30 April 2008

Major prize for Dundee computing student

A Dundee University student’s efforts to open up instant messaging on computers to older people have won her first prize in a major international competition.

Suzanne Prior, a final-year student in Applied Computing at the School of Computing at Dundee, won the undergraduate competition at the Student Research Competition at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, held this year in Florence, Italy.

Her research, supervised by Professor John Arnott and Dr Anna Dickinson of the School of Computing at Dundee, studied how older people might be encouraged to make more use of Instant Messaging (IM) on computers.

"Young people make great use of IM, but older people have yet to pick up on it in a big way," said Suzanne. "In my project I designed a new interface for IM, basing it around a familiar social environment in the form of a café scene, and studied older people, who were all new to IM, using it."

She found that most of her older users preferred her new interface to a traditional one, they made fewer errors in sending messages, and their online conversations were more informal and personal. They were also more successful in exploring and investigating the features of the interface.

The conference is is the premier international conference on human-computer interaction and to win Suzanne had to overcome competition from other major universities worldwide, such as Carnegie-Mellon (USA) and RWTH Aachen (Germany).

Professor Arnott described Suzanne’s win as a major achievement. "The CHI conference has a very big reputation; it is the most important international forum for presentation of research in the field of human-computer interaction, and it has very demanding standards," said Professor Arnott. "Suzanne has excelled by winning in such an environment."

Suzanne will complete her undergraduate studies in Applied Computing at the University of Dundee this summer. She is planning to continue on to study for her doctorate in computing at Dundee.

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