Just back from CHI 2004, the biggest annual usability conference, this year staged in Vienna. Jiri Mzourek, Matthias Mueller-Prove and I presented an HCI Overview paper about usability in open source software– specifically, NetBeans, OpenOffice.org and GNOME.
Bumped into Ron Bird, who I haven’t seen or heard from in 10 years when we worked at the now-defunct Reuters Usability Group in London. Also bumped into Seth, from whom we skilfully managed to avoid taking any questions at the end of our presentation 🙂
Coolest talk by far was from the guys at Carnegie Mellon who invented the ESP Game which, if a not unreasonable number of people play it, could end up generating accurate textual descriptions of every image on the web within a month[1]… neat idea or what?
[1] Sort of.