Finally in Maryland

I'm hoping to keep up my blog on what I'm doing outside of work here in Maryland, so people back home in Ansteorra/Texas will know. I don't know how often I'll be able to update this, but we'll see. In the next couple of days, I'll hopefully be posting a few pics and thoughts from my drive from Texas to Maryland.

Fitts' Law

Fitts' Law is very curious. It is a model of human movement which predicts the time to move a mouse/cursor/etc to a certain target area. The work for this was done back in 1954, and has many implications for design then as well as modern and future design.

The way humans move has not changed for years, and will not change quickly. What this law tells us is that in designing new interfaces, we need to be aware of the time it takes for a person to find and select an icon. This time can affect how well the user likes the program. So, when designing an interface, one should be aware of the size of their icons and buttons, since it could influence how users like and/or enjoy the program/device.

How do people use computers?

My CHI09 paper is called Computer Usage in Daily Life, by Thomas Beauvisage.

This paper is about a study of French participants that determined the different types of computer users there are, and created generalizations of this that could affect future design of computer interfaces. In my reading, I focused on the basic methods of the study and the results over the way the results were generated.

The French participants were recruited by phone and internet. Because of the nature of the study, all members of the family were required to participate. Overall, the panel included 661 households and 1434 individuals. The families installed a tracking application on their computer, which, once running, appeared as an icon in the system tray.

The study generated five computer usage day profiles, four household profiles, and five individual profiles.

The computer usage day profiles are:


Household Profiles:
1. PC 24/24 - 15%
2. Always available- 33%
3. PC on demand- 30%
4. Low usage- 22%

Individual Profiles:



After this study, they found three implications for design:
1. Operating System design: They believe it could enhance user experience by making computers boot faster. This would be better for the PC on demand and low usage groups.
2. Application and service design: They feel that in application design, the features only need to address one or two of the different groups, instead of trying to please all of the groups.
3. Web services design: "Providing new services as Web services rather than casual application appears to be a key for success."

Overall, this was an interesting paper. While I don't doubt that they got a decent representative group, it would be interesting to see what the results would be in America, or a different country.

Other interesting data:






Link to the paper here.

Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful (Some of the Time)

This paper is by Saul Greenberg and Bill Buxton. The point of this paper is to point out that usability evaluations are not always the best means to test a product. The authors seem to think that usefulness tests would be better. However, these are hard to do, since it is always unknown how useful people will find a product. They also believe that tests appear to be almost required, and this should not necessarily be so.

The authors make some good points in this essay. However, I do not see usability evaluations disappearing in the near future. But it would be nice if there were other methods to evaluate products that might give a better understanding of how they would be taken out in the world.

Harmful or Not: Human-Centered Design

I recently read a paper by Don Norman (oh my gosh! Another Norman writing!), called Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful.

Norman's main point of this paper is that design ought to be activity centered, and not human centered. The reason for this is that people do things on a computer for an activity or job. So the design of the program ought to be for what that activity or job is. One of his points is that people adapt to the tools.

I think he makes a good point in that activity centered design is important. I also think that the idea that people adapt to the tools is possibly true. However, people also adapt the environment to fit them. How else would the early humans have gotten tools in the first place? Maybe I'm hitting the wrong point, but that's what I think.

Methods of Collecting Internet Content

My UIST 07 paper is called Relations, Cards, and Search Templates: User-Guided Web Data Integration and Layout by Mira Dontcheva, Steven M. Drucker, David Salesin, and Michael F. Cohen.

This paper was about the three methods of organizing internet data that the writers had designed. The first is an interaction technique based on relations, linking different websites and allowing users to automatically extract content from these websites. The second is a way of merging content from these websites and being able to organize it visually in a way easy for the user to see. The third involves search templates to allow users to search faster for the information they want.

The relation-based interaction technique works when a user clicks to extract certain data from one website, and then gets information for the same company/restaurant/etc from a different website. They have the option of linking the two websites together. After that, when the user goes to one of the linked websites, the program will automatically pull the related information from the other website(s).



The organization of the content of these websites is done with the second method. A card is created with this information. Then the user can organize the data on these cards in any order they want. After they set the first card, all other cards will be set up the same way.


The search templates work similarly. They start with having a card and search template which has relations in it that say what website information goes where. Then the user can select a search template and type in their search query.



This seems like a very useful piece of software. It would enable many people to do more efficient searches that would save them a lot of time.

Inmates? Running the Asylum? We're in trouble!

I recently finished reading The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper. This was a very interesting read.

The book starts out by giving examples of what happens when computerized systems start being integrated in many different system. These examples were sometimes highly amusing, but most of the time dealt with important systems that failure causes enormous amounts of damage.

The author then goes on to tell of company blunders dealing with design, and design blunders in general. Then he mentions some of the things one can do about it. He states a method of design he feels would work well to take care of design issues.

I think this book seemed like it was trying to target multiple audiences for multiple parts of the book. Some of it aimed at developers and some of it aimed at managers. This made it a little bit harder to read, since the writing style was changing as we were going through the book. However, he made some very good points about the development process and the importance of design in the process. Overall, I enjoyed reading this book.