Press Release

Ebay, Yahoo!, CNET: Scaling the Masses

What do these Popular Web Sites do Right?

The Hague, NL -- Recent studies indicate that an increasing number of web users are gravitating to a small number of web sites. These sites cater to very large audiences. In fact, the top 25 largest web-site brands had anywhere from 5 million to 55 million unique visitors in July, 1999. Because of the very large audiences served by these sites, they have special usability issues never confronted by sites serving more limited or specialized audiences. A panel of experts at CHI 2000, the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, from Ebay, CNET, Franklin Investing, Yahoo! and Intuit will raise the usability questions that designers and developers of sites with very large audiences face regularly.

The panelists will represent large sites with different business models and goals, and will address questions including: How do you measure usability on a site serving millions of users? How have you adapted traditional usability engineering and other research to your design and development process? What kinds of issues need to be considered in making a site appropriately international? What is the best way to discover the nuances of foreign language, culture, and user needs that will make an international site usable? Find out at CHI 2000. This panel presentation will be moderated by Jared Spool, principal and founder of User Interface Engineering.

CHI is the premier worldwide forum for the exchange of information on all aspects of how people interact with computers. The annual conference on human factors in computing systems features a full program of presentations, tutorials and vendor exhibits. Researchers, practitioners, educators, and students from around the world join in exploring and creating the future of computer-human interaction. Approximately 2200 professionals from over 35 countries will examine the future of human-computer interaction from 1-6 April at the Nederlands Congress Centre in The Hague, The Netherlands.

CHI conferences are sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM)'s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI). In addition to ACM, various organizations in the technology industry support the CHI conference. The CHI 2000 champion sponsors include: Diamond Bullet, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Sun Microsystems, Unisys and Yahoo! Inc.

For more information, contact the CHI 2000 Conference Office at +1 410 263 5382 or send e-mail to chi2000-office@acm.org.