Leslie McFarlin, Kevin Buffardi, and Bob Schumacher to give presentation at HFES 2007

Leslie McFarlin, Kevin Buffardi, and Bob Schumacher of User Centric will present their paper focused on the usability of parental controls at the 51st Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES). The presentation will highlight the difficulties experienced by both parents and children when attempting to configure parental controls on entertainment and communication devices. Discrepancies between confidence ratings and actual performance when setting parental controls will also be discussed.

About Leslie McFarlin

Leslie has a B.S. in Psychology and a BA in French from Loyola University in Chicago. She remains at Loyola pursuing an MS in Applied Human Perception and Performance. Her research focuses on the usability of gaming systems.

About Kevin Buffardi, User Experience Specialist

Kevin concentrates on usability testing and evaluation in addition to eye tracking. He brings experience from the U.S. Census Bureau Usability Lab as well as the University of Maryland in Baltimore County, where he researched Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) with funding from the National Science Foundation. His other research interests include instructional technology, conflict resolution, and digital music & audio. Kevin also has a strong background in computer science and technical support. He earned his BS in Computer Science from University of Mary Washington and his MS in Human-Computer Interaction from DePaul University.

About Bob Schumacher, Managing Director

Bob has more than 20 years of experience in corporate and academic environments. Bob has worked in telecommunications, cable, Internet, and travel-related companies; prior to joining User Centric he was a Vice President, for Universal Access, Inc., a public telecommunications network company. He wrote the Ameritech standards for graphical user interfaces and has written dozens of technical and industry articles, as well as lectured, on user interface design. Bob has particular expertise in developing metrics for user performance and then driving those into financial models and business cases. He is the inventor of the controversial Patent 5,933,841 - called "Structured Document Browser", which describes a method of navigating electronic documents. Bob holds a PhD in Cognitive and Experimental Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.