LEarn from Video Extensive Real Atm Gigabit Experiment |
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LEVERAGE News No 2, April 1997 |
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InterACTS where LEVERAGE communicates with other ACTS projects Luis Bellido, a research fellow at DIT-UPM (Madrid technical university) and a key member of the LEVERAGE team, took part in the recent USINACTS distributed seminar on Usability in ACTS. He writes: The USINACTS distributed conference took place simultaneously in Brussels, Berlin, Tampere and Madrid - needless to say, I attended in Madrid. The event had an extra post-modern dimension - whilst discussing ‘usability’, the subject of the conference, we were ourselves participating in trials to evaluate the usability of the system itself. In the session on Usability problems in industry, Pat Jordan from Philips stressed the importance of human factors, especially ‘pleasure’ in defining usability. It was later pointed out that the concept of usability in relation to an industrial product (such as a toaster) is different and possibly less complex than usability in relation to a service (such as a distributed conferencing service) where management and organisational factors (such as hot-line support, updates and maintenance) also have to be taken into account. In the session on Social/Political issues familiar arguments were rehearsed such as: the need for users to use technology in order to stimulate improvement of that technology; the importance of trials for ACTS projects (no trials = no project!); the likely areas to benefit from new services (home banking, tele-education, tele-work, video-on-demand and on-line publishing among others) and the necessity for usability and marketing to work hand-in-hand to ensure a good service for users. The Business issues session featured presentations from Nokia, Telefonica I+D and TeamWARE.
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