Category: HCI Design

Human Computer Interaction Design

Frank Ludolph’s Last Working Day

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Frank Ludolph on Apple Lisa

Hi Frank,

today is your last day at Oracle. I cannot belief that retirement is an alternative to designing software and improving products for decades. I might figure it out myself in a couple of years.

Our ways have crossed several times. And I am extremely thankful for that. I still remember my first session on an Apple Lisa. It must have been around 1985. I was still in school, and we were visiting the University of Hamburg to get some orientation on the departments. When I started I chose Informatics. And I suppose the Apple Lisa played a significant role in my decision. Is it fate that I later wrote about Apple Lisa?

I’ve attended your presentation and public demo of the Lisa System at CHI ’98 in Los Angeles. Maybe a video still exists. I should look it up and publish it somewhere.* You had also booth duty for Sun Microsystems – presenting HotJava Views, a user interface for a network computer. And you were handing out VHS tapes (!) of Starfire. I still have mine – but no player anymore.

Then I joined Sun in 2002, and I guess I popped up in your office each time when I came to Santa Clara. The SEED mentoring program finally made it possible that we exchanged and discussed many ideas on the past and future of HCI. Dueling Interaction Models of Personal-Computing and Web-Computing at MEDICI 2007 is one of the results. But do you remember for instance also our jam session with Phil Clevenger on Hello World? Marvelous!

I will miss you at Oracle. Enjoy your life and let’s stay in touch.
Matthias

––

* Even better, transcript and video of CHI 98 are already online:

The Lisa User Interface as presented by Frank Ludolph and Rod Perkins at CHI ’98, April 1998

Back to Childhood in UI Design Jul 2011

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Here is the video of my presentation at Hyperkult: Back to Childhood – Infantilization of UI Design. After the talk Ivan Sutherland pointed out that the TX-2 was just build to prove the concept of a computer based on transistors. The four black knobs below the screen where not build in specific for Sketchpad; they rather controlled directly the value for four memory registers that Ivan used for scrolling and zooming the image on screen.

Back to Childhood – Infantilisation of UI Design from mprove on Vimeo.

German paper and references: Zurück in die Kindheit – Infantilisierung im UI Design.

Bill Verplank at Interaction 11

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Bill Verplank: Opening Keynote from Interaction Design Association.
“Bill Verplank is a human-factors engineer with a long career in design, research and education. As a fresh ME PhD from MIT he worked eight years at Xerox on the testing and refinement of what we now call the “desktop metaphor”: bit-map graphics, keyboard and mouse, direct manipulation. For six years, he worked with Bill Moggridge at IDTwo and IDEO doing “interaction design” – bringing the insights from computers to the industrial design of medical instruments, GPS navigation, mobile phones, and new input devices (keyboards, track-balls, mice). From IDEO, he moved to Interval Research for 8 years of innovating design methods (observation, body-storming, scenarios, metaphors) and researching active force-feedback (“haptics”).

He began teaching design and man-machine-systems as a graduate student at MIT and “visual thinking” and product design at Stanford in the ’70s. Since then he has lectured regularly in human factors, user-interface design and most recently “new music controllers” at Stanford’s CCRMA. In 2000, he joined the steering committee of the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) in Italy and has consulted most recently with the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID). He co-authored ACM SIGCHI Curriculum Recommendations and, for seven years, taught popular tutorials on Graphical Interface Design and Sketching Scenarios. He is known for sketching as he talks.”
See also_ Bill Verplank sketches metaphors at BayCHI 2008

10 Jahre UX Roundtable Hamburg

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Moin Moin,
aus dem Schatzkästlein…

Subject: Usability Roundtable – Einladung
Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2001 09:50:43 +0100

Hallo

endlich haben wir es geschafft – die erste
Usability Roundtable Hamburgs!

wann: Montag 5.3.2001 @ 19:30 (bis ?)
wo: News Cafe (Ecke Wilhelm-Kaiser-Str und
Neustädterstr., Axel Springer Verlag gegenüber)
was: Usability Themen informell diskutieren –
z.B. Trends in Germany/Europe
ROI / Cost-Justifying Usability
Resources
Methoden
wer: Du und Deine Kollegen, Gäste, usw.
wie: einfach vorbeikommen

Bitte sag mir Bescheid per Email, damit ich ungefähr
weiss, wieviel wir sind. Noch fragen? just ask!

Bis dann,
Jim

Man beachte das Datum! Auf den Tag genau vor 10 Jahren luden James Kalbach, Jürgen Spangl, Ariane Kempken und Sven Heinsen zum ersten Usability Roundable Hamburgs ein. Damals war nicht absehbar, dass aus diesem ersten Treffen mit 7 Leuten eine regelmäßige Institution der Hamburger Usability und User Experience Szene werden sollte.
Seither treffen sich aber immer mehr und immer wieder auch neue Leute am ersten Montag eines Monats, um aktuelle Themen der Gestaltung benutzbarer Software und Webanwendungen zu diskutieren. Unser Archiv verzeichnet 66 Roundtable-Treffen — hinzu kommen einige Classic-Termine, die den Abenden im News Cafe nachempfunden sind.
Unter http://uxhh.de versammeln sich inzwischen auch weitere Kreise, wie der Book-Club und das Local Chapter der Interaction Design Association Hamburg. Auch der World Usability Day der upa hat bereits fünf mal in Hamburg stattgefunden.
Alles in allem eine lebendige und offene Community, deren Mitglieder kaum zu zählen sind, da wir auf diversen Platformen präsent sind: Unsere Y!-Mailingliste hat 156 Mitglieder. Die uxHH-Gruppe auf Xing 317. IxDA Hamburg ist in weniger als einem Jahr immerhin schon auf 81 Leute bei mixxt gewachsen. FB schwächelt noch etwas. Aber das stört mich recht wenig.
Ich bin gespannt auf die Zukunft, da es in unserer Disziplin noch so unendlich viel zu tun gibt. Und es freut mich besonders, dass die UX Szene in Hamburg mit ihrer offenen und kompetenten Diskussionskultur jedem von uns immer wieder neue Einsichten vermittelt.
Bis dann, bei einem der zahlreichen Treffen in Hamburg
Matthias Müller-Prove