LEVERAGE News 2

LEVERAGE
LEarn from Video Extensive Real Atm Gigabit Experiment

LEVERAGE News No 2, April 1997

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InterACTS
where LEVERAGE communicates with other ACTS projects
Luis Bellido, a research fellow at DIT-UPM (Madrid technical university) and a key member of the LEVERAGE team, took part in the recent USINACTS distributed seminar on Usability in ACTS. He writes:
The USINACTS distributed conference took place simultaneously in Brussels, Berlin, Tampere and Madrid - needless to say, I attended in Madrid. The event had an extra post-modern dimension - whilst discussing ‘usability’, the subject of the conference, we were ourselves participating in trials to evaluate the usability of the system itself.
In the session on Usability problems in industry, Pat Jordan from Philips stressed the importance of human factors, especially ‘pleasure’ in defining usability. It was later pointed out that the concept of usability in relation to an industrial product (such as a toaster) is different and possibly less complex than usability in relation to a service (such as a distributed conferencing service) where management and organisational factors (such as hot-line support, updates and maintenance) also have to be taken into account.
In the session on Social/Political issues familiar arguments were rehearsed such as: the need for users to use technology in order to stimulate improvement of that technology; the importance of trials for ACTS projects (no trials = no project!); the likely areas to benefit from new services (home banking, tele-education, tele-work, video-on-demand and on-line publishing among others) and the necessity for usability and marketing to work hand-in-hand to ensure a good service for users.
The Business issues session featured presentations from Nokia, Telefonica I+D and TeamWARE.

Nokia presented their Nokia 9000 Communicator and described how their notion of usability involves interface and industrial designers, marketing experts and management working together throughout a product’s life from its conception through to (and during) its appearance on the market.
Telefonica I + D explained how an interface was selected for their INFOVIA service through use of questionnaires
TeamWARE described their approach to usability which is to maintain consistency in their interface to facilitate use and recognition of their whole family of products.
The Evaluation in ACTS session included many presentations but little time for what promised to be an interesting discussion whilst the final session entitled The way forward featured an interesting presentation of an advanced 3-D system which was controlled by the operator just looking at different objects. For further details of the USINACTS seminar including slides and papers see:
http://atwww.hhi.de/USINACTS/program.htm