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Ben Shneiderman's Contributions
- These contributions were often the result of collaboration with graduate students, colleagues, and especially with Catherine Plaisant. A more thorough About page and Timeline tells his story.
- The Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design
- The Ben Shneiderman Papers are a special collection at the University of Maryland Libraries, including the finding aid and box list.
- Full Resume.
Professional Contributions
- Leader in developing the fields of HCI and Information Visualization, promoting new designs and rigorous evaluation.
- Ben Shneiderman and Bill Curtis initiated the Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems. Work began in 1981 within the Software Psychology Society leading to the March 15-17, 1982 conference in Gaithersburg, MD at what was then the National Bureau of Standards.
- Founded UM Human-Computer Interaction Lab in 1983.
- General chair for conferences: Computers and Society, ACM Policy98, ACM Conference on Universal Usability 2000 & 2003, ACM Conference on Creativity & Cognition 2007.
- More than 200 conference keynote talks, 30-50 public talks per year.
- Editorial board member for 16 journals, and book series with 21 books.
Research contributions
Early work on database reorganization, physical file structures, indexing algorithms, and performance optimization. Subsequent work with graduate students led to many important software tools that influenced future research:
- Early hypertext system, Hyperties, which was a precursor for the web.
- Direct manipulation and dynamic queries concepts which led to Spotfire's commercial success.
- Touchscreen designs for small keyboards, home controls, artwork, and professional applications.
- Series of time series data analysis tools e.g. TimeSearcher.
- Creator of treemap concept of nested visualization of hierarchies with size and color coding.
- Hierarchical Clustering Explorer to analyze high-dimensional numeric data sets.
- Research, development, and evaluation of electronic classrooms.
- Medical informatics applications including patient histories and temporal event sequences: Lifelines, LifeLines2, LifeFlow, and EventFlow.
- Network analysis and visualization software (free, open source) NodeXL and the NodeXL Graph Gallery.
Educational contributions
- Co-authored two leading textbooks on Fortran
- Author of Designing the User Interface, first edition 1986, sixth edition 2016>
- Promoter of team projects on ambitious projects for mentors outside the classroom. Relate-Create-Donate educational strategy.
- Co-author of Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL
- Mentor for Doctoral (23) & Masters students (25+)
Design innovations
- Nassi-Shneiderman Diagrams for program design.
- Interface for the hot link, a key feature of the web.
- Small touchscreen keyboards with lift-off activation, home controls & finger-painting programs.
- Creator of treemap concept of nested visualization of hierarchies with size and color coding.
Commercial impact
- Developed key ideas with Christopher Ahlberg leading to commercial success, Spotfire.
- Board of Directors for Spotfire (1997-2002).
- Treemap concept has hundreds of commercial implementations, web sites and is a feature in Excel since 2014.
- Technical Advisor for ILOG (acquired by IBM), Smartmoney, Hive Group, Centrifuge Systems.
- Consultant for IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, GE, etc.
- Legal expert witness for Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, etc.