Bill Buxton
Personal Homepage:
http://www.billbuxton.comCurrent place of employment:
Buxton DesignBill Buxton is an interaction designer and researcher. He is Principal of the Toronto-based design and consulting firm, Buxton Design. Bill is one of the pioneers in computer music, and has played an important role in the development of computer-based tools for film, industrial design, graphics and animation.As a researcher, he has had a long history with Xerox’ Palo Alto Research Center and the University of Toronto (where he is still an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, and Visiting Professor at the Knowledge Media Design Institute). During the fall of 2004, he was a lecturer in the Department of Industrial Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design, and during the Spring of 2005, he was a Visiting Scientist at Microsoft Research, Cambridge.
From 1994 until December 2002, he was Chief Scientist of Alias|Wavefront, and from 1995, its parent company SGI Inc. In 2001, the Hollywood Reporter named him one of the 10 most influential innovators in Hollywood. In 2002 Time Magazine named him one of the top 5 designers in Canada, and he was elected to the ACM’s CHI Academy.
Publications by Bill Buxton (bibliography)
» 2008 «
Greenberg, Saul and Buxton, Bill (2008): Usability evaluation considered harmful (some of the time). In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 111-120. Available online
“Current practice in Human Computer Interaction as encouraged by educational institutes, academic review processes, and institutions with usability groups advocate usability evaluation as a critical part of every design process. This is for good reason: usability evaluation has a significant role to play when conditions warrant it. Yet evaluation can be ineffective and even harmful if naively done 'by rule' rather than 'by thought'. If done during early stage design, it can mute creative ideas that do not conform to current interface norms. If done to test radical innovations, the many interface issues that would likely arise from an immature technology can quash what could have been an inspired vision. If done to validate an academic prototype, it may incorrectly suggest a design's scientific worthiness rather than offer a meaningful critique of how it would be adopted and used in everyday practice. If done without regard to how cultures adopt technology over time, then today's reluctant reactions by users will forestall tomorrow's eager acceptance. The choice of evaluation methodology -- if any -- must arise from and be appropriate for the actual problem or research question under consideration.”
Copyrights may apply
Baecker, Ronald M., Harrison, Steve, Buxton, Bill, Poltrock, Steven and Churchill, Elizabeth F. (2008): Media spaces: past visions, current realities, future promise. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 2245-2248. Available online
“Established researchers and practitioners active in the development and deployment of media spaces review what seemed to be promised twenty years ago, what has actually been achieved, and what we might anticipate over the next twenty years.”
Copyrights may apply
Izadi, Shahram, Butler, Alex, Hodges, Steve, West, Darren, Hall, Malcolm, Buxton, Bill and Molloy, Mike (2008): Experiences with building a thin form-factor touch and tangible tabletop. In: Third IEEE International Workshop on Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces Tabletop 2008 October 1-3, 2008, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. pp. 181-184. Available online
» 2007 «
Hodges, Steve, Izadi, Shahram, Butler, Alex, Rrustemi, Alban and Buxton, Bill (2007): ThinSight: versatile multi-touch sensing for thin form-factor displays. In: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology October 7-10, 2007, Newport, Rhode Island, USA. pp. 259-268. Available online
“ThinSight is a novel optical sensing system, fully integrated into a thin form factor display, capable of detecting multi-ple fingers placed on or near the display surface. We describe this new hardware in detail, and demonstrate how it can be embedded behind a regular LCD, allowing sensing without degradation of display capability. With our approach, fingertips and hands are clearly identifiable through the display. The approach of optical sensing also opens up the exciting possibility for detecting other physical objects and visual markers through the display, and some initial experiments are described. We also discuss other novel capabilities of our system: interaction at a distance using IR pointing devices, and IR-based communication with other electronic devices through the display. A major advantage of ThinSight over existing camera and projector based optical systems is its compact, thin form-factor making such systems even more deployable. We therefore envisage using ThinSight to capture rich sensor data through the display which can be processed using computer vision techniques to enable both multi-touch and tangible interaction.”
Copyrights may apply
Buxton, Bill (2007): Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. Morgan Kaufmann
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» 2005 «
Owen, Russell, Kurtenbach, Gordon, Fitzmaurice, George W., Baudel, Thomas and Buxton, Bill (2005): When it gets more difficult, use both hands: exploring bimanual curve manipulation. In: Graphics Interface 2005 May 9-11, 2005, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. pp. 17-24. Available online
“In this paper we investigate the relationship between bimanual (two-handed) manipulation and the cognitive aspects of task integration, divided attention and epistemic action. We explore these relationships by means of an empirical study comparing a bimanual technique versus a unimanual (one-handed) technique for a curve matching task. The bimanual technique was designed on the principle of integrating the visual, conceptual and input device space domain of both hands. We provide evidence that the bimanual technique has better performance than the unimanual technique and, as the task becomes more cognitively demanding, the bimanual technique exhibits even greater performance benefits. We argue that the design principles and performance improvements are applicable to other task domains.”
Copyrights may apply
Buxton, Bill (2005): The renaissance is over: long live the renaissance. In: Proceedings of the 2005 Conference on Creativity and Cognition 2005. p. 3. Available online
» 2003 «
Fitzmaurice, George W., Khan, Azam, Pieke, Robert, Buxton, Bill and Kurtenbach, Gordon (2003): Tracking menus. In: Proceedings of the 16th annural ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology November, 2-5, 2003, Vancouver, Canada. pp. 71-79. Available online
“We describe a new type of graphical user interface widget, known as a
"tracking menu." A tracking menu consists of a cluster of graphical buttons,
and as with traditional menus, the cursor can be moved within the menu to
select and interact with items. However, unlike traditional menus, when the
cursor hits the edge of the menu, the menu moves to continue tracking the
cursor. Thus, the menu always stays under the cursor and close at hand. In this
paper we define the behavior of tracking menus, show unique affordances of the
widget, present a variety of examples, and discuss design characteristics. We
examine one tracking menu design in detail, reporting on usability studies and
our experience integrating the technique into a commercial application for the
Tablet PC. While user interface issues on the Tablet PC, such as preventing
round trips to tool palettes with the pen, inspired tracking menus, the design
also works well with a standard mouse and keyboard configuration.”
Copyrights may apply
» 2002 «
Grossman, Tovi, Balakrishnan, Ravin, Kurtenbach, Gordon, Fitzmaurice, George W., Khan, Azam and Buxton, Bill (2002): Creating principal 3D curves with digital tape drawing. In: Terveen, Loren (ed.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2002 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 20-25, 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota. pp. 121-128.
Tsang, Michael, Fitzmaurice, George W., Kurtenbach, Gordon, Khan, Azam and Buxton, Bill (2002): Boom chameleon: simultaneous capture of 3D viewpoint, voice and gesture annotations on a spatially-aware display. In: Beaudouin-Lafon, Michel (ed.) Proceedings of the 15th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology October 27-30, 2002, Paris, France. pp. 111-120. Available online
“We introduce the Boom Chameleon, a novel input/output device consisting of a
flat-panel display mounted on a tracked mechanical boom. The display acts as a
physical window into 3D virtual environments, through which a one-to-one
mapping between real and virtual space is preserved. The Boom Chameleon is
further augmented with a touch-screen and a microphone/speaker combination. We
present a 3D annotation application that exploits this unique configuration in
order to simultaneously capture viewpoint, voice and gesture information.
Design issues are discussed and results of an informal user study on the device
and annotation software are presented. The results show that the Boom Chameleon
annotation facilities have the potential to be an effective, easy to learn and
operate 3D design review system.”
Copyrights may apply
» 1999 «
Fitzmaurice, George W., Balakrishnan, Ravin, Kurtenbach, Gordon and Buxton, Bill (1999): An Exploration into Supporting Artwork Orientation in the User Interface. In: Altom, Mark W. and Williams, Marian G. (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 99 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference May 15-20, 1999, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 167-174. Available online
“Rotating a piece of paper while drawing is an integral and almost subconscious part of drawing with pencil and paper. In a similar manner, the advent of lightweight pen-based computers allow digital artwork to be rotated while drawing by rotating the entire computer. Given this type of manipulation we explore the implications for the user interface to support artwork orientation. First we describe an exploratory study to further motivate our work and characterize how artwork is manipulated while drawing. After presenting some possible UI approaches to support artwork orientation, we define a new solution called a rotating user interface (RUIs). We then discuss design issues and requirements for RUIs based on our exploratory study.”
Copyrights may apply
» 1997 «
Kurtenbach, Gordon, Fitzmaurice, George W., Baudel, Thomas and Buxton, Bill (1997): The Design of a GUI Paradigm Based on Tablets, Two-Hands, and Transparency. In: Pemberton, Steven (ed.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 97 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference March 22-27, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia. pp. 35-42. Available online
“An experimental GUI paradigm is presented which is based on the design goals of maximizing the amount of screen used for application data, reducing the amount that the UI diverts visual attentions from the application data, and increasing the quality of input. In pursuit of these goals, we integrated the non-standard UI technologies of multi-sensor tablets, toolglass, transparent UI components, and marking menus. We describe a working prototype of our new paradigm, the rationale behind it and our experiences introducing it into an existing application. Finally, we presents some of the lessons learned: prototypes are useful to break the barriers imposed by conventional GUI design and some of their ideas can still be retrofitted seamlessly into products. Furthermore, the added functionality is not measured only in terms of user performance, but also by the quality of interaction, which allows artists to create new graphic vocabularies and graphic styles.”
Copyrights may apply
» 1995 «
Buxton, Bill (1995): Proximal Sensing: Supporting Context Sensitive Interaction. In: Robertson, George G. (ed.) Proceedings of the 8th annual ACM symposium on User interface and software technology November 15 - 17, 1995, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. p. 169. Available online
“This talk addresses the issue of increasing complexity for the user that accompanies new functionality. Briefly, we discuss how complexity can, through appropriate design, be off-loaded to the system -- at least for secondary commands. Consider photography, for example. The 35 mm SLR of a decade ago was analogous to MS-DOS. You could do everything in theory, but in practice, were unlikely to do anything without making an error. When we think of photography, however, we see that there are only two primary decisions: "what" and "when", which correspond to the two primary actions: "point" and "click". By embedding domain-specific knowledge, modern cameras off-load all other decisions to the computer (a.k.a. camera) with the option of overriding the defaults. The net result is that the needs of the novice and expert are met with a single apparatus device. What we do in this presentation is talk about how this type of off-loading can be supported, and why this should be done. We do this by example, drawing mainly on the experiences of the Ontario Telepresence Project.”
Copyrights may apply
Buxton, Bill (1995): Integrating the periphery and context: A new model of telematics. In: Graphics Interface 95 May 17-19, 1995, Quebec, Quebec, Canada. pp. 239-246.
» 1993 «
Buxton, Bill (1993): HCI and the Inadequacies of Direct Manipulation Systems. In ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 25 (1) pp. 21-22
“The Direct Manipulation (DM) style of user interface made popular by the Macintosh is becoming a de facto standard. Rather than being taken as a point of departure, it appears to be taken more as a standard to achieve. Using the specification of scope as an example, DM interfaces are shown to be deficient in supporting a transaction fundamental to word processing, information retrieval and CAD. This essay is a plea for designers to break out of the complacency that surrounds the DM approach. It also calls into question the methodologies of HCI for the very limited degree to which they have challenged the DM approach and their paucity of ideas for generating strong new alternatives.”
Copyrights may apply
» 1992 «
Sellen, Abigail, Buxton, Bill and Arnott, John (1992): Using Spatial Cues to Improve Videoconferencing. In: Bauersfeld, Penny, Bennett, John and Lynch, Gene (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 92 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference June 3-7, 1992, Monterey, California. pp. 651-652. Available online
» 1991 «
Kurtenbach, Gordon and Buxton, Bill (1991): GEdit: A Test Bed for Editing by Contiguous Gestures. In ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 23 (2) pp. 22-26
» 1989 «
Mountford, S. Joy, Buxton, Bill, Krueger, Myron W., Laurel, Brenda K. and Vertelney, Laurie (1989): Drama and Personality in User Interface Design. In: Bice, Ken and Lewis, Clayton H. (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 89 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 30 - June 4, 1989, Austin, Texas. pp. 105-108.
“The title of this panel immediately leaps out as being out of place. Of all the things that come to mind when one thinks of computers and user interfaces, drama and personality are among the last. The point here is not to make using computers more dramatic, per se, but to learn and borrow from the performing arts about techniques that could improve main stream interface design. The contributions described in this panel are borrowed from the theatrical world, film producing and music. In all the panelists work, the user is at the very center of creating the actual user interface experience, either through direct user participation or via engaging the individual viewer's personality. The panelists' pioneering research has produced and created several examples of new user interface experiences and designs. The discussion will focus on what techniques offer the most promise for facilitating the design of really new experiential user interfaces.”
Copyrights may apply
Buxton, Bill (1989): On the Road to Brighton. In ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 20 (4) pp. 16-17
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Mar 16th, 2010
Changes to this page (author)
14 Feb 2010: Enabled abstracts to be shown on Bill Buxton's author page.29 May 2009: Author was edited 10 Jun 2008: Author was edited
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28 Apr 2003: Added the author to the bibliography
