User Sciences & Experiences Research (USER) lab, IBM Almaden Research Center

The User Sciences & Experience Research (USER) lab focuses on understanding how people interact with technology. Our goal is to improve the ease-of-use of existing products and explore new paradigms in using computers.

Our cross-disciplinary team is comprised of new form factor and user interface designers, human computer interaction (HCI) and human factors researchers, hardware and software engineers, cognitive and social computing scientists, and user study analysts. We work together to address three key technology challenges:

Devices

Buttons, pedals, switches, keyboards, pointing devices and graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are all established ways for people to interact with the many devices in their lives. Physical interfaces not only impact interaction efficiency, but also influence our perceptions of technology. We explore multiple modalities, including hand, speech and gaze controlled devices, in a quest to uncover the best device specific controllers possible, as well as a universal controller of all devices.

Information & People

Today, computer desktops, GUIs and web browsers serve as a primary interface to the world of information. Going beyond this, our research is aimed at creating intelligent agents that can act as intermediaries, assisting people in their interactions with abundant information. Intermediaries may also be able to handle many of the more mundane interactions between people. Promoting satisfying and effective social interactions that are mediated by technology is a rapidly growing challenge.

Place & Things

Embedded sensors, displays, and communication capabilities are beginning to change the fabric of the world around us. As part of our HCI research efforts, we are creating a small set of infrastructure technologies that can be used to easily build intelligent environments. These environments support context aware devices such as computers that know about all the other devices in a room (such as printers or monitors).

More Information: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/software/user/index.shtml