[Sigia-l] UT School of Information receives further Microsoft Grant

[Mary Lynn Rice-Lively]

PRESS RELEASE
 
AUSTIN, TX.  University of Texas at Austin School of Information Associate
Professor, Randolph Bias has been awarded $100,000 to study the effects of
Microsoft ClearType on user performance in programming tasks.  ClearType is
a font-rendering technology designed to make on-screen text easier to read.
Researchers at the School of Information have been examining the usability
of this technology, and preliminary results suggest ClearType can
significantly improve reading speeds for electronic text. The new grant will
extend this research into more complex task domains and explore ClearType¹s
effects on the performance of software programmers.

Dr. Bias joined the School of Information faculty in January of this year,
after spending over 20 years in industry as a usability specialist with AT&T
Bell Labs, IBM, BMC Software, and finally a consulting firm that he
co-founded.  While in industry, Bias published prolifically on topics such
as usability engineering methods, and co-edited Cost-Justifying Usability
(Bias & Mayhew, 1994), a book characterized by one reviewer as ³the bible
for usability practitioners.²  Dean Dillon stated: ³I am delighted that
Microsoft Research has continued to support our work in this manner. This
award is further testimony to the research capability of faculty at the
iSchool and the importance of user experience research to digital document
design.²

________________

Andrew Dillon
Dean and Professor 
School of Information
The University of Texas at Austin
http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~adillon/
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