Ladies Learning Code – August 6th, 2011 from Jon Lim on Vimeo.

As a lady in the industry, I’d like to thank all those that organized, attended, and volunteered at the event!  Makes me smile just knowing how hard we’re all trying to encourage more women into the industry!  Be sure to keep an eye out for this event!! :)

• Tabs offer users another mechanism for managing the sites that they browse — it allows for “higher-level task grouping”.
• Users like to use tabs as reminders for tasks that they’ve yet to complete, and bookmarks for websites that they often have to visit.
• Many people pointed out that they really like how new tabs are spawned in the background, as opposed to how new windows are launched in the foreground.  This gives them control over when they would like to visit that page (new tab).  Whereas in the case of a new window, their attention would be immediately drawn to the new window in the foreground.
• Users often choose to use tabs over “traditional revisitation mechanisms” (consisting of the back button, browser history, and bookmarks) because switching between tabs does not require reloading a page — it allows them to preserve the state of the website they are viewing.

Although this paper helped me understand how people currently use tabs, all the participants in this study were sighted users.  I’m interested in knowing how the visually impaired users interact with tabs (if they do so at all).  Are tabs something that they currently find useful?  Does it help or hinder the aural web browsing experience?  Some of my questions remain unanswered:

• Do visually impaired users use tabs?  How are tabs envisioned in their mind?
• How does the use of tabs differ from the use of multiple browser windows for visually impaired individuals?  Which one is preferred?
• What type of challenges and opportunities are experienced when using tabs?
• What type of challenges and opportunities are experienced when multiple web browser windows opened?

It’ll be great if I could get some feedback from the community!  It’ll be helpful to understand how visually impaired users currently use web browsers, and any personal experiences that they may want to share.

—

[1]  Patrick Dubroy, Ravin Balakrishnan: A study of tabbed browsing among mozilla firefox users. CHI 2010: 673-682

A few quotes by an assistant engineering professor at the Dalhousie University, taken from the article:

“That’s probably one of the biggest problems we have in engineering. It’s catch-22: There aren’t a lot of women in engineering and to attract more women to engineering, we need more women in engineering,” she says. “I think any opportunity we have to put that thought in girls’ heads is a good thing.” — Corinne MacDonald

Female role models, even plastic ones, help young women visualize themselves as engineers, she says. — Corinne MacDonald

Both of the ladies interviewed in this article pointed out that they never had “female engineering role models” to look up to.  Unfortunately, I think this is still the case.  But considering how Barbie’s 125th career is now a computer engineer, I think this is a good start!  And it’s good to know that more and more people are becoming aware of all the opportunities in the computer/IT industry, and how they aren’t just for men.

But yeah, just a thought I wanted to share. :)

As some of you may know, I participated in Google Summer of Code 2008.  And the project I worked on is called Cytoscape.  So if any of you are interested in this project, here are a few links:

Google Summer of Code 2010 — GenMAPP, Cytoscape, WikiPathways & Reactome

• Organization Profile
• Cytoscape-Discuss Google Group
• Project Ideas

For those of you who are interested in working on the project idea I worked on two years ago, it’s this one:

IDEA 16: Automatic (Smart) Node and Edge Label Layout

Cytoscape currently has a large number of layout algorithms that place nodes according to various criteria. However, a common problem with all of these layout algorithms is that node and edge labels are not accounted for in the aesthetic criteria of the algorithm. This means that labels frequently end up in awkward locations which are hard to read, overlap or obscure other labels, and otherwise don’t look quite right. As a consequence, users are frequently forced to adjust the position of labels s, which is a time consuming and tedious process. To fix this, we propose developing a layout algorithm for labels. Perhaps this algorithm could be integrated with a normal layout algorithm, or perhaps it could be a subsequent step that lays the labels out in an intelligent fashion once the nodes have been placed. Some work has been done on this, but more layouts are needed.

Language and Skills: Java, graph layout algorithms

Idea by: Mike Smoot

Potential Mentors: Ruth Isserlin, Gary Bader

My blog posts that are related to this project can be found here.

MarkUs: Dashboard Prototype

Feedback:

• Karen: Instructors often like to know the assignment average as a fraction in addition to the percentage.
  New Format: “Assignment Average: 70/100 (70%)” — for example

Please visit our MarkUs project blog here if you have any questions/comments/concerns, and leave a comment!

After finishing the prototypes for the grader assignment view, I moved on to re-designing the group formation tab.  Here are some prototypes:

Group Formation: Adding a student to a group

Group Formation: Removing a student from an existing group

Group Formation: Filtering -- Only show valid group formations

Group Formation: Filtering -- Only show invalid group formations

They can also be found on the MarkUs project blog here.  These prototypes will be used in a simple usability session this week, and I will be reworking these prototypes according to the usability feedback we get from the session.  More updates to come! :D

Professor Karen Reid and I just went through this design plan, and it is now posted on the MarkUs project blog.  Please check it out here.

After a bit of poking around, I found a thread in the WordPress forum that had a fix to the problem.  I’m not sure why my footer was missing the following line, but here’s the fix:

In footer.php, make sure you have this line:

<?php wp_footer(); ?>

Before these lines:

</body>
</html>

Hope this helps!

Leigh Honeywell will be speaking at the event.  She’s had a ton of experience in IT security and is an amazing (and inspiring) speaker — I’ve attended her presentations a few times, and she’s got lots of experience and knowledge to share (as well as interesting stories).  Leigh is the co-founder and director of HackLab.TO, attended the University of Toronto, and is a mentor for the Google Summer of Code program.  So she’s definitely somebody you’d want to meet!

As for me, I’m definitely going to go if work and school permits.

And yes, this is a ladies night out — sorry gents!