Anais do IHC'2001 - Departamento de Informática e Estatística - UFSC

Palestras Internacionais
Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability
Jenny Preece
Chair & Prof. of Information Systems
University of Maryland Baltimore County
Baltimore, MD 21250
http://www.ifsm.umbc.edu/~preece/
Like twentieth-century architects and town planners, online community developers shape
digital landscapes, but successful communities must have a clear purpose, people and social
policies.
Millions of people meet online to debate baseball scores, compare parenting experiences, get
stock information, and check consumer advice. They create communities by their presence or
absence, their behavior and personalities. Developers can’t control what people do but they
can influence them by defining purposes, policies and creating safe, enticing places for people
to meet. Knowing how to support social interaction (i.e., sociability) and human-computer
interaction (i.e., usability) produces thriving online communities instead of electronic ghost
towns.
In this talk I will discuss how developers can create sociability and usability for different
kinds of online communities. Compelling examples from research on empathy, hostility and
lurking illustrate key points. I also suggest how online communities can influence building
social capital.
The Future of the Web: Visual, Social and Universal
Ben Shneiderman
Professor in the Department of Computer Science
University of Maryland
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/ben/
The excitement and fear of the World-Wide Web are both justified. It is a compelling and
transforming technology that is just beginning to spread. It's impact will be huge. But it is a
technology whose evolution we can shape – if we think about what human values we hold
dear, and what kind of a world we wish to create.
This talk will show examples of advanced information visualization technologies visualization
tools for financial, commercial, and professional applications are beginning to appear and
profoundly expand user capabilities. Social interaction through online communities is
sweeping through the World Wide Web and could restructure relationships and governments,
but only if trust, privacy, and empathy can be ensured. And finally I will argue for universal
usability – bridging the digital divide by facilitating access by the broadest possible set of
users.
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