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.

Reading Books Online

The CHI2008 paper I read was called "Readability of Scanned Books in Digital Libraries," by Alexander J. Quinn, Chang Hu, Takeshi Arisaka, Anne Rose, and Benjamine B. Bederson.

The focus of the paper is on making scanned books easier to read online. The main type of book they talked about are children's books. In these books, the images can be nearly as important as the text. How the text is displayed can also be important. The writers have come up with two solutions to this problem.

The first is called ClearText, and it is when the text in the page is taken out and rendered in the font set of the user's machine. This makes it possible to "resize the text without resizing the background." It also would help towards the translation of the text for readers of other languages. However, problems come up when dealing with the font size. If the font gets too large, then it could obscure the image. There is also the issue of what the font size should be when switching between pages. They determined that there should be a maximum font size allowed based on the page with the most text.


The second is called PopoutText. This leaves the text as is in the picture/page, but it makes a sort of cut-out of it that can be clicked on and popped out of the image with greater magnification. The advantage of this is that the text stays the same, and the imagery with the text, if there is anything, will remain. However, this does not lend itself for translations of the text.


The writers then compared these two methods with the current method of online books. This method shows the image, and the user must magnify the image to see all the text. Then they must scroll around the page to find all the wording, and sometimes this can be a challenge, depending on the size of their screen.


I really enjoyed reading this paper. I can see these sorts of things coming into standard use, especially as more and more material starts appearing on the internet. Personally, I don't like reading things online, and part of the reason for this is in fact the smaller resolution of the screen. The writers mention this as one of their reasons for creating these interfaces. It looks like they have a good base, and I hope to see this come into more standard use in the future.

Link to paper

Homes, Robots, and Cars, Oh My!

Regarding Don Norman's "The Design of Future Things", there were several things I found interesting. First off, compared to "The Design of Everyday Things," the examples were completely relevant to our modern time. However, he seemed to use the same ones all the time. These are homes that will try to predict your needs and wants, and cars that will be able to drive you themselves without any human intervention.

I really don't know about anyone else, but I find the idea of technology that just does stuff for us to be a little strange. I realize that some of this sort of stuff already exists, and we're used to it. These are things like clothing factories that automatically make clothing. People used to do this themselves, to a certain extent, but it's become a thing where it's somewhat surprising when someone owns a sewing machine and can use it. I happen to be part of a group that makes our own historical clothing to do reenactment, so I'm slowly learning how to use a sewing machine, and my roommate certainly does.

But things like your scale telling your refrigerator what you shouldn't have for breakfast just because you've gained a little bit of weight? At this point, it seems a little off the top. The scale would need to be able to do so much in order to figure out how much weight is fat and how much is muscle. I know of someone who was told she was overweight for her height. She's a short muscular person in top condition. It's all muscle.

And cars that can drive themselves. At this point, it sounds kinda scary to me. I suppose that I just don't trust the technology we have today. Sometimes I wonder whether it is because I'm a computer scientist that I don't trust technology. Or for the same reason that I want to feel more in control of it, or that I understand what it's doing, and I can see potential for failure.

Overall, the book was well-written, and provoked interesting thoughts.

Tour Video Paper

The paper I read is called "Creating Map-based Storyboards for Browsing Tour Videos" by Suporn Pongnumkul, Jue Wang, and Michael Cohen. It is over the author's tool to allow people who make videos as they travel places to make a more comprehensive and informative tour guide-like portfolio. The tool takes in the video sequence, and pre-processes it to determine feature points for both quality measurement and identifying coherent shots. This pre-processing then creates a coherence matrix to help pick out the interesting shots that will be used to generate the final set of coherent shots. The authoring part of their program is where the user interface comes in. This is where the user can start creating their storyboard presentation. The third part of the tool is the viewing tool, where the user can view the videos and explore the locations of the scenes.

This sounds like an interesting tool that might make tour video processing much easier. What I liked is that they did a user study of the product (minus the pre-processing, since that would have been harder on the participants), and were well aware of the limitations of their testing. The authors seem to have a good plan for future changes and testing as well. I thought that this would be a great tool to have, if I ever found myself in a position to do something of this sort. However, I'm not sure if they really know whether this tool would be good for basic users, or those not used to working with computers. The participants of the testing were all major computer users. Also, their sample size of 13 seems a little low, but there could have been other limitations that affected this.

The above is the viewing tool of their program.
Below is the viewing tool, which is a web-based interface.

Both images taken from the paper directly. All rights to the writers.

The Mole People

I read "The Mole People" by Jennifer Toth. Overall, it was an interesting book. It was written more like a series of short stories than a chapter book with a plot. This made it a little easier to read, since you don't always have to remember what happened before, but also she talked to so many people that the names just started merging as I continued to read the book. I started having problems remembering who was who, and what sort of situation they were living in.

The book starts out describing her troubles getting information out of the authorities above ground, since they were trying to keep the fact that there were people living in the tunnels a secret. I can understand what they were thinking, in that they don't want people to panic about it. However, I don't see that they gain any real benefits from that. I think that if people found out on their own, then there'd be more panic than if they were already informed about it.

I think Ms. Toth is really brave for doing this research. She was going down into these tunnels to meet the underground dwellers. This would have been incredibly dangerous and she could have lost her life. On the other hand, I don't think she would have gotten as much information had she not done this. However, I think if she had had a partner working with her, then it might have been safer for her. And there might have been a little more data collection as well, because they can look for different things.

So, as a book, it was enlightening to see what sort of living situations the tunnel dwellers have, and realizing that this could have easily have happened elsewhere besides New York. It just happens that it is a heightened issue because of the number of tunnels beneath the city.

Forum Ethnography

I must admit, I was a little wary about doing an ethnography at first. I am no good at inserting myself into a place where I can make observations about a group of people. However, I think the ethnography I did with Kevin Kwan worked pretty well.

Considering that we weren't exactly seeing the people posting on the forum, I think we were able to see some good data on them. I personally don't post on forums at all, so this was entirely new to me. Some of the comments were highly entertaining, while others I felt were somewhat inappropriate. On the other hand, though, Kevin made it sound ike these sorts of comments are fairly normal. From what I know in real life, sheltered as I have been, I realize that these sorts of comments are more than likely used off the internet as well. Of course I know I can't completely generalize online forum thread posting with offline discussions. This is because once a discussion is off-topic in a person to person conversation, it will typically stay off-topic, especially if there are lots of people. It will, on occasion, come back to topic if it's more a question and answer session.

...I just realized that I linked our forum ethnography to real life. This is something I hadn't thought of originally, nor when I was working on the paper for the ethnography. But, people are the same either posting online or having a conversation. The type of person doing each might be different (since when you post online you're more hidden from other posters), but overall what they tend to say will be similar.

So, I hope I've hit something I should be blogging about. I more or less ended up off-topic. In the long term, though, this is what I got out of the ethnography I did with Kevin after letting it sit in my mind and mulling it over a little.

Media Equation

This book was focused around the subject of using already established psychological knowledge and applying it to media and computers. Reeves and Naas basically took all of the statements and replaced the secondary human in the statement with 'computer', or some form of that. Then they tested to see whether these statements still hold true. The basis of the book was to describe the experiments they did and explain the results.

Personally, I wasn't as fond of this book as I was of 'The Design of Everyday Things'. However, there were a few things I thought of initially as I was reading the first few chapters of the book. They seemed to keep expounding on the fact that people tend to treat computers and media as if they were real people. While I don't agree with them, I do know that I personally have named several pieces of my electronics, but that is mainly to keep them straight in my mind. I don't give them personalities. Sometimes I'll get frustrated at my computer and talk to it like it's got a personality, but I know it doesn't.

One of the other things I thought of while thinking along those lines is the fact that I am a computer science major. I work with computers, and have been dealing more closely with computers than the general populace has. So I was wondering whether this is the main reason I don't really think of media as being real (based on my impression of the definition of real in the book) is because of this. However, I realize that they mentioned that some of the people for one of their studies were fairly knowledgeable about computers, and could have programmed the programs they were using for the study. I just don't think that computers should be praising themselves, or making comments that are human-like, either praising the user or otherwise. If it was a human-like face on the screen doing that, then I can see it happening. But a spell check should NOT be saying things like 'you spelled this hard word correctly. congratulations!'...

Another thought I had concerned their idea of size and clarity of the image or sound. I don't think that people actually think of the media hardware as being 'real', but that they might instead be thinking about themselves being in the same place as what they are watching. This is one of the points I don't think I really understand about it. Also, a computer screen is much closer to you than a TV normally would be. I don't remember if they mentioned taking this into account or not when explaining their different experiments.

Overall, it is a decent book. I think those who are going into a field where they need to be able to interact with people should read this book, but in my experience as a computer scientist, I don't particularly agree with their point of view, nor think that it is a priority to read this book.

Commented on George's blog entry for this book.