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NJ 2007


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UsabilityNJ
The New Jersey UPA Chapter

Meeting Details for February 20, 2008

The next meeting of UsabilityNJ will be held on Wednesday, February 20, 2008 at Rutgers University Busch Campus, Room 701, CoRE Building, 96 Frelinghuysend Rd., Piscataway, NJ. (click for directions).

Park in lot 64 (shown on map). Parking is free after 5 PM.

Social hour starts at 6:30 PM. Presentation starts at 7:00 PM.

Topic: HCI and Competitive Advantage
Speaker: Marilyn Tremaine

This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP to rsvp [at] usabilitynj [dot] org if you plan to attend the meeting as a courtesy to our speaker and host.

Talk Summary

This talk addresses an issue that has been skirted both by the Usability Community and the Corporate Community, that is, what value do efforts in usability and user experience design provide to the overall corporation, and what competitive advantage might the skills and activities performed by usability personnel give to business operations? The talk is therefore not just concerned with the return on investment that might be achieved in various focused areas of usability, but also in areas such as:

  • the redefinition of business processes
  • the development of new markets
  • the creation of new products and services
  • the capture of unique information, the building of brand loyalty
  • the use of service engineering that ties a product with its service infrastructure
  • the better management of knowledge throughout the corporation
  • the use of HCI in developing successful corporate strategies

The talk will cover what types of competitive advantages have been identified for corporations and then give specific examples where HCI has been or can be used to gain a company one of the competitive advantages identified.

Warning: This is a talk that is trying to change your mindset from focusing on the users to focusing on business gains. However, the presenter will argue that this change will raise the profile of HCI people within companies so that they can get on with better serving the user.

Speaker Bio

  • Marilyn Tremaine, PhD
    Research Professor, Rutgers University
    Marilyn Tremaine Dr. Marilyn Tremaine is a Research Professor at Rutgers University where she has joint appointments in the School of Business, the College of Communication, Information and Library Science and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Prior to her appointment at Rutgers she was Chair of the Department of Information Systems in the College of Computing Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. At NJIT she directed the joint Rutgers-NJIT program in Human-Computer Interaction and the electronic ARTs Habitat (eARTH) Lab. Dr. Tremaine was also a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and the Michigan Business School, spending ten years in each of these positions.

    Dr. Tremaine has worked as Vice President of Research and Development for three software startup companies and was Senior Research Scientist at the EDS Center for Applied Research. At the University of Michigan, she started their HCI program and did the first work on HCI cost/benefit analysis. At EDS, she developed the Capture Lab, one of the first computer-supported meeting rooms. At Toronto, she headed the CAVECAT project, a video desktop conferencing research initiative, the Jabber project, an exploration into real time meeting indexing, and the Nonspeech audio project for understanding audio interface design.. At NJIT, she headed the Glosoft Research Project and the AudioBrowser Project developing collaborative interfaces for global teams and audio interfaces for the visually impaired. Her current research focuses on the design and development of multimodal interfaces to be used in collaborative settings and on developing computer-based training that enhances spatial skills for the comprehension of complex visualizations. Her work is widely cited and three of her journal papers have become seminal papers in the field. She has published over 150 papers in her career.

    Dr. Tremaine co-founded ACM-SIGCHI and has served as SIGCHI’s Vice-Chair of Communications, Chair of the Advisory Council, Vice-Chair of Finance, Vice-Chair of Conference Planning and most recently, President of SIGCHI. She chaired the CHI'86 Conference on Human Factors in Computing, the CSCW'92 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, the ASSETS'2000 Conference on Assistive Technology and the CUU’2003 Conference on Universal Usability. She serves on six technical journal editorial boards and is on four-to five conference program committees annually.

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Page last updated May 15, 2008.