Document navigation tools bring accolade for UC researcher
Published by Communications and Development
18 February 2009
A Canterbury University computer scientist has received recognition for research aimed at making human-computer interaction more efficient and user-friendly.
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| Professor Andrew Cockburn with his Chris Wallace Award for Outstanding Research Contribution. |
Professor Andrew Cockburn (Computer Science and Software Engineering) was recently awarded the Chris Wallace Award for Outstanding Research Contribution by the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia. The announcement was made at the 2009 Australasian Computer Science Week conference held at Te Papa, in Wellington, from 19 23 January.
Named after Australian computer scientist Professor Christopher Wallace, the annual award recognises work undertaken by an academic for postdoctoral research in a New Zealand or Australian university or research institute. The 2009 award is for work carried out between 2005 and 2007.
The award acknowledged a suite of work Professor Cockburn undertook on human-computer interaction, particularly in the development of improved user interfaces for document navigation.
“People spend a lot of time navigating through documents on computers and the scroll bar is accepted as the be-all and end-all in navigation tools,” Professor Cockburn said.
“But we think we can do better than that so we’ve been looking at user interfaces that can help people navigate better, and we’ve been doing that by understanding what users do and using that understanding to design and construct user interfaces that do the job better, then testing those interfaces in a realistic manner.”
Working with colleagues and students in the Computer Science and Software Engineering department, the navigation tools Professor Cockburn has been involved in developing include a speed-dependent automatic zooming tool, which zooms out from documents when the viewer is scrolling quickly, helping users navigate documents more easily; a footprints scroll bar which captures images of pages viewed for a certain amount of time, creating automatic bookmarks allowing the viewer to scroll back to previous pages easily and quickly; and spatially consistent overview thumbnail zones, which give an overview of all open documents, negating the need for users to search through minimised windows in the task bar or search through open files on the desktop.
Professor Cockburn said the research involved in developing the footprints scroll bar would be presented to the 2009 CHI (Human Factors in Computing Systems) Conference in Boston in April. A paper on the project, written by PhD student Jason Alexander, who was involved in developing the system, won the best student paper award at the 2008 Graphics Interface Conference in Canada last year.
For further information please contact:
Stacey Doornenbal
Communications Officer
University of Canterbury
Ph: (03) 364 2984
stacey.doornenbal@canterbury.ac.nz