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.

Mouse 2.0: Multi-touch Meets the Mouse

Mouse 2.0: Multi-touch Meets the Mouse
Nicolas Villar, Shahram Izadi, Dan Rosenfeld, Hrvoje Benko, John Helmes, Jonathan Westhues, Steve Hodges, Eyal Ofek, Alex Butler, Xiang Cao1, Billy Chen

This paper discussed various new ideas to implement into a mouse to add additional adjustable controls instead of the class 2 dimensions with buttons. The designers tried several different methods, such as movable arms, capacitance, and light as methods of detecting unconventional input. They built sensors to experiment with other movements, such as hand position on the mouse and rotating the mouse.

I find that more than 2 dimensional controls on mice (not counting buttons and scrolling) is probably unnecessary for most day to day activities. However with more advanced things like 3D design or gaming additional controls could prove very useful. For example, I recall playing flight simulator ages ago and was thrilled when I realized that the joy stick also had a third axis which could control power. There is no reason that a mouse should be restricted to only 2D sensing.

A Practical Pressure Sensitive Computer Keyboard

A Practical Pressure Sensitive Computer Keyboard
Paul H. Dietz, Benjamin Eidelson, Jonathan Westhues and Steven Bathiche

The designers built a keyboard with can detect how hard you push the keys. They used several different levels circuits laid out in a grid matrix. By pushing the key down, you completed different circuits, which is how they measured how hard the keys were pressed. This is notable because they keyboard has really not changed much since it was first widely used in the typewriter. In the paper, they describe how similar technology has been used in electronic music keyboards and other methods, however it has not been applied to the standard qwerty keyboard. From the user studies, they reported that many people would be interested in a keyboard which can expand user input.

I think this could be very useful for input other than conventional text from keyboards. The designers mentioned that in gaming that it could control how fast you move. That would be very useful as with conventional keyboards only send a discrete true/false type response. However, I don't see that this would be very useful in just typing/drafting papers. I don't mind holding the shift key to do a capital letter, and in some ways that would be easier in my opinion than pushing the key harder.

Virtual Shelves: Interactions with Orientation Aware Devices

Frank Chun Yat Li, David Dearman, and Khai N. Truong

In this paper, the writers used sensors to capture movement by the user. This was then translated to a mobile device as a proof of concept. The idea is to use the measured motions similar to a mouse to select objects/choices on a mobile phone. Motions were tracked by motion cameras, so for a production, it would need to be configured to use accelerometers built into the device. The idea is to use muscle memorization instead of forcing the user to push a series of buttons to select a choice. After testing, they found that after a bit of practice the testers like the idea.

I think this is a great idea and definitely worth looking into. *Finish

CommunityCommands: Command Recommendations for Software Applications

CommunityCommands is a plug in for AutoCAD which monitors user input and makes recommendations on commands which the users may benefit by using. The plug in first records all the users commands. Typically, all the users in an organization will use the system. After a set amount of time, a algorithm will compare all the users most commonly used commands. Then the add on will offer suggestions to the users of commands unobtrusively, so as not to interrupt the work flow. Commands were analyzed to try to make sure they were "good" by being useful to the user and not "bad" by being irrelevant or obsolete. This system was tested small scale and found typically favorable results.

To be honest, I've never really given much thought to making suggestions to the user. Typically with software you see the "tip of the day" or a suggestion quickly read or ignore it. It can being annoying if it inconveniences you. This is very unique idea which allows you to get feedback at your leisure.