Ask Don Norman

If you still can’t figure out how to open/close doors, water taps, switching lights on and off and many other things that seem trivial and easy, why computers are so complicated, or why attractive things seem to work better, this is your opportunity to ask Don Norman (of “Psychology of Every Day Things” and “The Invisible Computer” fame) why is not so trivial or easy. Ok/Cancel will be selecting the best questions from your emails and forward them to Don Norman.

HCI, Interaction Design and Interruptions

Computers can have many applications running at the same time (think of word processing + email + IM + blog feeds +… ). Nothing new or interesting. However, to keep up with all the information that the computer is throwing at us constantly is, to say the least, very difficult.

More than 20 years ago Peter Denning, then president of the ACM, wrote about the dangers of email as a tool that will cause information overload (*). Today is not only email, but IM, blogs, Wikis, news groups and so on and the problem is going to get (probably) worse. Users can only cope with so much information at the time and they are already inundated by many applications that demand attention constantly.

While designing an interface that exploited users peripheral attention as a notification method (such as ambient devices), I found the “Interruptions in HCI” website very well updated with tons of literature related to the subject, the people that are doing currently and in the past work related to interruptions, and some links that are worth exploring. Great website.

(*) Supporting Email Workflow. Gina Danielle Venolia, Laura Dabbish, JJ Cadiz, Anoop Gupta. Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2001-88.

The Hitchhikers' Guide To Google

"The web is big. Really big. This is good because the Web now encompasses the entire history, culture, science, and achievements of the human race, not to mention JPEGs of every romantically eligible member of that race under the age of 35. This is bad because it is now too big to find anything. The Hitch-Hikers Guide to Google is a collection of patterns that will be your guide through the Internet. By reading these patterns, you can, make friends, improve your lifestyle and experience excitement, adventure, and really wild things. When one reader didn't read these patterns, he dropped his computer in a puddle and couldn't search the web any more. Share and Enjoy."

If you like Douglas Adams writtings, you use Google, and you like to read sometimes things about (Software) Pattern Languages, then this paper is fun and interesting to read. Get it from here*. The paper was part of a workshop during the Euro Plop'03 (Pattern Languages of Programs) conference by Charles Weir and James Noble.

* The paper is actually in the proceedings of the workshop. The direct hyperlink seems to be unavailable.

Bluetooth Shopping

A new bluetooth service for big shopping surfaces has been launched in Australia. With a mobile phone and bluetooth, users can get up-to-date information of what is happening in the local area and surroundings such as special offers, events, getting directions (where is the nearest toilet?) or the “friends around” tool where you can check if any of your friends are near by.

The application sports as well a profile-based interface that can self-update according to your shopping habits over time. A tracking device or the ultimate retail therapy tool, time will only tell the success of such location based shopping services.



Via we-make-money-not-art.com

Agile Usability Engineering

(Source: hci.uni-konstanz.de)

A research group at the University of Konstaz (Germany) are exploring how to integrate Agile Software techniques and with modern Usability Engineering practices. They have published an initial paper (in german) describing their experiences at the German annual HCI conference “Mensch und Computer’04”.

This is not the first time (and won’t be the last one) that software development techniques and/or terminology is used in HCI (for example: Architectural Design Patterns, Software Design Patterns, HCI Design Patterns).

The Agile model focuses on customer satisfaction, small increments in development from design/architecture definition, testing/user testing, small incremental releases and "user stories" from conception to testing, delivery and support (and interweaved with eXtreme Programming techniques). The paper adds some HCI and Interaction Design terminology to the Agile/XP models and structures some of its phases around user centred design principles.

Search as a Desktop Interaction Paradigm

(Source: desktop.google.com)

With the latest entrants such as Google Desktop (Beta) or Blinkx, future ones such as MacOs Spotlight and WinFS search, existing ones such as Lookout, Quicksilver or X1 and many others, the war for searching your desktop is here.

However, as Google puts it with their Gmail service, ultra fast indexing and searching or your desktop represents to move from an archiving and classifying all your files (and emails and other types of data), to a more just “remember something” about the information that you want to reuse and search for it.

We have to remember as well the Unix tools such as locate/grep et al that allow to do th same more or less. The bottom line is that now you don’t have to navigate folders, just type the key words and off you go.

ZoneZoom

(Source: research.microsoft.com)

Portable handheld devices, while portable, have the obvious disadvantage of the screen size. Less screen size means that it will be more difficult to interact with visually rich (and/or textually rich) information. For instance, when using interactive mapping applications, it is very easy to get “lost” within the map requiring to keep zooming in/out and panning constantly to find out where we are, where we are going, and everything in between.

Researchers and Microsoft have developed the ZoneZoom navigation approach using Zoomable User Interfaces principles (ZUIs) to ease the use of maps on small form factor devices with keypads. With ZoneZoom, the current viewpoint is divided into 9 areas (one for each number key on the handheld), and the user can quickly zoom in/out and panning by using different press modes on the keypad. Once the user zooms in or out, the map is again divided into 9 areas, and so on. A paper expaling the idea and a prototype made in flash are available.

Backstage Beauty

(Source: stopdesign.com)

CSS or Cascade Style Sheets allows, roughly speaking, web designers to define the stylistic presentation of Html or Xml documents. Doug Bowman, from StopDesign, has the presentation that he gave at the Web Essential’04 conference available online, giving lots of reason of why we should use CSS and a tutorial of how to use them. Among the main "compelling" reasons:

• Separate content and presentation (The good old MVC anyone?)

• Smaller page weights or size in bytes means bandwidth savings

• Multiplatform. Different browsers or devices (i.e. mobile) are not such a big problem any more
  

• CSS flexibility and ease of use

• Scalable design

• Standards and accessibility compliance

• Allows designers to think in a different way about web design

Examplex of the power of CSS can be experienced at the CSS Zen Garden.

European Information Society Report

(Source: europa.eu.int)

"Telecoms services indicators 2004" is a report produced by IPSOS-INRA, a market research company, for the European Union to observe the status of the Information Society in Europe in terms of its development. The Report details some aspects of the use, penetration, subscription rates, demographics and many more details for information and communication services and devices.

From the website:

"The results of a residential survey conducted by INRA for the European Commission to monitor developments in the diffusion and usage of electronic communications services in connection with the regulation in the field of universal service. The survey took place between the end of 2003 and and the beginning of 2004 and consisted of over 44,000 household interviews in 127 regions of the 15 pre-accession Member States."

Full Report (6.7 Meg)

Take Everything With You

(Source: Washington Engineer)

If you have problems remembering to take the house keys with you, then RFID tags are here to help you. Wearing a personal server and a RFID tag reader located at the exit of the house, it can be possible to notify when the person wearing a special wristswatch walking out of the door has (or hasn’t) previously tagged items, like keys or books. When the reader detects the ausence of one of the tags as you pass by, the watch notifies you via the personal server.

The system helps as well to locate where the keys are by indicating the latest known location in the house (assuming that you have few RFID tag readers around the house).

The researchers from the University of Washington that have developed the system are now working on integrating the personal server into the wristwatch. In the mean time, we will have to remember to take the personal server and the special wristwatch with us.

This work was presented at the UbiComp (Ubiquitous Computing) Conference in Nottingham UK, and the abstract of the paper is available.

From Washington Engineer Via we-make-money-no-art.

To CMS or not CMS

Jeff Veen, from a web designer's perspective, points to some potential usability issues that users (and admins) of CMS (Content Management Servers) might encounter when using them.

My “real” website runs Mambo, a CMS , after some very basic tweaking and adjustments to the template, I am almost happy with it. This Weblog runs Blogger. So, right now, I am using 2 different web publishing tools rather than implementing them from the scratch.

CMS and Weblogs are far from perfect as they are not the solution to all web publishing needs, but they are perfect if the information architecture of your website fits the publishing model implemented in the CMS or you just need some simple diary like a Weblog.

Often less customisable CMS offer “instant” installation, publishing and improved usability (such as many Weblogs if we consider Weblogs as simple CMS) versus full customizable ones such as Typo3 or commercial CMS, where installation and customisation requires a steeper learning curve. The main issue is to balance flexibility, power and easy of set up and use, and as always, use the right tool the right job. And of course, if you dont like something that is open sourced, join them and help making it better.

UbiSense 1.0 Released

(Source: ubisense.net)

Ubisense has released Ubisense 1.0, a kit for developing Context Aware Applications based on tracking sensors. With the kit you can, as the website claims, track people or objects in 3D with an accuracy of up to 15 cm in real-time. With this toolkit you can turn physical spaces into "Smart Spaces" that are aware of what's inside and what's outside, creating a huge range of potential applications.

Record Your Whole Life

In this paper, Nicky Kern (and others) present the idea that we would need "only" 500 TeraBytes to store our whole life in video format, filming every instant of it with a head mounted camera, from birth to death.

Assuming that we live 100 years and that we film 24h at 10Mb per minute the result is only 500Tb. If we only film when we are awake, is less than half. Forgetting privacy, then the idea is plausible, the only problem is how to annotate the video so that is easy to index it and catalogue afterwards. The paper deals with this issue by using wearable sensors that can infer some activities, like "I was standing", "I was presenting" or "I was talking to other people". The prototype described has been use to record initially meetings.

The paper was part of the "Memory and Sharing Experiences" workshop at the Pervasive Computing 2004 Conference.

Usability as a Marketing Tool

(Source: simplicity.philips.com)

Nothing new of using usability as a marketing/strategy tool and as a way for product differentiation, but Philips has recently started a campaign where simplicity is the main selling points of its products. An interesting quote from their website:

"The digital revolution is supposed to have made our lives easier, but studies have shown that’s not the case. Around 30% of home-networking products, for example, are returned because people can’t get them to work. And 48% of people have put off buying a digital camera because they see them as too complicated."