Obedience to Authority

In Obedience to Authority, tests were performed on people to see to what level that they would inflict pain on another person if they were told to do so. The basis for this was from the experiments carried out in Nazi Germany. Part of the idea was to see if people "were following orders." Many different setups were tested. The subject was told to administer to shocks to another person when they messed up in a learning exercise. No shocks were actually administered, but the person faked it.

This is an interesting idea, however I think there are very real ethical concerns that should have been addressed. SOme people might be emotionally damaged from the experiment. I don't think this was ever taken into account properly. Even once they realized that they didn't actually hurt anybody, they still realized what they would do and to what level.

Emotional Design

Emotional Design was about how things affect emotionally and how that relates to utility and usability of the product. The book says how even if something is not useful. The basic idea is that we can like something and hold it in high esteem if it has great meaning to us.

I can agree with this. For example, I've gotten annoyed lately at windows 7 because I've been having some issues with it. While on the other hand, things that serve no purpose I like a lot. One such example would be this toy plastic fish that my grandfather gave me many years ago. It sits on my bookshelf and reminds me of him whenever I see it.

Inmates are Running the Asylum

The second part of the book discussed ways to look at programming and concepts regarding design. An interesting concept here was persona's. Instead of designing for users, you design for specific imaginary people. This allows you to have clearer set goals.

I thought that the second half of the book was quite decent. The persona idea was what I got the most out of. It was a way I had never though of before as how to think about when building something.

Emotional Design

The book "Emotional Design" was different from the previous books we read because it focused on making things that people want versus pure usability. In this book, a main theme was that designing something people like will typically serve much better than something that they use but hate. There were several examples of things that the author uses, like teacups and orange juicers which were not that practical, but had very off the wall designs. These as he said were great conversation starters and in some ways treated as pieces of art. Another idea is that human's interact on different levels, visceral, behavioral, and reflective levels. A good design will take the first two into account. A great design will use all.

It is important to design things so that people will like them. In general people will be much happier with something that is cool then something that is boring and useful. This is something that people should really take into consideration when designing products for consumption.

“My Dating Site Thinks I’m a Loser”: Effects of Personal Photos and Presentation Intervals on Perceptions of Recommender Systems

The article focuses on how people changing their answers if they perceive that the system is being affected with hopes of manipulating it as they see fit. For example, Netflix suggests movies based on what you have previously watched. If the movies it suggests are movies you don't like or wouldn't want people to know about, Are you are likely to change your queue to change what the system thinks about you? If the system has a picture of you, are you as worried about what it will say? For the paper, the authors set up a user study with a dating system to see if people changed their answers midway through and also how the picture affected it. The system displayed the same match set for everybody, regardless of how they answered, so it gave the testers a clear picture of how people try to manipulate systems. They found that people will start to change their answers if given intervals to see their progress/matches. They also found when people post a picture, they are less worried about what the text says.

I can agree with the basis of this article. Many times you will either consciously or subconsciously alter your decisions to get the system to say what you want it to. I've noticed this on netflix, for example when I rented Night at the Museum, it suggested all kinds of family movies including Disney kid's things. I'm not sure what prompted it, but I think the next one I got was Rambo.


My Dating Site Thinks I'm a Loser: effects of personal photos and presentation intervals on perceptions of recommender systems

Ethnography

My original idea for the ethnography was to compare line efficiency between multiple lines and a single line with then was helped by individual processors. For example, a grocery store where each checker has a line, or McDonald's, where there is just one line, which then whoever is at the front goes to the first available checker. This I decided would be hard to test and compare.

After talking with a few friends, we decided to get together on a group project. We eventually came to the conclusion to do a comparison between computer labs on observing how many people are actually doing work vs just surfing or wasting time. We plan to compare several computer labs at different times, and also potentially the gender of the user.

The Design of Everyday Things

The book, Design of Everyday Things, tells how a designer thinks about common place things to make them easier to use or more efficient. For example, how do you know if a door is a push or pull, or even where to push or pull? The author covers simple things, such as placement of the handle or bar to indicate which. The author later goes on to discuss how many times a bad design is really to blame in place of user error (which is officially the cause). The author argues that a good designer needs to get design the interface so that it will be easy and simple for the user.

This book is interesting in that it explores in great detail something that almost everybody takes for granted. I think this is useful for CHI because it makes you think how to make your user interfaces simpler. For example, put pictures by your buttons to make it more intuitive or change the layout so that there is less stuff per page to not intimidate the user as much. However, I think this book was much more verbose then necessary in describing the various examples and points.