Well, we’ve just come back from a 2-day conference on Computer-Human Interaction down in Dunedin, NZ. It’s mostly an academic conference - I think there were only a half dozen of the 72 delegates not from a university. Of those half dozen, Sam and I were the only ones from a usability company - the rest worked for software companies or consultancies.

The best thing - being able to hang out with some people who are in love with this stuff as much as we are. Oh, and being snowed in for a day - pretty unusual in this country.

There were a number of speaking highlights. Some of the new technology stuff was just cool. Mark Billinghurst from the Hitlab presented a keynote on Augmented Reality - where the user sees computer graphics superimposed on the real world around them. I was surprised to see how far they’ve come already.

Stephen Brewster from Glasglow did the other keynote, on haptic interfaces. Haptics is the study of how to couple the human sense of touch with a computer-generated world. He talked us through using a device called the PHANToM to teach vet students how to perform on ovarian palpitation on  horses. Not usually two fields you would associate together: usability and vet science. Actually, that was what one thing that seemed to be in common with all the really innovative stuff - overlapping disciplines.

Kate Terry also presented on her research on applying psycholinguistic techniques (the psychology of language) to web content. The theory is that if you use high-frequency words, then web sites are easier to read. In other words she found people read web pages faster when they used terms such as friends (133 occurrences per million words) as opposed to mates (only 21 occurrences).

There was obviously more, but I don’t have the space to describe them all. I enjoyed Jacqui Van Der Kay’s presentation on Usability at Telecom NZ, hearing about the usability of ambulance dispatch centres from William Wong and seeing Participatory Usability in action at the Uni of Waikato. Looking forward to next year already!

Trent