Joanna McGrenere

personal website

Reflections on my 15+ years exploring personalized users interfaces

17th of February 2015, 2:00pm - 3:00pm
PCRI building (650), Room 445 (How to get to there ? )


Abstract

There is no such thing as an average user. Users bring their own individual needs, desires, and skills to their everyday use of interactive technologies. Yet many of today’s technologies, from desktop applications to mobile devices and apps, are still designed for some mythical average user. It seems intuitive that interfaces should be designed with adaptation in mind so that they would better accommodate individual differences among users. Yet, what seems intuitive is not necessarily straightforward.


I will give an overview of my group’s research in the area of personalized user interfaces, touching briefly on my PhD work and moving all the way through to recent day explorations. I will highlight various approaches to adaptation, what we’ve learned about the strengths and limitations of those approaches, and where promising future opportunities lie.



Biography

Joanna McGrenere is a Professor and the Associate Head of Graduate Affairs in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She received a PhD from the University of Toronto in 2002, an MSc from UBC in 1996, and a BSc from Western University in 1993, all in Computer Science. Her broad research area is Human Computer Interaction (HCI), with a specialization in interface personalization, universal usability, assistive technology, and computer supported cooperative work. She often serves on program committees for the top conferences in HCI, including serving as the Papers Co-Chair for CHI in 2015. She is a member of the editorial board for ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing. Joanna won a Microsoft Research Software Engineering Innovation Foundation (SEIF) award in 2013, a Killam award for Excellence in Mentoring (2012), an Outstanding Young Computer Science Research Award from the Canadian Association of Computer Science (2011), was appointed as a Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies Early Career Scholar (2010), and was the first recipient of the Anita Borg Early Career Scholar Award (2004). Joanna is also chairing the steering committee for the relatively new HCI@UBC initiative: an interdisciplinary meeting for scholars working in the area of Human-Computer Interaction at UBC.