Downloads page     The Buzz: Supporting Extensively Customizable Information Awareness Applications Ph.D. Dissertation     The Buzz: Supporting User Tailorability in Awareness Applications CHI 2008     The Buzz: Flexible Information Aggregation and Presentation for End Users CHI 2007 Workshop     Designing Interfaces to Enrich Personalization DIS 2006 Doctoral Consortium

Increasingly abundant access to data and cheaper display technology costs are creating an exciting opportunity to create new information awareness tools that can present information calmly through peripheral and ambient interfaces. These tools offer the potential to help people better manage their attention and to avoid information overload. Different people, however, have distinct information needs, and customizing these systems is often difficult. Existing interfaces typically provide too coarse or too fine a granularity of customization, resulting in tools that are too rigid or too difficult to configure.

The Buzz is an extensively customizable information awareness system that supports a broad class of users, from typical end users to tinkerers and developers, at using, modifying, creating, and sharing powerful and flexible customizations. These customizations are powerful in the sense that the user can control abstract behaviors of the system, and flexible in the sense that the complexity of the customization can vary with the power needed to express it. This system provides more extensive customization capabilities than other customizable awareness applications without requiring programming.