commented on
Ben Carlston
Lei Gu
I understand that the reason why CHI accepted this paper was to have the experts use the paper and the authors for target practice. However, as I understand it, they are only cautioning the blind use of the newer ethnography techniques. They are recommending to the designers to also take other approaches to design into consideration, not just the new ethnography techniques. I don't see why this paper has such a bad rep. It is not unreasonable to request that other factors be brought into consideration before making design decisions.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Fitz Law
Commented on
Cole Jones
Brad Twitty
Josh Myers
The main point of Fitz Law was that the bigger and closer the item is to the edge of the screen, the better. The user can get to the object faster and a bigger target means it is easier for people to click on the item. I know my parents still have trouble clicking on the icons to make the internet run at home, so a bigger icon would make things a lot better for people. I think that Apple's Dock in Mac OS X works somewhat with this principle. The Dock can be attached to the side (top, bottom, left, right) and in some cases you can make the icons on the Dock bigger when you put your mouse near it. I think I turned off the setting for that though... :(
Cole Jones
Brad Twitty
Josh Myers
The main point of Fitz Law was that the bigger and closer the item is to the edge of the screen, the better. The user can get to the object faster and a bigger target means it is easier for people to click on the item. I know my parents still have trouble clicking on the icons to make the internet run at home, so a bigger icon would make things a lot better for people. I think that Apple's Dock in Mac OS X works somewhat with this principle. The Dock can be attached to the side (top, bottom, left, right) and in some cases you can make the icons on the Dock bigger when you put your mouse near it. I think I turned off the setting for that though... :(
Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful?
commented on
Brian Salato
Lei Gu
Source
"Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful (Some of the Time)" by Saul Greenberg and Bill Buxton CHI 2008.
The main point this article was trying to make is that usability evaluations, when performed without thinking it through, can be detrimental to creative design or innovative technology. They believe that the HCI community is negatively affected by this and proposed several ways to fix it.
First, usability tests is not the only method when performing user centered design and should be used when the problem and stage of user interface development warrants it.
Second, there are some times when usability testing is would not produce useful information, such as at the very beginning of design, when usefulness outweighs usability, and where the unpredictable culture affects how an innovative system is used.
Next, there are other ways other than using usability evaluations to validate the work, such as rationalizing the design, expected usage, case studies, and participant critiques. One of his complaints with CHI is that the conference specifies using a usability study, and in particular, a quantitative study. They believe that submissions should be judged based on the question, the system or situation described, and whether the inventors used a reasonable method to argue their points.
Fourth, the method of testing usablity tends to result in weak science. For novel innovations, they should use an existence proof, where they show one case where it could be use. For variations of already existing products, risky hypothesis testing is appropriate. Finally, there should be more help for others to replicate the results.
Lastly, they argue that HCI should look to other fields to determine worthiness. Design teams need to be able to differentiate between sketches, early designs, which are ideas that can quickly be changed, and prototypes, which are more finalized and thoughtout.
Commentary
I agree on some of the points. There are some things that are extremely useful but are designed poorly. I don't think they should be discarded. To paraphrase what I read in another paper, if the designers explain sufficiently why they designed something the way they did, it would be acceptable by the public.
Brian Salato
Lei Gu
Source
"Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful (Some of the Time)" by Saul Greenberg and Bill Buxton CHI 2008.
The main point this article was trying to make is that usability evaluations, when performed without thinking it through, can be detrimental to creative design or innovative technology. They believe that the HCI community is negatively affected by this and proposed several ways to fix it.
First, usability tests is not the only method when performing user centered design and should be used when the problem and stage of user interface development warrants it.
Second, there are some times when usability testing is would not produce useful information, such as at the very beginning of design, when usefulness outweighs usability, and where the unpredictable culture affects how an innovative system is used.
Next, there are other ways other than using usability evaluations to validate the work, such as rationalizing the design, expected usage, case studies, and participant critiques. One of his complaints with CHI is that the conference specifies using a usability study, and in particular, a quantitative study. They believe that submissions should be judged based on the question, the system or situation described, and whether the inventors used a reasonable method to argue their points.
Fourth, the method of testing usablity tends to result in weak science. For novel innovations, they should use an existence proof, where they show one case where it could be use. For variations of already existing products, risky hypothesis testing is appropriate. Finally, there should be more help for others to replicate the results.
Lastly, they argue that HCI should look to other fields to determine worthiness. Design teams need to be able to differentiate between sketches, early designs, which are ideas that can quickly be changed, and prototypes, which are more finalized and thoughtout.
Commentary
I agree on some of the points. There are some things that are extremely useful but are designed poorly. I don't think they should be discarded. To paraphrase what I read in another paper, if the designers explain sufficiently why they designed something the way they did, it would be acceptable by the public.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
The Inmates Are Running The Asylum
Source
"The Inmates are Running the Asylum" by Alan Cooper
This book seems to be for managers of software companies. Alan Cooper states that computers are spreading throughout every business field, so software design is getting more important. The title comes from the belief that software engineers are running the software company. No matter what the upper management say, the software programmers have the final say in how the program will be implemented. Although I was not aware of this, it does make sense. The managers usually are too busy to deal with the code.
In the first part, he describes how if you include a computer in everyday objects, you will get a computer back. He describes cognitive friction as the "resistance encountered by a human intellect when it engages with a complex system of rules that change as the problem changes" and states that software interaction is very high in cognitive friction. He also coins the term, dancing bear, which represents something that does a lot, but really meets none of the requirements.
He stresses putting interaction design before programming in the product design phase, so it would go design->programming->user test / bug test ->tweak. This would save money in the long run, but it would take much more time. He equates it with the movie industry, where preplanning could take years and implementing the plan would take a relatively short time. The problem with this is that managers usually put unreasonable deadlines on the programmers. They don't seem to realize that the consumer would be more angry at a unfinished product, not a late released product. An unfinished product would do more to lower consumer loyalty. The typical problems with softare is that software forgets, software is lazy, software gives too much info, software is inflexible, software blames users, and software won't take responsibility.
He calls us Homo Logicus, which separates us from normal humans. I kinda agree with that statement, although I believe that something similar could apply to other disciplines such as the sciences and math. Also, he compares us with jocks from secondary schools and how the table is turned on our old tormenters.
To design good interaction design. we need to design for pleasure. Instead of trying to create one program for everyone, design for one subgroup and make them very happy. To do this, we need personas. We also need to design for power. We need to design based on goals, not tasks. The most important goal is personal goals and need to be careful of false goals. As a tie in with "The Media Equation" we can make software polite, which would be interested in the user, deferential to the user, is forthcoming, has common sense, anticipates user needs, is responsive, is taciturn about its personal problems, is well informed, is perceptive, is self-confident, stays focused, is fudgable, gives instant gratification, and is trustworthy. Finally, they need to design for people by using scenarios. Daily use scenarios would be the most important since those would most likely happen. One problem that programmers have is that we try too hard focus on the fringe cases.
Commentary
Overall, I think this is a good book and should be required for software engineering since that would've helped the project in there. I never thought of the fact that programmers have a lot of clout in the programs they design, but it makes sense since they own the code, and managers don't want to get rid of the good programmers. The design principles (design for people, pleasure, and power) is very important and the personas, personal goals, and use of daily scenarios could really help when I am assigned to projects in the future. Also, I never would've considered that I act like a jock with my computing knowledge, not strength.
"The Inmates are Running the Asylum" by Alan Cooper
This book seems to be for managers of software companies. Alan Cooper states that computers are spreading throughout every business field, so software design is getting more important. The title comes from the belief that software engineers are running the software company. No matter what the upper management say, the software programmers have the final say in how the program will be implemented. Although I was not aware of this, it does make sense. The managers usually are too busy to deal with the code.
In the first part, he describes how if you include a computer in everyday objects, you will get a computer back. He describes cognitive friction as the "resistance encountered by a human intellect when it engages with a complex system of rules that change as the problem changes" and states that software interaction is very high in cognitive friction. He also coins the term, dancing bear, which represents something that does a lot, but really meets none of the requirements.
He stresses putting interaction design before programming in the product design phase, so it would go design->programming->user test / bug test ->tweak. This would save money in the long run, but it would take much more time. He equates it with the movie industry, where preplanning could take years and implementing the plan would take a relatively short time. The problem with this is that managers usually put unreasonable deadlines on the programmers. They don't seem to realize that the consumer would be more angry at a unfinished product, not a late released product. An unfinished product would do more to lower consumer loyalty. The typical problems with softare is that software forgets, software is lazy, software gives too much info, software is inflexible, software blames users, and software won't take responsibility.
He calls us Homo Logicus, which separates us from normal humans. I kinda agree with that statement, although I believe that something similar could apply to other disciplines such as the sciences and math. Also, he compares us with jocks from secondary schools and how the table is turned on our old tormenters.
To design good interaction design. we need to design for pleasure. Instead of trying to create one program for everyone, design for one subgroup and make them very happy. To do this, we need personas. We also need to design for power. We need to design based on goals, not tasks. The most important goal is personal goals and need to be careful of false goals. As a tie in with "The Media Equation" we can make software polite, which would be interested in the user, deferential to the user, is forthcoming, has common sense, anticipates user needs, is responsive, is taciturn about its personal problems, is well informed, is perceptive, is self-confident, stays focused, is fudgable, gives instant gratification, and is trustworthy. Finally, they need to design for people by using scenarios. Daily use scenarios would be the most important since those would most likely happen. One problem that programmers have is that we try too hard focus on the fringe cases.
Commentary
Overall, I think this is a good book and should be required for software engineering since that would've helped the project in there. I never thought of the fact that programmers have a lot of clout in the programs they design, but it makes sense since they own the code, and managers don't want to get rid of the good programmers. The design principles (design for people, pleasure, and power) is very important and the personas, personal goals, and use of daily scenarios could really help when I am assigned to projects in the future. Also, I never would've considered that I act like a jock with my computing knowledge, not strength.
Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful
Source
"Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful" by Don Norman
Summary
This article was mainly about how blindly following want the users want is detrimental to a product. He begins by saying that knowing one's users is very important. Current beliefs state that this is the most important part of designing a successful product. However, he points out that companies that are supposedly good at human-centered design still produce confusing products. He then points out that the car and some everyday objects were designed without user studies and they ended up being successful. The reason they are successful is that they follow activity-centered design principles. The designers developed it knowing what activities the product would perform. They take the previous design and improve upon it based on the problems they or their customers experienced. He also counters the argument that technology should adapt to human use by giving some examples of how we adapted to technology: the clock and watch, writing systems, and musical instruments. He argues that activity centered design can be successful if the designers can sufficiently explain why they designed the product that way. Activity centered design requires an understanding of people, technology, tools, and the reasons for the activities. His major problems with human centered design is that focusing on the individual person or group can make it easier for that individual but harder for everyone else, the people's needs today may be different from the needs of tomorrow, it distracts everyone from the support of the activities themselves, and too much attention for the needs of the users can produce a non-cohesive design.
Commentary
I have noticed a change in philosophy in Don Norman from his first book, The Design of Everyday Things, to this paper and his latest book, "Emotional Design". In the first book, his main point seemed to be that we need to focus on the user and the product should be easier for the user to use. Ease of use is important. However, like he said in this paper, strictly obeying the users could lead to a product that tries to please everyone, but disappoints them instead. That was one of the complaints we had when we read the first book. I agree that there needs to be a balance between the two. You can't ignore the users completely, especially when they complain, but the company knows what direction they want to go, so they should have the say in what goes into the program.
"Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful" by Don Norman
Summary
This article was mainly about how blindly following want the users want is detrimental to a product. He begins by saying that knowing one's users is very important. Current beliefs state that this is the most important part of designing a successful product. However, he points out that companies that are supposedly good at human-centered design still produce confusing products. He then points out that the car and some everyday objects were designed without user studies and they ended up being successful. The reason they are successful is that they follow activity-centered design principles. The designers developed it knowing what activities the product would perform. They take the previous design and improve upon it based on the problems they or their customers experienced. He also counters the argument that technology should adapt to human use by giving some examples of how we adapted to technology: the clock and watch, writing systems, and musical instruments. He argues that activity centered design can be successful if the designers can sufficiently explain why they designed the product that way. Activity centered design requires an understanding of people, technology, tools, and the reasons for the activities. His major problems with human centered design is that focusing on the individual person or group can make it easier for that individual but harder for everyone else, the people's needs today may be different from the needs of tomorrow, it distracts everyone from the support of the activities themselves, and too much attention for the needs of the users can produce a non-cohesive design.
Commentary
I have noticed a change in philosophy in Don Norman from his first book, The Design of Everyday Things, to this paper and his latest book, "Emotional Design". In the first book, his main point seemed to be that we need to focus on the user and the product should be easier for the user to use. Ease of use is important. However, like he said in this paper, strictly obeying the users could lead to a product that tries to please everyone, but disappoints them instead. That was one of the complaints we had when we read the first book. I agree that there needs to be a balance between the two. You can't ignore the users completely, especially when they complain, but the company knows what direction they want to go, so they should have the say in what goes into the program.
Undo and Erase Events as Indicators of Usability Problems
Source:
"Undo and Erase Events as Indicators of Usability Problems" by David Akers, Matthew Simpson, Robin Jeffries, Terry Winograd. CHI 2009
Summary
The authors of this paper wanted to study negative critical incidents which will show usability problems with Google SketchUp. They differentiated event-based reporting and self reporting. In this experiment, they used undo and erase operations for the event-based reporting and compared it with self reporting by the user. In the formal experiment, they had 35 participants from a variety of backgrounds. The experiment was 90 minutes and was separated into training to use SketchUp and identifying critical events, practice using the program, performing the modeling assignment, and retrospective commentary. For the assignment, the users were given specific instructions and told not to deviate from the instructions, and the commentary was moved to after the assignment was over because previous work noted that immediate commentary was disruptive to the process. The commentary portion included a series of questions about the critical events detected automatically (undo and erase operations) and/or self reported. The questions asked what was happening immediately before the event occured, was the problem surprising, what did the user do to get around the problem, and also if they reported it as a problem and if not, why. The commentary session paired off users as a speaker and listener. The listener would ask the question and judge when the question had been answered, and the speaker would talk about the event.
Results
The events were assigned severity based on how many operations detected it. Mild severity events were detected due to self reporting. Undo operations indicated medium severity. If all three methods were used, then the event would be catagorized as severe. Also they catagorized events based on frequency of the event and the impact of the event (whether or not the event would completely stop all work). After analyzing the data, the authors determined that undo and erase events detected about 90% of all severe usability problems. Similar numbers for the other catagories existed. Figure 1 shows a venn diagram of the results. Of particular note is the events detected only by undo or erase. When asked why the user didn't report the issue, many users mentioned that they blamed themselves and not the program, which is similar to what Don Norman said in "The Design of Everyday Things."
Figure 1
Analysis
I believe that this experiment showed some interesting results. I knew that undo and erase operations can show simple mistakes, but I never associated that they would use those operations to deal with usability problems. In hind sight, it made sense. I think that this experiment should be repeated with other programs as part of a usability test to see how to better design the interface to reduce the number of problems.
"Undo and Erase Events as Indicators of Usability Problems" by David Akers, Matthew Simpson, Robin Jeffries, Terry Winograd. CHI 2009
Summary
The authors of this paper wanted to study negative critical incidents which will show usability problems with Google SketchUp. They differentiated event-based reporting and self reporting. In this experiment, they used undo and erase operations for the event-based reporting and compared it with self reporting by the user. In the formal experiment, they had 35 participants from a variety of backgrounds. The experiment was 90 minutes and was separated into training to use SketchUp and identifying critical events, practice using the program, performing the modeling assignment, and retrospective commentary. For the assignment, the users were given specific instructions and told not to deviate from the instructions, and the commentary was moved to after the assignment was over because previous work noted that immediate commentary was disruptive to the process. The commentary portion included a series of questions about the critical events detected automatically (undo and erase operations) and/or self reported. The questions asked what was happening immediately before the event occured, was the problem surprising, what did the user do to get around the problem, and also if they reported it as a problem and if not, why. The commentary session paired off users as a speaker and listener. The listener would ask the question and judge when the question had been answered, and the speaker would talk about the event.
Results
The events were assigned severity based on how many operations detected it. Mild severity events were detected due to self reporting. Undo operations indicated medium severity. If all three methods were used, then the event would be catagorized as severe. Also they catagorized events based on frequency of the event and the impact of the event (whether or not the event would completely stop all work). After analyzing the data, the authors determined that undo and erase events detected about 90% of all severe usability problems. Similar numbers for the other catagories existed. Figure 1 shows a venn diagram of the results. Of particular note is the events detected only by undo or erase. When asked why the user didn't report the issue, many users mentioned that they blamed themselves and not the program, which is similar to what Don Norman said in "The Design of Everyday Things."
Figure 1
Analysis
I believe that this experiment showed some interesting results. I knew that undo and erase operations can show simple mistakes, but I never associated that they would use those operations to deal with usability problems. In hind sight, it made sense. I think that this experiment should be repeated with other programs as part of a usability test to see how to better design the interface to reduce the number of problems.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Webmail Clients = Desktop Mail Clients Soon
Sources
(1) USIST 2007 - Enabling Efficient Orienteering Behavior in Webmail Clients by Stefan Nusser, Julian Cerruti, Eric Wilcox, Steve COusins, Jerald Schoudt, Sergio Sancho
This paper was discussing the advantages of desktop email clients vs browser based email clients. Then, they discussed their implementation of their own browser client that tries to have the same advantages of desktop clients while keeping the advantages of browser clients.
Limitations of Browser Based Clients
_______________________________________________________
They have implemented a client called BlueMail, whose goal was to "gain the same independence from network and server performance and ultimately similar performance characteristics as a desktop mail application while running inside a web browser" (1).
Purpose for Email
As many studies have shown, email is no longer just used for communication purposes. In a corporate setting, people also manage personal information and tasks in the clients as well. Users use the inbox and folders as to do lists and frequently scroll and sort through the list. A study found that sort-by-headers (with pivoting) was first in the list of most useful email features, while instant search came in second.
They used the term orienteering, which "involves navigating to a search target by a series of small, local steps that leverage contextual knowledge and include both keyword search and browsing by meta-data" (1).
Got to be fast
In web-based clients, response time is very important because can be affected by factors such as network delay. In order to keep the user's flow of though uninterrupted, they determined that response time for sort, search, or switching folders must be less than a second. Response time for scrolling through a list of emails must be less than half a second.
__________________________________________
For the purpose of the paper, they focused on mailbox sizes of 10,000 messages but also looked at the fringe case of 50,000.
__________________________________________
Implementation
BlueMail use the traditional three tier architecture of web applications:browser, mid-tier, backend. The research paper focused on the mid-tier aspect and the client, and BlueMail uses existing IBM products to cover the backend tier.
The mid-tier service is to interact with the backend datastores and to provide an interface client for components. It was implemented as a lightweight J2EE application. The mid-tier service performs "data-transformation and integration services, allowing the client to offload CPU-intensive operations to the mid-tier if they are not time critical." (1)
The client application follows the design of an "object-oriented model-view-controller application" (1)
___________________________________________
They also discussed some of the classes that were used and what they did. However, I will not discuss them here.
___________________________________________
Performance
Display and Scrolling
BlueMail was designed to maintain a local cache of all the message headers. In order to shorten the time needed to show all the messages, they designed the Document Object Model (DOM) to contain only a subset of the headers, only 3 times the amount of headers that would fit on a page. They padded this structure with two large elements on both sides to determine the size of the task bar.
To scroll, they "captured the scroll event, calculated the rows that should be visible at the new position, render the new message headers in the DOM and recalculate the size of the padding elements. This had the effect of reducing the number of rows to create. Also, it could even be accelerated by reusing the existing DOM tree and modifying the attributes of the individual nodes. They also decided to suppress page refresh until the scrollbar is still. In order to have some visual feedback, while the user is scrolling, there is an overlay displaying the value of the sorted column (so it would display the date or the sender, depending on which column is sorting the list).
Sorting
They had 4 choices of how to implement the sort: full javascript array sort, incremental javascript array sort, index merge sort, or ranked AVL tree. The AVL tree was by far the fastest. However, the tradeoff was higher memory usage. A rough estimate of memory consumption for an AVL tree of 10,000 entires was about 1 MB of memory, and this consumption would grow linearly with the number of entries in the index.
They also implemented a pivot function where the user would change the sort order while leaving the selected row in the viewport. The purpose is to keep the "context of the ongoing mental search operation on the new sort order" (1).
Search
They implemented a search function which processes the primary index, searching through all the subjects and creating a temporary index with the matching results. The response time was about 400ms for 10,000 messages, but rendering the index would take an additional 200ms.
Test Case
Conclusion and Opinion
I think this paper is slightly out of date since there are some email clients that does similar things already. However, most of them are not implemented to this extent. For example, the new Yahoo email system is similar to this, but if I remember correctly, they still have a limit on the number of emails per page, and the response time could be better. Gmail is similar, although I like the interface on gmail better than yahoo. The one drawback to this is that it would not work well with older computers or dialup. It may run slowly on computers that have low memory and it seems that dialup internet connectiosn would take too long for the new messages to be retrieved.
(1) USIST 2007 - Enabling Efficient Orienteering Behavior in Webmail Clients by Stefan Nusser, Julian Cerruti, Eric Wilcox, Steve COusins, Jerald Schoudt, Sergio Sancho
This paper was discussing the advantages of desktop email clients vs browser based email clients. Then, they discussed their implementation of their own browser client that tries to have the same advantages of desktop clients while keeping the advantages of browser clients.
Limitations of Browser Based Clients
- scrolling
- searching
- sorting
_______________________________________________________
They have implemented a client called BlueMail, whose goal was to "gain the same independence from network and server performance and ultimately similar performance characteristics as a desktop mail application while running inside a web browser" (1).
Purpose for Email
As many studies have shown, email is no longer just used for communication purposes. In a corporate setting, people also manage personal information and tasks in the clients as well. Users use the inbox and folders as to do lists and frequently scroll and sort through the list. A study found that sort-by-headers (with pivoting) was first in the list of most useful email features, while instant search came in second.
They used the term orienteering, which "involves navigating to a search target by a series of small, local steps that leverage contextual knowledge and include both keyword search and browsing by meta-data" (1).
Got to be fast
In web-based clients, response time is very important because can be affected by factors such as network delay. In order to keep the user's flow of though uninterrupted, they determined that response time for sort, search, or switching folders must be less than a second. Response time for scrolling through a list of emails must be less than half a second.
__________________________________________
For the purpose of the paper, they focused on mailbox sizes of 10,000 messages but also looked at the fringe case of 50,000.
__________________________________________
Implementation
BlueMail use the traditional three tier architecture of web applications:browser, mid-tier, backend. The research paper focused on the mid-tier aspect and the client, and BlueMail uses existing IBM products to cover the backend tier.
The mid-tier service is to interact with the backend datastores and to provide an interface client for components. It was implemented as a lightweight J2EE application. The mid-tier service performs "data-transformation and integration services, allowing the client to offload CPU-intensive operations to the mid-tier if they are not time critical." (1)
The client application follows the design of an "object-oriented model-view-controller application" (1)
___________________________________________
They also discussed some of the classes that were used and what they did. However, I will not discuss them here.
___________________________________________
Performance
Display and Scrolling
BlueMail was designed to maintain a local cache of all the message headers. In order to shorten the time needed to show all the messages, they designed the Document Object Model (DOM) to contain only a subset of the headers, only 3 times the amount of headers that would fit on a page. They padded this structure with two large elements on both sides to determine the size of the task bar.
To scroll, they "captured the scroll event, calculated the rows that should be visible at the new position, render the new message headers in the DOM and recalculate the size of the padding elements. This had the effect of reducing the number of rows to create. Also, it could even be accelerated by reusing the existing DOM tree and modifying the attributes of the individual nodes. They also decided to suppress page refresh until the scrollbar is still. In order to have some visual feedback, while the user is scrolling, there is an overlay displaying the value of the sorted column (so it would display the date or the sender, depending on which column is sorting the list).
Sorting
They had 4 choices of how to implement the sort: full javascript array sort, incremental javascript array sort, index merge sort, or ranked AVL tree. The AVL tree was by far the fastest. However, the tradeoff was higher memory usage. A rough estimate of memory consumption for an AVL tree of 10,000 entires was about 1 MB of memory, and this consumption would grow linearly with the number of entries in the index.
They also implemented a pivot function where the user would change the sort order while leaving the selected row in the viewport. The purpose is to keep the "context of the ongoing mental search operation on the new sort order" (1).
Search
They implemented a search function which processes the primary index, searching through all the subjects and creating a temporary index with the matching results. The response time was about 400ms for 10,000 messages, but rendering the index would take an additional 200ms.
Test Case
Conclusion and Opinion
I think this paper is slightly out of date since there are some email clients that does similar things already. However, most of them are not implemented to this extent. For example, the new Yahoo email system is similar to this, but if I remember correctly, they still have a limit on the number of emails per page, and the response time could be better. Gmail is similar, although I like the interface on gmail better than yahoo. The one drawback to this is that it would not work well with older computers or dialup. It may run slowly on computers that have low memory and it seems that dialup internet connectiosn would take too long for the new messages to be retrieved.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Stanley Milgram
This book was a biography of Stanley Milgrim. It starts out with his childhood in New York. It goes through his education, and his high intelligence. He was able to get financial scholarships to go to Harvard and get into grad school. He was the center of moral controversy with his obedience experiment. In that experiment, his subject "shocked" one of his partners, but prerecorded screams of pain were recorded and played so the subject would hear. The results were that people would follow the commands of someone with supposed authority. The obedience levels were still relatively high even for people who had to hold the hand of the person to the shock plate. He did debrief the subjects afterward, and told them that there was no harm actually done. Even with this, people still were not pleased with his actions. After finishing grad school, he taught at Princeton, and then City University of New York where he continued his research. Other experiments he had done include the memory mapping of New York City and Paris and the six degrees of separation.
I believe that the obidience experiment may not have been ethical, but it is realistic to some situations that could happen in the real world. The goal of the experiment was to find out what would cause obidience to authority, and the results show that most people are willing to put aside their concerns if the authority figure commands them to. The stress felt by these people were probably similar to those felt by the people who were indirect accessories to atrocities in World War 2. So, even though the experiment may be unethical by the standards of the time, the results are realistic because in the real world, people go into stressful situations all the time and I don't think this experiment went too far in that respect.
Also, the other experiments like the mental mapping and six degrees of separation provided interesting results. I knew that some areas in cities are more familar than others, since that area may be the what the city is known for. However, I wouldn't have expected that sometimes, they knew the famous areas better than their own neighborhoods.
I believe that the obidience experiment may not have been ethical, but it is realistic to some situations that could happen in the real world. The goal of the experiment was to find out what would cause obidience to authority, and the results show that most people are willing to put aside their concerns if the authority figure commands them to. The stress felt by these people were probably similar to those felt by the people who were indirect accessories to atrocities in World War 2. So, even though the experiment may be unethical by the standards of the time, the results are realistic because in the real world, people go into stressful situations all the time and I don't think this experiment went too far in that respect.
Also, the other experiments like the mental mapping and six degrees of separation provided interesting results. I knew that some areas in cities are more familar than others, since that area may be the what the city is known for. However, I wouldn't have expected that sometimes, they knew the famous areas better than their own neighborhoods.
Emotional Design
Emotional Design, by Don Norman, was mainly about how we associate emotions with everyday things. Attractive things are easier to use because we are in a positive state, which means we're more relaxed. We can think more critically when we're at ease, so if anything goes wrong, alternative solutions can be found. When we see something unattractive, we become more stressed, so our train of thought becomes more narrow and we may miss obvious solutions to our problems. Also, he mentioned the levels of emotions: visceral, behavioral, reflective. Visceral level is based on the appearance. Behavioral is based on how effective and pleasurable it is . Reflective is more looking back at the experience. Some designs focus on each of these levels separately, but good designs use all 3. These concepts can be used to make better games and sites for the public, but most companies don't implement them. For example, the google search page has 1 o in google for each page. Little things like that makes a website seem more fun than the generic yahoo search pages, which is rather bland and more work oriented. Also, game companies could use these concepts to create better games that cater to subgroups that use their products. However, they don't do that and sell a game system for everyone. Of course, this could be due to business reasons.
I like this book. The idea that we like to use attractive things is something we don't think about, but subconsciously do. Also, the levels of thinking and how lower levels can be overridden by higher thinking makes sense, although we don't think in those terms.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Don't Interrupt Me
This paper was about interruptions while in the workplace and how they affect the time it takes to complete the task and the mental strain on the workers. They sought to measure the disruption cost of the interruptions (the additional time to reorient back to an interrupted task or stress) and whether personality factors can affect the disruption costs.
They ran an experiment with 48 German university students. They were assigned a task to answer emails as quickly, correctly (using a fact sheet), and politely as possible. In the first task, they had no interruptions. In the second, they were interrupted by a superior through the phone or IM on related topics (the human resource context). In the third, the interruptions were not related to what they were doing. They were told to attend to these interruptions immediately.
They measured how long it took to complete each set of emails and how long they took to respond to the interruptions. They also measured the subjective workload through a modified NASA Task Load Index, with the addition of stress. They also noted the personality of each of the participants.
The results show that same context interruptions are not more beneficial than different context interruptions, although they may be perceived to be. Interrupted work is performed faster, mainly because the person will work faster, with the same politeness and correctness. However, they experience more stress, higher frustration, more pressure and effort. This could have an effect on system design. Through the results, even 20 minutes of interrupted performance can cause higher stress and frustration in people. Newer systems can keep track of these interruptions and control them over a long period of time, so the person will not be too overloaded.
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review of technical paper:
Mark, Gloria, Daniela Gudith, and Ulrich Klocke. The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress. CHI 2008.
They ran an experiment with 48 German university students. They were assigned a task to answer emails as quickly, correctly (using a fact sheet), and politely as possible. In the first task, they had no interruptions. In the second, they were interrupted by a superior through the phone or IM on related topics (the human resource context). In the third, the interruptions were not related to what they were doing. They were told to attend to these interruptions immediately.
They measured how long it took to complete each set of emails and how long they took to respond to the interruptions. They also measured the subjective workload through a modified NASA Task Load Index, with the addition of stress. They also noted the personality of each of the participants.
The results show that same context interruptions are not more beneficial than different context interruptions, although they may be perceived to be. Interrupted work is performed faster, mainly because the person will work faster, with the same politeness and correctness. However, they experience more stress, higher frustration, more pressure and effort. This could have an effect on system design. Through the results, even 20 minutes of interrupted performance can cause higher stress and frustration in people. Newer systems can keep track of these interruptions and control them over a long period of time, so the person will not be too overloaded.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
review of technical paper:
Mark, Gloria, Daniela Gudith, and Ulrich Klocke. The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress. CHI 2008.
Monday, March 2, 2009
I'm sorry dave, I'm afraid I cannot let you have eggs today
I read the book The Design of Future Things by Don Norman. It is the same overall concepts from the last book The Design of Everyday Things but with more relevant examples. The last book was written 20 years ago, and many of the examples in that book have been resolved or are unfamiliar to us. He discusses how contemporary technology will be like in the future. However, he warns that we still make the same mistake in designing technology without the human factor. He mentions how automation may be good, but can be disastrous if it was not designed for humans to take control in time to correct a problem. Some examples in the book include cars that can drive itself amd a house with appliances that tries to get you to follow the doctor's orders. He also gives some rules for design on page 193, but I won't write it out here since it would take up too much space.
I think this is a decent book. However, some of the examples seem a bit too science fiction-like. The automated car that can drive by itself sounds good, but the public would never let that happen for the same reason why the autopilot on a plane will never handle takeoffs and landings for passenger jets. I think very few people would trust their lives to a computer and hope the programmers have thought of every possible situation (which they won't). Next, his talk of the super house seems creepy. Although it could be helpful, like the house playing loud, angry music as a wakeup alarm would be nice. But having the refrigerator and toilet to team up to pester you on your eating habits seems too much. Also, his talk of intelligent robots doing menial tasks to make human lives easier seem like the plot to every sci-fi movie/show where the robots decide to attack all humans.
example 1
I think this is a decent book. However, some of the examples seem a bit too science fiction-like. The automated car that can drive by itself sounds good, but the public would never let that happen for the same reason why the autopilot on a plane will never handle takeoffs and landings for passenger jets. I think very few people would trust their lives to a computer and hope the programmers have thought of every possible situation (which they won't). Next, his talk of the super house seems creepy. Although it could be helpful, like the house playing loud, angry music as a wakeup alarm would be nice. But having the refrigerator and toilet to team up to pester you on your eating habits seems too much. Also, his talk of intelligent robots doing menial tasks to make human lives easier seem like the plot to every sci-fi movie/show where the robots decide to attack all humans.
example 1
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Browsing Large HTML Tables on Small Screens
Source:
"Browsing Large HTML Tables on Small Screens." by Keishi Tajima and Kaori Ohnishi. UIST 2008
"Browsing Large HTML Tables on Small Screens." by Keishi Tajima and Kaori Ohnishi. UIST 2008
Figure 1: Normal Mode w/ collapsible headers
Figure 2: Record Mode
Figure 3: Cell Mode
In the paper "Browsing Large HTML Tables on Small Screens" by Keishi Tajima and Kaori Ohnishi. Their goal is to try to solve the problems of viewing large tables of data on a PDA or a cellphone. First, they start off by narrowing down the types of tables that people would normally go on while they're using a portable device. Next, they went into a discussion of how to interpret the data in the table, such as using the relational approach or the matrix approach. Then, they talked about the different modes that they try to implement. Normal mode is well, normal. They allow the user to fold unnecessary columns or rows to view only the ones they want. Also, they can show a balloon with the headers of the rows and columns so the user can know what the data represents. If the user clicks on a row (column) header, then the table will show the cell contents and its corresponding column (row) header. In cell mode, it will show the same thing, but it would include the header that you clicked on at the top, and this time, the user will always see that header. The style of folding has a problem because it needs to know which row and column are headers. Composite cells can be a problem if they represent an aggregate of two categories. They devised many rules to determine whether logical substructures and whether the cell is part of the header. They did experiements on whether or not their rules would work. They used a group of 80 tables, and it didn't work for all of them, showing that more work needs to be done. Some rules caused more errors than others.
I believe that this is important for portable devices. It would be more convenient for the people to be able to access data on the run. While it is possible to shrink the table down so you can see it, reading it would be difficult. The normal and cell modes were use to use and understand. Of course, finding out the headers is the difficult part and would need more work in the future. If I had more knowledge of databases, since they use some database terminology in the paper, I might have been able to understand this paper more and come up with better ideas on how to solve some issues.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Mole People, Mole People.. taste like moles... talks like people... Mole People
Comments
I have commented on the following blogs:
Sarah Gray
George Lucchese
Eric Scott
The Mole People
I have read the book the Mole People by Jennifer Toth. This was not a clear cut ethnography, but there are some similarities. The book starts out by generally telling how the author first learn about the mole people and how the study got started. The remaining chapters continually tells the story of the people under the subways, but it did not seem to have a main connecting timeline. Only in a few chapters does the author refers to a past event. Futhermore, it seems that the chapters were stories of their own. They talk about different groups in the subways and tell what happens when she was with them. Some of the stories were second hand stories passed down from the different camps.
Overall, this was generally a good book. Of course, I have my doubts about some of the stories. Like when she encountered that gang, and the book had the other people's words quoted. I think she might have made some of the quotes up and just extrapolated what might have been said through her knowledge of the personality. I don't think she mentioned anything about how she recorded the speech, so she might had to make some things up when she thought about it later. Also, sometimes, she could've did a better job of reminding the reader of who was who, because after a while, everyone's names started to blend together.
So for cliffnotes, this book was ok.. but one of my main criticism of this book was that I don't know how she got some of those longer quotes, unless she was recording them.
I have commented on the following blogs:
Sarah Gray
George Lucchese
Eric Scott
The Mole People
I have read the book the Mole People by Jennifer Toth. This was not a clear cut ethnography, but there are some similarities. The book starts out by generally telling how the author first learn about the mole people and how the study got started. The remaining chapters continually tells the story of the people under the subways, but it did not seem to have a main connecting timeline. Only in a few chapters does the author refers to a past event. Futhermore, it seems that the chapters were stories of their own. They talk about different groups in the subways and tell what happens when she was with them. Some of the stories were second hand stories passed down from the different camps.
Overall, this was generally a good book. Of course, I have my doubts about some of the stories. Like when she encountered that gang, and the book had the other people's words quoted. I think she might have made some of the quotes up and just extrapolated what might have been said through her knowledge of the personality. I don't think she mentioned anything about how she recorded the speech, so she might had to make some things up when she thought about it later. Also, sometimes, she could've did a better job of reminding the reader of who was who, because after a while, everyone's names started to blend together.
So for cliffnotes, this book was ok.. but one of my main criticism of this book was that I don't know how she got some of those longer quotes, unless she was recording them.
Forum Trolling from the TNZ: Abandom all hope, ye who enters here
I worked on an ethnography with Sarah Gray. We had a choice between two forums, The Neutral Zone from a Star Trek message board, or the general board from TexAgs. After choosing The Neutral Zone (TNZ), we decided on what kinds of data to collect. We chose the top 5 non-tagged threads, and we took data on the number of posts, the number of off-topic posts, the type of thread, the political leanings of the original post, and the first off topic post in that thread. We did two checkpoints. We had some assumptions going into the study, and it turns out 2 out of 3 were incorrect:
- The majority of the political threads were neutral in nature, at least the original post was. Of the 7 political threads we saw, only 2 had a liberal leaning OP. (incorrect original assumption)
- Once a thread got off topic, we found that the discussion usually went back on topic. We believe this is because of users reading the original post and replying to that instead of reading the entire thread. (incorrect original assumption)
- Original posts with a more partisan feel will get more off topic posts and these off topic posts will appear ealier. Of the 2 liberal threads we saw, both were quite accusatory in nature, and the third post in each of those threads went off topic.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Does Media = Real Life?
I have commented on the following blogs
Lei Gu
Eric Scott
Sarah Gray
The authors of the book argued that even though we know that media is not real and doesn't have feelings, we still treat it like it was a real person. They started their research by going through the social science section of the libraries and looked at different studies about human-human interaction in the areas of mannerisms, personality, emotions, social roles, and form. They looked at the result of the studies and replaced the second human with the word computer or media. Then they performed experiments to determine if the new hypothesis was valid for human-computer interaction. For the most part, their arguments were validated.
As I starting reading, I noticed that they did not do a real good job of justifying the results. The experiments seemed to confirm everything they said, and any criticisms of the methods were brushed aside with ease. I did not do further research into the details of the experiments and maybe doing so would clear up my concerns, but as it stands now, I am not completely convinced the results validated the hypothesis.
The main point of the book was that we would treat a computer like a human being, even though we know it isn't. I guess this could be true to an extent, since I think a running joke is that I treat my macbook like I would treat my child (which is a scary thought considering the condition of the laptop before I had it repaired... 4 times). They also said that computers should be nice to the users and respond positively to the user at certain times, like a complimenting spell check. That might be useful to certain people, but to me, if my macbook ever did that, I would feel like strangling it. I prefer usuability and efficiency, not niceness.
I personally think that this book is decent. It is not as good as the previous one, The Design of Everyday Things, but it does have valid points here and there, but, as I mentioned, the authors could've done a better job of justifying the results and why criticisms do not apply, and sometimes, the authors go too far when saying that computers should act like a nice human being.
Lei Gu
Eric Scott
Sarah Gray
The authors of the book argued that even though we know that media is not real and doesn't have feelings, we still treat it like it was a real person. They started their research by going through the social science section of the libraries and looked at different studies about human-human interaction in the areas of mannerisms, personality, emotions, social roles, and form. They looked at the result of the studies and replaced the second human with the word computer or media. Then they performed experiments to determine if the new hypothesis was valid for human-computer interaction. For the most part, their arguments were validated.
As I starting reading, I noticed that they did not do a real good job of justifying the results. The experiments seemed to confirm everything they said, and any criticisms of the methods were brushed aside with ease. I did not do further research into the details of the experiments and maybe doing so would clear up my concerns, but as it stands now, I am not completely convinced the results validated the hypothesis.
The main point of the book was that we would treat a computer like a human being, even though we know it isn't. I guess this could be true to an extent, since I think a running joke is that I treat my macbook like I would treat my child (which is a scary thought considering the condition of the laptop before I had it repaired... 4 times). They also said that computers should be nice to the users and respond positively to the user at certain times, like a complimenting spell check. That might be useful to certain people, but to me, if my macbook ever did that, I would feel like strangling it. I prefer usuability and efficiency, not niceness.
I personally think that this book is decent. It is not as good as the previous one, The Design of Everyday Things, but it does have valid points here and there, but, as I mentioned, the authors could've done a better job of justifying the results and why criticisms do not apply, and sometimes, the authors go too far when saying that computers should act like a nice human being.
Friday, January 30, 2009
my comments on other blogs
I have commented on the following blogs
Devin McKaskle
Kevin McDowell
Loren Cole
I might have commented on other blogs earlier, by the deadline, but I forgot to list them here so you can see it.
Devin McKaskle
Kevin McDowell
Loren Cole
I might have commented on other blogs earlier, by the deadline, but I forgot to list them here so you can see it.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
dtv converter box
First of all, it appears that the designers intended for this device to be connected to only the tv, antenna, and the vcr. Since I had to connect the dvd to the tv as well, the resulting network was a major web of wires. I think my final connection strategy was to connect the box and the dvd player to the vcr using different connecting wires (the tri colored one and the single coaxial (???) wire), and then connect the vcr to the tv. Also, in order to actually watch the tv with the dtv, I had to turn on the vcr as well. It wasn't too hard but it wasn't easy for my parents to learn this extra step. I had to write a list of instructions for them so they could learn it faster.
Next, setting up the converter box to watch tv on was fun. As far as I could tell, there was no automatic prompt to set up the converter box for the first time. So, I had to look for the menu button on the remote. The company that designed this device tried to put too many buttons on the small remote. Since my parents have bad eyesights, they will have troubles seeing which buttons does what. It took me a while to find the menu button, which looked just like the buttons for the numbers, and it was hard for me to see the word menu.
I believe that this was mentioned in the book, "The Design of Everyday Things." If the device is too complicated, then people will memorize a few features and won't even use the rest. I believe that this will be the case at home. I'm sure there are plenty of features that the dtv box provides to improve quality of watching tv. However, since many of the features are relatively hidden (or listed in the manual), these features will probably be ignored, and only the basic clicking through channels will be used.
So cliff notes, too many wires, too many buttons, not designed for people who has bad eyesight.. not a good design..
The Design of Everyday Things
Even though this book was originally written in the 80s, many of the concepts of user interfaces still applies today. Since the title was dealing with everyday things, his examples were simple to understand. The door problem, such as pushing on the wrong end or pushing instead of pulling happens to the best of us. Other examples are more complex than the door problem, but his point remains clear: if the design is poorly design, then even the smartest will have troubles using it. He also makes another point about feedback to the designers. If it looks simple, or if the user has the instructions on how to use the interface, and yet, they have troubles, they would most likely not report the troubles to the designers, due to embarrassment. In the door example, whenever i mess up using a door, I think "I hope no one saw that" Finally, he gives some pointers on how to improve design. However, many new products still makes the same mistake as before. This can also be due to the consumers, who continually buy the cheaper product, which has the worse design. So the manufacturers believe that this is what the people want.
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