UIST 2007

Dirty Desktops: Using a Patina of Magnetic Mouse Dust to Make Common Interactor Targets Easier to Select
Amy Hurst, Jennifer Mankoff, Anind K. Dey, Scott E. Hudson

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Summary:
The authors of this paper are attempting to create a platform independent system that will aid users in selecting highly used buttons by jumping the mouse to these buttons when the mouse is close by. This is also independent from the applications that are being used. There is no code required by application developers for this to work in their applications.

The whole idea is to use every mouse click as "magnetic mouse dust." Wherever there was a mouse click on the window of an application, it would be recorded. As buttons were repeatedly clicked, magnetic mouse dust would gather over them. Whenever the mouse approached these dirty areas, the mouse would be attracted to the button and land on the buttons. This made it very easy to land the mouse on a button once the system had learned where all of your clicks have congregated. This is able to be independent from the application because system events just record the x and y coordinate of the click in relation to the window.

There were two types of dust: dust that accumulated when the mouse was clicked and dust that accumulated when the mouse was dragged. The dust that correlated to dragging the mouse aided in dragging scrollbars and the like. Users found the entire system to be helpful. Some users took longer to grow accustomed to the mouse being controlled by the computer, but after they got the hang of it, they enjoyed it.


Discussion:
This seems like an effective system. I would have to use it to see if it would benefit me at all, but I know that there are some users with physical disabilities that could really benefit from this kind of assistive device.

The one thing that the paper did not address that I had questions about was what happened when the window resizes, either by force of the user or the computer. It could either clear all the dust and start over, or, since the dust is computed in relation to the top left corner of the window, the dust move to still be at the same coordinates in relation to that corner. Both could be useful, depending on the application. Some applications anchor everything to the top left corner and it would be fine to keep the dust. Some buttons anchor to other sides though and the dust would be congregating over a portion of the screen that was no longer a button after a resize. The paper was not clear on what happened to the dust.

Emotional Design

By Donald A. Norman

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Summary

In Emotional Design, Norman again discusses the design of the things around us. This time it is focused on the emotions contained within designs and the emotions evoked by designs.

People invariably interpret objects as if they have emotions, it does not matter whether they are animate or inanimate. Because of this, designers should consider this when working on their new creations. Especially for games, movies, music, and robots. Emotion can easily be added to these mediums and are, in fact, necessary if the product is going to be successful.

In the beginning of the book, Norman discusses the impact a design can have on our emotions. A design impacts our emotions on three different levels: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. The visceral level is the immediate, natural, and instinctive impressions people get from looking at utilizing a design. Good behavioral design leads to a functional product. The product might be ugly, but if it gets the job done right, it is scoring points with the user on a behavioral level. The reflective level is affected when a person consciously thinks back on using that product. The reflective emotions are not necessarily accessed when the product is in use. It is when the user is thinking.

Discussion

This was a decent read. It is hard to discuss this book as if it was new though. This is the third book by Donald Norman that has been required reading and I'm growing tired of reading numerous books about design without being able to put any of it into practice.

I think that if we were going to be putting the things that we are learning from the Norman books into practice, it would have been good to do this with the first books before reading this one. Emotional Design focuses on an entirely different part of design and it would have been nice to put the other focal points into practice before moving onto this one. There is a lot of information to take in and it will be hard to utilize it all at once instead of taking it in piece by piece.

CHI 2008 Evaluating Visual Cues for Window Switching On Large Screens

R. Hoffmann, P. Baudisch, D. Weld

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This paper evaluated the effectiveness of different cues to help direct a user's attention to a new window to focus on. The intended environment is a system set up that include multiple and large resolution monitors. Because there is so much screen real estate, the user needs this additional help to find the windows they are looking for otherwise it wastes time.

The methods of attracting attention were varied. There were four different frames that would highlight the window, there was a mask that dimmed everything except for the active window, and there were four trails that would lead to the new window.

The most effective method by itself was a trail called CenterSplash. This began in the center of the screen and tapered up to the new window. The tests were measured by the time it took a user to find the new window. When different frames and trails were combined, the best result was the CenterSplash, RedFrame, ShadowFrame, and BubbleFrame amalgam. This was only slightly better than the CenterSplash by itself when comparing times, but it scored much better on a user preference test.

The Man Who Shocked The World: The Life And Legacy Of Stanley Milgram

by Thomas Blass

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Summary:

The Man Who Shocked The World is a biography of Stanley Milgram. Milgram was a very bright child who always had an interest in science and was known to carry out many experiments. He went to college, and did predictably well. Even though he had a love for the natural sciences as a child, his graduate studies were focused on social psychology.

Milgram's most famous contribution to social psychology is his obedience experiments. In these experiments, he tested to see how long a subject would obey when put in a situation that contradicted with their morals. The subjects were told to shock another person with an increasing number of volts in order to "teach" them to remember a sequence of words. Unknown to the subjects, the person getting shocked was in on the experiment and was not actually getting shocked. The results were surprising to everyone. A very large percentage of people continued to obey the orders to shock the "learner" even after the shocks were apparently dangerous to his health.

The obedience experiments were very controversial and brought Milgram into the public eye. Even though he started other experiments, he could never fully move past the obedience experiments. His last years consisted of teaching at CUNY while studying city life.


Discussion:

The most discussed aspect of Milgram's life was whether or not his obedience experiments were ethical. It is hard for me to draw a conclusion on how I feel about this issue. The methods could have been detrimental to the subjects. The stress they were put under may have caused health issues if they had heart problems. They could have also been affected mentally if they were unable to accept the fact that they were willing to shock a person just because they were told to. Those are some of the unethical issues that I see with these experiments.

However, the participants reported that they were happy to be in the experiment and I do think the results are significant. So, since the outcome of the experiment was good, I approve of it. If it were to be done again, I think that more prescreening should be done to ensure that the participants can handle it physically and mentally.

The Design of Future Things

by Donald A. Norman

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Summary:

The Design of Future Things introduces design ideas that should be kept in mind when designing novel technologies that people are not currently familiar with. The two main illustrations used are automobiles, that either somewhat take over driving or fully take over driving, or smart homes. The smart homes described monitor your living habits around the house and either make suggestions on what you do (e.g. tell you what to eat) or predict what you want to do and take the necessary actions to make that possible (e.g. turn on lights and music when you walk into a room).

Norman has a summary of Design Rules at the end of the book that pretty much summarize the book into a few lines:

Design Rules for Human Designers of "Smart" Machines:

1. Provide rich, complex, and natural signals.

2. Be predictable.

3. Provide good conceptual models.

4. Make the output understandable.

5. Provide continual awareness without annoyance.

6. Exploit natural mappings.

Design Rules Developed by Machines to Improve Their Interactions with People:

1. Keep things simple.

2. Give people a conceptual model.

3. Give reasons.

4. Make people think they are in control.

5. Continually reassure.

6. Never label human behavior as "error."

Discussion:

Even though it was not the focus of the book, my favorite parts were when the author discussed current research projects and the technologies that were being produced. I was not very interested in their design as much as I was just interested in what they can do. I think that will be the way most people will approach these future technologies. They will not consciously care about the design, only how cool or useful the product is portrayed by ads. If the design is poor, the products will be frustrating to use, but if they are a novel product, they will still be purchased nonetheless. Most of the time, design will only become a factor when two similar products are released and their utilities are the same. Then, when a good design is what gives a product its advantage over its competition, is when design will be given priority.

UIST 2008 Backward Highlighting: Enhanced Faceted Search

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Wilson, et al.

Summary:

Faceted searches rely on columns of categories to filter search results. One example which was heavily used is the column view in iTunes. There are two current methods of faceted search: directional and non-directional. iTunes uses the directional browsing, in which every column to the right of the selected column is filtered according to the selection. So, for example, if a particular Artist (middle column) was chosen, the Albums (right column) would be filtered to only show the albums by the particular artist. The Genre column (left column) would not be touched though. Non-directional browsing filters results in both directions. If an Artist is selected, both the Genre and Album columns would be filtered out.

Backward Highlighting (BH) is a new middle ground for faceted searches. BH leans more to the side of directional browsing. If a column is selected in the middle, all results to the right are filtered out as in directional browsing, and all columns to the left retain all data, but the related data is highlighted. The idea is that the added highlights should show every possible combination of selected data that could be used to get to the current filter results.

There were three hypotheses going into user studies. 1) Users will be able to discover more facts. 2) Users will remember more facts. 3) Users wil use the remembered facts to improve search behavior. The tests that were done used three different settings: no BH, BH, and BH that grouped all highlighted items at the top. The results concluded that all three hypotheses were correct and that there was no significance difference between grouped and ungrouped BH.

Discussion:

BH seems very logical and it makes me wonder why this has not been done before. It adds metadata to the screen without taking away from the data like non-directional faceted search but, at the same time, it does not overburden the user with this metadata. I do question the usefulness of this metadata. The tests show that users remember the highlighted rows, but what good does that do if the user knows how to get there already? I am sure there is a good application for this, but I cannot think of one at the time of writing.

Taskpose: Exploring Fluid Boundaries in an Associative Window Visualization

Bernstein, et al.

Summary:

Taskpose is a combination of a window manager and a task manager. It determines which windows are stuck in a common task and group those windows together when Taskpose is called up (the presentation draws heavily from Mac OS X's Expose). It also tries to determine which windows are the most important and enlarges the important windows' size.

The window importance and window relations are based on window switching. The more a window is switched to, the more important it becomes. And the relationships between windows are developed by monitoring how many times Window A switches to Window B and vice versa. The windows then move around the screen to congregate with similar windows. The more important a window is, the larger the thumbnail becomes. The larger, more important windows have a static tendancy and the smaller, related windows are attracted to them.

After a week long user study, Taskpose was found to be useful but still had some weaknesses. Users tended to like Taskpose. It was very useful when the open windows were too numerous for the Windows Taskbar to appropriately handle. There were two prominent shortcomings of Taskpose. First, it did not recognize "parent-child" relationships, such as a buddy list and the chat windows. Second, when multiple projects were being worked on simultaneously, the two projects would merge in Taskpose.

Discussion:

Taskpose's presentation takes from Expose, which I really like. However, its usefulness falls short due to the two problems discovered during the user study, especially the second shortcoming. If these issues could be fixed, it could be useful and would make window switching quicker and require less mental work. Another problem, which is mentioned in the paper, is that importance and relationships are solely based on window switching. Importance should also include the time a window is active.