Last week was the 4th annual Xerox Innovation Group (XIG) conference in Webster, NY. It is an event that brings together researchers from all of our centers: Xerox Research Center Canada, Europe, India and Webster (my center) as well as the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). I was on the conference committee as the one of the keynote speaker chairs (I brought Professor Judy Olson to speak to our researchers about scientific collaboration over distance), so I was pretty busy during the event, helping with the logistics and networking with all of the amazing people in our organization.

In the midst of all this activity, I was surprised with an Excellence in Science and Technology award, along with 5 other team members, for our work on on Open Xerox. Open Xerox is the web portal that hosts technology prototypes from XIG, making them accessible to the external user community well before the launch of a product offering. I am responsible for the design and usability of the site and it’s associated services. Here’s the text from the award:

This award recognizes the Open Xerox Team. It has over a thousand users and is being used to support RFPs, customer engagement and technology licensing as well as share R&D across the XIG and broader research community. Designed to combine technologies, facilitate transfer, ease integration into customer applications and host software at very different levels of maturity the proprietary platform also has built-in IP protection.

The team for Open Xerox is a cross-center team, including people from Xerox Research Center Europe (XRCE) and Xerox Research Center Webster (XRCW). Pictured (from left to right) are Irene Maxwell (XRCE), Sophie Vandebroek (CTO of Xerox and President of XIG), me and Mike Kehoe (XRCW). Behind us is the video screen that shows some of our other team members connecting via video conference from XRCE in Grenoble, France: Jutta Willamowski and Nicola (hidden off screen). Herve Poirier (XRCE) is also on our team and was present at the conference, but did not make it for the awards ceremony. We were all given a nice plaque and an iPad 2 for our efforts. I’m very proud of the team and the project so I decided to post about it here.

One of the fun things about working in a research center is that we are encouraged to publish and obtain patents for our ideas. This year I contributed to two publications that came out of my usability evaluation work on the Document Interactions project. Here are the references:

Eric Bier, Wei Peng, Zahra Langford, William Janssen, Patricia Wall, Jonas Karlsson, and Tong Sun. A story-based approach to making sense of documents. IASTED (International Association of Science and Technology for Development) Proceedings on Human-Computer Interaction, 2011.

Tong Sun, Jonas Karlsson, Wei Peng, Patricia Wall, Zahra Langford. “Managing Interactions in the Collaborative 3D DocuSpace for Enterprise Applications”, The 4th International Conference on Human-centric Computing 2011.

You can find the conference proceedings for HumComp2011 here.

This project also spawned a chapter in an upcoming book about online interview research to which I contributed content and illustrations. In addition, I have two patents in the application process for user interface innovations on two other projects, I’ll post here if/when they are finalized. I will eventually get everything formalized into my resume.

In the beginning of 2010, I started working on a Xerox Innovation Group research project called Trailmeme in the role of Usability Lead. Last week, the project was launched from private to public beta at DEMO Fall 2010, a launch pad for emerging technology.

Trailmeme is a new kind of publishing that enables users to create visual maps of Web content. With Trailmeme, content generators, or trailblazers, can create trails to organize and present Web content in a way that tells a story. Trailblazing finishes with a social act, when authors publish their trails for others to walk. Content consumers, or trail walkers, can enjoy well organized journeys through meaningfully sequenced content with commentary. Trails can be turned into PDF documents for printing or use as ebooks.

If you are interested in seeing what Trailmeme is about, you can go to Trailmeme.com and sign up. This is a project with a lot of moving parts: a destination site, search site, a browser bookmarklet, a Firefox toolbar and a WordPress plugin. Throughout the year, I have been doing heuristic evaluations of each aspect of the project and then wireframing improved interfaces. I am privileged to work with a talented UI designer, Anoop Surendran who transforms my wireframes into polished designs that can be implemented by an amazing development team. We’re in beta so some of the edges are still rough; my next task is to plan some quick user testing to set direction for the next round of improvements and features. If you do try it, please don’t hesitate to let me know what you think.

For more information, check out the release post on the Trailmeme blog and watch the 6 minute presentation given by Project Lead Venkat Rao at DEMO.

The project has also received some excellent press coverage:
DEMO: Trailmeme lets you take a walk on the Internet on VentureBeat
Xerox-Incubated TrailMeme Launches, Reducing Real-Time Anxiety on siliconANGLE
Collect, Process and Share Your Online Research with Trailmeme on ReadWriteWeb
Trailmeme creates retraceable, social Web history on CNET News
A More Organic Way to Organize The Web’s Content on Mashable

For more press, see the Trailmeme in the Media Trail (also pictured in the screen capture above).