman for Indian Usability Practitioners

Response to call for papers

Call for papers announced for CAUE has received 50 papers all together. We received about 22 research papers from usability practitioners (44%), 15 papers from faculty members (30%) and 13 papers from students (26%). The review committee has shown sufficient leniency in order to encourage the paper authors and selected 28 papers for inclusion in the conference proceedings.

Download CAUE 2008 Proceedings

Response from Information Technology Industry

It is obvious that usability engineering is gaining greater support from IT industry, whereas educational institutes are still catching up with the demands of industry. Usability practitioners from IT Service companies have contributed large number of papers if compared with the contributions from product companies.

CAUE 2008 Programme Schedule

CAUE Photos

Response from Academia

We received 28 papers from academia (15 papers from faculty members and 13 papers from students), mainly from engineering and design institutes. We had expected more contributions from the faculty members of newly established design institutes. Out of the papers received from faculty members, very few of them directly focused on the theme of usability engineering and human-computer interaction. We were unable to select some papers as they focused on different aspects of computing and not on the conference theme. It is evident that more awareness about usability needs to be created in the academia.

We had specifically announced a thematic track on HCI in Education with the objective of understanding the experience of faculty members from engineering and design institutes. We wanted to bring up the challenges faced by them in teaching usability engineering and human-computer interaction. But unfortunately, no papers are received on this theme. Presently, we can observe significant participation from engineering and design departments. But this isn€™t enough. People from humanities (psychology, social science, linguistics, etc.) should also get involved in advancing the usability research.

13 papers are received from students of design and engineering institutes. The papers submitted by design students have focused on specific experimentation involving users, assessment of user interface technologies and product design. In future, we would like to receive more papers from the students of engineering and humanities.

Thematic distribution of papers

We have broadly defined 6 thematic tracks for papers namely-

• Offshore Usability
• Usability for Bridging the Digital Divide
• Usability Engineering
• User Experience Design for New Media
• User Experience Research
• HCI in Education

Although these themes are not very tightly bound, we found that most papers could fit under the themes of Usability Engineering, User Experience Design for New Media and User Experience Research. India enjoys a very significant share in offshore IT market. But we received very few papers on this theme. More serious experimentations are necessary to identify the difficulties and possible solutions for usability in offshore settings. We received no papers on the theme of HCI in Education. Experts specializing in different areas are invited to speak at the conference to cover the themes where few papers or no papers are received.

Technical diversity

The research papers have covered various aspects of usability related to wide ranging applications such as m-commerce, e-governance, business portals, etc. Many papers have also focused on accessibility interfaces that cover search engine optimization, menus for font selection, mobile interface for low literate, home page design strategies, etc. Sufficient coverage to user interface guidelines, user centred design case studies, evaluation of usability methods and standards is also ensured. Papers on Web 2.0, multi-touch technology for mobile and object oriented system architecture offer technical insights of usability. Motivational, persuasive and user driven approaches to design are also featured. Some unusual topics related to factors affecting the performance of call centres and design of portable X-Ray system are helpful in expanding the horizon of usability. Topics that elaborate process and methods like user experience design strategies and design management are also included.

On the whole, the conference is offering coverage to diverse topics related to usability. There is major scope for improvement in terms of scientific rigor of research, depth of experiments and quality of documentation. However, we should be happy to have taken a step forward.

Conference on Advances in Usability Engineering is intended to help in capturing the state-of-the-art of usability in India. CAUE team has resolved to publish the conference proceedings so as to trigger incremental developments. Such manuscript will be immensely helpful to practitioners, researchers, faculty members and students. I hope that it is made available in libraries and on Internet for future reference. I hope that the success of CAUE will establish a new benchmark for the usability research in India. Looking forward to many more chapters of CAUE in the years to come.

Dr. Dinesh Katre

CAUE 2008 Advisory / Review Committee

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