Pat’s Point of View

Apparently there were a few sore heads this morning, but I was fine (yes it’s boring but safe). The second conference day got straight into it with plenty of paper presentations, including two by Floyd Mueller, who was without a doubt the most entertaining speaker of the conference.

There were some interesting topics presented today, but I did feel there was a lot of repetition in the choice of papers (is it just me or is everyone in HCI looking into gesture recognition?). In particular I liked the talk on stories with emotion and conflict by Georg Strøm, as this use of narrative is something I’ve been trying to include in my UX work for some time. Compared to use cases and other techniques typically used in software development, stories and narrative are much more useful—from my point of view anyway. I also thought the on-going discussion about the level of formality in diagrams was interesting, and this ran across several presentations, the common factor being Beryl Plimmer it would seem.

Then it was my turn. My quick 15 minutes on mentoring was well appreciated, judging by the feedback I got, but I found it really hard to keep to the time limit. And this was the case, even thought I cut the presentation down to focus on just one aspect of the paper, across about ten slides. Hopefully I was able to affect the audience somehow, and sell the idea of mentoring to those who might not have considered it. And of course I hope I didn’t bore anyone to sleep. My slides are, as always, up on SlideShare.

More on the usability side, I think discussions by Vince Bruno and Jessica Enders were interesting, and caused a fair bit of discussion. I found Vince’s talk, on his research into usability practitioners in Australia, interesting because he seemed so surprised by what he found. For example, of course we focus a lot on having users involved in research and design activities, it’s user-centred design! Practitioners I spoke to appreciated his honesty and the openness with which he approached his research.

Jessica’s talk on her research into the usability of ‘zebra striping’ in tabulated information was a great effort. Practitioners definitely need to get more involved in this kind of work, helping bridge the gap between academy and industry. This has inspired me to look at how I can do some research into a very practical problem such as Jessica has, and come up with some answers which will help the practice of user experience and related fields.

Overall it was a conference that possibly had less to offer me in terms of picking up new knowledge, but the chance to catch up with peers and stay connected with current academic research is always welcome. I’ll definitely aim to present again next year, hopefully something unique and thought-provoking.

However, from my point of view, it’s hard not to find fault with the conference. I said it last year, and I’ll say it again now, there’s a lot to be desired regarding presentations from academics. There is some really interesting material in the work they’ve done, but their presentations don’t expose this. In most cases, authors failed to engage their audience and didn’t effectively communicate the fruits of their hard work. They seemed to be following a rigid format (presumably the ‘traditional’ presentation adopted in academia) and in many cases did not structure the presentation for the allocated time. Granted, this was hard when you only have 15 or even 25 minutes, but presentations are not the place to discuss every single detail of your work, that’s what the papers are for. Trying to plumb the depths of the technical details behind your thesis, or present tables of data in this environment, does you no favours. If anything, you confuse the audience and dissuade them from reading the paper, but certainly you come off looking ill-prepared and it probably heightens your nerves.

I would like to see less presentations, each allocated a bit more time, and perhaps teaming up paper authors with practitioners or communications students, to put together an effective presentation. For all I know, this is what one should expect from an academic conference and this is what the bulk of the audience wants, but is that a good enough reason to continue?

See what people are blogging about: ozchi2007, Adelaide, CHI, paper presentations

Popularity: 17% [?]