November 18, 2008

World Usability Day Dresden

Last Thursday I gave a talk at the World Usability Day Dresden with the title "Nutzerunterstützung in Diagramm-Editoren zum Erlernen visueller Sprachen" (in English: User assistance for diagram editors supports the learning of visual languages). I provide an abstract of my talk (in German) on my website. I got quite encouraging feedback and some nice tips on how to actually conduct a user study.

All in all, I really liked this workshop. It was well organized by Jan-Henning Raff from the media center of TU Dresden. There have been round about 50 participants listening to the ten talks. Although I am not a usability expert (I just start exploring this domain), I learned a lot from most of the talks. In particular I enjoyed the talks about tools:

  • Jürgen Steimle introduced the CoScribe-System, an impressive pen-and-paper-interface for collaboration based on the Anoto approach.

  • Stefan Meißner from seto company talked about Enterprise 2.0 and introduced a nice WYSIWYG editor for websites.

  • Severin Taranko from queo media demonstrated a WordPress plugin that gives visitors of your blog an overview over the most relevant and popular articles of your blog (using some reasonable criteria).

  • Robert Jung motivated the use of sketch tools for CAD. In particular he showed a nice video of a tool developed at the university of Toronto: ILoveSketch. There is a nice video on the tool's website.

  • Prof. Gerhard Weber and one of his students talked about accessibility in (web) applications. They have improved the accessibility of the Moodle learning platform for blind people. Furthermore, they have studied how blind and non-blind people collaborate in the creation of UML class diagrams.



The day was completed by a "Usa-beer" evening in a nice bar of Dresden.

1 comment:

Steffen Mazanek said...

Now there is a screencast about the WYSIWYG editor for websites presented by Stefan Meißner from seto company at the
seto blog.