UsabilityNews

By Simson Garfinkel


Researchers at Microsoft have come up with a way to create easy-to-remember passwords without making a system more vulnerable to hackers.

Instead of enforcing complex passwords, as many organizations do, the new scheme makes sure than no more than a few users can have the same password, which has a similar overall effect on security. Further research from Microsoft also reveals why only some organizations insist on very complex passwords.

Increasingly complex password requirements--rules like "passwords must be 14 characters long and contain at least two uppercase letters, two lowercase letters, and three symbols"--make it difficult for attackers to guess passwords using a so-called "dictionary attack," which involves trying many possible passwords in succession.

Without such restrictions, people tend to pick passwords that are easy to remember, easy to type--and easy to guess. For example, when 32 million passwords from the social media website RockYou were inadvertently released last December, nearly half were found to be "trivial passwords" such as consecutive digits, dictionary words, or common names, according to an analysis last January by the Web security firm Imperva.

Requiring that passwords include numbers, symbols, and mixed cases significantly increases the number of possible passwords. With such rules, a dictionary attack becomes infeasible, but passwords also become harder to remember.

By Martyn Perks


The Race Online 2012 campaign has just launched its Manifesto for a Networked Nation, which aims to get the entire adult UK population hooked up to the internet before the 2012 London Olympics. The campaign is spearheaded by Martha Lane Fox, a veteran of the online world, having co-founded the successful LastMinute.com travel business during the dot.com boom. She was reappointed UK Digital Champion by the new Lib-Con government in June 2010.

Through research conducted by the consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Race Online 2012 found that 10million British adults – one fifth of the population – have never been online in their entire lives. Unbelievable as it sounds to anyone who uses the internet on a regular basis, there are still lots of people out there who have never managed to tweet on Twitter, gabber on Facebook or even read an article on spiked!

Race Online 2012 seems like a worthwhile campaign to allow more of us to enjoy the benefits of the internet. But it is worth asking why this government-endorsed campaign is so keen to bring every single Brit online, and to create a ‘Networked Nation’. It is also worth keeping in mind that there is a tendency, when focusing on the so-called ‘digital divide’, to exaggerate the potential of the internet to transform society, as if removing the divide is enough in itself to cure society of all its ills.

A month on from launch, there 's been a lot reported about alleged antenna problems with the iPhone 4, but on the whole I feel the device is the successful evolutionary step customers were hoping for. I've been using the new iPhone 4 for one month and it has are two great advancements. Firstly, the iPhone 4 has a very high resolution screen with 4 times more pixels than the previous iPhone. Text on the iPhone 4 is almost clear as printed text and I find myself reading many more news articles and emails on it. If, or when, Apple release an iPad with a similar display I predict it'll be extremely popular.

The biggest software development with the iPhone 4 is multitasking (which is now also available on the iPhone 3GS). Multitasking allows users to quickly flick between apps and pick-up straight where they've left off. This really suits iPhone users who often use apps for short periods of time, like quickly checking their twitter feed. In fact, I now find myself avoiding apps that don't yet support multitasking and switching instead to those that do.

In short, the user experience and functionality of the new device are so strong that it overcomes any teething problems.

Council websites have become an integral source of information for people living in cities. They provide information on everything from pet registration to garbage collection dates and noise restrictions. Using Loop11, we invited 600 participants to take part in a website usability study of of Australia's six capital city websites: Sydney, Hobart, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide and Darwin. Participants were asked to try and complete several tasks on each website.

Darwin City Council had the best score with 74% (The only council website to score over 70%). Perth and Adelaide Council had the lowest scores with 54% and 58%, respectively. There was little difference between the remaining three websites with only 7% margin separating them.

Surprisingly, Hobart City Council , the only council website which required participants to download a PDF did not come in last. Despite the lowest task completion rates and longest average time per task Hobart was saved by a good “ease of use rating”. But clearly there’s a lot more work to be done by city cCouncil websites to help people navigate their websiteefficiently and find the appropriate information, especially by the the City of Perth and Adelaide Councils City Council.

This report was generated entirely from results obtained through running a usability study with Loop11, published at www.loop11.com/council-websites/

The marketing and design industry in the UK is seeing strong signs of renewed confidence, according to the new European Market Eye report from the industry’s specialist recruitment consultancy, Aquent.

The survey of marketers as well as advertising, design and digital agencies found that three in five organisations predict a rise in permanent staff. The number of organisations increasing salaries looks set to double throughout the remainder of 2010, with 32% expecting pay rises over the next six months compared to just 16% over the last half year.

The digital sector seems to be leading the way in this recovery, with 45% of digital agencies expecting to boost salaries. Almost two thirds (60%)of organisations reported an increase in permanent staff, and a massive 80% are predicting a further rise in employees, indicating a very strong first half year performance in the sector..

Elsewhere in Europe, France too is experiencing a steady recovery with 38% of companies expecting salaries to rise, compared to just 29% reporting a rise over the last six months. Two thirds of French companies are also expecting to recruit permanent staff. And it is not just the UK which is seeing the boom in the digital sector, 73% of French digital agencies expecting to see a rise in staff too. Recovery in the Netherlands appears to be slower with firms showing more caution. Only a fifth of Dutch companies are expecting a rise in salaries, with 35% expecting an increase in permanent staff numbers.

“The UK marketing and design sector was hit hard by the global downturn and after 18 months of little hiring across the industry, we’re certainly now seeing signs of recovery and the market hotting up” comments Peter Geary, Aquent’s UK Regional Director. “It is especially interesting to see the boom in recruitment for the digital sector as web 2.0 becomes an increasingly important tool for businesses looking for new ways to engage with their customers. It is very reassuring to see these measurable signs of confidence returning and companies beginning to plan for the future again.”

User experience poster: A really nice single sheet poster on techniques to enhance the development process and bring some user focus.

Print out and share.

By Paul Marks


Google attempts to return relevant search results in the blink of an eye. But in future it could go one better, delivering search results to its users even before they know that they want the information.

Amit Singhal, one of Google's veteran search algorithm engineers, wants to develop a search engine that second-guesses users' needs well ahead of time. "I call it searching without searching," he said at a briefing at Google's London headquarters recently.

In future, your Google account may be allowed, under some as-yet-unidentified privacy policy, to know a whole lot about your life and the lives of those close to you. It will know birthdays and anniversaries, consumer gadget preferences, preferred hobbies and pastimes, even favourite foods. It will also know where you are, and be able to get in touch with your local stores via their websites.

No more present panic
Singhal says that could make life a lot easier. For instance, he imagines his wife's birthday is coming up. If he has signed up to the searching-without-searching algorithm (I'll call it "SWS" for now), it sees the event on the horizon and alerts him – as a calendar function can now. But the software then reads his wife's consumer preferences file and checks the real-time Twitter and Facebook feeds that Google now indexes for the latest buzz products that are likely to appeal to her.

"It might suggest I buy her an iPad and point me to some relevant product reviews," he says. But SWS might also discover, again from fishing in recent social media, that the local gadget store has a three-week waiting list for iPads. "So it would bring forward its alert to give me time to order it."

Singhal's idea taps into a growing research trend that is exploring ways to personalise search. For instance, Yahoo Research in Barcelona, Spain, has demonstrated that basic demographic information can help to reduce the ambiguity of some search terms by weighting search results towards what a particular user is likely to want to know.

In enterprises worldwide, workforce management continues to be based on the technology of more than a decade ago. Yet, today's technology has evolved considerably compared to that of ten years ago. Where previously basic functionality, primitive graphical user interfaces and design as an afterthought were considered acceptable, today's enterprises understand the value of limitless speed, comfortable and intuitive application design that allows managers to spend less time on processes, focus immediately on key factors that drive company performance, and ultimately make better decisions.

It has become an accepted rule of the modern age that technology advances at an increasing pace. Technological challenges that seemed insurmountable a decade ago are infallibly overcome by human inventiveness. As technology develops, user expectations rise in step. The immediate implication is that technology used today needs to be faster, smarter and more powerful than that created a decade ago. To rise to the top in an increasingly competitive market, solutions must be intuitive, friendly and effective; in short, they must be usable.

By Marisa Peacock


In the past when we’ve talked about usability testing, we’ve approached it from the perspective of tracking visitors’ behaviors online to help us better understand how customers use a site. But what if you could actually ask each individual a question? That’s what Kampyle aims to do with its feedback analytics tools. Unlike traditional website analytics, 'Kampyle for Websites' doesn’t lend insight about a company’s website with numbers. Instead, it use words.

With Kampyle, companies can place branded, fully customizable feedback forms on their websites, which customers can access and submit feedback about the site.

Words + Numbers = Results
Integrating feedback forms into a website not only adds a human touch, but it also helps to streamline support and sales leads. Obviously, tech support can’t fix what they don’t know isn’t working well, so the forms let them fix bugs before they become bigger issues. As well, sales teams can follow up with users who have exclusively provided information about why they didn’t complete a web form, abandoned a shopping cart or left the site altogether.

While Kampyle finds value in a customer’s words, it doesn’t think companies should ignore web analytics altogether. That’s why its dashboard integrates with Google Analytics and Omniture, allowing its customers to see both what and why in one place. The Kampyle dashboard can alert site managers to what the most pressing issues are (as indicated from form feedback) while showing comparative analytics that may highlight what result it’s having (ie site bounces, decreased page views, etc) on the site.

By Oliver Marks


The fascinating history of the automobile is remarkably similar to how personal computing appears to be evolving. Less than 100 years ago there were no standards with experimental contraptions controlled by levers, pedals, handlebars, wheels and a variety of power sources. Henry Ford succeeded in rolling up the best ideas of the day and developed early mass production techniques to standardize around the Model T. There was no value associated with aesthestic design or usability in early Ford products and a close lineage to horse carriage design.

‘Micro’ soft popularized the concept of personal computers powered by green screen DOS instead of macro mainframe behemoths in a similar fashion - just as Ford standardized the wheel, pedals and dashboard early micro computing users standardized around typewriter functionality.

While the modern individual can purchase sophisticated devices and interact with sophisticated services with instant credit card transactions, most businesses are stuck in a dour, bureaucratic digital grey filing cabinet world that lacks transparency or vitality when it comes to equipping employees. The result has been the employee expectation that work environments are gray, foggy cubicle worlds to the multicolor outside world.

Today Ford and General Motors are completely different global companies compared to fifty years ago, extracting astonishing performance from vehicles which most consumers never lift the hoods of, such is the efficiency of their usability and product design. In comparison today’s average business computer user is likely to be accessing layers of elderly enterprise applications via a five year old pc equipped with a previous generation internet browser. Collaboration is principally by email, frequently with attached Microsoft Office documents.

The motor industry standardized around use models and conventions after a few decades of fragmentation, resulting for example in the ability of London Transport to standardize around a single bus body style and matching chassis and drivetrain and drive after WWII. This meant they were able to freely mix and match mechanicals with bodies as required to move vast numbers of people around each day, while vehicle exceptions for special needs were also catered for.

A similar kind of overarching collaboration planning pays huge dividends in driving business efficiency and performance at enterprise scale, while not paying attention results in chronic inefficiency, fragmentation migraines and ever more complex IT gordian knots to support.

Local councils in the UK have experienced a downturn in website usability over the last year as they fail to address key transactional facilities, according to a new study released today.

The 2010 Local Council Website Usability report from user experience consultancy, Webcredible looked at the top 20 Local Councils outlined by the Society of IT Management (Soctim) and revealed that the average usability score achieved overall was 58.7 per cent, a dip in comparison with last year’s average score of 59.9 per cent.

The report did however reveal that despite improvement in some areas, many local council websites are still well below par when it comes to the usability of key transactional aspects. Areas such as error handling and calls to action made no improvement from last year and remained weak. Furthermore progress indicators to support users when conducting online transactions suffered a disappointing result with 12 out of 20 council sites scoring zero or one out of five. This is an area that needs immediate attention as managing users’ expectations is essential in engendering a sense of trust with visitors.

Other areas of disappointment included navigation, which is essential in encouraging website usability. Declarations of further cuts to budgets could severely impact the usability of websites as councils could look to group services together, leading to confusion and frustration. Many users will opt to use the phone or face-to-face services as their preferred means of contact, thus costing time and money.

Despite this, efforts to find local councillors within each area have improved significantly. Perhaps a result of the election earlier in the year, 13 out of 20 councils scored full marks with all sites scoring above three points when assessing how easy it was to find information about local councillors.

Trenton Moss, Director at Webcredible comments, “With an estimated 81 per cent of the population using the Internet, access to online information has never been so important. Despite efforts to develop certain areas, there is much scope for improvement. As budgets experience severe cuts and councils look to save on IT spend, websites could be something that suffers significantly. Local Councils must look towards investing in website usability as a way to capture these efficiency savings, for providing an intuitive online service will save time and money spent on implementing these services over the phone or face-to-face.”

By Jeff Sauro


I compiled a list of papers that have had a large and lasting influence on the field of Usability and User Experience. I then asked Jim Lewis and Joe Dumas, two pioneers in this field for their top five. There was considerable overlap in both the papers and topics suggesting that while there may be some disagreement with the conclusions of the papers there is strong agreement on their impact.

1. Designing for usability: key principles and what designers think. Gould, J. D. and Lewis, C. (1985)
Go to any UX conference and you'll hear the same points as those raised in this pioneering paper: early and continual focus on users; empirical measurement, iterative design.

Two honorable mentions for pioneering work include:

- Al-Awar, J., Chapanis, A., and Ford, R. (1981). Tutorials for the first-time computer user. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 24, 30-37.
This is one of the first descriptions of formative usability testing. Prior to this paper most user testing efforts were more summative (benchmark testing).

- Shackel, B. (1990). Human factors and usability. In J. Preece and L. Keller (Eds.), /Human-Computer Interaction, Selected Readings/ (pp. 27-41).
This paper defined usability as a function of efficiency, effectiveness & satisfaction (the ISO 9241 pt 11 standard). Despite many proposed extensions, we still think of usability in terms of these three aspects.

2. Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces, Nielsen, J., and Molich, R. (1990)
Despite much criticism, Heuristic Evaluation a "discount usability method" still plays a major role in interface evaluation. HE is best conducted with multiple trained professionals (ideally experts in both UX and the domain) and done prior to and in addition to a user-test.

3. Damaged merchandise? A review of experiments that compare usability evaluation methods. Gray, W. D., and Salzman, M. C. (1998).
With the proliferation of discount methods such as Heuristic Evaluation came a number of papers determining which method was "better": User Testing or Heuristic Evaluation? While there were a lot of good insights from these papers, Damaged Merchandise pointed out in detail that the methodologies used to make the comparisons were poorly designed and lead to fallacious conclusions.

Human Factors International (HFI) has just announced an extension of its successful program for certification of usability practitioners (Certified Usability Analysts) which currently provides certification to about 10% of the world's usability practitioners. As a service to the industry, the company will enable organizations to gain certification for their level of institutionalization of usability. They can be certified as Level III, IV, and V depending on their achievement on HFI's Usability Maturity Model. The certified organizations can then submit a product, application, or website to become certified for usable design.

A "Certified Practice in Usability" will have a validated level of maturity based upon the presence of trained and certified staff, user centered design methods, standards, and tools. The organization will also be rated for its executive attention to usability, organizational structure, and culture of care for customers. Each organizational submission will be systematically reviewed and audited by HFI staff to ensure compliance.

A "Certified Usable Design" can only result from the submission from a certified practice and it generally bears the label of the level of maturity of that practice. Certification assures that an approved user centered design process has been followed and that certified staff have attested that each deliverable document has been appropriately completed. The internal staff must also attest to the usability of the end design. The completed submission must prove the process and approvals. HFI staff will then review the documents and the design; rejecting any submission that fails to meet systematic criteria of good practice.

Eric Schaffer, CEO of Human Factors International, says, "It's time that purchasers can be assured that they will not be tortured with technology. They should be able to buy with an assured level of usability."

By Alex Faaborg


Software development is built around quantitative measurements. Measurements such as the time it takes an application to load, the amount of memory used, or the load on the CPU. These measurements are all easy to calculate and are wonderfully quantitative. One of the reasons some organizations tend to discount usability (both in practice and in artifacts like the severity descriptions in bug tracking systems), is an inaccurate view that usability is an amorphous and subjective thing that simply can't be scientifically quantified and measured. That assumption is incorrect.

The usability inspection technique of heuristic evaluation, which was introduced by Jakob Nielsen [2,3,4] has emerged as one of the most common ways for professional UX designers to evaluate the usability of a software application. Heuristic evaluations are extremely useful because they formally quantify the usability of a software application against a set of well defined and irrefutable principles. Usability violations can be quantified individually: either an interface supports undo, or it does not, either an interface is internally consistent, or it is not, etc. Usability violations can also be quantified in aggregate: the software application currently has 731 known usability issues.

Additionally, by establishing a tracking system on a set of agreed upon principles, much of the debate on the level of "there is no right or wrong with UI / every user is entitled to their personal opinion / all that matters is the ability to customize" that is currently found in some development communities can be significantly reduced. Usability heuristics will help ground these debates, just as currently in software development no one argues in favor of data loss, or in defense of crashing.

By Priya Ganapati


In a magic trick that only geeks can pull off, researchers at MIT have found a method to let users click and scroll exactly the same way they would with a computer mouse, without the device actually being there. Cup your palm, move it around on a table and a cursor on the screen hovers. Tap on the table like you would click a real mouse, and the computer responds. It’s one step beyond cordless. It’s an invisible mouse.

The project, called “Mouseless,” uses an infrared laser beam and camera to track the movements of the palm and fingers and translate them into computer commands.

“Like many other projects in the past, including the Nintendo Power Glove and the Fingerworks iGesture Pad, this attempts to see how we can use new technology to control old technology,” says Daniel Wigdor, a user experience architect for Microsoft who hasn’t worked directly on the project. “It’s just an intermediate step to where we want to be.”

Though new user interfaces such as touchscreens and voice recognition systems have become popular, the two-button mouse still reigns among computer users. Many technology experts think the precision pointing that a cursor offers is extremely difficult to replicate through technologies such as touch and speech.

Last week Intel CTO Justin Rattner said though Intel research labs is working on new touchscreen ideas, the mouse and keyboard combination is unlikely to be replaced in everyday computing for a long time. In the case of the Mouseless project, the infrared laser and camera are embedded in the computer. When a user cups their hand as if a physical mouse was present under their palm, the laser beam lights up the hand that is in contact with the table. The infrared camera detects this and interprets the movements. A working prototype of the Mouseless system costs approximately $20 to build, says Pranav Mistry, who is leading the project.

By Martin Metz


What is usability?
At its most fundamental level, usability is defined as the study of the ease with which people can achieve a particular goal by operating a human-made tool or system. The central question of usability is how well can users learn and use a system or tool to achieve a goal and how satisfied are they with the process provided by the system or tool. The concept of usability can be applied to a variety of ventures people undertake in communications, software, mechanics, consumer electronics, and objects used to transfer knowledge (such as manuals and books). However, for the purposes of this brief introduction to usability, I want to focus on usability's role in computer science, specifically user interface design or ui design, in addition to giving you as a designer advice on how to create user interfaces characterized by optimal usability.

User interface design and usability
In computer science, usability, when referring to the user interface design of a software application, specifically focuses on evaluating how clearly and effectively a user can interact with the user interface. Several methods such as those subsumed under the User Centered Design method offer ways to accomplish great usability, for example by creating wireframe prototypes and conducting usability tests. These methods allow the interface designer to gather valuable user experience feedback that can be employed to improve the overall usability of a website or other type of software program. Usability.gov defines these user experience measurables as such:

• Ease of learning - How fast can a user who has never seen the user interface before learn it sufficiently well to accomplish basic tasks?
• Efficiency of use - Once an experienced user has learned to use the system, how fast can he or she accomplish tasks?
• Memorability - If a user has used the system before, can he or she remember enough to use it effectively the next time or does the user have to start over again learning everything
• Error frequency and severity - How often do users make errors while using the system, how serious are these errors, and how do users recover from these errors?
• Subjective satisfaction - How much does the user like using the system?

If you want to guarantee optimal usability in your interface design then make sure to take advantage of tools like usability testing and keep the above mentioned questions at the heart of your user experience inquiry.

Computer component maker Intel is investing in research and development projects that provide insight into how technology can be used to better the human-computer experience.

"Better technology isn't enough these days," said Justin Rattner, Intel Senior Fellow, Chief Technology Officer and Director Intel Labs. "What the individual values today is a deeply personal, information experience. When I look ahead, this is the biggest change in computing I see coming."

During the company's annual Research at Intel event on June 30 more than 30 research teams showed off their latest inventions in the fields of energy, transportation, user experience, the cloud and platform innovation. The projects exampled how next generation technology will be integrated into people's lives.

Interaction with computers will become much more natural in the future said Intel, showing a first glimpse at how tomorrow's users will seamlessly interact with "invisible computers" through gesture, voice and touch.

Intel's Oasis - a "Smart Kitchen Top" that can recognize food products placed on a kitchen bench -provided an insight into how computers will be used to help generate shopping lists, show nutritional information, offer cooking tips, or provide recipes tailored to the ingredients we have in our house in the future.

A second invention developed by Intel's research department demonstrated a simple and cost-effective way of tracking your personal energy consumption within the house using a low-cost energy sensor.

I can’t count how many times in the past couple years I’ve heard people talk about how important information architecture (also referred to as IA) is to SEO. Yet it’s almost always presented in a way that calls upon a lot of highly technical lingo. Taxonomy. UX. Contextual browsing. Mental model. Ontology. Semantic web… Honestly speaking, I don’t even know what half the lingo means in the moment I hear some of these words.

And my eyes instantly gloss over. Yet in truth, even though I’m not a rocket scientist (nor a library sciences major), it turns out I totally get it – not from a linguistic perspective, but instead, from a visual and marketing perspective. So this is the first in a series of articles that will present otherwise highly complex concepts in hopefully easy to understand ways.

Caveat
Before I proceed, let this be a warning to anyone reading this article who, themselves, might in fact be, speak and breathe in highly technical terms. I’m not here to profess that I fully grasp every single thing about IA. In fact, I may even over-simplify some of the concepts I discuss. I ask your forgiveness in advance, simply because my goal of this and future related articles is to help non-technically advanced people in our industry. The more I (we) can help others understand these principles and concepts, the better we as an industry will become, and the higher quality both of users and search engine results…

Rocket Science Simplified
Okay – so what’s this thing all about? From an SEO perspective, Information Architecture, in plain English, is:

"The way and means by which content on a web site is organized and presented for users and the search engines to be able to easily digest and gain the most value from."

Some (but not necessarily all) of the most important aspects of achieving successful information architecture for SEO include:
•Research & Investigation
•Testing & Analysis
•Structural Modeling
•Establishing Relationships
•Design
•Implementation
•Review

So What? I already do all that stuff…
Unfortunately, many people who “think” they know SEO really only know just enough to be dangerous. Or they know enough to get some pretty significant results, but then they hit a performance ceiling.

By Adam Hartley


A new in-depth, qualitative study has compared the average reading speeds from reading long-form texts on four different reading devices – the traditional printed book, the PC, the Apple iPad and the Amazon Kindle. Jakob Nielsen's reading usability study looked to answer one simple question: are the latest e-books and tablet PCs as good as printed books?

iPad versus Kindle versus Book
"We conducted a readability study of people reading fiction on the two highest-profile tablets: Apple's iPad (first-generation) and Amazon's Kindle 2," notes Nielsen. The study was conducted using Apple's default iBook app and focused on testing "linear, narrative content because it's the primary use case for e-book readers." Readers were taught how to use both the Apple and Amazon e-readers before the study, so the focus could be purely on measuring and comparing reading speeds.

Method
"We ran a within-subjects study, testing each user on all 4 reading conditions — printed book, PC, iPad, and Kindle — rotating the sequence in which we exposed users to each device. On each device, we asked each user to read a short story by Ernest Hemingway," Nielsen explains. "We picked Hemingway because his work is pleasant and engaging to read, and yet not so complicated that it would be above the heads of users."

The stories took 17 minutes and 20 seconds to read on average, with all 32 users in the study being people "who like reading and frequently read books… because we wanted to focus on the people most likely to actually read long texts on tablets." The results show that the Apple iPad measures at 6.2 per cent lower reading speed than the printed book and that the Amazon Kindle measured at 10.7 per cent slower than print.

Intel Corporation Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner has just announced a new research division, called Interaction and Experience Research (IXR), that is focused on defining new user experiences and new computing platforms. The innovations coming out of the labs are expected to help re-imagine how we will all experience computing in the future.

Enabled by Moore's Law and the performance advancements now available across a continuum of computing devices including the traditional PC, the company's engagement and experience with technology, according to Rattner, will become much more personal and social through individual user contexts informed by sensors, augmented by cloud intelligence, and driven by more natural interfaces such as touch, gesture and voice.

"Better technology isn't enough these days," said Rattner. "What the individual values today is a deeply personal, information experience. When I look ahead, this is the biggest change in computing I see coming. At Intel, we've been building up our capabilities in the user experience and interaction areas for over a decade. We've recently assembled an outstanding team of researchers consisting of both user interface technologists and social scientists to create the next generation of user experiences. We've learned, for example, that the television experience isn't the same thing as the Web experience, even though more and more TV will be delivered via the Internet. Browsing the Web at 10 feet is an experience few people relish, but television experienced via the Internet is a huge step beyond broadcast."

Rattner said the new division will be led by Intel Fellow Genevieve Bell, who has been one of the leading user-centered design advocates at Intel for more than a decade.