Raluca Budiu

About me

I am a User Experience Specialist at Nielsen Norman Group. My job there has three components:

1. Teaching seminars worldwide on topics related to mobile usability, usability of touch devices, human-computer interaction, and cognitive psychology for web designers;

2. Doing applied usability research on a variety of topics, including iPad and mobile phone usage, and children's websites;

3. Consulting for companies from a variety of industries.

Previously, I worked at Microsoft and at Xerox PARC.

I obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. I am originally from Romania.

Nielsen Norman Group Publications

Raluca Budiu, Jakob Nielsen.

"Usability of iPad Apps and Websites".

Raluca Budiu, Jakob Nielsen.

"Usability of Mobile Websites: 85 Design Guidelines for Improving Access to Web-Based Content and Services Through Mobile Devices."

Raluca Budiu, Jakob Nielsen.

"Usability of Websites for Children: Design Guidelines for Targeting Users Aged 3-12 Years (2nd edition)."

Selected Academic Publications

Raluca Budiu, Peter Pirolli, Lichan Hong (2009).

Rememberance of things tagged: How tagging effort affects tag production and human memory. Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Cystems, CHI'09 . Boston MA, 615-624.

Lichan Hong, Ed Chi, Raluca Budiu, Peter Pirolli, Les Nelson (2008).

SparTag.us: A low cost tagging system for foraging of web content.

Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI'08), Naples, Italy, 2008.

Raluca Budiu, Peter Pirolli (2007),

Modeling navigation in degree-of-interest trees. Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Conference, Nashville, TN, August 2007.

Raluca Budiu, Christiaan Royer, Peter Pirolli (2007),

Modeling information scent: A comparison of LSA, PMI and GLSA similarity measures on common tests and corpora. Proceedings of RIAO'07 Pittsburgh, PA, May 2007.

Raluca Budiu, Peter Pirolli, Michael Fleetwood, Julie Heiser (2006),

Navigation in degree-of-interest trees. Proceedings of the Advanced Visual Interfaces Conference (AVI), Venice, Italy, May 2006.

Raluca Budiu, John R. Anderson (2006).

Word learning in context --- Metaphors and neologisms. In M. A. Vanchevsky (ed.). Focus on cognitive psychology reseach. Nova Science Publishers, NY: Hauppage.

Raluca Budiu, John R. Anderson (2005).

Negation in non-literal sentences. Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Stresa, Italy, July 2005.

Raluca Budiu, John R. Anderson (2004).

Interpretation-based processing: A unified theory of semantic sentence comprehension. Cognitive Science, 28, pp. 1-44. [abstract] [pdf]

Raluca Budiu, John R. Anderson (2003).

Verification of Sentences Containing Anaphoric Metaphors. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling, Bamberg, Germany, April 2003. [abstract] [pdf]

Raluca Budiu, John R. Anderson (2002).

Comprehending Anaphoric Metaphors. Memory & Cognition, 30, pp. 158-165. [abstract] [pdf]

Raluca Budiu (2001).

The Role of Background Knowledge in Sentence Processing. Doctoral Dissertation, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. (Available as Technical Report No. CMU-CS-O1-148.) [abstract] [pdf] [defense slides]

John R. Anderson, Raluca Budiu, Lynne M. Reder (2001).

A Theory of Sentence Memory as Part of A General Theory of Memory, Journal of Memory and Language, 45, pp. 337-367. [abstract] [pdf]

Raluca Budiu, John R. Anderson (2000).

Integration of Background Knowledge in Sentence Processing: A Unified Theory of Metaphor Understanding, Semantic Illusions and Text Memory. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Cognitive Modeling, Groningen, Netherlands, pp. 50-57. [abstract] [pdf] A more detailed variant of this paper is included in my thesis proposal. [pdf] [proposal slides]