Paper Reading 25 – Finding Your Way in a Multi-dimensional Semantic Space with Luminoso

Comments
Paola Garza
Steven Hennessy

Reference Information
Finding Your Way in a Multi-dimensional Semantic Space with Luminoso
 - Robert Speer, Catherine Havasi, Nichole Treadway, and Henry Lieberman
 - IUI 2010, Hong Kong, China

Summary
The authors of this paper presented a program called Luminoso.  They explained how massive amount of semantic data, such as that from a mass survey, can be very difficult to sort through and form conclusions from.  This is especially true when user free response sections are available for the user to fill in.  What they propose is forming relationships between all of this data and representing it in a multi-dimensional space.  This is exactly what they accomplished with Luminoso.

The main view of the Luminoso interface.

The described the program as appearing similarly to Google Maps in how the user can interact with it.  Each node stands for a particular topic or area, and the more elements that relate to this area, the large the node becomes.  Then related areas branch off of this, and so on.  These clusters form abstract representation in the space.  One of the key features they included was the ability for the user to drag individual nodes in order to realign the focus of the overall arrangement of data.  This allows the user to concentrate on a specific opinion type in a survey for example and see all the various elements relating to it.  The designers argue that using a system like Luminoso to visualize data will become increasingly important as semantic networks continue to grow.

Discussion
I’ll be honest and say some of the content of this paper went a little over my head.  But I do understand the general concept of it all.  One thing I learned from this is that writing anything in the free response sections of a survey is apparently pointless when the survey audience is extremely large.  This is probably obvious to most though.  If no one is going to read it, there really isn’t any point to writing anything in those sections.  However, they mentioned they could group these free response areas with the applicable clusters of data making it easier to view on a handful at a time.  I have never thought of any major needs for a system like Luminoso, but they have convinced me that it can be very useful when dealing with massive amounts of polled or collected data.

Paper Reading 24 – The Why UI: Using Goal Networks to Improve User Interfaces

The initial view of when the user enters their goal.

Comments
Patrick Frith
Steven Hennessy

Reference Information
The Why UI: Using Goal Networks to Improve User Interfaces
 - Dustin A. Smith and Henry Lieberman
 - IUI 2010, Hong Kong, China

Summary
This paper dealt with a program called ToDoGo.  The authors explained how users often have goals they want to accomplish and that software should be tailored to helps users meet these goals.  They explained an online system where users declare their goals, and then post updates as to whether or not they met their goals and how they met them.  They took this format and implanted it into the ToDoGo system.  In their demonstration for how it works, they streamlined the process a little more than recognizing trends from a website.

Suggested tasks pertaining to the goal.

In the ToDoGo system, the user specifies what their goal is and a few attributes pertaining to it.  Once it is added, the program recognizes from its database related steps required to meet this goal and notifies the user about them.  If the user selects these goals, the program will further guide them in completing these sub-goals leading up to the main goal.  The designers’ main goal was to demonstrate how this type of application approach can be helpful in improving the user experience as a whole.

ToDoGo gives directions to aid users in completing their goal.

Discussion
I think the authors brought up a great point.  When presented with a program, it can sometimes be a little complex and overwhelming at first.  There are manuals and tutorials to help with this, but sometimes you just want to complete a simple task without the need to familiarize yourself with the entire program.  If the user could type in a goal and have the program give instruction on how to complete their goal, this would be amazing.  I love this idea, but it seems fairly high level and abstract to actually implement.  The work presented in this paper, however, has me optimistic that this can become a reality someday.

Paper Reading 23 – Automatic Generation of Research Trails in Web History

Comments
Patrick Frith
Paola Garza

Reference Information
Automatic Generation of Research Trails in Web History
 - Elin Rønby Pedersen, Karl Gyllstrom, Shengyin Gu, and Peter Jin Hong
 - IUI 2010, Hong Kong, China

Summary
Research trails are an attempt at tracking web activity more robustly than simply using bookmarks or view browsing history.  The designers noted how web research behavior is very different from more conventional means of research like in a library.  Users will start at a certain site with sometime a vague understanding of what they are exactly looking for.  Over the course of exploring pages, their path they took can be quite varied.  If they decide to take a break from this activity, there is no effective tool right now to make getting back into the research a simple task.  Users tend to forget where they were, and will waste time trying to find their place.

The research trails concept eliminates this problem by representing browsing history as a path of connected sites.  As the user is browsing, the algorithms the designers use pay attention to the content and decipher when one research path ends and when a new one begins.  Once finished exploring a research avenue, the user can reference their path and easily see where they started and specifically how and when they reached their final destination.  The authors noted in their user study the challenge of how to handle similar research trails.  A possible solution would be to merge similar trails together and open up the similarity threshold within the algorithm.

Google as a giant robot.

The designers were satisfied with the trailing methods robust ability to recognize gradual shifts and research direction and to handle those properly.  In order to make the product more ideal, they would like to add pertinent snapshots to various points along the user’s trail.  Another important feature addition would be allowing the user to tweak the trails by changing adjusting its figures and moving items around.  They noted how these features are important in the final product, but they were not necessary in order to demonstrate the research trails concept.

Discussion
This was a very fascinating and extremely useful concept they explained in this paper.  I have a feeling everyone has gone on some extreme Wikipedia tangent before.  You start by looking at one page and then you see three, four, or maybe more links you would like to investigate.  So you  open new tabs or windows for those.  And then each one of those can spawn multiple new topics to investigate, and so on.  Before you know it, you have filled up an entire afternoon of exploring.  This can be entertaining and educational, but what if you want to take a break or you have other important tasks to accomplish that day?  Bookmarking all of those windows or tabs for later use is an option, but what are the chances you will remember what in the world you were doing and where to start?

Honestly, you’ll probably give up or miss a major avenue of research.  Either that, or you will waste a great deal of time researching on where you left off in your research.  Yes, a random Wikipedia binge is often not extremely important, but it definitely could be.  This is exactly the kind of situation research trails are made for.  The program would be tracking your tendencies the entire time, so you could easily come back to exactly where you left off.  It would also make is easy to back track in case you wanted to at yet another tangent to the research.  On top of this, the algorithm is also designed to recognize subtle changes in research paths.  So, it should be able to recognize separate research tangents if they are distinct enough.  This would further the simplicity of picking up all of the various research trails if you need to set them aside for awhile.

In case it is not obvious, I am very enthusiastic about the idea of research trails.  If it is not already in use, I would imagine it is getting close to becoming available for people to try out.  Since two people from Google worked on this project, I would be willing to bet this will be yet another interesting innovation that will simply appear one day without warning just like the web snapshots within search results did.

Paper Reading 22 – Vocabulary Navigation Made Easier

Comments
Paola Garza
Patrick Frith

Reference Information
Vocabulary Navigation Made Easier
 - Sonya Nikolova, Xiaojuan Ma, Marilyn Tremaine, and Perry Cook
 - IUI 2010, Hong Kong, China

The arrangement of words using the LG vocabulary style.

Summary
Finding particular vocabulary words can be quite difficult.  This is especially true when the selection is increases into the hundreds.  The authors of this paper acknowledge this issue, and they set out to find a solution.  People with lexical impairments were a main focus of theirs.  They ended up testing 16 people, 7 of which were female.  In this test, they asked the participants to fill in phrases uses two different sets of vocabulary words.  One was a more traditional format called LG vocabulary, whereas the other was created by the authors called ViVA vocabulary.

The main difference is that the ViVA format is created to reflect more of how the particular user’s mind groups and sorts vocabulary words and their relations.  As they thought it would, there was a significant decrease in the time needed to navigate to the correct vocabulary words using the ViVA vocabulary format.  While the test subjects did not have any lexical impairment, the designers believe that the improvement they saw with the participants would only be amplified when the system is used by people who do have lexical impairments.

The arrangement of words using their ViVA vocabulary style.

Discussion
This seems like a pretty interesting idea.  It also seems like something that could help people remember words when they simply can’t think of the specific word they are looking for.  But like the authors said, this would be a great tool for foreign language speakers who are not native to this country.  Sifting through a translation book can be extremely cumbersome, but having a system like this in a portable device could do wonders to improve upon that kind of situation.  The last few papers have been pretty great ideas, and this one is no different.

Paper Reading 21 – Supporting Exploratory Information Seeking by Epistemology-based Social Search

An example entry in the system.

Comments
Paola Garza
Patrick Frith

Reference Information
Supporting Exploratory Information Seeking by Epistemology-based Social Search
 - Yuqing Mao, Haifeng Shen, and Chengzheng Sun
 - IUI 2010, Hong Kong, China

Summary
This paper deals with solving the issues of effective exploratory information seeking (EIS).  EIS refers to searches where users are searching for specific information on a subject or topic.  Initially, these users tend to not have all the information they need to yield the best search results.  Suggesting keywords like Google uses is one method of improving this problem.  But, they proposed to use a social search approach to help expand on past searches.

With their system called “Baijia,” users can perform a search and then attach applicable sites to the search query they found in their search.  This helps future users by being able to not only see a possible search query similar to theirs, but they can also see what kind of results this query might yield.  The key difference they point out between their approach and similar ones is they allow other to refine these EIS social searches.  If a certain query is close or does not quite yield the results someone wants, this other person can also expand and add to the stored query.  Allowing these feature further expand on the effective of the original query, and this will also help future people improve their searching even more than before.

This is how the entry appears from new searches.

Compared to other options available, the authors found their implementation to be far superior to conventional search engines in supporting EIS needs.  They were able to find the desired information quicker and more efficiently.  The added ability to alter the social search entries also helped improve their solution to EIS.  They plan to conduct user studies to further evaluate their approach and collect information about the application’s interface.

Discussion
I tend to have fairly successful searches when I am looking for information using Google.  However, I can certainly see how this could help a great deal in improving time spend searching for certain types of information.  For items that are extremely difficult to find, it would help a lot to have groundwork laid out by people who might have conducted the same search in the past.  I would definitely like to see the results of their testing and see how practical this approach is over a broad selection of searches.  If it’s still very successful, I’d love to try their application out at some point.

Paper Reading 20 – A Multimodal Labeling Interface for Wearable Computing

Comments
Paola Garza
Patrick Frith

Reference Information
A Multimodal Labeling Interface for Wearable Computing
 - Shanqing Li and Yunde Jia
 - IUI 2010, Hong Kong, China

The different parts that make up the labeling system.

Summary
A different way of labeling items and features in the field was discussed.  The current way of performing these tasks is with a keyboard and mouse.  The mouse is used to circle an area or object and the keyboard can easily be used to type in the label.  However, this can be cumbersome and very inconvenient for many environments.  The authors proposed a new way to achieve these tasks with a wearable computer.

The device is comprised of the different elements outlined in the picture to the right.  The person needs to wear a computer that is in a backpack of sorts.  Then they also have a camera on their head and a Bluetooth microphone.  In order to label an object, the person simply reaches out their finger and encircles what they would like to label.  The camera picks up on this and registers encircled object.  Then the microphone is used to label the object through speech recognition.  Encircling objects with a finger was found to be much quicker than with a mouse and could be done in a fraction of the time.  Their speech recognition was also found to be 98% accurate in labeling properly.  Overall, their system was extremely successful in the applicable environments.

The labeling system in action.

Discussion
This idea was pretty interesting.  I had never previously thought about situations that would need a device like this.  But now I can certainly see where it could be useful.  If these labeling actions are needed, using a portable keyboard and mouse seem extremely inconvenient.  It just makes a lot more sense to have a system where you can simply gesture around an area and speak the name, and then move on to the next item.  I don’t really have much else to say about this.  This idea seems very useful for its environment and it was a fantastic solution to the problem they presented.

Paper Reading 19 – A $3 Gesture Recognizer – Simple Gesture Recognition for Devices Equipped with 3D Acceleration Sensors

Comments
Patrick Frith
Paola Garza

Reference Information
A $3 Gesture Recognizer – Simple Gesture Recognition for Devices Equipped with 3D Acceleration Sensors
 - Sven Kratz and Michael Rohs
 - IUI 2010, Hong Kong, China

Summary
The $3 Gesture Recognizer is targeted at providing an easy to use and easy to implement gesture recognizer to be used in prototyping environments.  Essentially, for designing gesture-based applications, this device could be used as an easy effective alternative to more expensive and complex solutions.  This device is also based on simple trigonometric and geometric calculations, so no external frameworks or toolkits are needed in order to use it.

A main issue with other gesture recognition devices is that they are mostly based on a 2-D landscape.  If a gesture cannot be mapped to a 2-D plain, then it cannot be included in the device’s gesture subset.  The designers set out to expand on the work of Wobbrock et al by implementing a 3-D version of their device.  They also point out how their work is similar to how Nintendo’s WiiMote functions and recognizes gestures, and they end up using the WiiMote to capture gestures.

Their user study involved 12 participants performing each gesture in the diagram of the subset 15 times.  On average, their implementation of gesture recognition resulted in an 80% recognition rate.  In the figure included, (b) had the highest recognition rate, while (j) caused the most trouble for users.  They explain this might be due to the ambiguity of the motion (j) requires and how wide open to interpretation that is to the user.  Users also found (h) and (i) the most uncomfortable to perform.

Overall, they only had an 8% false positive rate.  Although, they did point out some weaknesses.  Each gesture must be explicitly started and stopped by the user.  The recognizer is unable to pick up on gestures in the middle of other motions.  They also are only able to store so many gestures in the subset.  If the subset becomes too large, false positives rise and there is too much overhead to calculate the recognition.  However, the test was a success, and they were able to produce an alternative to more advanced recognition approaches that is cheaper and more convenient to use.

Discussion
Gesture-based applications have always been fun to use.  I’ve only really used the Wii myself, but the gesture recognition in devices like that is intriguing.  I never put much though into the science behind this recognition until reading this paper though.  It seems like they have a pretty useful idea they are developing.  While most of my ideas point to uses in gaming, this technology could be used for many different things.  One of these could surgeon training or some other training that requires great motor skills and coordination.

But, they have already stated how they have a limited subset of gestures.  I imagine something like a surgeon trainer would require extremely accurate gesture recognition techniques.  I am sure the $3 Gesture Recognizer could be up to the task.  They would just need to improve its technique so it could calculate far more gestures than it currently can.  I look forward to seeing where gesture-based technologies go in the near and far future.

Paper Reading 18 – Activity Awareness in Family-Based Healthy Living Online Social Networks

Comments
Patrick Frith
Paola Garza

Reference Information
Activity Awareness in Family-Based Healthy Living Online Social Networks
 - Stephen Kimani, Shlomo Berkovsky, Greg Smith, Jill Freyne, Nilufar Baghaei, and Dipak Bhandari
 - IUI 2010, Hong Kong, China

Summary
This paper explained how to use a social network coupled with an activity awareness interface in order to help improve overall health of individuals.  The test they conducted set out to see if the activity awareness interface did in fact make user more aware of their health and the activities they can do to improve it.

An example of part of the Activity Awareness interface.

The activity awareness interface gave visual feedback through graphs of the user’s performance.  During the test, families of 4 (two parents, two children) with social network experience were chosen.  Some of the groups had access to the activity awareness interface, while others did not.  In the end, the overall experience of each group was collected.  It was found that the activity awareness interface was quite helpful to those who had it.  It also ended up motivating the users to be more active and be more aware of their overall health.

In the future, the designers would like to find ways to collect real-world user activity data.  This could then be compiled back into the activity awareness interface and improve the overall user experience.

Discussion
At first, I didn’t exactly see the point of this.  But after finishing the paper, this seems like an interesting idea.  With people being on computers so much now, finding ways to tap into that and help motivate people to be more active could help a lot.  To me, it seemed like this social network they were using was designed for this testing purpose.  I imagine it can later be adapted to major social networking sites, because having a separate network devoted this might not gain a large enough audience to make an impact on overall health.  Even still, this is an interesting idea in using technology to help promote physical health and awareness.

Paper Reading 17 – Using Language Complexity to Measure Cognitive Load for Adaptive Interaction Design

Comments
Paola Garza
Patrick Frith

Reference Information
Using Language Complexity to Measure Cognitive Load for Adaptive Interaction Design
 - M. Asif Khawaja, Fang Chen, and Nadine Marcus
 - IUI 2010, Hong Kong, China

Not exactly what this paper is talking about, but it's pretty American.

Summary
This particular study was designed to measure the cognitive load of a person during more strenuous and less strenuous tasks.  As the cognitive load increases, stress can increase with it and make it more difficult for a person to perform a crucial task.  The writers of this paper hope to expand in this field with their study so better design can be implemented.

They noted that they used data from a previous study with people of bushfire management teams.  The tasks the teams had to carry out had varying degrees of difficulty and time constraints, so this worked out well for collecting data.  Essentially, they made transcripts the speech used by the team members, and analyzed it for word usage and complexity and sentence format.  Their hypothesis was that as difficulty and stress increased, vocabulary complexity decreased while sentence structure would become longer, more complicated, and also incomplete.

They were correct about sentence structure, but vocabulary complexity increased with difficulty and stress.  This was opposite to what they predicted, but they think this kind of data can help shed some light on the proper measuring of cognitive load in the future.  They would like to improve their further studies by adding more grammatical and language parameters so they can include more parts of speech in the study.

Discussion
I had never really thought about this cognitive load idea before, and honestly I would have thought vocabulary would go down with stress level.  I’ve never paid attention to how I behave under stress, but I might pay more attention.  Also, the cognitive load seemed similar to how a person’s mood directly affects how well they can be open to figuring something out.  This kind of work seems pretty abstract, but I can definitely see how it can be extremely helpful in increasing productivity overall.

Paper Reading 16 – The Satellite Cursor: Achieving MAGIC Pointing without Gaze Tracking using Multiple Cursors

Comments
Paola Garza
Zach Henkel

Reference Information
The Satellite Cursor: Achieving MAGIC Pointing without Gaze Tracking using Multiple Cursors
 - Chun Yu, Yuanchun Shi, Ravin Balakrishnan, Xiangliang Meng, Yue Suo, Mingming Fan, and Yongqiang Qin
 - UIST 2010, New York, New York

Satellite Cursor targeting.

Summary
The Satellite Cursor is a new way to implement multiple cursor navigation.  In this implementation, only one actual cursor is needed for interaction.  The other cursors automatically appear and hover around the surrounding potential targets.  The system automatically calculates where to place each screen object’s satellite cursor by determining the relative position of each object in terms of the actual cursor’s location.  Then when the user moves the cursor, the satellite cursors move similarly so small movements by the user can touch many different objects with little effort.

To reduce screen clutter, the cursors are not all displayed at the same time.  There are various visual cues present in the system to denote where the hidden satellite cursors are located in reference to their objects.  One such method is a small dot that rotates around the object showing roughly where the satellite is located.

The satellite ear tracking method.

There were two user studies conducted to determine how much mouse movement and pointing time were decreased while using the Satellite Cursor system instead of conventional pointing.  The results were that pointing time was decreased a decent amount, while movement time was drastically decreased in all situations.  Because of this success, the designers would like to improve upon the design by improving target prediction algorithms to reduce cursor uncertainty, improving recognition of more complex UI elements such as menus, and some other tweaks and enhancements.

Discussion
While I do think this is a cool idea, I can’t help but feel it would take awhile to get used to the way the system works.  I would be willing to mess around with it, but I feel quite comfortable just using the regular pointer method.  I do have a larger monitor and I have never had too much trouble moving my mouse to whatever object I needed to interact with.  To me, it just seems like normal pointing is something you get used to so the guesswork is gradually eliminated.  It’s like playing a new first person shooter with slightly different mechanics.  It feels foreign at first, but you get used to the feel of the game until moving the crosshair feels extremely precise.  Either way, I would like them to continue work on Satellite Cursor.  It has the potential to be invaluable if they can tweak it to interact with all the different UI elements a user might run into.  If they can get it to feel extremely natural as well, they I could see this system catching on in niche markets.

Paper Reading 15 – Enhanced Area Cursors: Reducing Fine Pointing Demands for People with Motor Impairments

Comments
Patrick Frith
Paola Garza

Click-and-Cross cursor.

Reference Information
Enhanced Area Cursors: Reducing Fine Pointing Demands for People with Motor Impairments
 - Leah Findlater, Alex Jansen, Kristen Shinohara, Morgan Dixon, Peter Kamb, Joshua Rakita, and Jacob O. Wobbrock
 - UIST 2010, New York, New York

Summary
This group of researchers set out to find a better means for motor-impaired individuals to use cursors for selection on computers and devices.  They stated that the current solutions for this problem are insufficient.  In order to try and remedy this problem, they came up with four different cursor interaction and selection types.  Two were crossing cursors (a Click-and-Cross cursor and a Cross-and-Cross cursor) and the other two were magnification cursors (a Motor-Magnifier and a Visual-Motor-Magnifier).

Cross-and-Cross cursor.

The two crossing cursors selected items by crossing over or near the desired target.  The Click-and-Cross cursor required the user to first click and move the cursor outward until the resulting arc circumference crossed over the target.  Then the user moved the cursor near the desired area on the arc where the target was.  The other cursor of this type achieves similar results without the need for any clicking.

The two magnifying cursors use different means of magnification in order to aid the user in selecting targets.  The Motor-Magnifier uses a wide selection cursor to isolate an area, while an inset Bubble cursor then makes the selection within the magnifier.  No actual magnification is done with this method, but the mouse gain is decreased to simulate increased magnified behavior.  The other option is the Visual-Motor-Magnifier, which does actually magnify and does not alter mouse gain.  The larger viewing space helps the user choose the target.

Motor-Magnifier cursor.

For testing, 12 participants with motor impairments and 12 without impairments were asked to perform some task sessions ranging from 90-120 minutes long.  The participants were also given an introduction to the tools as well as being allowed to ask questions before proceeding with the tests.  The results showed that the overall error rate for impaired individuals was reduced by 82%.  They set out to find a better solution for aiding impaired individuals in selecting items, so they were very pleased with this result.

Visual-Motor-Magnifier cursor.

Discussion
I was actually not aware that this kind of need was such a big issue.  You don’t exactly hear a lot about it at least.  But now that they have discussed it, I think it is great that they have given so much attention to solving this problem for impaired individuals.  I was really impressed with their solutions as well.  The way they seem to allow a broad selection at first, and then refine the selection process to a more precise broad selection appears to be the perfect solution.  Now that they have proved that better solutions for this problem do exist, hopefully they will be further developed and available for OS’s in their accessibility options in the near future.

Paper Reading 14 – Chronicle: Capture, Exploration, and Playback of Document Workflow Histories

Comments
Patrick Frith
Paola Garza

Reference Information
Chronicle: Capture, Exploration, and Playback of Document Workflow Histories
 - Tovi Grossman, Justin Matejka, and George Fitzmaurice
 - UIST 2010, New York, New York

The main view of the Chronicle interface.

Summary
The Chronicle is a means to track the progress of a document with many features to review and analyze the progress.  In this case, it utilized photo editing software to track the progress of the photo’s changes.  Throughout the process of editing a photo with software, many changes can occur such as layer editing and other special effects, and Chronicle keeps track of these changes in a few different ways.

One is with video playback of the changes being made.  The program records the entire editing process so users can see exactly how a certain effect was done by the original creator.  Another view is the timeline view, in which all of the changes and what kind of effect the change utilized is laid out in a graphical timeline.  And the other view is a calendar view where a screenshot of each photo design is displayed on the day it was created so the user can easily view the progress of the photo.

The developers conducted a study involving 8 participants with at least 3 years of image editing software experience.  The participants’ job was to carry out a series of tasks that utilized Chronicle’s capabilities without having much experience with the software.  They were explained the main features and functionality of the program, but that was all.  In the end, the participants were able to complete 92% of these tasks.  Then they were all asked to evaluate their experience with a series of questions.  Overall, they enjoyed the program and rated it highly and it made sense to them.

Chronicle's timeline view.

One of the main downfalls of the program is that it is application dependent on Paint.NET, the program they adapted to use their system.  In the future, they would like to change it so it can be used with any type of photo editing software.  They would also like to find a more convenient way to store the history video recordings, possibly on a network server instead of the local machine.  They hope do more tests to truly figure out if Chronicle is an effective learning tool, seeing as that was one of their main objectives in creating the software in the first place.

Chronicle's calendar view.

Discussion
I have gotten into some photo editing over the past year or so, and I really like this idea of saving all of the history of the creation process.  And like they said, this could be a very useful way for people to learn from other’s work exactly how to do complex editing tasks.  Written tutorials are nice, but unless they are accompanied by a video, they can be difficult to follow and figure out.  But even the history tracking they have in Chronicle is nice enough to warrant a program for that purpose.  I don’t necessarily need to see exactly how all of my creations were made, but it would be useful to see how I did an effect without having to rediscover the entire process all over again.  Chronicle is a great idea, and I really hope they continue work on it and make it more application independent.

Paper Reading 13 – D-Macs: Building Multi-Device User Interfaces by Demonstrating, Sharing and Replaying Design Actions

Comments
Paola Garza
Zachary Henkel

Reference Information
D-Macs: Building Multi-Device User Interfaces by Demonstrating, Sharing and Replaying Design Actions
 - Jan Meskens, Kris Luyten, and Karin Coninx
 - UIST 2010, New York, New York

Summary
D-Macs is a system that allows for the recording and sharing of design action sequences.  As in, if someone on a design team made a specific GUI design choice, the actions leading to this choice could be recorded and shared with the rest of the team.  There are many benefits and features to this system that the designers point out.

How the D-Macs system shares and handles its various functions.

One is the automation or repetitive design actions.  This can save a lot of time when creating multiple iterations of a design that have similar portions to them.  And similarly, the system gives feedback during automation so the designer can see how these actions are being replicated.  If some of the repeated designs can be generalized by D-Macs, then they can also be used in other projects requiring similar actions.  The system can also provide contextual cues to help show when repeated actions can and can’t be used to the desired situation.  And the system also allows designers to view and share design choices so everyone can benefit from other work and help guide other designers.

In future work, the designers plan on finding more ways D-Macs can be used in general-purpose GUI design projects.  They would also like to automate the connected community of designers better.  The current iteration requires designers to search for sequences and decide which ones apply to what they are trying to accomplish.  The creators of D-Macs would like to employ some sort of automation that can recognize similar sequences and make recommendations.  They also plan on conducting a full study and releasing D-Macs as free open source software for everyone to experiment with and help design.

Discussion
This seems like a brilliant idea.  But I think it can also be applied to non-GUI related work as well.  Take video editing or photo editing for example.  Sometimes there are sequences of actions that need to be done over and over again.  D-Macs might be able to recognize and record these sequences of actions as well.  I am sure there might be scripting systems built into much of this software for this purpose, but D-Macs seems like a great tool for it also.  Or it could be applied to everyday work as well.  Some sort of repetitive sequence of actions could be converted into an automated script simple by monitoring the actions.  This seems way beyond the scope of D-Macs perhaps, but with the software becoming open source who knows what might happen with it.

Paper Reading 12 - TwinSpace: an Infrastructure for Cross-Reality Team Spaces

Comments
Patrick Frith
Paola Garza

Reference Information
TwinSpace: an Infrastructure for Cross-Reality Team Spaces
 - Derek F. Reilly, Hafez Rouzati, Andy Wu, Jee Yeon Hwang, Jeremy Brudvik, and W. Keith Edwards
 - UIST 2010, New York, New York

Summary
TwinSpace is a system that aids in interactive group work.  In other solutions, the creators explain that these do not include support for remote participants.  As in, they only work if all team members are within the same space.  The creators of TwinSpace set out to expand on this system by adding technology with virtual worlds to the mix.  They name this main idea as collaborative cross-reality, or CoXR.

A demonstration of all the parts of the system in use.

CoXR contains four main features: a communications layer, a common model, a mapping capability, and specialized virtual world clients.  The communications layer is made to connect the virtual space with the physical space.  The common model is designed to bring together devices and services from the virtual and physical realms.  The mapping functions work with connecting and synchronizing both worlds.  And the virtual world clients are designed to monitor the interactions between the two worlds.

The designers explain that current virtual world and smart room layouts do not meet the requirements for interactive group work.  However, they point out that the TwinSpace system they have made shows that these two worlds can be joined together to meet these needs.  They hope that the groundwork TwinSpace has laid out will help in the development of powerful cross-reality environments.

Discussion
The TwinSpace system seems like a pretty interesting idea.  I have never been in the workplace, so I am not fully aware of the needs of a team of individuals.  But, the presentation of the game system to demo the technology explained pretty well how TwinSpace can be used.  I didn’t touch on this in the summary, but it basically allowed individuals to move around in a virtual space and interact with it by having a top-down view on a tabletop and a screen showing the front view.  This made me think of multiple teams developing a game where the teams might be halfway across the world from each other.  If both teams could directly interact with the game environment at the same time, they could more easily communicate ideas.  While this could be great for other work environments, I think game developers could benefit greatly from this system.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.