One Minute Papers & other HCI Miscellanea

International Job Sources:

http://www.umich.edu/~icenter/overseas/
http://www.globalinfojobs.com

-jdw

Question: For every new design, one can come up with multiple user studies. But how does one decide which user studies are important and which ones are not?

Point: Adding help feature into a design seems to be very important. It should be very intuitive and straightforward, but who decides what intuitive and straightforward is?

Main point: Years ago the focus was on content development on the web. Recently, it seems there's more focus on how to better present users with focused information and how to manage that content.

Question: I wonder about animation. Even though the article we read was not conclusive on the usefulness of it, we can all point to good applications. What are the rules, I wonder?

Main point: Limitless possibilities for user studies. A few minutes of heuristic evaluation uncovers numerous UI issues that "need" to be empiricially tested. It seems we need stronger frameworks or processes for determining what are the most critical aspects to test.

Question: What is the role of theory in guiding the design/selection of users studies?

Main Point: Designing help takes a lot of planning. Even with Jesse's simple looking animations, it was interested to see that the class had many different ideas. Since it would be impossible to conduct user studies for each idea, the designers just have to make decisions either to use their intuitions.

Question: How long can these animations be before users get tired of them? Does interaction enable users to retain focus longer?

Point
Help is largely absent from web sites. It's another indication that the web browser is almost a step backward in terms of interface usability, considering that help has been around in software for quite some time.

Question
Where is the line between help about using a site and help about content on the site? Is help about content on the site what the site should be addressing anyways? Is there a separation between a site help system and the site itself?

Main point: interesting that you guys are using animation to help explain concepts on the gov stats website since you mentioned studies have found graphics don't necessarily help or hinder the what people take away from a website. nice graphics by the way.

Question: for people to use the animated index is there a box that they have to scroll through first to find the topic?

point: helping people understand statistics may require expertise in educational psychology.

question: is "help" a stop gap approach to solving what is essentially an information architecture (and bureaucratic) problem on the bls site?

(a) Main Point: Templating of sorts is a very viable and accessible way to mollify the amount of labor required to make help tools more interactive and multimodal.

Question: Will animation and other help devices designed to simplify understanding occasionally offend users who feel the level of presentation is below their comprehension abilities? (Seems unlikely, but I know a guy who is gravely offended by the existence of Reader's Digest.)

Main point: Usability is a science that is important in facilitating design. Though it is always an iterative process.

Question: with the gov docs pop-up you are combining visual learning with text. Do you need both? Should they be designed to stand alone?

Main point: nice review of a series of usability studies realted to open-video project.

question: How is representation of the users for these studies? For example, if most of users selected from SILS, they can not reprent the general user since they have much higher computer skills.

Main point: HCI and user studies are a science and not window dressing. Gary showed us a model of a user study and using it helped the researchers design experiments.

Question: It seems the open video project is investigating the “art” that went into making the videos in the first place.

Point: Complex problems require complex user studies. Numerous interacting and/or contradictory effects may be present, making the challenge of determining which effects are most influential (and relevant to theory/practice) especially important.

Question: How do we establish isomorphism of low-level 'tasks' and high-level 'goals?' How do we map low-level cognitive measures (e.g. recognition/recall memory) to broader concepts such as 'understanding?'

Main point: It's remarkable how much people can glean from fast forwards even when they are moving very fast.

Question: Even though people can recognize and assimilate video clips at a very high rate of speed, I wonder if they can really arrive at the same understanding of "aboutness" they would get with a textual description? What might we do to approach that?

Point: It's interesting to me that user satisfaction and learning aren't correlated.
Question: Would it be worth varying the speed of fast forward based on the frequency of scene changes?

point: reading text requires more cognitive muscle, takes more time, is more memorable, seems to be prefered to images

question: but why? studies have shown that literate people have better working memory. are linguistic symbols more salient in the mind than visual symbols/objects?

Major point(s)
User studies that build on one another lead to more focused evaluation of interesting facets of a UI. Choosing what facets to test is difficult, however.

Question
What kind of audio fast forwarding could be developed to supplement the video fast forwards?

. user studies can be used for different purposes: understanding the overall problem, deciding the benefits of a particular feature, or effectiveness of a new interface.

Main Point: A lot of time and planning went into the usability studies for Open Video. The number of users in the study was surprisingly small, but it was useful at least to provide feedback.

Question: How does color or greyscale affect how well people can recall images?

Question:
Is text really better for search vs looking at the pictures?

Point:
Even with a very fast rate of fast forward people are able to fill in the gaps and come up with a very plausible story.

A main point: Although they are not customized to the content, arbitrarily selective visual previews of video content can serve to convey the gist of content effectively.

A question: There seems to be a spectrum from customized preview to automatic and incremental frame selection that causes inverse variation in preview creation labour and effectiveness of information; for what situation types can an estimated "best" point along this continuum be recommended (that is, if it's not always at the extreme of no customization of frame selection criteria)?

Main point: The idea of Open Video fast forward, seems similar to how visually impaired people speed up the audio of BAT. I would wager that the more people use the software the more information that people can retain at a higher speed. x64 would actually be slower to some people.

Question: With practice I wonder how fast video's will be viewed in the future?

Let's do lunch awesome idea! I can see a very techy family using this to pass information back & forth. Good metaphor of sticky notes. Like the graphics as well. Would be cool if it could be text messaged to everyone on a beeper if people's filter's were set up appropriately to recieve messages when they are posted.

The Let's Do Lunch Demo may be accessed at www.cs.unc.edu/~parente/ldl/PostDemo.html. Any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

You will need Macromedia Flash 7. If you have an older version of flash, the program will start, but will not run correctly. Version 7 for Internet Explorer may be downloaded from Macromedia's website at http://www.macromedia.com.

All comments and questions about the design may be sent to dsjen@cs.unc.edu. Any problems running the demo should be directed to parente@cs.unc.edu

PITCAM:
http://www.unc.edu/webcams/pitcam/

Science Complex Construction Cam:
http://scicomwebcam.chem.unc.edu/

Point:
People seem to behave differently in face-to-face communication than they do in a chat environment. It is not necessarily true that the most vocal in one setting are the most vocal in the other.

Question:
Should we have different software, devices for disabled people or should we make everything accessible to everyone? Or better yet, should we make software just for the use of disabled people?

Interesting point from class: Our limited attention has to be factored into the design of a user interface. As we discussed, when using ISEE it was difficult to share attention between the chat discussion and video. A similar difficulty can happen with screen readers; it is difficult to listen to simultaneously listen to the screen reader and another person speak. So the interaction has to be designed to facilitate switching attention between different tasks.

Question: Given the attention problem is it possible for visually impaired and sighted persons to collaborate on a computer while the visually impaired person uses a screen reader, which interrupts the conversation?

point: I'm very impressed with how BATS has progressed. I bet there are plenty of applications for sighted people also--might help with adoption.
question: I wonder about equivalence for audio browsing--in most cases wouldn't restructuring things like long lists be a kind thing to do? Text readers go through all of the text on a page from beginning to end--which is fine if you just want to read the page, but if you're looking for specific information, it would be nice to be able to browse through a hierarchical arrangement of information chunks rather than slog through the whole thing. Very often the organization of a page will give a sighted person enough cues to do this very thing. So maybe 1 page for a visual presentation = several organized pages for audio browsing.

The big point that I learned in class today was that accessibility for the visually disabled takes careful planning. It was surprising to see that Google wasn't accessible because part of its success is due to its simple design.

My main question for today is what the standards for accessibility are. What exactly are the guidelines?

. accesibility requires interface designers to make use of all available tools : sound, feel, and structural markup. Structural markup & style-sheets need to be implemented on a very low level basis to be really successful.

. accessibility can be really cool.

? what features of information architecture can facilitate accessibility? What level of organization and structure is most appropriate for required levels of accessibility. Is a higher level of structure always bettter?

Point: Accessibility is often about catching people with disabilities up to a level where they can gain a minimal understanding of information. Accessibility often lags far behind usability for common users.

Question: How can techniques used for presenting information through audio or tactile feedback to the visually impaired be integrated into standard visual interfaces to improve the presentation of periphery information?

What's the relationship between cognitive load/limited capacity models and HCI for accessibility? What are the cognitive demands on users of JAWS or related interfaces? Do (e.g. visually) impaired users have different cognitive capabilities/preferences than other users?

Point: Difficult to design with everyone in mind. CSS sounds like it might help.

Question: Is the next step for the stuttering device a combination stuttering device & hearing aid?

point: accessibility for some users may erode usability for others
question: why use JAWS to read a UI designed for seeing people rather than design an OS/UI for visually impaired people?

A main point: While software, etc., is being developed to aid those with accessibility issues, it is not at all adequate to leave responsibility for accessibility with such tools; the most effective and needed accessibility work is with content producers, not interpreters/interfaces/etc.

A question: While regulations encourage a minimum accessibility requirement, might they hinder accessibility in many cases where designers are satisfied with meeting minimums where they may not have been in the absence of such requirements (Devil's advocate, I suppose).

Note: I thought the accessibility presentation from the CoSci crew was terrific -- thanks!

It's interesting to think of accessibility design as serving a greater population that way the designs would be more readily be accepted.

I am wondering how style sheets can be used to direct to text only sites especially when using mobile devices.

MITs "Memory Glasses" are in the news. These were discussed at the latest Symposium for Wearable Computers. I don't have a link to the paper.

http://www.theindychannel.com/technology/2580527/detail.html

Point: Technology is helping people with disabilities lead more of a independent life. In the sense a person with a disability doesn't have to rely on other humans to help implement a task. They can be a little more independent and free with how they structure their time & activities.
Questions:How can we make technology to integrate everyone? Or can we?

Microchip 'could do away with pills'
"Scientists in the United States have developed a new way of taking medicines which could improve the effectiveness of some treatments including HIV therapy." (from M G)

Hi all, there were some good points about biometrics and implants on the OMPs.
FYI, there was work in 1998 (see link below to new report) about implants in humans to control cursor via 'thought.'
http://www.hoise.com/vmw/articles/LV-VM-12-98-13.html

point: embedded computers are the future of hci
question: how is eye-tracking being used to control computers?