Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCHI New Zealand chapter's international conference on Computer-human interaction: design centered HCI

CHINZ 2006 is the seventh event organised by the New Zealand Chapter of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction. The Chapter was established in 1999, providing a forum for researchers and practitioners to share ideas. Conferences have been held in many different locations: Palmerston North, Hamilton, Rotorua, Dunedin and Auckland. This year, of course, the conference is being held here in Christchurch with its thriving IT industry. It has been pleasing to see over the years, that this conference has run in such a large number of places, reflecting the interest in interface issues throughout New Zealand.The theme of this year's conference, Design centered HCI, is an important one given the many challenges that have to be faced in ensuring that people can easily use the web, mobile phones etc. Those of us who teach students about this topic often find that many of our students are focussed on the technology and not the interaction. It is a challenging task to make people in the computing industry aware of the needs of users and how the principles of good design can be applied to meet these. The authors of the papers presented here have considered these issues. Only twenty papers were submitted but the standard was very high and sixteen were accepted as full papers. All of these papers were blind reviewed by three reviewers.