HCI-2

No booze for beer goggles - subconscious control

2005-04-29T11:00:00.000-07:00

Just read a cool article on some research about the use of words to subconsciously affect our thinking, the main part of the article is that after showing some lads alcohol related words like, beer, whisky, martini and malt, it affected them when rating some ladies, even stranger was the second study referenced showing how "simple words can sway our behavior. One notable study found that after undergraduate students were subconsciously exposed to phrases such as 'old age' and 'bingo' they walked more slowly down hallways"

Why aren't we creating user interfaces which subconsciously tell us how wonderful we are how easy to use the system is while increasing our libido at the same time! As in some respects usability is different between users

Read it here

Security, Paranoia and Usability

2005-04-28T23:00:00.000-07:00

Read this article by mark Burnett, its only short but details some of his security principals and his setup at home, 3 firewalls out to the internet, special secret email addresses for each online account, 5 passwords to boot up laptop and read email (one 50 characters long). This is one very extreme usability vs security view. I consider myself fairly secure I use passwords of length at least 8 alpha numeric always have a firewall well 2 but probably don't change my passwords as often as i should, why? Because change causes me problems, I cache password for email, they must change, my PDA must change my laptop must change every service i use which there must be at least 20, would require change then there is the multitude of different interfaces I must use eBay, outlook, XP, pocket PC, Linux box, windows 2003 server, blogger, paypal, banking........ When are these going to be manageable, usable and friendly! Why should I have to remember a password anyway?

Project round up

2005-04-28T03:10:00.000-07:00

As its not the end of the module, its about time to round up the project me and nasty mind have completed.

It all began in with a discussion, having pumped ourselves full of creativity tools, we began brainstorming our ideas and pulling from our joint experiences bouncing ideas and talking to others, we came up with an idea to provide an aid for snowboarders. Our brainstorming sessions generated the best results by doing them individually without communication then meeting up and producing combined ones. At this point we had an idea, a concept but we required users to utilize the UCD process, but before we found any we decided to create some scenarios based on our own opinions of what the system should do along with looking into product competition, so we did a little bit of research. Having identified our users we needed to find out what they required of such a device so we put our ethnometric heads on and toyed with a number of questionnaire designs. Having got real users to fill out our questionnaires we did find some errors in our questionnaire deigns but still you can only learn from mistakes. We were at the stage having an idea/concept, some example scenario, some idea of competition, users and initial information they would require. Our next stage was to build storyboards and a paper prototype to try out on our user some of the ideas and our interpreted realizations of their requirements (which are never the same as they expect) . Prototype refinement came next having tested our prototype out on a subset of user. Finally our project got to a powerpoint stage having identified a limitation with the paper prototyping techniques, and utilizing card sorting to refine the interfaces. The cycle in UCD is refinement and user feedback and hence more of this process continued.

Overall the process has been interesting although more time would have enabled us to possibly take the idea much further. On the academic side although the results don't look amazingly professional and a high standard of work, this is not the point, the point is that we learn the process and its one thing talking about a process its another actually doing it. These ideas seem so easy simple and common sense on paper, implementing them changes this opinion and you realize and appreciate things more. Good design doesn't come for free interaction and usable interfaces are not pulled out of the air UCD is one good method but in reality, the ideas its advocates are harder to implement and their success and the response they receive are not always as expected. All in all the project has provided insight into a different way of thinking about problems which can only be a good thing!

Design and lecture roundup

2005-04-28T02:13:00.000-07:00

Well its time now to put HCI to one side, It has taken far more time than a 10 credit module Should! Far far more! But it has also taught me more skills than I thought, although I didn't fully agree with Russells teaching style (which I have made clear to him in the past - HCI 1) I have changed my opinion. I reluctantly took HCI-2 because of the limit choices available for modules, and the fact I didn't fancy NLP-2 as I hadn't done NLP-1 (although this wasn't a prerequisit which didn't make sense - why call it NLP 2 ?) but I am very glad I did and would recommend it to all others, but don't take it thinking it is an easy option, it is certainly not - although there are only 2 essays and a project to complete oh and a blog, these involve a lot of reading, I have read more in this module than all others I have taken. The good thing about the module is that - it is more in touch with the real world. A lot of other modules in CS are very restricted to one view, often the lecturers and you often think when am i going to use these skills I am learning as opposed to HCI-2 were the issues are real, today and interesting, you cannot get bored because of there is so much to learn. However, because of this reading it does take up a lot of time, and is hard to keep up with. But all in all it was good and well worth doing!

Deadlines - HCI done

2005-04-27T01:41:00.000-07:00

Well HCI second essay is in today, just finished and am fairly pleased with it, its taken bloody ages although Russell mentioned in the lecture it should take 3 days, I think I went a bit over that (well a lot) as I started a few weeks back! Although not exclusively, its strange how assignments always seem to take up the time they have been allotted even if you start well in advance well not all the time but recently, HCI essay 1, dissertation, essay 2 have all taken way longer than I had planned nakering up revision. Only got Imaging and visualization project to do now fun!

Mobile context aware graffiti

2005-04-18T07:44:00.000-07:00

Came across this interesting application while researching some stuff for my essay which is taking forever!
Its a context aware mobile (PDA based) application for virtually tagging areas of the city, its a pretty cool concept especially if its kept in the virtual space!

Ubiquitous Computing

2005-04-11T23:58:00.000-07:00

Well been doing lots of research for my essay for this HCI module, the question seems so vague its hard to write, think I have read far to many papers and not done enough writhing but still. Found this pretty nice video on their future vision of ubiquitous computing, cooltown <- video from HP.

1 essay, 1 dissertation and only 4 exams :)

2005-04-02T18:05:00.000-08:00

So I haven't been blogging because, I haven't had time, If im writing here I should be writing my dissertation, well its going ok and im bored so I thought I better post something. It does show in others blogs though people with a lot of work on have just stopped posting recently so how do people with blogs that update them every day get the time? I duno guess they aren't working, well haven't had chance to do much on HCI project tried to get the XDA to work with our prototype but it insists on displaying in landscape and the limited power point viewer cannot handle the actions, only simple transitions but still. Haven't started the other HCI essay dreedin that one does any one know when we will get the marks for the first one ?

Work, 2 essays a dissertation, a presentation and 2 projects! oh and exams !!!

2005-03-18T01:10:00.000-08:00

Ok so had a lot on this week and have for the next few until everything is over and 3 years gone! But still, Finally finsihed the first of two essays for HCI, printed and done, dissertation is another matter so much to write! Project presentation tuesday, and doing some consultancy tomorrow for a local firm so the presure is on. Hence the blog has had a backseat, Our design project is going well, user oriented analysis showed up weak points and we will be posting our redesigned (hopefully XDA compatible interfaces)soon. Having had chance to test out tomtom (SatNAV for my car) it is clear there are a number of design choices we have made which simply wont work with our intended finger interface, namley the tabs or the close proximity of them, some restructuring needs to be done. Check out nastyMind my partner in crime for the paper prototypes which he kindly uploaded!

Security and Trackbacks!

2005-03-14T01:41:00.000-08:00

This blogger editor is stupid! Or its internet explorers popup manager! I click check spelling and it says popup disabled click here, enable popups it decides to refresh and wipe out my editor ! GRrr. Anyway I was saying I have set up trackbacks its easy to do go here, plus This is a kind of test to trackback to bens post which I found funny but true.
Here goes....

Prototype Testing

2005-03-13T16:00:00.000-08:00

Prototype Testing
Originally uploaded by stephenedginton.

Thought it was time to test out a new picture blog upload tool flickr (allows you to post to blog better than hello in my opinion) and update the project status. Since the last post. We have developed a powerpoint prototype based on the paper prototype to hopefully get around the interaction and feedback issues we faced with the paper. Last week I managed to get one of our users to sit down for 20 minutes and go though the new powerpoint prototype. The goal was simple, to asses the interface and menu designs. We went though a think out loud exercise where I simply had a number of tasks and asked the user (Gary) to perform them. Generally it went really well he required little guidance which was good, but we must bear in mind he is a competent computer user. The exercise identified a number of problems with our interface! Some categories one example "Tracking" didn't have any semantic meaning he didn't associate this with its intended use (track where the user has been, and statistics). After later discussion he felt "History" was a better name we agreed. Secondly he felt some screens had too much information like finding places. One issue which couldn't be evaluated was the screen size for the prototype, due to our resources we used a monitor but a PDA sized device is more realistic. Fortunately my XDA IIi has come! And has a powerpoint viewer albeit limited so our next step is to revise the prototype and do more cycles of user testing on this. Another thing interesting was the reaction as the user realized the systems potential for solving his problems commenting "This would be great on the slopes".
Now that we have also been through all our questionnaire results we will be adjusting the prototype as such adding/removing features as identified.

The Actual Lecture

2005-03-11T03:06:00.000-08:00

Well it was hard to concentrate and take seriously our lecturer in drag, so Il direct you to Greg's and Richard's blogs for a summary!

Russell.... I Mean Rachel

2005-03-10T18:02:00.000-08:00

"People in Britain do all manner of things for kicks - some lick stamps, others sit on chairs. This fellow, who calls himself Rachel Beale, likes to dress up as a lady. Takes all sorts."

Today For comic Relief (which is Tomorrow- he just couldnt wait) Our HCI lecturer Russell Beale, decided to become a Lady Boy.
Very funny! looks like Emily Howard off little britain
Its all for a good cause though so we will let him off!

Privacy and Accountability

2005-03-07T14:50:00.000-08:00

Blogging allows people to talk about their thoughts and opinions providing an insight into the author. But should all this be divulged without a second thought? Is it sensible to publish your every thought, and are there any consequences of doing so?

A potential problem with detailing your every move, thoughts and opinions are identity fraud, what if people utilize the information to impersonate you? Say you comment on your blog about a chat room you talk in with a specific handle you use and others, you speak to; it may be possible to create a similar handle and impersonate the author of that blog.

As another example image a child is using blogging to detail activities at school, where they go the way they walk home what they have been doing. This information previously unavailable is suddenly plastered all over the internet and it will only be a matter of time before the information is abused. Also comments on blogs provide even an indirect communication channel to them.

One reason not to divulge information under ones name is that it may have adverse effects with both home and work life. Numerous blogs:

Waterston sacks bloggers
Apple blogs leaking information
Lost job at Microsoft because of blog

report that they have upset friends and family by posting there opinions on their blogs. And with the resent news reports of companies sacking employees divulging product ideas or company practices people realize that publicly writing about ones life and interests is not as simple as it might seem at first.

Are pseudonym blogs the answer or password protected ones, I think this depends on the context of its use and the authors respect to their information consequences, but awareness of potential effects must be considered and I for one will be careful with respect to the things I mention!
More discussion on the legal status of bloggers here

Slashdot The Repercussions of Blogging

Macromedia, Yahoo Vs Bloggers

2005-03-04T03:24:00.000-08:00

Just read an article on slashdot, about Macromedia having to answer several blogs regarding there decision to package there flash player with Yahoo ? What were they thinking? Anyway it just gives an example of the power of blogging and the pressures business's face now its easier for many people to come together and generate bad publicity

Project prototype so far

2005-03-01T19:23:00.000-08:00

Hopefully, we should be getting all our questionnaire results back tomorrow. In the mean time NastyMind and I have been working on prototypes!

We went through the paper prototypes we designed and found them well to have a lot of disadvantages in our scenario.

They were good for the following reasons:
They made us actually think about the interaction, the ways in which things would work and not confined by any development tools or widgets.
They allowed us to build an information architecture
They keep you focused on the task, because they can do anything with no restrictions
They facilitated later methods.

They were bad because:
They are very unnatural having to move between paper breaks the speed. Users loose interest and are not fully focusing on the task
They provide false feedback, no sound nor the sense of actually clicking on something

They take time - this is to some extent independent of method, the time to design a prototype obviously does depend on methods used like RAD, powerpoint paper etc but we found the time was taken actually planning how things are going to be ordered where facilities are going to be and how users are going to achieve there tasks.

For this we used card sorting techniques and sketched storyboards.

Next we actually tried the prototype out on each other and on one of the users. Both of us found the interaction very abstract and un-natural but it did get across some of the ideas and did point out initial design problems at that early stage. More on that later.

Our next stage is to hold a focus group with two / three of our selected users and review a powerpoint based prototype we are now developing to resolve the issues of un-natural interaction. We hope to also do this on a PDA (my o2 xda II i when it bloody comes!) To provide a more realistic environment.

Freedom of information act........freedom? really....?

2005-03-01T18:50:00.000-08:00

In the lecture last week Russell mentioned this week’s topics for blogs should be an ethical/privacy/security type of theme.
On the infamous reading list is the freedom of information act which came into power January 2005. I have read over some of it but it’s not a very enjoyable read, very disjoint and references all over the place. Not a very usable resource as shown below!

The freedom of information act can be summarised as follows

"An Act to make provision for the disclosure of information held by public authorities or by persons providing services for them and to amend the Data Protection Act 1998 and the Public Records Act 1958; and for connected purposes...."

What interested me were Russell's comments at the start of the lecture, namely
what would happen if he requested public bodies to provide him with all the CCTV footage they have on him.

This is my breakdown of this act and what would happen.

(1) Any person making a request for information to a public authority is entitled-

(a) to be informed in writing by the public authority whether it holds information of the description specified in the request, and

(b) if that is the case, to have that information communicated to him.

However, as with all government documents there are clauses!
Subsection (1) has effect subject to the following provisions of this section and to the provisions of sections 2, 9, 12 and 14.

So firstly the provisions of this section
(3) Where a public authority-
a) reasonably requires further information in order to identify and locate the information requested, and
b) has informed the applicant of that requirement

In other words this means that the public authority in our case is allowed to ask for further information i.e. where a bout’s where you, at what time about and doesn’t need to do anything until we respond.
(Note the reasonably - not a very scientific measure)

(4) The information
a) in respect of which the applicant is to be informed under subsection (1)(a), or
b) which is to be communicated under subsection (1)(b),
is the information in question held at the time when the request is received, except that account may be taken of any amendment or deletion made between that time and the time when the information is to be communicated under subsection (1)(b), being an amendment or deletion that would have been made regardless of the receipt of the request

So if they don’t happen to archive the CCTV then the public authority will be ok but we all know they do, so this shouldn’t come into play.

Subsection 5 of 1 doesn’t really apply either but

6) In this Act, the duty of a public authority to comply with subsection (1) (a) is referred to as "the duty to confirm or deny".

This states either way Russell will be generating them paperwork.

Now the clause and why this request would be refused!

Now the cost of retrieving the CCTV footage of Russell would be immense even if he could give them a rough estimate of the times and places he was, the volume of data would huge and the technology currently from what I have read is unable to do this kind of thing. Ok there are facial recognition systems, which may be possible to apply but the cost of such request would be large and this is why it would be refused!

12. - (1) Section 1(1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit

2) Subsection (1) does not exempt the public authority from its obligation to comply with paragraph (a) of section 1(1) unless the estimated cost of complying with that paragraph alone would exceed the appropriate limit
3) In subsections (1) and (2) "the appropriate limit" means such amount as may be prescribed, and different amounts may be prescribed in relation to different cases

Therefore, Russell could find himself not even getting a reply for his information request not even having to comply with the "duty to confirm of deny".

So how free is our information, after reading that I’m not so sure! Even though Russell’s request may have been an extreme case there seems many loop holes through which public authorities can escape and escape without even answering.

Here is an article testing out a similar claim and a number of others. The article puts a figure on the appropriate limit - 3 days work. The article details a request for speed camera information which was rejected! So Russell you've got no chance!

Blog Technologies: Blogrolls

2005-03-01T16:50:00.000-08:00

Finally in this 3 part series on blog technologies comes blogrolls.

Image your friends come to your flat and could see the books on your bookshelf, it would give them an indication of the kinds of things that interest you and they may in fact interest them as well. This is like blogrolls.

Blogrolls are just a list of other blogs that you are somehow associated with. (friends, work, interests etc).
So why not just use hyperlinks to friends and other blogs your interested in, well we are all lazy, and if we can click a button that does it for us then why not. This is what blogrolls facilitate. They work by maintaining a list of url's to other blogs / sites and provide an interface to dynamically add and remove items. Then on the weblog, or website what ever you simply include some JavaScript which populates the list on your site. Hence no messing around with html.

At current I would say it still requires work, although its simple it could be made simpler and having to register with other sites like blogroll.com just adds to the increasing number of usernames and passwords we as computer users have to remember!

A possible extension for blogrolls could be to make them intelligent and provide people with more information than what you are interested in but a kind of history of what you have been looking at. Like a LRU least recently used blog roll which is ordered based on the owners visiting, providing entries which you would have been looking at.

Or how about automatic blogroll entry of sites you view a lot, that could produce some interesting results!

take a look at the right hand pane for my blog roll, also a previous post I made

Blog Technologies: Trackbacks

2005-03-01T16:30:00.000-08:00

Imagine your at a cocktail party and someone the other side of the room mentions your name, you selectively pick that up even if your in conversation with somebody else, now apply it to blogging and you sort of have trackbacks.

Trackbacks allow you to hear what other people have to say about you in the cocktail party blogsphere. The idea is that when someone decides to talk about you . You have the ability to see what they have to say, like a remote version of post comments. It allows for the aggregation of community information building on what permalinks brought community and providing a more coherent interface to the information and views about a topic.

Currently the technology doesn't automatically infer who you are talking about and notify them, but instead it required you to explicitly say "hay you I'm talking about you here is what I have been saying". It does it by a means of trackback pings explained on the websites below.

Basic introduction trackbacks
Intermediate trackbacks
Advanced technical specification

Blog Technologies: Permalinks

2005-03-01T15:56:00.000-08:00

This week we have been asked to look into how some blog technologies work and why they are useful. The first of these technologies are permalinks.

Permalinks are very simple, and its one of those technologies that disappears and just seems obvious. The initial problems with blogs are that blogs are reverse chronological diaries of thoughts and issues and as such the front page is dynamic, it changes as posts are added. The problem becomes apparent only when trying to reference one of these entries. As after time passes and new posts are added the post may be archived or removed.

Hence the solution that came about was permalinks, or "permanent links". How it works is simple, each blog entry is given a unique URL (universal resource locator) . for example this post I am writing now will be given
http://stephenedginton.blogspot.com/2005/03/blog-technologies-permalinks.html

As each post has its own URL any other blog/site can reference it without a problem.

Although it’s trivial, it effectively transformed blogging providing the ability to create community. Discussions and chat emerged from the ability to relate to other peoples views and commentary and talk about it, as such communities emerged and the blogsphere changed from a disjoint set of information to an overlapping highly coupled media form.

The permalinks arguably in my opinion created community.
The other two technologies I will talk about in later posts complement permalinks to some extent.

For a more historical overview take a look at this permalink about permalinks plasticbag.org

Like many good technologies it is initially denounced work of the insane then considered obvious and mundane, then everyone claims to have invented it.

Project - Prototype and story board

2005-02-24T20:02:00.000-08:00

After getting back one of our questionnaires and reviewing it which we will be posting when we get the rest back, we began work on the prototypes. Initially Bradley and I started out with plain paper and lots of colour pens to begin jotting down ideas as a kind of storyboard through our system debating many different interface features from how menus should look, how to maximize the screen size, and the information architecture for our device. How menus should be structured, options features etc. This process took far longer than we thought!
We are now in the process of converting our storyboards into post-it sized screens for our prototype, so we can actually test this out on our potential users to evaluate our designs.

We will be posting the storyboards / prototypes in the near future!

Web content for mobile and PC browsing

2005-02-24T20:00:00.000-08:00

As a complement to our lecture on designing for mobile devices comes an article from Nokia, on differences, guidelines and best practices when developing web content for mobile browsing.
A lot of the things already mentioned in my previous post on the lecture are reiterated in this article but it does apply a slightly more technical approach than our lecture did. Have a read

Context Aware Tour guide -OLD SCHOOL

2005-02-24T07:20:00.000-08:00

This is an old school implementation back in the day of a "context aware" mobile device to be used as a tour guide. Although the technology used is a bit dated and the prototypes are a bit of a bodge with TV remotes all over the ceilings for positioning information, the ideas and principals discussed are still relevant and interesting.
Have a read (ACM login required)

Some points from the article that we can apply to our project include

"applications for mobile environments should take advantage of contextual information such as position , to offer greater services to the user"

This is what we hope to do for our project by providing information based on context. For example when viewing the weather we take into account the altitude of the user as this can affect greatly the conditions as well as the users position.
Also when offering a map to the user for displaying piests we take into account the users level, abstracting away runs which may be too difficult or too easy.

Another import usage for mobile context computing discussed was group interaction and the ways in which to facilitate this. Again for our project we hope to utilize some kind of system similar to cyberguide to track friends on the slopes and users experiences.

Throughout the implementation details of cyberguide were discussed the usage of vector maps and bitmaps. Vector maps allow for scaling and easy route finding this is something we will be looking to use but the similar problems faced by the cyberguide team will be the generation of these maps, we had an idea of setting the device to record mode to build the resort map. To further this we came up with the ideas of keeping a track of where users have been for historical context. Again this was mentioned in the paper along with keeping track of rich multimedia diaries aiding the capture of historical context for possible later use.

Automated capture of the users experience was an interesting idea where by users gestures could be interpreted to analyse their experience.

We came up with an idea of reviewing piest experience and voting to help choose the best runs to try to capture this information through the use of a review page on the device but an autonomous method would work better (maybe measuring adrenalin levels, heart rate and excitement? Not sure if this would be possible though.

Mobile Devices - maximizing screen space

2005-02-24T05:12:00.000-08:00

This weeks reading list and lectures has been devised around mobile devices and the implications of these to design.

One of the shorter papers to read is a pilot study on the use of sound to aid the usability of small screens. Like we all know when you have a small screened device you need to make the most of the space you have, this article considers the use of smaller buttons / widgets by providing sound as a feedback mechanism. The study revealed that by utilizing basic (click) sounds and enhanced (different tones) sounds for different actions, usability was increased with less errors.

In our project our device will need some sort of input method, we were considering some type of touch screen as keypads would not really be practical. An idea that a user suggested was quite interesting as an input method of a dimple on a glove which could provide more resolution than just a finger. The use of sound could really benefit this method for confirmation and feedback.

Project - Ethnography

2005-02-22T21:05:00.000-08:00

With our initial scenarios and task analysis complete we need to get a better understanding of the user needs for this device, before attempting to write a questionnaire for our project we decided to firstly do some research and interview a user. The user is Gary Parfrey an IT manager who snowboards a lot, I decided to interview him with only an outlined structure and try to capture his ideas and thoughts for such a device and the common problems he has a boarder.

From this initial interview we got some ideas which tied in with some of the scenarios we had thought of like route planning, tracking statistics and providing weather and news. Some of my questions were aimed at understanding the environment in which the device must work, mainly for the position on the body for the device and possible input methods, something we were thinking of was a stylus maybe connected somehow, but Gary dismissed this straight away he suggested a glove with a dimple on the index finger which I thought was interesting.

The next stage was create a questionnaire to get a better understanding of the users. Russell and 4 others have kindly agreed to complete the questionnaire.

For the questionnaire design, we tried to follow this as a set of guidelines.

The questionnaire follows (click each thumbnail)

Project competition - snowboarding gadgets

2005-02-22T20:20:00.000-08:00

These are just some ideas which we have seen mainly for inspiration but also to see what's available in the market today

Snowboarding Ipod - Bluetooth in jacket control


checkout the article for picture of jacket and hat.


Flexible LCD screens, our device will have to have some kind of display how good would it be if it was on your sleeve and it didn't matter how hard you hit it? Well the technology isn't here yet but were getting there

The closest mobile devices have got to snowboarding

well maybe not but still

Project - Scenarios

2005-02-22T20:10:00.000-08:00

The details of the scenarios we have done will be here soon, bradley has the notes!

Project - Concept Ideas Through Brainstorming

2005-02-22T20:00:00.000-08:00

As mentioned in a previous post, we have decided to do our project on the lines of a snowboarding route finder / context aware mobile system. To generate some ideas Bradley Aka NastyMind and I, spoke with each other informally and went away to do individual brainstorms, We then got together and bounced ideas off each other to come up with a cumulative brainstorm encompassing all of our ideas. It was quite surprising the number of things we came up with which were similar and it generated a few new ideas. This showed the effectiveness of doing it firstly independently.

The next step for us was to do some detailed problem definition, user needs analysis, task analysis and scenarios to try and understand the types of tasks users would wish to perform.

Designing for Mobile Devices

2005-02-22T07:25:00.000-08:00

Screen sizes, funny keyboards, battery life, connectivity, portability, price, processing power and a number of other issues all impact on the design considerations for mobile devices.

The web on these devices (especially mobile phones) is still poor, WML the wireless markup language was a sparse experience which users did not like, its pretty much a failure.

Instead of WML and WAP, mobile devices have been given other options some which compact the website and have a window that can be moved over the image, others which try to separate the website into one long narrow area like this

check out this site for some information on how opera decides which rendering mode should be applied and some examples of WML rendering.

The other prominent subject was that of context of use the differences between what we do on our desktop computer and what we do on our mobile device.
Early on we saw devices that tried to compete with the desktop like full email clients, but now we are seeing devices that complement the desktop.

A nice example of this is ActiveSync with Microsoft Exchange server, which I have been setting up for a company. The PDA connects over Bluetooth to a mobile phone, dials the internet establishes a SSL tunneled connection to the companies ISA 2004 firewall which is then bridged to there Exchange 2003 server, and it works extremely nicely synchronizing emails allowing for the download of attachments.

I will soon be getting my XDA IIi which I have ordered an therefore I should soon be able to review it as a mobile device and see how well / or not O2 and Microsoft pocket PC work!
Also I will be using it hopefully to blog with but more on that when I get it.

When designing for mobile devices we should maximize their potentials and minimize their down sides

The Design Process - Chapter 5 HCI

2005-02-21T18:10:00.000-08:00

Ok so I have been catching up on some of my reading to get my blog into shape and start doing some of this reflective learning !

There are a number of issues from HCI which affect the usability of interactive systems and these are relevant within all stages of the software life cycle. The book claims that the requirements for any interactive system are always incomplete, and this is easy to comprehend. Interactive systems have many different users with different expectations about the facilities which the interactive system should support.

The solution to this problem is to use an iterative design model where systems are built and the interaction with users observed and evaluated to determine how to make them more usable. The experimentation must be done as close to a real interaction situation as possible.

There are a number of techniques which can help this design process. One is to get a clear understanding early on in the design of the tasks that the users will be wanting to perform.

In our project we have been doing this through the use of user task analysis and scenarios where we have come up with short stories describing situations the user could be in and the tasks they would want to complete.

Another technique is to use standards and guidelines.
Standards - should be followed
guidelines - should be followed ideally and broken when the reasons for them are understood

This technique takes some of the guess work out of designing systems and provides a core proven base to which design rationales can be accounted to.

The final technique which was mentioned was that of prototyping.
We are all pretty familiar with prototyping and its a very common way of refining interface design and interaction semantics.

This is the other technique we will be using for our project. We are in the process of generating storyboards, on paper which we will be using in a 'wizard of oz' based prototype technique where by the user selects items on a piece of paper and we give them the next screen they will see. The important thing to remember about prototyping is that it must be representative to access the usability and functionality of the system. This does not mean it must provide complete functionality just a subset of it.

Card Sorting - Web Design

2005-02-18T21:16:00.000-08:00

Today's lecture was about web site design not particularly web design specifics such as menus, colors pictures and fonts but the more fundamental Navigation, Graphic Design and Information Architecture.

Information Architecture is the core to any usable website. Its the process of organizing the content of the site such that an unfamiliar user from the websites target audience should ba able to locate the information they are after.

IA is not a trivial thing to do, this was evident when we colluded together to generate a number of random words which we where then instructed to use card sorting a trivial technique to cluster the spartial words to categories them.

Some of the words were:
cabbage
Thatch
Telephone
Fish
Bullet
Hammer
Table
Rubbish
Lego Brick
and some other strange things!

These were all written onto post-it notes and the class was broken into 3 groups, we stuck all the words onto the wall and I began moving these around under the instruction of our group. This was a long process and many rationales for why different things should be clustered together were debated.
At the end of this process we had a relatively good categorization for the site. Due to the random words and no definition of a target audience the process was a bit chaotic but we did come to some consensus and this was the key! After comparing the categorization the two other groups came up with we were still happy with our own and likewise others with there's.
therefore whenever trying to structure the information architecture for a site try to involve key users and business decision makers

Font are the clothes words wear!

2005-02-15T20:20:00.000-08:00

Just listened to 'from Arial to wide Latin' a radio 4 article about the implications fonts and typefaces have upon us. It was really quite interesting, how we actually subliminally make judgments about the information based on the typeface used.
The example given was
The Times The SUN
Where the times is more roman and 'part of the establishment' as opposed to the SUN being more bold and brash with no serif.

Serif - with fiddley bits
sans serif - no fiddley bits

The main focus of the article was that fonts are the clothes of words and they produce the tone of the voice. The typefaces are loaded with references which can have associations from memory.
There must be a synergy between the font and the subject.

An interesting point made was about gender specific fonts how media presented to women is normally in a more thin and elegant typeface eg vogue magazine, whereas typefaces used for male media is more chunky and bold like Loaded. However this is more marketing than gender based.

Another interesting issue is the use of fonts with children, a study revealed that 99% could not spot the difference between two types of fonts they are not consciously aware, reasons proposed were that they are subject to many different typefaces on advertisements etc and are able to adjust and adapt their reading. Also as fonts carry physiological baggage children are too inexperienced to have "font memories" this again relates to the context and association with memory.

Some font tips given are
For text to be printed use : serif font like time new roman
for email/ computer based use:arial , thoma
Use a maximum of two typefaces in a document (anymore apparently looks like a ransom note!)

Last thing to mention is the problems that can be caused by getting the font wrong, namely misidentification between alpha and numerical characters 0 o, I 1, 5 s. The example given was taken from a flight control system where some information was illegible!

Fonts are not just pretty print! They send subliminal messages to your readers and unconsciously can influence its interpretation. Fonts are more powerful than words in some senses. From a HCI perspective fonts are extremely important in providing to the user the information at the right "font level" in the right tone, fit for purpose. In advertising choosing the right typeface is extremely important to give the correct impression. I will certainly be paying more attention to my typeface usage.

Cell phone for the elderly

2005-02-10T03:07:00.000-08:00

An article here mentions the design considerations for a mobile for the elderly, I still think this one is best!
Not really mobile though, but that arguable about some elderly too.

Cultural Probes

2005-02-10T02:50:00.000-08:00

Understanding users in their environment is extremely important when trying to design any type of system in which they must interact. Ethnographic techniques are quite well understood, for example questionnaires, surveys, and observation of users in their environment and in the lab have been done for a number of years to try and understand users in their own context and they way in which they work. These techniques have their pros and cons but are still a little intrusive to the user. A interesting paper I have just read is on "cultural probes", the idea is to give the users a number of items like a camera, postcards which specific questions, customized maps and give the users a number of prompts to for example take a photo of the first person you see, take a picture of a place you go to when you relax. The actual study was trying to understand elderly people in their communities see where they fee safe, the activities they enjoy doing. The results seems extremely good with the probes generating enthusiasm and a communication. Check out the article its quite interesting.

Self Correcting Picture Frames

2005-02-07T23:50:00.000-08:00

Just had a cool idea, well I think so anyway, how about picture frames that are able to straigten themselves! This could be done quite easily with a small motor, digital spirit level and a weight which could move? Maybe Im just loosing it a bit!

Our Project Idea

2005-02-07T22:42:00.000-08:00

Today nastyMind and I sat down to brainstorm our ideas for our project. Initially we identified two possibilities:

A gym "personal trainer"
This could provide, motivation, keep track of schedule and performance, enable you to compete with other ie a virtual rowing race with others, also monitor general performance and provide homogeneous statistics instead of having information distributed over all the machines that you use.

A skiing/snowboarding helper
The idea was to provide a kind of location context aware route planning and safety system. Features like where am I? Show me all piests that are for my level? Where is the closest food place? Help I have broken my leg etc.

We both decided to have a think, and concluded the second would be most interesting and we have a few contacts who we will be using throughout including Russell. If any one on the course is interested, please comment.

Faster and faster computers but still slow interfaces

2005-02-07T22:22:00.000-08:00

Read an article today by the cranky user at IBM about where all our processor cycles are going?
The general theme is that although computers are getting faster and faster, they are doing ever complex things and this results in performance that is not much greater than 15 years ago, ok so the interfaces look nicer and today's systems do much more but isn't it time have OS's that are just ready to work when you are? Hopefully we will soon get to a point where the OS will be instantly ready when we are.

Blogging Social Impact

2005-02-05T18:13:00.000-08:00

Blogging has had a massive social impact and this will continue as more and more blogs and communities knit together. Easy to use blogs leads to more people using them and more community information. It’s important to understand the meaning of community in the blogging world because it has many different forms. Communities can consist of one blogers with many readers who comment on the topics raised. They can be a collection of bloggers with a collection of readers who comment of entries and blog about there thoughts and options on matters or they can be friendships with a small number of readers and shared entries and comments.

Bloggers have been categorised into a number of levels:

Individual Bloggers – which form clusters of interest groups with geographic and interest correlation between one another. A fact for you 80% of friends in the blog world are mutual; if I name Bradley as a friend he will (better!) name me as one.

Pairs, friendships – bloggers with shared interests, providing frequent and important entries

Blog communities- identifiable bursts of activity that can be tracked over time. The magnitude of burstiness seems to be increasing over time also.

Location and interest are the main factors that create community. 20% of the time, 2 friends of the same blogers are friends themselves. This was calculated by a clustering co-effiecnt of bloggers which is extremely high compared with the 4.2 million blogs available!

There has been an increasing amount of growth in communities within the blogsphere. The burstiness – frequency of blog entries/ comments is greater than the increase in communities which suggests behaviour of bloggers within communities is changing. It’s becoming more busrty. When topics are “hot” and everyone wants to say there piece and voice there opinion. A study at livejournal showed a vast number of interest groups exist > 850,000. Communities are generally local interacting among a small number of bloggers (3-20). Bloggers in the community often link to and cross link each other. Another important point about communities is that they have different levels of activity, they may be facing “blogger burnout” which nothing interesting to write about or be in a manic hive of activity discussing the latest hot topic. They are often quirky, highly personal, read by repeat visitors and interwoven into a tight knit but active community.

An interesting fact is that 3 out of 4 of all bloggers are between 16-24 with interest and friendship correlation with age. Another interesting fact is that 0.5% of bloggers are 1-3 years old! These are people setting up blogs for there pets and babies.

Blogging if different from a number of different types of media. For a nice example take email, people may feel embarrassed to send an email about a subject that the recipient may not care about; on a blog it doesn’t demand reading and as such is not intrusive. Also it requires no addressing. Blogs allow people to express their opinions and feelings and outlet their thoughts. They are often used for reflective learning also. That is the main reason I am writing about these topics having read the ACM blogsphere articles on blogging.

A massive trend is the number of children adopting this new way of reaslising there thoughts and opinions. Although these blogs are really intended for a small close knit community of friends in their case, the internet’s nature promotes openness and with the advent of paedophiles grooming children this provides them potentially with information which we would not promote if we realised the potential for what it could be used for these issues must be realised, as many now have the power within a few clicks to publish anything they wish we must educate users that this medium is of global scale!

Blogging Tools and its development

2005-02-05T05:05:00.000-08:00

These are some of the interesting points and some of my opinions of the Blogging tools available today and how it all began.

Blogging didn’t really just begin; it kind of evolved like many things of this world. The first website built by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN was like a blog it was a collection of links pointing to news sites as they came online, weblogs began as web site link aggregators, providing useful links. In 1997 many people began commenting on the links and posting there thoughts, this required quite a lot of technical knowledge to understand HTML, pay for a web host etc and as such the blogspace consisted of technically minded people. Also focus began on posting short distinct entries, kind of like online reverse chronological diaries. In 1999 came the introduction of Blogging software tools that allowed the creation of blogs with no knowledge of HTML or websites, simple click and publish. This opened up this technology to many more people. 2000 saw the introduction of cross blog talk allowing blogers to easily cross reference other bloggers, then came the introduction of comments to blog entries; this lowered the bar for readers to become writers and helped generate community. Blogs bring together information and reveal media bias and perhaps also influence opinion on a wide scale. Personally I have not been involved in the bogging scene until now, in fact I have not even come across it since now and I would consider myself with quite a broad range of knowledge this phenomenon kind of passed me by, until now!

If you’re reading this and you don’t have a blog but would like one check out www.blogger.com, it is so easy and it’s free.

Other development’s in the blog scene include cross link management, www.blogroll.com is one of these kind of things, have a look at the right hand sidebar, it contains blogs I find interesting. The blogroll basically allows me to maintain this list without manually adding and removing html entries, also it provides some indication on if the blogs have anything posted within the last 24 hours. There are things like find a friend which allows metadata to be used to fiend friends from blogrolls.

Other terms you will see in the blogging world include Atom and RSS (really simple syndication) these are xml based common formats for the aggregation of blogs. For example if a blog you are interested has an RSS feed, you can see simple summaries, atom is similar too. Firefox (really nice browser) utilises RSS feeds and allows you to quickly aggregate all the blogs you check for interesting things.

Then finally there are tools www.memestreams.net. Memes track what ever is copied from one person to another. Many bloggers see something interesting on a blog they read or news and blog on it themselves providing commentary or for other reasons meme streams allows us to see what topics are of most importance and the current latest gossip.

www.waypath.com is another kind of blog analysis tool; it uses URL’s referenced in blog entries to link blogs about the same entries.

One issue with blogs is the signal to noise ratio, you get a lot of information you aren’t really interested in when looking at certain blogs, and the semantic web aims to help increase the s/n through blogspace, by providing richer structured metadata and using this to search and filter only things of interest. However some people claim increasing the individuals control of content can reduce importance of the public sphere and group polarization can occur which I kind of agree with, you often skim though blogs on a certain subject and find something unusual which takes your interest, filtering would remove these things. Semantic blogging is not yet ready in place but is an ongoing project.

Our lecture on blogging

2005-02-03T19:08:00.000-08:00

Last week we had a lecture on blogging and some of its social implications. The general trend of the lecture was that blogging is building or helping to build community by providing users from all backgrounds the ability to generate free easily updateable blogs (websites) where they can write about their feelings, opinions and reflect on things but also comment on other people’s blogs. Russell pointed us to some light reading of some articles about blogging in the December 2004 communications of the ACM. I will post any thing interesting that I find.

Windows filesystem checking

2005-02-03T17:56:00.000-08:00

Don't you just hate it when windows on boot up tells you its checking your filesystem for problems, well I have reason to hate it with a passion! My laptop has been randomly crashing (4 months old) it has a bios/hardware fault, anyway as you can image windows reboots and comes back up saying checking disks, I normally just click ignore but this time I thought well let it do its business...... So what did it do? It decided my windows profile (emails, photos, major project uni work, etc etc) was corrupt and converted the profile root into a file! Next when windows loaded it said it cant find the profile( derr yeah) and creates me a nice new one, writing over any data I thought I may be able to recover! It displayed y/n for convert to folder but chose y automatically, I have lost 2 weeks of work and hence hate windows chkdisk and will never trust it again!

Creativity

2005-01-24T11:01:00.000-08:00

In our hci lecture we covered creativity and various techniques that could be used to become more creative. We were asked to bring in unusual in our teams Bradley came armed with a transformer and a gecko ? Strange and unusual just don't ask why he has them ? We split into groups and using brainstorming were tasked to generate interesting ideas using the objects as inspiration.

The objects we were using were a balancing board and a gecko, needless to say there were some interesting and very odd ideas such as:

making the board look like a gecko
taking a stance like a gecko on the board
making bits fall off the board like a lizards tail falls off
and many more

Some interesting techniques for creativity are detailed on mindtools There are some normal things like brainstorming but also interesting ones like reversal. The idea is you ask the opposite questions and analyze these to determine things ie

imagine you want to increase the usability of a website, you ask the question how do I make a website really unusable? Examples

let it take forever to load
use odd colors that really clash
make it display different in different browsers
underline things so people think they are links but are not
make things follow the mouse

As you can see by asking these questions we can get ideas like ensuring the website loads quickly is cross browser compatible etc.

Rotary dial mobiles

2005-01-22T17:02:00.000-08:00

The rotary dial interface was common on many phones in the 1950's I think I have actually used one, at my nans some time ago. These were very bad interfaces in my opinion, quite an un-natural interface and slow number processing. We thought we would never see them again, but there back! Well not really someone has built a rotary dial mobile cell phone! they took a 1957 rotory dial phone, hacked its rotary interface, wired it up to a pic controller chip to decode the number and hooked this up to a GSM module, with a battery, could this be the interface for mobile phones for the elderly? Well its still an interesting technical article lots of pics and some code.

Apple ipod Shuffle - design

2005-01-22T16:51:00.000-08:00

The ipod shuffle is an example of a well designed device fit for purpose, its interesting to see exactly what's inside these little devices to see how the interface design affects the physical and component design, this person has disassembled one giving an overview.

Bluetooth clothing!

2005-01-17T23:00:00.000-08:00

There is no getting away from technology, we know the best technology weaves itself into our lives and becomes invisible until it fails, well Motorola are joining forces with a snowboarding company to actually weave it into our clothes! (link). Have to be careful washing them :)

Being able to controls my mp3 player and listen to it in the hood of my jacket does sound a novel idea maybe "blue jack"eting will become a new craze!

Interesting I/O device : think of lectures, with this we would not have to listen to the crackle and pop of poor amplifier systems, and could get clear audio broadcast to our clothing! Also we could vote or raise a question by pressing a button on our jacket.

Living Robots!

2005-01-17T22:37:00.000-08:00

Just read an article on living robots on BBC news. At the university of California scientists have managed to use rat heart cells to create a tiny device that moves on its own when the cells contract! How Ace!
The article mentions maybe the possibility of using the technology to build tiny power plants or generators, could it soon be possible to feed your PDA or laptop to stop its batteries running out.

This technology looks extremely interesting! What other areas of HCI could these robots be applied too? Tactile interfaces? Display technology? Human - Computer interconnection ?

Phone - Engaged dilemma

2005-01-14T17:33:00.000-08:00

Ok so I thought Id use my blog to record ideas and this one is HCI oriented,
If you have ever tried to phone someone and they are engaged/busy or it rings and then cuts off its very annoying. If someone phones you and you cant/don't want to speak with them you can always cut them off but often they will try again and again until you have to answer.

My idea is to portray information to the caller for the reason, i.e. "driving", "in a meeting", "on the phone", "don't want to talk to you".

Taking it further the profile of the phone could determine the response, or the user could choose to reject stating a reason. Also how about the phone being able to sense its environment i.e. in the car.

My HCI Interests - topics for the HCI-2 course

2005-01-14T13:03:00.000-08:00

Ok, so im new to this, my first blog entry for my HCI-2 course to give lecturers an insight into the kinds of topics within HCI that interest me.
Im interested in the way technology embeds intself into our lives and how from a technical point of view it can be sucessfully achieved.

For the course I would like to see:
Embedded Device Programming: - frameworks, example code, architectures, standards etc that are used in the development of embedded devices like set-top boxes, home automation and mobile computing devices.

Physical Device Design:- Limitations affecting design , integration of componets to humans (sounds scary I know - spiderman 2 anyone?) and ways in which we interact with systems (samsungs new 3d motion detection phone - although you may look stupid while txting your friends its still pritty cool)

Intelligent system - how AI can be applied to make computer systems more usable, evolving interfaces evolving hardware.

Website Design:- Standards, CSS, PHP maybe a mini project developing website, serverside apache, mysql.

Thats my lot, HCI covers such a broad category of "things" its hard not to enjoy some part of it.