I received a copy of Cases in Online Interview Research in the mail last month. I created an illustration and helped write Chapter 7 “Guides and Visitors: Capturing Stories in Virtual-World and Interactive Web Experiences” with team members Patricial Wall, Jonas Karlsson, Tong Sun, Wei Peng, Eric Bier, Christian Overland, Mike Butman, Suzanne Fischer and Lisa Korzetz. The chapter documents our work on a collaborative project between the Xerox Research Center Webster (XRCW), Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)  and The Henry Ford Museum called Document Interactions. In partnership with the museum, our research team created a web application and a 3-D virtual world to facilitate the sharing of stories around museum artifacts.

This was one of the first projects I worked on when I joined XRCW in late 2009. My role on the team was to improve the usability of the web application and virtual world interactions. I evaluated the web application and gave suggestions for improvement, I planned and led the user evaluation of the web application (combining user testing and structured interview techniques), and helped plan the user evaluation of the 3-D virtual world. All of the user evaluations took place virtually over the phone and via shared screens, rather than face-to-face, which made our project a prime candidate for inclusion in the book.

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.