The Design of Everyday Things

Reference
The Design of Everyday Things
- Donald A. Norman

Summary
The title essentially explains what this book is about.  Norman starts by explaining how involved and connected device design is with the human mind.  There are many details that go into design that most people don’t talk about, and these are the most elegant and useful parts of the design.  Any device that a person just naturally knows how to use by looking at it is a masterful design implementation.  If the user can start using and figure out a device without a manual and on its design alone, this is a truly successful design.

Another major point was including human error into the equation.  And not only being aware of it, but knowing that errors by the user will definitely happen.  The design, if possible, should have countermeasures to human error, or at least be ready to handle them.  Having a self-destruct button right next to another frequently used one would be a terrible idea.  However, if a clear cover were placed and secured over the self-destruct button, this would at least be aware of the potential error and place some restriction in the design to hinder it.

Choosing aesthetics over practicality is a major and common design flaw.  Norman uses the explanation of an award-winning design that no one can use.  This greatly ties in with the main point of his book, which is to employ user-centered design.  It is perfectly alright to design something pleasing to the eye and with new features people might not have seen before if the design is still manageable to the people who will be using it.  A good system he pointed out was his POET system involving 7 main points: use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head, simplify the structure of tasks, make things visible, get the mappings right, exploit the power of constraints, design for error, and when all else fails, standardize.  Everyday things should be easy to use and practical.  By keeping his POET system in mind as well as designing with the user in mind, Norman believes annoying everyday things can be a thing of the past.

Discussion
Norman’s book was certainly an interesting take on devices many of us interact with on a daily basis.  Before reading this, I never thought too much about annoying devices.  I simply put up with them and took the time to learn their seemingly illogical designs.  But what I didn’t realize is that there was a good explanation to the reasoning behind why these designs are annoying and difficult to use.  On the bright side, this makes it much easier to find and gravitate towards the much better designed products.  I don’t really have much more else to say about his book.  All I can hope is that I can implement his advice into anything I design, and be able to detect poor designs and advise people against using them.  This was a useful book, and it certainly ties in nicely to his other book we’re reading, Emotional Design.

Book Reading 26 – Opening Skinner’s Box

Chapter 7 – Rat Park
Summary
The Rat Park experiment was a test by Bruce Alexander in finding some sort of explanation about the nature of addiction.  What the experiment revealed was that rats given the freedom to roam and be free and happy did not get addicted to a morphine-infused drink, while rats in a cage definitely did.  While these findings were interesting, Slater saw contradictions to both sides.  The conclusion was that there are too many variables involved in who does and who doesn’t get addicted.  Body chemistry combined with free will are the main driving force.

Discussion
I think free will and the ability to resist temptation play a major part in addictions.  I have never been addicted to hard drugs, but let’s take pizza for instance.  It’s definitely not healthy, but sometimes I get a powerful craving for it.  It’s quite easy to sit at my computer and just ignore it.  But it’s also just as easy to open the Domino’s website and place a 2 for 1 order for $9 using a coupon code.  I can rationalize reasons for both choices in resisting and giving in, but it always comes down to my ability to resist that temptation.  I will live without pizza, but sometimes it just hits the spot.

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Book Reading 25 - Coming of Age in Samoa

Chapter 8 – The Role of the Dance
Summary
The dance is extremely important in defining attitudes towards each other in Samoan culture.  It is also one of the few times when the younger children are the focus of attention.  Children with handicaps appeared to be the most popular dancers as well, as these added to their personalities in dance.  Along with the state of sexual relations, the ability of a child to dance is crucial to their self-image.

Discussion
While shy people refuse to dance in this country, it’s interesting that shy Samoan children dance regardless of being shy.  They might be terrified of doing so, but they do it anyway.  I personally think that constantly putting themselves out there will build their self-confidence, so this can be a good thing.  It was also interesting that the personalities they projected while dancing did not necessarily project how they were outside of that environment.  Even if they are a free spirit, the confines of that society would not allow them to be.

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Book Reading 24 – Emotional Design

Chapter 1 – Attractive Things Work Better
Summary
In this first chapter, Norman explains how emotion greatly affects the ability of humans to figure things out.  In an example dealing with two ATM designs, most people found the more attractive looking one easier to use.  He explains this is because positive emotions open up the mind and allow for more complex thought.  But negative emotions make humans more cautious, so design that invokes this also has its place.

Discussion
I believe I have some of the tendencies that provoke open minded thinking before working on something.  I never noticed it before though.  If I have an art project I want to work on, I find it hard to get started if I am not in the mood.  When I am not in the mood, this is usually because I have recently finished a lot of school work or I might be stressed out.  By playing a game or just relaxing for awhile, this can help get my mind creatively ready.

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Paper Reading 11 - Eden: Supporting Home Network Management Through Interactive Visual Tools

Comments
Patrick Frith
Jessica Gonzales

Reference Information
Eden: Supporting Home Network Management Through Interactive Visual Tools
 - Jeonghwa Yang, W. Keith Edwards, and David Haslem
 - UIST 2010, New York, New York

The main Eden interface.

Summary
Eden is a tool designed to simplify the management of home networks.  It is a more visual representation of the home network, and is geared towards making management easier for the novice users.  Most software available to manage networks is meant for the enterprise level, and is far too complicated for most other users.

When first thinking about how to design Eden, the designers had to decide which elements to include in the interface.  If they included too many, the user could get overwhelmed.  In order to find out which ones most users would need, they conducted a study.  And in this study, they first wanted to find which actions could already be done with existing tools.  Then they turned to 14 users of varying skill level to find other desirable actions they should implement in their design.

PacketTrap: an enterprise-level program.

After giving the users surveys and conducting interviews, they found the main three elements the users wanted for network management.  These were a way to see the network status at a glance, easy to access security features, and control over the network performance.  To aid in design, the designers divided all the needs into either membership management, access control, network monitoring, or the quality of service policy for bandwidth priority.

Before beginning design, the users were shown a myriad of different interface implementations.  The top choice was used for the design, and the finished product was given to the same 14 users.  In addition to Eden, the users were also asked to perform tasks using OS/Router configuration, Network Magic (an alternative similar to Eden), and Network Magic and Eden combined.  The vast majority of users preferred Eden alone over all the other choices in the trials.

For future research, the designers plan to expand Eden in many ways.  As an immediate goal, they would like to add the ability of remote home network administration.  They also mentioned a main issue they want to address, which is different support for home access controls.  They did not fully take into account the power relationships in the home for the first study.  By doing so, they believe they can improve this aspect of Eden greatly.

A couple of the potential design layout options.

Discussion
I usually don’t mess with my home network too much.  If I can get internet and I can transfer files when I want to, that is good enough for me.  However, it would be very nice to have easy ways to view network traffic.  I have had times when the network seems to be bogged down by some unknown reason.  I know there is some way to check this via the command line in Windows, but I admit I am too lazy to find out how.  And even when I do find out how, I would prefer a more visual way of doing this.  I really like this Eden idea, and I feel there is a huge market for it.  I don’t mind not having it since I can usually figure out how to do what I want.  But there are a lot of households that I am sure could benefit greatly from Eden.

Ethnography Results – Week 3

I kind saw a lot of the same things as last time.  I want to go more in depth in tracking down user’s posting habits, but this will require a lot more time than I gave myself for this week.  I have found a few interesting people I can track though.  I did some commenting as well, but I might have to give it some time before seeing any reactions.  There is a good chance I won’t get any results from those.  I will update this post accordingly.

Commenting and Posting
As I said I left a few comments here and there.  The ratings of comments and posts add up to a user’s total karma.  This karma can then be spent in a store I think.  I will look into this.  I didn’t really feel that inspired this week, so I didn’t leave many comments.  I don’t want to force anything.  My novelty account only posts in quotes from movies and stuff.  I tend to do this on facebook from time to time, so this is not too difficult of a task for me.  I have doubts it will get any reactions though.  These can be blatantly off-topic and users don’t always care for this kind of stuff.  It really depends.

I am essentially still trying to find a good way to incorporate commenting into the research.  Posting my own topics is something I only plan on doing if it seems worth it.  It would seem like kind of a waste if it wasn’t significantly entertaining.  If I think of a great idea, then I plan on making a post.

The Atheism Category
The user who was discussing their struggle with becoming an atheist does definitely post in many other categories.  Like I said in the introduction, I plan on sorting through their other comments and posts to see what their activity was before posting about this.  I would also like to see what their behavior has been since posting that.

How one user felt after his departure from Christianity.

Going through the atheism category can become tiresome at times.  I still find it interesting to monitor the behavior here, but the vast majority of posts are the same thing over and over.  They are either funny pictures designed to cut the knees off of religion, or quick anecdotes just saying how stupid religion is.  I just get irritated with the notion that all these people want to do is take shots at religion.  They almost seem desperate to undermine any and all competing points of view as reassurance that their philosophy is in fact sound.  I don’t mean to sound like I am ranting.  This is one thing I was afraid would happen.  I’m kind of being judgmental too.  Oh well.  I’ll try to tone down on this in the following weeks.  Moving on.

But amongst all the dreg, I always find at least a few interesting posts of people’s testimonials.  This time I found two.

The first was about a priest who lost his faith 10 years ago, but is still preaching at his church.  He likes the comfort of the environment and his friends there, and he is afraid to come out to everyone and break it off.  This was a post where people were prompted to ask him anything.  Obviously the biggest question is what caused him to lose his faith.  So far, there have been no responses from him.  Unfortunately, the longer he waits to reveal himself, the more painful it will be for everyone.  The church is comprised of 1500 worshippers, so that’s a lot of people who will feel completely betrayed.  I completely understand his not wanting to come clean though.  I am interested to see if he comes back to say anything else.  If he does, this will be part of next week’s results.

The other post was about someone who had a good friendship with a coworker, but religion ended up destroying it.  The person posting is an atheist, and the coworker is a Christian.  She noticed the poster turning down a lady’s offer to hear the word of Christ who was handing out flyers.  When she questioned him, she found out he was an atheist.  This led to the standard discussion of each person’s view, and she immediately became cold to him and very unfriendly.

Now this last case is the kind of thing I would like to see more of in the atheism category.  I would love to see more posts that are this thought provoking and full of depth.  In this case, the coworker is way out of line.  While I might be a Christian, I am not a robot.  As the poster later said, she is being a complete slave to her religious views.  She is being cold to him in an effort to defend her image of what an atheist is instead of seeing him as another person.  That’s terrible.  There is no reason why they still can’t be good friends, and that is the main point of the poster.

Wrap-up and Plans for Next Week
I ended up writing quite a bit, but there were some great topics to discuss.  I still feel like I am trying to find a clear direction for my portion of the reddit study, but I think these discussions I had might have helped.  While some of the posts are just taking short jabs at religion, others clearly have something to say about how religion and other views tie into society itself.  These are fantastic.

I don’t believe I knowingly surround myself with atheists, especially being at Texas A&M.  So, I think I would like to investigate how others view religion from the outside and how competing religious views affect society.  I can refine this a bit more for next week’s update.  I will also monitor posting trends as well, but I think I can get better results by finding the more thought provoking posts like the ones I found this week.

Book Reading 23 – Opening Skinner’s Box

Chapter 6 – Monkey Love
Summary
The work of Harry Harlow on primates is discussed.  He tried to find the true root of love and connection by love.  He used artificial mothers, one soft and one made of mental.  While the monkeys latched onto the softer one, later they became incapable of properly living and mating.  The animal activist movement spawned because of his animal testing and sacrificing of his animals for science.

Discussion
I would never be able to conduct these kinds of experiments on animals.  However, I also don’t feel like I would fight vehemently to stop them right now.  I think it is more of it not being as important a priority for me as other things in life.  Also, I would definitely choose my life or a loved one’s life over an animal’s life.  But this really depends.  I was far more attached to my dog than to other people I don’t even know.  This seems to be a very tricky moral situation.

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Book Reading 22 - Coming of Age in Samoa

Chapter 7 - Formal Sex Relations
Summary
The different aspects of sexual relations were discussed.  It would seem the first lovers of most young women are older men.  Samoans do not value celibacy like some Western cultures do.  Virginity does put more value on a girl’s life, but they see no point in not having sexual relations.  Also, cheating on spouses does not necessarily doom the relationship.  This is quite common.  And divorce is a very informal and easy task.  Two people simply separate and the deed is done.

Discussion
While a lot of their views seem to be opposite of those in this country, I think this has changed quite a bit since Mead wrote her book.  The general feeling in this country is that virgins are assumed to be the minority after a certain age.  This changes with region, but this is generally true.  We still stick to monogamy to define relationship devotion, but even this has some leniency in certain groups.  This is a very small minority of course.  But things have changed a lot from Mead’s time.

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Book Reading 21 – The Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 7 – User-Centered Design
Summary
Norman outlined his POET system with 7 main points: Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head, simplify the structure of tasks, make things visible, get the mappings right, exploit the power of constraints, design for error, and when all else fails, standardize.  He points out more examples of each situation, and how reversing these points can lead to purposely difficult safety mechanisms.  They can also be reversed for use in game design.

Discussion
He tied up his book quite nicely here.  And you could kind of see this whole user-centered design premise forming from the first chapter.  When the user is forgotten as being the main focus of design, products fall way short of what they should be.

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Paper Reading 10 - Gesture Search: A Tool for Fast Mobile Data Access

Comments
Patrick Frith
Paola Garza

Reference Information
Gesture Search: A Tool for Fast Mobile Data Access
 - Yang Li
 - UIST 2010, New York, New York

Meant to be an "A," but
could also be an "H."

Summary
This paper was about a new search tool called Gesture Search.  As its name implies, the user draws gestures instead of typing to search for items.  This particular version was designed for Android phones.  The user simply draws a letter with their finger on the screen.  Using handwriting recognition software, the program deduces which letter possibilities the gesture could be, and displays a list of results that could relate to its deduction.

The initial results and the
next letter.

There is a timeout feature that allows for separation of drawn characters, since only one can be drawn at a time.  The more gestures a user gives, the more specific the results become.  In order to become a more efficient tool for the user, the program learns the user’s search habits.  If they continually pick the same result after the same gesture, this result will float to the top of the results list.

The final results with "An."

The designers performed a usability test with a large group to find out if the program was in fact quicker to use than standard typing searches.  They found out many useful things during the study.  One was that the most popular items searched for using Gesture Search was contacts.  They also found that 74% of the gesture queries did not require any deletions.  This showed that Gesture Search was very accurate in finding what the users wanted without the need for typing.  And lastly, the vast majority of gesture queries only required two gestures or less.

Search history influencing
future searches.

Discussion
This seems slightly similar to the stroke-based typing discussed in my last paper assignment.  I like this gesture direction of tools.  It is similar to how programming continues to drift farther and farther from machine code.  The more abstract the code writing process becomes, the easier it is for humans to fully express their ideas in code form.  I think the reason these gesture-based methods of searching and typing are so efficient is because of how abstract they are.  With typing, we adapt our ideas to the tool.  With Gesture Search, the tool is adapting to how we behave and is drastically simplifying and speeding up the search process.  This is the second paper in a row that makes me sad I don’t have a touch screen phone.

Book Reading 20 – Opening Skinner’s Box

Chapter 5 – Quieting the Mind
Summary
The chapter discusses the experiments of Leon Festinger as he set out to prove his theory on cognitive dissonance.  The idea that aided in this was his infiltration of a cult.  After the cult’s main belief was disproven, he observed one individual in extreme denial.  The other members of the cult followed suit.  He noted that this is how most religious groups might respond to something like this.  If the belief system is undermined, the members will do just about anything to grasp onto the fleeting idea.  This includes embracing ludicrous notions just to protect the foundation.

Discussion
I like Festinger’s theory of beliefs matching up with behavior.  I think this can be seen all around us.  For instance, if I procrastinate and continue to flee from my work, what do I do?  I convince myself that this is perfectly fine, even though I know full well that the best course of action is to simply get the work done.  That is my true belief on that matter, but beliefs can be adjusted to match behavior with enough motivation.

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Book Reading 19 - Coming of Age in Samoa

Chapter 6 - The Girl in Her Community
Summary
Mead explains the girl’s role in the community.  Women have very specific roles, while men also have their own specific roles.  For the most part, these are strictly kept separate.  The treatment of various actions, such as adultery, are treated very differently depending on whether or not a woman or man committed it.

Discussion
While we do have unspoken but not concrete roles for males and females (not in a sexist way, but just understood stereotypes), the Samoans seem to take this to an extreme.  The types of labor men and women can do are not only kept separate, but each sex must not mingle within the other’s labor.  They even go as far as to have the men hold out in a house somewhere to stay far away from the women when they are performing some of the tasks.  It’s interesting how normal this is for them but how odd it would be for any of us to see this here.

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Book Reading 18 – The Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 6 – The Design Challenge
Summary
As the title suggests, this chapter discusses the main challenges of design.  A few examples are brought in to make the point clear.  Two of these are the typewriter and the faucet.  Many iterations of keyboard layout have been tried, just as many iterations of faucet design have been used.  Norman notes that a major pitfall in design is choosing aesthetics over practicality.  He’s used this quite often in the book mentioning an award-winning design that no one can use.  Often these designs fail to take the actual users into account.  Keeping the user base in mind can alleviate this problem considerably.

Discussion
The last technical paper I read was all about different ways of implementing the keyboard, so it’s interesting how this chapter brought this up as well.  I agree that it’s ridiculous when the design of something most people need to use, such as a faucet, can actually be confusing.  The operation of it is so simple.  I would rather have the design be simple and easy to use than to be fancy looking and more difficult to figure out.  The latter will be nicer to look at, but I don’t see the point in making something complicated to the point where you need to learn how to use it over time.  This is especially true if the device is something simple that is made needlessly complicated by poor thinking.

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Paper Reading 9 - Performance Optimizations of Virtual Keyboards for Stroke-Based Text Entry on a Touch-Based Tabletop

Comments
Paola Garza
Patrick Frith

Reference Information
Performance Optimizations of Virtual Keyboards for Stroke-Based Text Entry on a Touch-Based Tabletop
 - Jochen Rick
 - UIST 2010, New York, New York

Summary
This paper explained a more efficient way of typing on touch-based devices.  Touch-based devices use virtual keyboards, so it would be quite easy to switch to a different keyboard layout.  There are quite a few different keyboard layouts available, and Rick goes over these in great detail.  But his main point was not only to address the keyboard layout but to also address the inefficiencies of tapping keys like most are used to.

An example of how the strokes were analyzed.

The other method he advocates is the stroke-based system.  Finger or stylus gestures would denote various letter combinations.  In his study of eight adults (6 right-handed, 2 left-handed), he received some very interesting results.  Using the stoke-based method on the standard Qwerty layout gained 17.3% speed over tapping.  Switching the layout to an OPTI II layout while using the stoke-based method gained a 29.5% increase in performance over the stoke-based Qwerty results.

Original studies were for touch-based tabletop systems.  But, further studies are planned to test the various methods on handheld devices such as the iPod Touch and iPhone interface.  While various keyboard layouts have been available for quite some time, Rick understands the resistance to make the switch to possibly more efficient layouts.  However, he concludes that stroke-based typing with OPTI II is predicted to be over 50% faster than using tapping with the standard Qwerty layout.  He hopes this might be a big enough incentive for users to venture into different systems of typing on touch-based devices.

Discussion
While I didn’t care for reading about all the math equations behind the work, it was interesting to hear about Fitt’s Law after it being part of the reading for HCI Remixed.  It seems to be a very important law in HCI research, and it’s cool to see it as a big part of such an in depth study.

The various keyboard layouts discussed in the article.

I feel like I can type well enough with the Qwerty layout, but I would not rule out trying some of these stroke-based systems.  While I don’t own any touch-based devices, I would be all for trying one if I did.  I also was not aware whatsoever of how many keyboard layouts had been tried over the years.  Even though that section of keyboard history was long, it was still fascinating to switch between the selections and diagrams to actually see what he was talking about.

Typing by tapping on touch devices is not too difficult, but it never quite feels like a normal keyboard.  I know where the keys are supposed to be, yet I never feel like I could type nearly as fast as on a physical keyboard.  For this reason alone, I hope stroke-based methods with alternate keyboard layouts are made more available to the public.  This is a really novel idea, and it deserves to at least be attempted in a widespread manner.

Ethnography Results – Week 2

After the discussions during class, we decided to each choose a specific category on reddit to monitor and take notes on.  In addition to this, we also agreed to each make two accounts on reddit.  One is for normal posting and commenting, and the other is a novelty account that is primarily for seeing what reactions posts and comments from this account get.

This week was still in the introductory phase, so we were all still trying to get a feel for how to tackle this idea and get good enough results from it.  There is definitely some good potential in exploring the culture of each category though, and we will progressively get better as we get more used to our roles in observation and get more used to the general feel of reddit.

Commenting and Posting
I got really engrossed in exploring the various categories so I could find a good fit for me.  Since I felt I was still getting used to reddit as a whole as well, I did not do any posting or commenting yet.  But now that I have chosen a clear choice for my category to monitor, I can give my exploration more of a direction and not wander as much looking for options.

The Atheism Category
I am a Christian myself, so the atheism category seemed like a very interesting category to monitor and learn about.  Right off the bat, I noticed that many of the posts seemed to be about debunking religion in general.  A lot were about how someone had a debate or discussion with a non-atheist and stumped them, and they celebrated this as a major victory.  I suppose this all makes sense seeing as this is a haven for atheists.  I will keep an eye out for any standout postings or discussions differing from this general trend.

There was one topic that was extremely interesting.  Someone explained that they were new to atheism and had just started 3 months ago.  Their explanation was that it was extremely difficult to deal with and they were seeking guidance on how to make the transition easier.  Everyone was very helpful and many noted that this is normal in the early phases of the switch.  I have never actually heard someone tell of how they switched to atheism from being religious.  I plan to pay attention to this post and to follow this individual to see how they behave over time.

Wrap-up and Plans for Next Week
Overall, this was a successful week in getting more of an understanding for how to go about the reddit ethnography research.  In addition to the commenting and posting where applicable, monitoring of subscription numbers in categories and subcategories, as well as posting trends of users in the atheism category will be noted.  Only paying attention to how users post in the atheism category will not get the full picture of the user.  Also, I am still figuring out the best way to format the ethnography results updates, so this format will hopefully change and become more organized.

Book Reading 17 – HCI Remixed

Chapter 6 - A Creative Programming Environment
Summary
The writer went over the beginning of the GUI based on interaction with icons.  He longs for HCI innovation to not just be incremental, but to also make massive gains as with Pygmalion.

Discussion
I really enjoyed seeing what is considered to be the first use of icons in a GUI.  Most of us probably take for granted the GUI for an OS.  Based on what the first iterations looked like, I am fortunate to have had so many improvements since then.

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Chapter 7 - Fundamentals in HCI: Learning the Value of Consistency and User Models
Summary
The Xerox Red Book was discussed.  Its importance in developing the user interface with various options was explained.

Discussion
It’s cool to see the perspective of people before the age of the GUI.  It must have been really exciting to design the outline for such an invention and be on the verge of its existence.

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Chapter 9 - The Disappearing Computer
Summary
The notion of the disappearing computer was discussed.  There were two aspects pointed out.  One was the computer physically disappearing into devices.  The other was the computer remaining but people not realizing its presence since it’s such a large part of life.

Discussion
It’s unbelievable how much computers really have disappeared in both regards.  It’s quite plain to see my tower next to me, but I never think much of it honestly.  It’s kind of an assumed part of life.  When the power goes out or the internet goes down, that’s when I really notice that there’s a computer sitting next to me all the time.

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Chapter 10 - It Really Is All About Location!
Summary
The Active Badge system was mentioned.  Its connection to the GPS and path-finding systems of today was discussed.

Discussion
I remember when MapQuest and Google first became options for finding your way.  It seemed so crazy to not have to call someone and write directions for to get somewhere.  Now these methods are so prevalent that they can be used in phones.  No one really has an excuse for not knowing how to get somewhere, unless there is no cell phone reception.  Then we’re sunk.

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Chapter 46 - The Essential Role of Mental Models in HCI: Card, Moran, and Newell
Summary
The connections between mental models and technical research is discussed.  There is a clear debate about which type of field is driving HCI research.

Discussion
Obviously all of the contributing fields are important.  But getting inside people’s heads is crucial in designing an interface that is easy to use.  From the other readings, it’s clear that psychology plays a massive role in successful design and implementation.

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Chapter 47 - A Most Fitting Law
Summary
Fitt’s Law is the main topic of discussion.  More specifically, its application to modern GUI design is pointed out and the ways in which menus should behave to cater best to humans.

Discussion
I never knew laws like this went into the design of a GUI.  Also, there seems to be quite a bit of thought that goes into menu behavior and theory behind why one design is better than another.  You can notice if a design is poor, but following Fitt’s Law would be able to specifically point out why this is.

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Paper Reading 8 - Planz to Put Our Digital Information in Its Place

Comments
Paola Garza
Jessica Gonzales

Reference Information
Planz to Put Our Digital Information in Its Place
 - William Jones, Dawei Hou, Bhuricha Deen Sethanandha, Sheng Bi, and Jim Gemmell
 - CHI 2010, Atlanta, Georgia

The Planz layout with documents links to entries.

Summary
Planz is an alternative method to storing files and ideas.  A point was made that it is difficult to keep track of files when they are in folders.  Once the folder is closed, it is quite easy to forget its contents.  The Planz system allows ideas to be laid out in an outline format.  Next to each entry, a direct link to a specific file can be given.  They argue this is a more visual method to laying out files and ideas, so they tested the system.

For a week, eight people tested out Planz while performing tasks they do every day.  They were asked to manipulate documents, manage emails, and utilize web references both with Planz and with the normal methods they usually use.  While inconclusive as to which is better, Planz was favored as the most visually efficient method.  They plan to continue work on Planz and add better support for email integration and web page applications.

Discussion
I don’t think I would have any use for this system right now, but it is a different twist on information management.  They mentioned conducting a much longer test and I would like to see the results of this.  While I don’t have a use for this, it could become a nice and robust system for business uses.  Maybe later on I will run into a situation where Planz would be handy.  I will keep this system in mind in case this happens.

Ethnography Proposal - Updated

Project Group Members
Aaron Kirkes
Adam Friedli
Patrick Frith

The Group
An idea we came up with is to study reddit.com.  This site is a general posting site where the postings gain a ranking with a thumbs up or thumbs down given by each user, and this affects how close to the top of the lists of postings the post is.  The posts can range from notable news topics to humorous items from the internet to people being bored and posting that they are staying awake for 72 hours and are asking for people to tell them things to do.  These are a few examples we saw perusing for about 10 minutes.  We have not had any other prior experience with this website.

The Learning
We hope to find out if there is any specific etiquette or behavior people are expected to abide by on the site.  Does breaking news make it to reddit before it makes it to other mediums?  Are there people who post regularly on reddit, and if so, what exactly makes them popular?  How are these people consistently appealing to the general populace?  What is the general behavior in specific categories on the site?  How do people tend to react to comments from a normal account versus a novelty account?

The Studying
Since this is an online website, it should be very easy to observe at least two hours per week.  Each of us plan on making a normal account and a novelty account.  We will also each choose a specific, smaller category to monitor as well.  We can pool our results as well, and try to find trends of midday postings versus late night postings.

Quantitative and Qualitative Data
Quantitative data can be the number of postings of a certain kind, such as newsworthy postings versus humorous postings versus general nonsense postings.  We can also keep track of the rankings of our comments and postings from both the normal and novelty accounts.  Qualitative can fall into the types of postings and what the more successful postings possess that the others do not.  We will keep track of how people react to our comments and postings and how they react in each of our categories of interest.

Interaction
We can comment in the more general areas and in the specific categories of interest we choose.  We could even create posts asking some questions that the readings bring up, such as what people think of Milgram’s shock experiment, or any other ideas that might come to mind.  If these posts are successful, they might even be able to become part of the data for the study.  We will initially stick to commenting on already created posts, but we can certainly make our own posts when it makes sense to do so.

Book Reading 16 – Opening Skinner’s Box

Chapter 4 – In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing
Summary
This chapter discussed responding to emergencies.  The main example was of a woman getting murdered and raped over the course of 30 minutes, and none of the 38 witnesses did anything about it.  She went into reasons for this, as well as group tendencies of action for human beings.

Discussion
The discussion of imitation and cuing gave me an idea for the ethnography study.  When I was looking on reddit, there were some topics without comments.  I wonder if topics like these gained at least one comment if it would receive a flood of comments and get viewed more.  This tendency seems to work for websites like Newegg.com that sell items.  I always sort by products with the most reviews and check out the most reviewed ones first.  I am wary of things without any reviews, even though they might be just as good as the more popular items.  Also, I would probably check out those same items more if they had any reviews at all.  The state of the product is not as much of a concern to me then as much as how many reviews it has.  This is not entirely the same idea, but it is close enough.

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Book Reading 14 – The Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 5 – To Err is Human
Summary
This chapter was all about human error.  It discussed the different kinds of errors and the reasoning behind them.  It also gave useful examples of each.

Discussion
I find that many mistakes happen because you change the normal order of operations.  Think of an action or series of actions that you do, and then remember a time when you made a mistake you couldn’t understand.  Most likely, you did something out of order or inserted a different task in between the normal order of operations.  One time, I poured orange juice into my bowl of cereal.  I don’t remember why anymore, but I know I had messed up the normal way I was used to in preparing my breakfast.

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Book Reading 15 - Coming of Age in Samoa

Chapter 5 - The Girl and Her Age Group
Summary
While this chapter talks about the various age groups of the girls, it also includes that of the boys.  The girls will group by age while they are younger, but this stops before they hit puberty.  The boys do many activities together starting when they were young, so the grouping by age is a factor throughout their lives.

Discussion
The age dynamics do seem a bit similar the ones we are used to.  The different age groups in this country though are mostly determined by schooling I think.  But most definitely, viewing people as an age group appears to vanish at some point during college.  When the girls in Samoa acquire more responsibility, this seems to be when age starts to fade away for them.

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Paper Reading 7 - Manual Deskterity: An Exploration of Simultaneous Pen + Touch Direct Input

Comments
Paola Garza
Patrick Frith

Reference Information
Manual Deskterity: An Exploration of Simultaneous Pen + Touch Direct Input
 - Ken Hinckley, Koji Yatani, Michel Pahud, Nicole Coddington, Jenny Rodenhouse, Andy Wilson, Hrvoje Benko, and Bill Buxton
 - CHI 2010, Atlanta, Georgia

Summary
Manual Deskterity is an application designed to explore the use of pen and touch interaction with a touch screen interface.  The creators note many designs today feature either pen-only functions, touch-only functions, or pen and touch interactions being viewed as the same input.  They venture to explore the possibilities of adding pen and touch together in forming new tools.

Their project is a sort of scrapbooking interface that allows writing or drawing on the surface and the manipulation of objects.  The system runs on the Microsoft Surface and has many unique features to it.  First of all, they differentiate between hand and pen by using infrared and having the pen appear as the brightest object at all times.  This allows users to naturally write on the surface while also resting their hand on it.  As a general rule, the pen writes, touch manipulates, and pen combined with touch forms new tools.  Naturally they had to falter on this in a few instances, but the user studies allowed them to find out where.

The X-Acto knife feature.

One of the first compromises they had to make was interacting with the object context menu.  Selecting an object pops up the context menu, and they originally wanted the menu selection to be a pen action.  Users wanted to make a selection using touch as well, so they decided to make pen and touch work here.  The other two main instances of interchangeability were tearing and finger painting.  They employed an X-Acto knife function where the pen acts as the knife.  By using a finger for cutting, this represents a tear as someone would by tearing paper with two hands.  The finger painting is just as it sounds and was added due to a natural tendency of user interaction with the system.  For more specifics on the capabilities of the Manual Deskterity, I highly suggest watching the video demonstration below.

The user evaluation received positive feedback as being a very natural tool to use.  The designers note this as more of a toy than an invention.  Its main purpose was to research the possibilities of pen+touch interaction and how to improve these interactions in future designs.  They hope what they have found will aid other researchers and designers, and they also plan on refining the systems limitations to further improve on pen+touch techniques.

Discussion
I honestly wasn’t planning to write so much about this paper, but there really is a lot of information they present.  It’s always fun to use touch screen devices, mainly because I don’t own one myself, and this idea of adding pen+touch capabilities to devices is a fantastic idea.  What I love most about what they did was replicating the natural tendencies of users.  They studied how users interacted with real materials, and then reflected these into their design.  This is the key in creating a natural design, and they pulled it off quite nicely.  I also liked how they started with a staunch “pen writes, touch manipulates” rule, but were willing to make exceptions where needed.  They clearly cared about making a natural design for the users, and it really showed in their work.

In case you didn’t read the lengthy summary, the video above is their demo.  It’s really entertaining to watch, and I highly suggest checking it out.

Ethnography Results – Week 1

Some of the available categories.

The general layout of the homepage.

Reddit seems like a very interesting system.  It can be a valuable source for breaking news, but just as easily be a source for wasting hours upon hours of time and never get anything useful done.  However, both uses are equally as relevant.  The main page displays all the different kinds of posts, but the site is also divided up into many categories for more refined interests.  Some of these include funny, politics, science, world news, programming, and many more.  So, reddit can appeal to just about internet user imaginable.

Only perusing the first page of posts on the homepage, I spent easily an hour looking through comments and going on other offshoots from links within the posts and their comments.  Most of the picture posts display a thumbnail next to the post’s title, so it’s very easy to gravitate towards those.  While the posts themselves have a vote ranking, the comments within each post do as well.  The highest ranking comments sift to the top, and are usually the most entertaining to read.  People definitely use some jargon here, and certain reactions to posts appear expected.  Why users are accustomed to certain reactions is part of the subculture I would like to investigate.

Most of the posts were picture-related, while many others were questions to viewers or stories, followed up by current events or news.  I’ll give some examples with links to close out this post.

*** NOTE: In case profanity bothers you, be aware comments might contain some.  It's no different than what you might find perusing Facebook though.

One of the picture posts as a reference
to pop culture.

Pictures:
Swedish subway system (reddit post)
My license plate has never been so fitting (reddit post)
This is what happens when I leave my husband home alone for the weekend... (reddit post)
Wolverine…or two Batmen? (reddit post)

Questions/Stories:
Worst Facebook post or comment that got you in trouble?
How can the Syfy Channel continue to fund crappy movies?
Story about getting burned by helping someone (pay attention to the top-rated comment)

Why don’t able unemployed people get bumped to the top of the jury duty list?
Have you ever taken a class where the professor literally wrote the book for it?

Current Events:
Patriot Act renewal (reddit post)
Super nova causes a star to hurtle through space at 54,000 mph (reddit post)

Book Reading 13 – Opening Skinner’s Box

Chapter 3 – On Being Sane in Insane Places
Summary
Slater explains an experiment by Rosenhan where he and 8 of his friends attempted admission into mental institutions.  He wanted to test if completely sane people could be improperly diagnosed as insane.  It worked, but his studies came under fire.  So, Slater tried this in the more modern age 8 times.  She was not admitted, but was improperly diagnosed.  However, she found the state of these facilities today to be far more welcoming and friendly than when Rosenhan performed his experiment.

Discussion
These experiments were fun to read about, and I think they raise some good points.  Even if psychiatry is not as fine a science as other fields, however, it’s still important.  But I don’t think Slater’s point was to further discredit psychiatry.  She showed that its current state is much improved from Rosenhan’s time, and that the people in it are not malevolent.  They care very much for helping people, and are simply doing the best they can with the knowledge of the mind that the field has right now.

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Book Reading 12 - Coming of Age in Samoa

Chapter 4 - The Samoan Household
Summary
While outlining the Samoan household, this chapter also goes into the family structure in great detail.  There are many levels of relationships in each house, and many minute details dealing with how siblings of various ages are to interact with each other.  Rivalries for leadership can become very complicated as well.

Discussion
The fact that the reading mentioned many children or adolescents not getting much time to themselves seems like it would cause a large strain on them when hitting puberty.  I might have misread, but it seemed like Mead was saying the children are either being watched by superiors, or having younger children help them with tasks throughout the day.  They don’t seem to have much time to just relax and enjoy.  It sounds like they mostly have a constant grind of living.

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Book Reading 11 – The Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 4 – Knowing What to Do
Summary
Norman explains further how the layout of designs affects people’s interpretation of how they should operate.  This time, he used the example of building a simple police motorcycle out of Legos to show the main factors that go into an intuitive design.  Yet again, the world and life experience play a large part in creating a design most people can or should understand.

Discussion
I think everyone has been plagued by the light switch fiasco.  Most confusing ones I have seen have labels explaining which switch goes to what.  His custom faceplate idea seems like a really good one, and I think that should be used more where it might be applicable.

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Paper Reading 6 - Adaptive Mouse: A Deformable Computer Mouse Achieving Form-Function Synchronization

Comments
Paola Garza
Patrick Frith

Reference Information
Adaptive Mouse: A Deformable Computer Mouse Achieving Form-Function Synchronization
 - Sheng Kai Tang, and Wen Yen Tang
 - CHI 2010, Atlanta, Georgia

The general appearance of Adaptive Mouse.

Summary
The Adaptive Mouse is a mouse venturing away from the shape and function of the conventional mouse.  It is instead a smooth and rounded blob of sorts without any buttons.  It is able to sense the user’s hand position (right or left-handed) and from this, know where the fore finger and middle finger should be placed for the left and right-click functions.  In order to achieve this, they tested the device on a group of 30 people (15 male and 15 female ranging from age 20-35) to calibrate their software.

This is how a button press is registered.

Their findings were that the participants generally enjoyed the Adaptive Mouse, but with one downfall.  If the users did not fully apply their palms, the mouse would have trouble tracking the cursor and the buttons did not always behave as expected.  After mentioning other similar mouse research projects, the designers noted that they plan on addressing these issues as they conduct more research in the future.

The makeup of Adaptive Mouse.

Discussion
Seeing as the mouse has gone relatively unchanged over the years, I welcome these new research ideas into its design.  This might not be a problem for most, but I have had the buttons on a mouse wear out before.  Sure, this might have been from too much gaming, or not enough, but it can still happen from other prolonged heavy uses.  This blob-like design without buttons at all would eliminate this problem altogether.  I also liked the idea presented about using a mouse in a dark conference room.  This situation directly addressed some of the ideas brought up in The Design of Everyday Things with contextual uses of devices and how they can be designed differently for easier use.  I look forward to hopefully seeing these new and intriguing mouse ideas develop and appear in the market.

Ethnography Proposal

Project Group Members
Aaron Kirkes
Adam Friedli
Patrick Frith

The Group
An idea we came up with is to study reddit.com.  This site is a general posting site where the postings gain a ranking with a thumbs up or thumbs down given by each user, and this affects how close to the top of the lists of postings the post is.  The posts can range from notable news topics to humorous items from the internet to people being bored and posting that they are staying awake for 72 hours and are asking for people to tell them things to do.  These are a few examples we saw perusing for about 10 minutes.  We have not had any other prior experience with this website.

The Learning
We hope to find out if there is any specific etiquette or behavior people are expected to abide by on the site.  Are there things people can do to be viewed of as a noob or inexperienced user?  What are the general posting trends?  Does breaking news make it to reddit before it makes it to other mediums?  Are there people who post regularly on reddit, and if so, what exactly makes them popular?  How are these people consistently appealing to the general populace?  We can come up with other ideas as we observe over time.

The Studying
Since this is an online website, it should be very easy to observe at least two hours per week.  We would say even a couple hours each day should be quite easy to accomplish, depending on the workload given for other classes.  We can pool our results as well, and try to find trends of midday postings versus late night posting.

Quantitative and Qualitative Data
Quantitative data can be the number of postings of a certain kind, such as newsworthy postings versus humorous postings versus general nonsense postings.  Qualitative can fall into the types of postings and what the more successful postings possess that the others do not.

Interaction
Once we gain a general understanding of how posts are laid out, we could make a post about this very project for class asking how people view reddit.com.  We could even ask some questions that the readings bring up, such as what people think of Milgram’s shock experiment, or any other ideas that might come to mind.  If these posts are successful, they might even be able to become part of the data for the study.

Book Reading 10 – Opening Skinner’s Box

Chapter 2 – Obscura
Summary
The author discussed Milgram’s experiment in which he presented people with a scenario that tested obedience.  Participants were asked to shock someone with increasing voltages whenever he answered a question wrong.  It was all staged though and no one really got injured.  But she wanted to investigate the meaning behind this experiment, since it got so much negative publicity.  She found it showed far more than most gave it credit for.

Discussion
Experiments like this are extremely important.  Some might call it inhumane, but look at how it affected Jacob.  He ended up changing his entire outlook on life just because of how the experiment made him see himself.  This is a groundbreaking revelation, and anything that gets people talking as much as Milgrim’s work did makes his work successful no matter what people might say about it.

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Dr. Celine Latulipe - Exploring the Design Space in Technology-Augmented Dance

Reference Information
Exploring the Design Space in Technology-Augmented Dance
 - Celine Latulipe, David Wilson, Sybil Huskey, Melissa Word, Arthur Carroll, Erin Carroll, Berto Gonzalez, Vikash Singh, Mike Wirth, and Danielle Lottridge
 - CHI 2010, Atlanta, Georgia

Summary
This paper discusses the latest presentation of the Dance.Draw project.  But first, it gives some background on the history of the project and the work leading up to its current state.

The Dance.Draw pilot performance. The dancers can be seen
holding the mice in their hands.

Dance.Draw started at UNC in January of 2008.  Its purpose is to coordinate the movements of dancers with visualizations.  These visualizations are projected onto a screen directly behind the dancers.  The first method for capturing the motion was with wireless Logitech Air mice that the dancers held during their performance.  Having to hold the capture devices hindered the options of the dancers, so they worked on finding a more convenient method.

Next, they used wired 3D accelerometers that were worn by the dancers.  Because of the wired nature of the system, they decided to use a pre-recorded visualization from the dancers in rehearsal.  This did, however, pave the way for the next iteration of the system.  This next iteration used a wireless sensing unit containing an accelerometer, as well as the option to use wireless gyroscopic mice.  The mice in this instance did not need to be held by the performers though.  They wanted to make the Dance.Draw software open to as many user inputs as possible, so this last configuration is a great start to reaching that goal.

The Bodies/Antibodies performance.

Discussion
I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed visualizations based on music, so this is a really neat idea.  Not that keeping dance and performance the same as it’s always been is bad, but I think it’s about time modern technology is added to mix things up a little.  It seems weird to me to be so surprised at technology like this, but this kind of goes for most things.  We have all grown up in a technical world, but it still feels like its full acceptance is being held back by the general populace.  If something is too foreign, there still seems to be too many who are happy with keeping things the way they are instead of trying something new.  It’s that same crowd that never thinks new things can trump the old tried and true things.

Another shot of the Bodies/Antibodies performance.

Hopefully you can understand what I mean, because I’m not sure if I’ve been clear enough.  I think this feeling will fade as our generation begins to replace the current ones that are in power.  Essentially, I view Dance.Draw as something that should be more prevalent.  It’s the kind of experimentation in creative mediums that should be embraced, if it is not already.  They have videos on the site of each performance, and I highly recommend checking them out if you’re curious.