Emotional Design Microblog

Chapter 1: Attractive Things Work Better

Summary

An experiment done between Japanese and Israelis to determine if attractiveness of an design was a very important factor. In the study it was found that Japanese took attractiveness of design more of a valuable factor in design than did the Israelis that cared more about the functioning factor. A rather new study from psychology has found that affect, emotion and cognition compliment one another. The brain could be seen as three levels: Visceral, Behavioral, and Reflective. Input is taken in through the senses and as humans it is processed by the three layers to output an action. The response can be a combination of the levels (bottom-up or top-down) or it can be mostly impacted by one specific layer over ruling the others. The role of positive and negative states do have an impact on design. Happier thoughts often result in creativity; versus negative thoughts often guide people to be more contentious of the appropriate design function. Yet design can and should be driven by both thought processes in order to have both the creative and functioning factor. A brains action can be driven from both biological predisposition and experience; and it is the second and third layer that is often impacted by these factors.

Discussion

I found this to be an interesting shift between the author's last book to this one. On the "Design of Everyday Things" it was more focused on making a product that worked correctly and could be understand by users. This books takes a different approach around affect, emotion and cognition. I've seen similar work with affect and behavioral factors presented in other courses I've taken (HRI focused) so it was nice to see the correlation between fields.

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

Comments:

Comment #1:

Comment #2:

Paper Information

Title: Eden: Supporting Home Network Management Through Interactive Visual Tools

Authors: Jeonghwa Yang, W. Keith Edwards, David Haslem

Conference: UIST 2010

Summary

This paper presents the network managing system for the home called Eden. It's an interactive and direct manipulation of the home network. It supports a range of tools and puts it in a format that is graphic oriented and user friendly to make manipulation of the network understandable to the user. In a study they found some of the features that people to be desirable in the system. One would be a desired to have an easy way to see the status of the network. Second feature would be security. Last would be to gain more control over network performance to ensure resources are being used correctly. From that analysis they grouped network management task into the following groups: membership, access control, network monitoring, QoS for bandwidth priority.

Eden Interface (Source: publication)

Discussion

I found this paper to be rather interesting. The interface of an application makes all the difference in how a product is used and if it's used successfully. I found it useful that they evaluated people's responses of the system as the implemented features. They took a user's perspective and it strengthened their network tool.

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

Comments:

Comment #1:

Comment #2:

Paper Reference Information:

Title: Gesture Search: A Tool for Fast Mobile Data Access

Author: Yang Li

Conference: UIST 2010

Summary

This paper presents the Gesture Search tool for mobile phones. This tool uses a handwriting method that can be activated from multiple areas of the phone based on the gesture the person does. Based on what letter the application detects the user writes it will collect information, applications and web links based that correlate with that letter. The author provides a through explanation of the implementation and algorithms used to create this tool. There was also a user study done with the tool with the tool implemented on Android phones. The log analysis test had 125 users. It collected information on the types of data the users accessed using the application and contained some statistical findings on length of the gesture. According to user feedback in the study they found the tool to be 'useful and usable'. They did find that 66% of the users used the tool to access their contacts versus 35% that accessed applications although 17 our of 59 who participated in the feedback survey found this feature useful.

Discussion

This tool seems to be a neat feature. While I've seen it on smaller scale of texting in a few phones, I thought it was interesting how they implemented it to access the store of the phone and able to access a lot of different things. I personally think that would extremely useful, the phone I have at the moment has a scroll by letter feature, but I've always found it difficult to use because the button is rather small and it doesn't always scroll correctly. Due to that finding I often just scroll to my contacts until I get to the one I want. I thought the last line of the conclusion was an interesting way to end the paper, made me laugh. "As a user enthusiastically commented: 'I gesture it, I find it.'"

Ethnography Results Week #3

This week we got to focus with our initial onsite observation of following around the technicians. On Friday (February 18, 2011) from 7:30-10:00a.m. (we left a little early because Zack had previous commitments back at our lab), we did our first observation. The student workers for Harrington Media Center are required to be at work by 7:15a.m Monday-Friday, however the technicians come into work around 7:30. When we arrived at the office I became aware of how much change has occurred since I last had been there. There is a wall that used to separate the technician office and the storage closet, that wall has now been removed and the office has been expanded. The technician office now has two supervisors, one preparing to be a supervisor for the downstairs office. There has been update and modifications to the layout of the office, it's very organized and has a cozy feel to it. The light brown paint seems to have really expanded the room feel.

When we arrived only two of the three technicians working that time were present. One was on his laptop switching between a few different things. The other one was very friendly and made an effort to engage with us in conversation, even offering us to join him in ordering breakfast, but since we both had already eaten we passed on the opportunity.

About an three-fourths of an hour later one of the supervisor came into the office. I hadn't met him before, but he seemed similar in personality to the supervisor that managed the techs when I was there. Shortly after the main technician supervisor came into the office.

Around 9:00 the one of the tech's got paged to go to HECC 105 because the professor stated that red wasn't showing up on the projector. We headed downstairs to observe the troubleshooting of the problem. One of the supervisors reset one of the Ethernet cables that controls the projected image (NTI cable) and the problem didn't re-occur after that. The professor was nice to us and she offered us the opportunity to troubleshoot the problem during her lecture since her class was taking an exam. We proceeded to the projection booth to check the lap hours on the projector and then exited the classroom.

When returned I noticed that one of the other student technicians was gone, I thought maybe he went to class, but he was actually attending to another problem in HECC 204. The technician that attended to HECC 105 decided to proceed to HECC 204 when he realized they weren't able to discover the problem. On this observation, we did cross through the middle of the class to reach the podium. One of the student workers from the media center was also present observing and looking for a possible future fix to the current problem. They discovered that they needed to replace the computer completely and decided to that putting in a laptop as a temporary fix would suffice for now.

Our second observation was Monday, February 21, 2011 from 3-5pm. Upon entering the office we realized there were five technicians on duty during this time. The one thing that has become evident over our last two visits is what a unique, close group this truly is. They not only spend time together working, but they make an effort to hang out with one another (even the supervisors) for various activities and sometimes even sharing a meal together. They are a very close group and from an observation perspective they have a unique way communicating with each other, often using language and way of speaking that only they understand.

We also got to meet with the IT manager for IMS (current supervisor for Harrington Media Center). Her office is in the projection booth above HECC 100. It has a unique feel to it as well. It's decorated with a lot of personal things and although it may just be a projection booth it says a lot about the people who are in that office. She inquired about our project and how I was doing since my leaving IMS back in July. We talked about different things from upcoming equipment installations about to occur in ANIN, to former and current student workers, to our personal goals as Zack and I prepare to graduate with our Bachelors.

I showed Zack the downstairs office (formally known as Harrington Media Center) and the card system they use to manage the use of equipment in the various buildings for the HMC area. The students partially noticed our presence and some of them didn't. One of them even thought that Zack was a new hire (a little confusing how I fit that role, as though I would return all the way from Bright to 'teach' this really special new hire...haha). A lot of them were doing there own things and one was on his laptop.

In the coming day I plan to take a closer look at the technology used in various classes at different times. We will also continue to follow the technicians on Fridays and Mondays. It's been an interesting project so far, and even I've come to some findings that I wasn't aware of until this project. I've greatly enjoyed working with my partner and seeing how he views and takes in this truly unique environment.

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

Comments

Comment #1: Adam Friedli

Comment #2: Pending

Reference Information

Title: Performance Optimizations of Virtual Keyboards for Stroke-Based Text Entry on a Touch-Based Tabletop

Authors: Jochen Rick

Conference: UIST 2010

Summary

The author introduces shape-writing for touch-based tabletop devices. Shape-writing is defined as stroking through all the letters without lifting their finger to write out words. The author introduces the concept of using virtual-keyboards but switching to a stroke method instead of a tap method. There is a transition to the layout of the keyboard and the author presents a series of different options from the usual QWERTY keyboard. After evaluating how each of the keyboards would suite the Shape-writing method the author concludes that the ATOMIK square keyboard is the most optimal. The model they created was based on Fitts's law to have a more sophisticated actions. There was a user study conducted with 8 adults (6 right-handed, 2 left-handed individuals). The users completed a series of movements which had four parts: beginning, middle, end and lifting the finger. They began by completing a task of over 100 sequences to train in using the device. The study noted the time by distance ratio and stroke time by angle. The author continues in justifying the model used by demonstrating how it fits into Fitts's law and then finding a suitable lexicon for the spelling of the words. In evaluating the existing layout they concluded that the optimal layout to use was the Square OSK and Hexigon OSK.

ShapeWriter Software (Source)

Discussion

I thought it was an interesting detailed paper about the shape-writer methods. While this wasn't the first time I had seen this feature (I've been aware of it on Android phones since the summer), I couldn't really justify the need to change the layout of the keyboard (as we've already seen it successful on the QWERTY layout). Nonetheless, I applaud the author for attempting to take a different approach and trying other layouts to see if there is a better way to implement this feature. I did get to try this feature on a Samsung Captivate phone and it was neat. It worked well, but I did have to get used to it at first; but I've always thought it was interesting new way of typing.

Ethnography Results Week #2

In the past week we finalized our Ethnography project with Dr. Hammond. We established our workspace to do our observations on the web-based KIOS system. We also began to gather classroom equipment specifications by surveying the KIOS and looking into the Inventory system database. We are also finalizing our plans to do onsite observations in classrooms and following the technicians as they respond to technical issues.

Some of the issues that I was made aware of by the staff were:

• Issues with the CPS responder & clicker system (in Zachary 102), which are used to collect survey data from the students using a digital remote. While IMS installs the CPS receiver in their automated podium they were having difficulties with the responder being visible to the software which analyses the data and provides an output file to the corresponding course, course section and professor. This problem is a joint concern for IMS and the staff which are in charge of managing the CPS software (ITS).
• Yesterday, Harrington 204 and 207 were having issues getting the system to display the current selected device. This is a current problem which they are looking into to correct.
• This morning their were reported problems in Peterson and a technician was responding to the call; however I have yet to collect more information on the issue and the outcome of the problem.

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

Comments:

Comment #1: Zachary Henkel

Comment #2: Steven Hennessy

Paper Information

Title: Planz to Put Our Digital Information in Its Place

Authors: William Jones, Dawei Hou, Bhuricha Deen Sethanandha, Sheng Bi, Jim Gemmell

Conference: CHI 2010, Atlanta, GA, USA

Summary

Planz (short for 'Personal Project Planner') is an integrative document-like overlay to a folder hierarchy system. It allows additional support including e-mail messages, web references, and informal notes. On the front end of the document it shows the files listed in outline, tree like structure along with two basic operations "Drag & Link" and "In Context Create." It acts as a word processor but allows better manipulation and options to store the data. In an early evaluation of Planz they found out that it was a feature believed to 'save a lot time.' They also did a study with 8 people and had them perform various task and then answer a questioner discussing their experience. While the results showed a mix of responses from what the usual prototype some people had been using for years they found that it had a good visability factor. As far as future work they plan to make modifications for certain features in order bring forward their vision for this product.

Planz program (Source: Publication)

Discussion

I thought this paper was interesting to read. I think the Planz program sounds very useful and can't even begin to count how many times I've had to take time to find documents I've stored on my computer or external storage devices. I think it would have helped this paper if they would have discussed more about the features of the program and use a few more visual clues to how the system works; however, I did notice how they did discover they had a website to discuss in more detail their program and how it works.