INLS 180 Day 10 Notes
February11, 2004
Main Points
User perspectives help
improve design
There are many techniques for
assessing user needs
Difference between assessing
user needs with an innovation and an upgrade
Questions are the basis for
progress
As with other topics, user
needs is a balancing act between top-down and bottom up action—professional
activity
Questions
How to corral/manage our
assumptions?
How can I ask better
questions?
Are expert critiques and
incremental development better/worse than market research approaches?
What is unique about gov services with respect to accessibility?
Is the LC NDl
successful? How can we know?
What are the kinds of online gov services?
How to insure privacy in
patron-library interactions? (from trust to
malpractice insurance)
How to make user studies less
intrusive?
How can we know what is good
info for others to know and what right(s) do we have to impose such info?
If user need is identified,
must we act upon it? (how
to make a bomb)
Demographics
role in needs assessment?
Are there standard measures,
procedures, metrics for user studies?
2. User Needs summary: pp
slides
3. TV Structure assignment
discussion
Structuring
How do you tell what is important in a text document? Paragraph length? Sentence/word length? Italics/fonts/styles? Section orderings? What about in video?
Format tags versus content tags
Structure tagging usually shows hierarchy (e.g., indentation, <> and </> to close section)
Parallel channels important in video
Shot sequence patterns: abababab….vs aabaaaab etc….is there an iambic pentameter shot pattern? Is this genre specific?
Consider not only the length of a shot, but how these
lengths vary across the entire segment (e.g., patterns in the shot lengths to
affect gist,response). Are there staccato and euphonious ‘phases’?
Text scroll bars/crawls are a new channel in video. Effects? Abuses? Possibilities for retrieval and indexing?
Meaning
Meaning as ‘new information’ versus as emotional
state/experience
What does the length of a shot mean? Is it a surrogate
for relevance?
What goes on in a shot adds to the frenetic or calming
effects.
an entire story in 10 seconds: poetry vs novel
information transfer (bandwidth): the commercial explosion vs talking head show
Silence as meaning. What are the visual equivalent? Blank screen? Frozen image?
What is the visual equivalent to rapid, urgent verbalizations?
Interactivity:
In your mind versus your body? Is interpretation interaction? Change in both sides?
If you laugh, that is a reaction, does that change the video? (if you buy the product, keep watching, etc….over time there may be some ‘change’?)
How can we change video? Format (e.g., screen size, change language) vs order (e.g., see ending before intro; skip segments/commercials) vs substitute (e.g., change Antonio Banderas to Paul Newman…not to mention to Jane Fonda; or change comedy to tragedy)
What if you had access to 1000000 webcams?
As we gain more interactivity capability, we lose some of the interactive effects of the info resource acting upon us (more of our cognitive/affective/physical resources given to the interaction rather than to the absorption and reflection of incoming signals)
How to handle forward references (e.g., news to come
when we return, previews for next week's sitcom or drama, etc.). How might these be tagged? How do hyperlinks
work in video?
How to markup the video AND
audio channels?
Hypervideo
Jumps
Recommendations/ personalizations (e.g., in specific channels—language, text streams, etc)
4. Discuss Dervin & Nilan
5. One-minute paper
What was the big point you learned in class today?
What is the main, unanswered question you leave class
with today?