Submission deadline: June 30, 2000 THE NEW USABILITY A Special Issue of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) Editors: Peter Thomas, Robert Macredie and Bonnie Nardi Usability engineering has now reached the stage of a mature industry with a stable set of objectives, processes and common knowledge. Usability has now effectively been productized to assist companies in making a differentiated customer offering in a fiercely competitive technology marketplace. In an environment where information technologies are treated as commodities, usability is now a key factor in a product's success, and consumer expectations are that products will have usability engineered-in. However, the object of usability has dramatically changed. Far from being only a key issue in the design of workstation/PC-based software applications and office-based peripherals and devices, usability is now an central issue in the design of a vast range of technologies, particularly handheld and mobile personal systems used away from the organization, and in new application scenarios, particularly internet-based e-commerce applications accessed from the home and the community. There is now a question mark over whether established usability engineering methodologies will be suited to emerging technologies and applications and to the business contexts in which they will be developed and applied to the market. Usability issues are increasingly demanding and complex, since emerging systems and applications have a broader user base, a wider range of uses and more demanding user expectations. Dramatically shortened product timescales, the explosion of digital media content and a move toward mass consumer markets has had the result that communications and computing products will be selected for their ability to deal with the latest content in a highly usable fashion. This means that usability is of key strategic importance in product design. The discontinuity between between emerging technologies and the current usability engineering approaches will be explored in the special issue of TOCHI. Specifically the issue will explore what form a 'New Usability' will take, and how The New Usability may be far more successful in creating highly-usable products and services than is possible by attempting to apply the existing approaches . Contributions which take a strong stance on the New Usability issue are welcomed, as are empirical papers which report on the application of the New Usability in application areas such as interactive TV, mobile and personal systems, embedded computing , ubiquitous and context-aware computing, domestic computing technologies and Internet appliances. All contributions will be rigorously peer reviewed to the usual exacting standard of TOCHI. Further information, including TOCHI submission procedures and advice on formatting and preparing your manuscript, is found at <http://www.acm.org/tochi/>. Please indicate in your cover letter that you are submitting for the special issue on "The New Usability." To discuss a possible contribution, please contact: Peter Thomas <[log in to unmask]> Robert Macredie <[log in to unmask]> Bonnie Nardi <[log in to unmask]> (TOCHI Associate Editor) The deadline for contributions is June 30, 2000. Jonathan Grudin, Editor, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jonathan Grudin, Editor ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction Email: [log in to unmask] Microsoft Research Web: www.acm.org/tochi One Microsoft Way Phone: (425) 936-0784 Redmond, WA 98052-6399 USA Fax: (425) 936-7329 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------