Making Monitoring UIs Suck Less

Google Tech Talk
February 26, 2009

ABSTRACT

Presented by Conrad Albrecht-Buehler.

Technology users are technology observers as well: monitoring for problems or opportunities that might arise. Designing interfaces to support the monitoring of technology presents unique challenges: from detecting situations to responding to situations, to changing the tools to match a changing operating environment or the changing knowledge of the observer.

I present "Heed": a scale and framework to help observers of a system evaluate which situations need scrutiny and when, along with an example heed-based interface that encourages the development of situation awareness. I discuss how the framework and interface can be applied to four different situations: server performance, a business's finances, user experience in a community forum, and the risk of disease outbreak at a veterinary clinic.

Conrad Albrecht-Buehler is always on the look-out for new and challenging user problems to explore and design remedies for. He received his Ph.D. at Northwestern University studying human-computer interaction with Don Norman, and is now adjunct faculty at Northwestern's Segal Design Institute teaching user-centered design. His research focuses on interfaces for situation awareness and information visualization. In his spare time, he designs products for stroke survivors and enjoys dog training.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google
• tech
• talk
• monitor
• ui

[rwese]

If you can't focus longer than 10minutes you should, just move a long.

[davidboreham]

The entrepreneur in this video who has to monitor servers while writing code and doing biz dev deals. That's my life. So I found this presentation extremely useful. It could help me sleep at night. I would add 'number of Tweets@ per hour' as a useful indicator of service trouble ;)

[hansiraber]

when my pasta pot needs my attention it simply grows until it flows over.

i'm pretty damn sure that's were his inspiration came from!

[LA206BW]

Don't be silly - this is very applicable to cooking!

[hansiraber]

pf.... this is even too boring to listen to while cooking....

[destinystruth]

haha...,

but 19 thumbs down just for making a comment like that...?

damn, youtubers are pretty gay.