Yesterday five SI students had the opportunity to call into the Mozilla Labs 'design lunch' (which is held every Thursday at the Mozilla HQ in Mountain View) to get feedback on their fall University Design Challenge submissions.

Members of the Mozilla Labs team gave our students some great feedback on their ideas and asked some thought-provoking questions. Pictured above are Pascal and Jono from Mozilla, as they appeared on our live video stream.

Overall, we have had another great experience this semester working with Mozilla and developing submissions for this challenge!

Five HCI students recently submitted entries to Mozilla's University Design Challenge. The object of the challenge was to address browsing history: “How can we make sense of this rich source of data and how do we best present this data to the user?”

After an initial brainstorming session, the students worked individually or in teams to create mockups, prototypes and concept videos. Mozilla has blogged about the design challenge results, and some of the Mozilla Labs team will be giving our students personalized feedback over the phone next week. Check out the Design Challenge submissions from SI:

Natalia Fisher - Snapshot History

Natalia's Snapshot History allows users to visually scan and search for specific words or phrases in their browser history by displaying searchable thumbnail screenshots and a time frame selector. Check out her mockups.

Tom Haynes - Timeline

Instead of showing web history as a one dimensional list, Tom's Timeline includes additional contextual information (like time of day, duration of visit, browsing path to the page, whether pages were opened in a new tab or a new window, etc) to help people re-find the pages they were looking for. See his mockup and video.

Katie McCurdy and Kiran Jagadeesh - Firefox Foresight

Firefox Foresight uses past user browsing behavior and patterns in order to predict which websites they are likely to visit at a given time, and in a given place.  The system will make suggestions to users via a sidebar notification and recommendation system. Check out Katie and Kiran's concept description and narrated storyboard.

Jose Jimenez - Mozilla's History Browsing
Jose's timeline helps users remember which sites they have visited by providing a sliding timeline at the top that can be used to navigate back and forth. Users will visually see the sites they have been to and be able to see the path in the which they got to any given site. See Jose's concept description and prototype.

On October 13, SOCHI held our first-ever "Ignite" event, where students were invited to speak for 5 minutes about a topic of their choice. This event was modeled after the official Ignite events, where speakers are given 20 slides and slides auto-advance after 15 seconds, whether they are ready or not! We found that this was a great format for students to keep it short and simple in talking about topics they are passionate about.

We had 9 awesome speakers for the event: some talked about lessons learned during their summer internships (including for several startups), some shared advice with fellow students about job searching and independent studies, one reported on a recent conference, and one gave a rousing talk on affordances. We encourage you to check out them all, as each speaker much to share. Enjoy!

Speakers:
Katie McCurdy: “Most Important Things I Learned at the 2009 Design Research Conference”
Laura Rodrian: “Professional for Hire: Making the Most of Your Job Search”
Noah Liebman: “The Death of Touch: Tactile Affordances in an Age of Multitouch”
Jeremy Canfield: “Phonagle, the Untold (short) Story”
Debra Lauterbach: “Choose Your Own Adventure: Extending Your Learning Outside the Classroom”
Eunice Shin: "Working for a Brand Experience Agency"
Wentao Wang: “HCI Work in Startups”
Jo Pu: “100 Days of Summer at Pitney Bowes” - slides only available on Slideshare
Ami Arnault: “Lessons Learned from Working for an Early-stage Startup” (presentation not recorded)

Playlist of presentations on Vimeo: (or click here to go to Vimeo)

Source: Flickr

Check out the creativity of SI students - the collection of student sketchnotes from danah boyd's talk at the JSB symposium last week is now online!

Sketchnotes are just visual notes - they use pictures, doodles, typography, etc. to represent concepts rather than taking verbatim notes. Studies have shown that this type of visual notetaking actually helps you focus more during a talk, and also helps you remember more of the details later. Sketchnotes have been popularized recently by people like Mike Rohde, whose sketchnotes from SxSW and other conferences have circulated widely on the web.

Participating students (in order of sketchnotes):

* Yang-Chen (Avalon) Hu, Human-Computer Interaction student
* Colleen Theisen, Tailored student
* Katie McCurdy, Human-Computer Interaction student
* Laura Rodrian, Tailored student
* Jeremy Canfield, Tailored student
* Dug Song, local entrepreneur
* Debra Lauterbach, Human-Computer Interaction and Social Computing student
* Elaine Engstrom, Human-Computer Interaction and Library & Information Services alum

Check out the showcase page of the whole collection here.

Yelp provides a suite of tools connecting people to local business through community contributed reviews is at the frontier of motivating to users to contribute. They currently boast about 25 million unique hits per month, and growing quickly, thanks in part to the efforts of their Community Managers.

SOCHI was privileged to hold a brown-bag lunch with two such community managers, Mariah Cherem and Colleen Curtis from Yelp.com. Mariah is the current Metro Detroit Community Manager, and Colleen was the Chicago Community Manager. They provided a great view of what's it like to work for one of the country's best known social media companies. They talked about how they foster the sense of community and keep their users happy and reviewing.

Four UX industry leaders came to SI tonight to talk about 'What makes an effective UX professional;' the event was put on by Michigan UPA (MUPA), the Michigan/Ohio chapter of CHI (MOCHI), the Student Organization for Computer-Human Interaction at the School of Information (SOCHI), and the School of Information Career Development Office. Each panelist gave an introduction and some tips, and then the panelists took questions from the audience. Following are some liveblogged notes from each panelist's individual talk as well as a summary of the panel discussion.

Source: Flickr

Source: Flickr

Source: Flickr

We held the kickoff meeting for this fall's Mozilla Design Challenge last Thursday night up at Design Lab 1 (or DL1 as we say) on North campus. 26 SI students came to eat some pizza courtesy of Mozilla, sketch ideas relating to browsing history, and then work in small groups to further brainstorm, develop, and whiteboard ideas. The evening was super fun and stimulating, and it was a great chance for HCI types from different years to get to know one another a little better. Jeremy captured some great pictures throughout the evening - check them out on flickr.

Students will now work individually or in groups to develop their ideas a bit further; the next check-in point for the challenge will be on Thursday, October 8th in the DL1 at HCI show and tell. This will be a chance to show off progress and get some feedback from peers.

The challenge will officially end somewhere right around Halloween, and students will submit their designs at that point. The goal is to submit a short video explaining the concept, although some students might take it to the next level and create an animation or prototype. We are really looking forward to seeing what people come up with!

If you missed the first event but want to get on the email list for this challenge, just write sochi-officers@umich.edu.

We are now officially on our way to a great semester! Welcome to all of our new HCI students. Many of you have been asking, "How do I join SOCHI?" We have great news for you: you don't have to do anything! There are no membership dues or official roster list for SOCHI. Just show up at any of our events!

There are a few things that you can do to be sure you catch all of the latest SOCHI news and are informed of our events:

1. Sign up for the SOCHI listserv. Directions can be found at:
http://sochi.cms.si.umich.edu/?q=content/join-mailing-list

Today Tyler Bell, Product Manager for the Geo Technologies group at
Yahoo!, spoke at SI on the subject of Geo Informatics (or as the wikipedia entry puts it, geoinformatics.

Talk Description: Location-Aware Applications are all the rage in today's
technology and start-up scene. Yet understanding location and providing
the best user experience entails much more than simply putting dots on a
map. This short talk provides an overview of how Yahoo! tackles
geographic context and entity recognition to connect our users with the
world around them.

Read on for notes from SOCHI attendees!

All School of Information students, alumni, faculty and staff are invited to get the year started right this Friday, September 11th at Dominick's!

SOCHI has arranged an SI-only gathering at Ann Arbor's favorite backyard patio from 6-9pm. We are looking forward to seeing many old friends and new faces. Stop by anytime! Just look for the section marked off for SI.

If you're new to Ann Arbor, Dominick's is located just South of the Law Quad (or two blocks Southwest of West Hall), on Monroe Street.