04 November 2009 @ 16:00 - 17:00

Seminar on "A Usability Engineering Approach to Usable Systems for Human Needs" by Dr. Theng Yin Leng, Division of Information Studies, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University

Seminar Room, 8th Floor, Temasek Laboratories, 5A Engineering Drive 1, National University of Singapore

Abstract: History has taught us that inadequate understanding of users, scenarios of use and technologies have resulted in “unusable” systems, leading to failures of many research and development computing projects. Designers need to develop usable and useful interactive systems, as designers often design for themselves unless they are trained to realise that people are diverse, and that end-users are unlikely to be like them. The more errors that can be avoided "upfront" by the right method, the less work both test users and designers will have to put in to refine prototypes to improve their usability. Using examples from past and on-going research projects, this talk outlines a usability engineering approach to the design and evaluation of interactive systems that are user-friendly and user-focused.

Speaker: Dr. Theng Yin Leng completed her PhD in 1997 on addressing the “lost in hyperspace” problem in hypertext, and proposed a framework to understand design and usability issues. She then joined Middlesex University (London) as a Lecturer from 1998 to 2001. Currently, she is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair (Research) at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). She teaches on the Information Studies/Systems Masters Programmes: Digital Libraries, Human-Computer Interaction, Usability Engineering and Information Architecture.

Dr. Theng’s research in digital libraries and user interface design has won her two research grants from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC, UK) during her four years of teaching at Middlesex University (London). Upon her return to Singapore, in 2003, she was also awarded a Tier 1 MOE grant to work on a suite of qualitative and quantitative techniques to help designers build usable and useful digital libraries in the Web and mobile environments. In 2007, she received two A*Star grants investigating mobile media (as Co-PI) and interface design patterns (as PI). Recently, she received a grant from the Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Welfare Foundation to investigate possible approaches offered by the interactive digital technology linking exercise to healthy food consumption among the elderly.

Dr. Theng has participated in varying capacities as principal investigator, co-investigator and collaborator in numerous research projects in the United Kingdom and Singapore since 1998. These projects involve usable and useful interfaces for hypertext systems, the Web and mobile environments; e-learning building tools and learning objects; usability evaluation techniques; and geospatial digital libraries. Dr. Theng has more than 100 publications and publishes widely in international journals, and conference proceedings. She has graduated three PhDs in the areas of internet ethics, cognitive user modeling and knowledge commons and community roles of cultural institutions, and is currently supervising six PhD students in the areas of user-centred information retrieval systems, visualization of ambient information on mobile devices, value-trust models for social networks, agents and trust in mobile media, detection of negative sentiments in blogs, and creative thinking in future education scenarios.