Pat’s Point of View

Adelaide put on some lovely weather for the first day of the conference—if a little hot for those of us with pale Celtic skin—and there was a good vibe in all the sessions.

One thing was obvious this year, there are quite a few international delegates that made their way to our distant country to attend OzCHI. And over all there was quite a diverse mix of discussions taking place. Although I didn’t really understand what was being said around some of the more academic topics :)

The things of interest for me included the talk on probes by Mark Rouncefield, measuring cognitive load using speech features by Natalie Ruiz, and the talk on the link between spatial ability and the use of site maps on websites by Chris Pilgrim (he found there is a link, which might sound obvious to experienced practitioners but it’s worth having some science to back that up).

Topping off the day was a great conference dinner at Adelaide Zoo. Under the ‘big top’ and surrounded by all sorts of dangerous critters, plenty of healthy discussion took place (and it wasn’t as nerdy as you might think). I think the quote of the night had to be Shane Morris saying “I’m going to make you a star!” once he found out someone at our table actually liked using Microsoft Expression, and was willing to admit it :)

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