Human Computer Interaction (HCI) lies at the heart of imagining the future of interactive systems and making sure they are useful and usable when developed. From its original focus on usability engineering methods, HCI has evolved into a vibrant multidisciplinary area of research and practice. Research in HCI has become a key driver in understanding how people, work practices, business value, and technologies interact. Some of our highlighted research includes:
BlueSpace: BlueSpace is a next-generation prototype workspace with the goal of increasing knowledge workers' productivity by deterring unwanted interruptions and improving team awareness and communications. It also provides users with greater control over their environment by allowing them to personalize their environmental settings. There are several cornerstone technologies and applications that BlueSpace utilizes to achieve these goals. One of these is the myTeam application which combines sensor data with user input to provide availability awareness to registered team members. Another is the Everywhere Displays projector that creates interactive displays on walls and tables, allowing users to quickly reconfigure their workspace to support working with colleague.
Community Research: Our community research program explores how emerging technologies may provide new business opportunities for IBM products, in support of workplace communities for communities of practice and geographical communities. We have also performed detailed analyses of the business costs and opportunities of communities of practice.
Reinventing Email (ReMail): Electronic mail is the most widely used business productivity application. Though email usage has changed, our email clients largely have not. People are increasingly frustrated by their email, overwhelmed by the volume, losing important items, and feeling pressure to respond quickly. The ReMail project investigates how people use email and how we might design and build better email systems.
The MoMail project reinvents mobile email to support the way users really work with email. A key design approach in MoMail is to enable users to perform most email management functions directly within the inbox screen. This is accomplished through gestural menus, thread highlighting, and one-liner previews.
Loops is a web-based "persistent chat" system that allows members of a distributed workgroup to collaborate synchronously and asynchronously, with participants being able to see who is (or was) present and what has happened recently. Loops (and its predecessor, Babble) makes use of social proxies, minimalist graphical visualizations of the presence and activities of people participating in a Loop.
Research for Consulting and Services Businesses: Historically, IBM Research has focused its efforts on science and engineering relevant to the hardware and software businesses, such as physics related to magnetic storage and computational theory related to encryption algorithms. With the growth of IGS, we now have the opportunity to direct research toward IBM's consulting business.
ReachOut: ReachOut is a methodology and a chat-based tool for peer support and community building. It offers new methods for handling such problems as locating, selecting, and approaching the right set of potential advisors. ReachOut bridges the gap between newsgroups and real time synchronous chats. It takes the best of both options, and adds push technology to portray new, by-topic awareness and mid-level persistency.
Web Accessibility: Despite accessibility standards for the web, many pages remain difficult to use. This project investigates a method of making web pages accessible without requiring the use of assistive technologies. A standard browser, provides the ability for users to access web pages reformatted in the manner most usable by them.
IBM is a leading center for human-computer interaction (HCI). From the development of enabling technologies, such as speech recognition, to cutting-edge interaction design, IBM's HCI research spans more than a quarter of a century. Drawing on such disciplines as anthropology, computer science, psychology, and sociology, as well as visual and industrial design, HCI work is carried out in contexts ranging from laboratories to on-site collaborations with customers.
