Another informative presentation last night by Dr. Mary Czerwinski of Microsoft Research, sponsored by our local Puget Sound SIGCHI.

Personally, multitasking is a subject I find compelling, especially as it relates to running a small business. Somehow, I'm able to keep a lot of small details relating to projects I'm working on in my head and prioritize them. It often seems that other people on the team have a much harder time doing that. It's as if they can only keep one thing in their register stack at a time. Seems personality type has a lot to do with it, according to the Myers-Briggs intelligence types.

The question then becomes one of learning style, hard wiring in the brain, adaptability or some other yet-to-be discovered factor. How to design an interface that works for everyone?

Dr. Czerwinski presented some interesting videos of how her group's interface design templates worked for controlling the way multiple windows are displayed and manipulated.

But her answer to a question I posed about whether certain people are better at multitasking than others opened a whole new set of questions about how all this is changing the way we function in the world. She mentioned that that younger people in her study were comfortable writing code while listening to music and text message at the same time - with a possible slight drop in IQ.

My kids do the same. Well, maybe not the code writing. I'm amazed to walk into my son's room to find him reading a textbook, chatting online with classmates, checking his mySpace page, emailing, listening to music, watching TV and scratching the dog behind the ear - and still get good grades.

Is all this multitasking the cause of so much ADD/ADHD or a symptom? Then there's the research on how playing certain video games make for better laproscopic surgeons, as heard the other day on NPR.

The message is about how we can help people be in control - of their tasks, time, access and lives.

I've been impressed with the quality and scope of research going on at Microsoft, and appreciate the effort of folks like Dr. Czerwinski to create user interface systems that make life a little less frustrating for all of us information workers.

Looks like this may be a long ways from being released, but could be a real breakthrough for us "visual learners" Thanks to Alok Jain for posting this video on the IxDA discussion group.

Prototyping websites has been a hot topic on the Interaction Design (IxDA) discussion board recently, along with a huge thread about the new iPhone and Bill Buxton's hand sketching for early prototypes.

I stumbled upon Canvas as a prototyping tool a while ago. It's relatively easy to learn and allows you to target links, uses layers and exports as a "clickable" PDF or as HTML easily.

Being a Mac user, I really like OmniGraffle for ease of use, but hadn't though of it as a prototyping tool, until Michael Angeles generously offered to share his knowledge and custom stencils with the rest of us. Haven't had the chance to start using his method, but plan to migrate over to that platform for an upcoming prototype.

Like so much else these days, there are many strong opinions about what's the best tool for prototyping – from Axure, iRise, Viso, to a combination of Adobe's Illustrator and InDesign. Andy Clarke has an interesting take on the subject in his new book, "Transcending CSS".

Although I'm stumbling around trying to actually write CSS, his book is beginning to make sense, although a lot of it is way over my head right now. Clarke maintains that producing well marked up CSS interactive prototypes may be a more effective workflow. Hope I can get my old brain around this new workflow.