Research Projects:

fMRI research on reading processes

Doctoral student S. C. (Hans) Huang and I are beginning a thread of research employing brain imaging (fMRI – functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to identify similarities and differences in the human processing of alphabetic words, logograms (e.g., Mandarin characters), and HCI icons.

CI-TEAM Implementation: Educating a Competitive, Cyberinfrastructure Savvy Engineering and Construction Workforce

This is NSF-funded work I'm doing with PI William O'Brien, Associate Professor in Civil Engineering. The goal of this project is to research and design advanced cyberinfrastructure - particularly in information integration and sensor networks - to support the civil infrastructure such as roads, bridges, and buildings.

Studying Design Intent for Software Evolution and Maintenance

Another NSF-funded thread, this one with PI Dewayne Perry, Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Our goal with this work is a better understanding of the documentation needs of maintenance designers for software systems and to construct a model of how those maintenance designers interact with documented knowledge about legacy designs.

Usability support of Texas Office of Court Administration's development of a web-based application to support electronic filing

This is applied usability engineering support, including requirements gathering and prototype testing, of a web-based application to support electronic filing, presentation of case information, and other information flow both for judges' chambers and the clerks' offices, and to improve the public web presence for selected case information and documents. Doctoral student Tanya Rabourn has helped me with this.

Usability support of Vignette

We have been providing ongoing usability engineering support, including mostly remote usability testing from the Information eXperience Lab, of Vignette's emerging next generation of web content management software applications. Recently I've been helped with this by Master's candidate Ying-Chen (Orange) Liu.

Fitts' Law Project

Perhaps the most well-known law in the field of human-computer interaction, Fitts' Law specifies the function for the time it takes to acquire a target (say, click on an icon) based on the size of the target and its distance from the current location of the cursor. With Doug Gillan, Chairman of the Psychology Department of North Carolina State University, I am conducting a series of studies to quantify the role of cost of an error, within Fitts' Law. That is, Doug and I believe that the more costly an error (and the harder the recovery therefrom), the longer the time to acquire a target (ceteris paribus).

Recent and Upcoming Events

This May 26th, we'll host our first "IX Lab Day," a webcast series of talks by students and faculty who have conducted studies in the past year. See more information on the IX Lab site.
Last year I won the student-elected Texas Exes Teaching Award for the School of Information, of which I am most proud.
Two students, two library colleagues, and I are pleased to have a paper appear in a recent Journal of the Medical Library Association: Moore, M., Bias, R. G., Prentice, K., Fletcher, R., and Vaughn, T. Web usability testing with a Hispanic medically underserved population. J Med Libr Assoc. 2009 April; 97(2): 114?121.
Under the "Research" tab you can read more about the two recent NSF grants on which I am co-PI.
In recent years we’ve been proud to have hosted campus-wide presentations by Jack Carroll, Mary Beth Rosson, Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Aaron Marcus.
In the unlikely event that you should want to know even more about me, see Cliff Anderson’s profile of me in the UPA Voice, December, 2007 or the UT-Austin Graduate School interview with me in their December, 2007, “Spotlight on the Faculty.”