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My name is Thorsten Büring and I am working as a Usability Consultant for Zühlke Engineering AG in Zürich, Switzerland. Being trained as a Human Factors Computer Scientist and Designer I am very much into User Experience (UX). Our customers from various industries seek to optimize the appearance and Usability of their products, including software as well as hardware interfaces. Over the past 10 years UX has evolved as a major key success factor. Being pampered by stylish, attractive and yet usable consumer devices such as mp3 players, mobile phones and play stations, users are no longer willing to accept confusing interaction and gray dullness as being natural technical constraints. Vendors of business and industry applications increasingly face up to the new Usability challenge, either by requesting external expertise or hiring UX specialists. In addition, influential companies such as Microsoft and Adobe push the design sensation by providing technology to bridge the gap between interaction design and software development. Designers without coding skills become mature and equal members of the development team. What makes the current design trend even more exciting is the fact that it is self-enforcing. The more important UX becomes the faster the cycle of demand and innovation spins - leading all the way to great novel user interfaces.
As of UX one topic which has kept me captivated for the past six years or so is Mobile Usability. During my Ph.D. studies at the HCI Lab of the University of Konstanz I experimented with various approaches of zoomable user interfaces - the goal being to virtually enlarge mobile GUIs, making them less dependent on the physical constraints of small screen sizes.
Funny to think that not long ago it was a real struggle to implement highly interacive and animated user interfaces on handhelds. Unlike modern mobile phones those devices featured a bare minmimum of CPU, graphics power and memory capacity. Luckily, implementation has become far more convenient, with the latest clue being to revive the good old web languages XHTML, CSS and JavaScript for platform independent development of mobile user interfaces. See for instance Ares and PhoneGap. Another subject I am interested in is Information Visualization with a particular focus on Ambient Information Visualization. Please refer to my LMU lecture or the projects section for more information.
Not to forget: check out Wc-Locator, a great fun project by Christiane which tracks public restrooms along with restaurant and bar toilets.
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