Carly Moss @carlymosshci - Tumblr Blog

Reading 12

1) The first reading was called "Change on a Dime: Agile Design" from UX Magazine. It was written by John Anderson and is about being able to deal with changing specifications for a design. It describes agile development as a "movement away from the typical waterfall model of software development that requires an initial comprehensive design." Instead, agile deals with many iterations with much smaller deliverables. Anderson discusses that you will probably not have an opportunity to make a big upfront design but instead will have to wait after development has begun to start designing. You also has to be able to react to quick changes in the course of development. Anderson recommends that you keep designs simple and maintain consistency through development. Also, he says to avoid the "design vortex" which I believe means to be able to stop designing at certain points when it really isn't necessary to get the whole picture across. Finally, he says to stay focused on your project and to consider the benefits of agile development. The second reading was about submitting a successful CHI paper. It addresses the introduction, the review form, making a significant contribution, and offering benefit to the reader, ensuring results are valid, gaining credit for originality, and describing the work clearly and concisely.

2) Something I would like to discuss in class is the specific instances in which agile design would come up and when it is best to use it. I think it would also be useful to see some designs that were designed in that way as compared to designs that were laid out from the start, and see if there are any noticeable differences in the interface.

3) Another thing I would like to discuss is validity of results/what sort of results we're actually looking for. I'm still not solid on the concept of analyzing our results and presenting them in a formal way because we do not have that much to measure with our product until it is a fully functioning application, which I don't think we will get to in this time.

#readings #reading 12 #reading #reading responses

Homework 6: Heuristic Evaluation for OutfiTerator

OutfiTerator

Minor problem (visibility of system status)-When you add a photo, perhaps have an alert that says "photo added for confirmation"

Major problem (error prevention) - not really sure what the filter feature does. Is this a search option?

Major problem- I do not see the functionality for changing the tags on a photo

Positive comment (error prevention) - you seem to always have a "cancel" function.

Positive comment- you always have a confirmation box

Cosmetic problem (consistency)- The color blue of your buttons is sometimes inconsistent

Cosmetic Problem (consistency)- your checkboxes are a bit inconsistent (your "school" one looks a bit odd)

Major problem (consistency & standards, error prevention) - no central navigation

Cosmetic problem, minor (consistency)- some of your buttons are icons (trash, add) and some of them are words--it looks a little unclean sometimes.

Cosmetic problem (consistency) the format of your confirmation boxes is inconsistent. Sometimes you have red/black and sometimes it's all grey.

#homework #homework 6

Homework 6: Heuristic Evaluation for PrereqMe

PrereqMe

Minor problem (Consistency and standards)- the location of your search bar is not consistent with other website locations (usually it is on the top right). This might throw of users a bit.

Major problem (user control & freedom, error prevention)- what does it mean to add something to your plan? Does that mean you are planning to take it in the future or you want to say that you have taken it already? When I added it to my plan I didn't see where it went.

Major problem (user control & freedom, error prevention)- adding a semester- Spring/Fall/Summer I/Summer II don't have any specific years associated to them so I don't understand what that really means.

Positive comment- your website looks really professional. I'm really impressed!

Positive comment- I really like the animations when you view a course and it pops up and slides a little bit.

Minor problem - when you are viewing the Dashboard and you have the accordion list of CS Major Requirements/CS Additional Courses for BS…etc, why can't you have more than one of those open at a time? Why does opening one close another?

Positive comment- your search function works really well! The one that is consistent on the main page and also

Major problem (Help and documentation)- help documentation should be there

Major problem (consistency) - why is the search feature only show up in the top middle of the page after you have created an account?

Minor problem (user control & freedom) - can you give people access to the full working site without them signing up for an account first? Maybe they can set things up first and then if they choose to save it they can set up an account

Major problem (error prevention) -forgot your password has no functionality (but I understand not implementing this considering you have so much of the rest of your site working)

Major problem (error prevention, user control and freedom) -logging in doesn't actually do anything

#homework #homework 6

Reading 9

1) The first reading was called “Think Outside the Box, but Don’t Forget the Box Exists” from UX Magazine. It discussed how consistencies between designs from different websites are important so that users intuitively know how to navigate a design, but if you are going to stray from the standard conventions, you need to be consistent within your own design. It gave examples of poor design on websites such as LaLicious, Amazon, and the MoMA and suggested how to fix those designs so that they are easier to interact with. The second reading was called “10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design” from Mashable and listed 10 things User Experience Design is NOT and why. It stated that UX is NOT user interface design, a step in the process, about technology, just about usability, just about the user, expensive, easy, the role of one person or department, a single discipline, or a choice. The next reading was titled “Five Low-Hanging UX Tips” and listed five simple tips to improve website/application design: “when in doubt, make it faster,” “remove stuff,” “do the thinking for me,” “delight customers,” and “first impressions matter.” The final reading was called “Closeness of Actions and Objects in GUI Design” from the Nielsen Norman Group and stressed the importance of placing objects and actions close together in a GUI in order to make operations more straightforward.

2) Something I would like to discuss in class comes from the first reading where they talk about the thirteen different font treatments that show up in the product description of each of Amazon’s products. The article states, “Thirteen styles are too many for users to memorize and decipher to quickly learn a system and reuse it properly. Further, the current micro system lacks visual organization, making it difficult for users to quickly scan the page.” I think it is ironic that Amazon, “the largest online retailer in the world,” has such poor design on its website. When I think about it, I often find it very difficult to find certain features on the website and each page is often very cluttered with too many products for me to possibly focus on. How could a company that is so successful make so many mistakes in its design? This also links to the example of poor design with button placement in iTunes that is mentioned in the last reading from Nielsen Norman Group. I guess it is important to acknowledge that even hugely successful companies can make poor design choices.

3) Another thing I found interesting is the tip listed in the third reading, “when in doubt, make it faster.” The article cited that “For Google, an increase in page load time from 0.4 second to 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20%.” That’s crazy! I think we take speed for granted a lot these days, but it is obviously very important to people. I know that I have abandoned a page if it was taking too long to load. I wonder if our patience for load time will just get worse over time. I bet the load times of an average page now will seem archaic in just a few years, similarly to how I remember waiting for dial-up in the 90’s.

#reading #readings #reading responses #reading 9

Reading 7

1) The first reading was a sample Usability Test Report, with guidelines for what to put in each section and what sorts of questions to ask users. The second reading was called "Stats: We're Doing It Wrong" written by Judy Robertson for Communications of the ACM. Robertson claims that researchers often analyze attitude questionnaires with likert scales incorrectly. She states, "For ordinal data, one should use non-parametric statistical tests," which apparently the majority of people are doing wrong. Researchers fear that non-parametric tests will fail to catch the problems that parametric tests may find. Robertson pushes forward the use of robust modern statistical tests and the idea that authors must publish effect size results in addition to significance results. To quote Robertson again, she describes the difference between these two results:

Significance testing checks to see if differences in the means could have occured by chance alone. Effect size tells you how big the difference was between the groups

Researchers often forget to report on effect size. The third reading, written by James Cariﬁo & Rocco Perla, also addressed the topic of likert scales and items and was called "Resolving the 50-year debate around using and misusing Likert scales." This reading basically stated there was nothing wrong with using parametric tests to analyze these scales. This article closed with:

Treating the data from Likert scales as ordinal in character prevents one from using these more sophisticated and powerful modes of analyses and, as a result, from beneﬁting from the richer, more powerful and more nuanced understanding they produce.

To be honest, I found this article (and the one that came before it) hard to understand because I was not really familiar with the terms that they were discussing, and I think that the authors assumed that the readers already knew what they were talking about. But I believe that this reading is disagreeing with Robertson and saying you should not treat the data from Likert scales as ordinal. The fourth reading from the Nielsen Norman Group describes how to execute a heuristic evaluation. It discusses the differences between heuristic evaluations and traditional user testing. Heuristic evaluations allow more participation in by the observer and more freedom by the evaluator on how to proceed with the evaluation. It does not provide "perfect" results, as the article states, but is considered a "discount usability engineering" method and can potentially offer incredibly useful results. The last section of this reading discusses how to find the right number of evaluators, and even provides a formula that predicts the number of problems found based on the amount of evaluators. The final reading was called "The 1984 Olympic Message System: A Test of Behavioral Principles of System Design" and talked about the success of the OMS and why it was so successful. The designers of this system that was used for communication with Olympic athletes valued three principles: early focus on users and tasks, empirical measurement, and iterative design. The success of OMS taught that following these three principles can help make other designs successful, and it does not have to take an extreme amount of time or cost a lot of money.

2) One thing I'd like to discuss in class would be the section from the reading about OMS entitled "So What? First Impressions." Often when I am reading a lot of the materials for this class, the guidelines for good design and usability seem like common sense, and it almost seems obvious that someone would have to write that down. But this article makes a good point of recognizing that these principles are not always obvious to everyone and in practice are not always followed for one reason or another. First of all, this article proved that the extra time put into planning ahead saves you time managing usability problems in the future, so it is clearly important. Also, if these principles were truly common sense, then design would be an easy task and we wouldn't need all this literature on it.

3) Something that I found annoying from this reading was that the two articles portraying contrasting views on how to analyze results of Likert scales were pretty hard to read. I think they require a lot of background knowledge on that subject, with the Carifio/Perla reading tried to provide with brief descriptions of terms as they were introduced, but I still found it hard to process. I would like to get more clarification on what all of this terminology means.

#reading 7 #reading #readings #responses #reading responses

Reading 6

The first reading described how to create paper prototypes and shared the benefits and limitations of it as well as providing a detailed description of the process as a whole. The second reading from Nielsen Norman Group compares and contrasts A/B Testing versus Usability versus Radical Innovation. It discussed the benefits and drawbacks of each method, such as how A/B testing may be the cheapest but radical innovation in theory can have infinite improvement. The third reading was a comparison of the effectiveness of heuristic evaluation, usability testing, guidelines, and cognitive walk-throughs as user interface evaluation methods. The fourth reading was a more detailed look at cognitive walk-throughs and the fifth was a more in depth analysis of heuristic evaluation. Finally, the sixth reading discussed how to avoid wasting time in usability sessions.

Something interesting to discuss in class comes from the second reading from Nielsen Norman Group on the economic impact of radical innovation versus A/B testing and usability. The article mentions that radical innovation typically does not have the largest economic impact on the world, which surprised me. How could the companies responsible for the invention of the railroad and computers not benefit the most? The case that it makes for the iPhone is an interesting example of how many people can benefit from radical innovation from one company. But that also brings up an argument about copying...

I found it interesting how Nielsen quantified the amount of time you can avoid wasting in usability sessions. I understand that you are trying to maximize the time spent on improving your product, but I don't find that welcoming users, having them sign a consent form, debriefing them etc. should be considered wasteful...those are necessary parts to user testing. If you view this as wasteful, then it would be impossible to ever have a session where you do not waste time.

#reading 6 #reading #readings #responses #reading responses

Homework 4

Interface Idea: An app that will help everyone from first time exercisers to experienced gym rats have a better gym experience.

Gym app for Marino

Personas:

Kate is a sophomore studying Health Sciences at Northeastern University. She is an active person who enjoys running and biking but is not very familiar with weight training and most of the machines at the gym intimidate her.

Joe is a fourth-year student at Northeastern studying Business. He is a fitness fanatic and has been going to the gym regularly since high school. He knows his way around the gym and feels very comfortable there.

Professor Jay is a 44-year old English professor at Northeastern who lives 40 minutes outside of the city. He enjoys using the gym at Northeastern after he teaches his classes and has been doing basically the same workout routine for the past five years.

Task scenarios:

Calorie tracking/Tutorials:

Kate wants to get in better shape, but is not sure how. She cannot really afford a personal trainer right now, and she’s tried looking online for workouts but has been overwhelmed by all of the different sources of information. And every time she goes to the section of the gym with weight machines, she sees everyone who appears to already know what they are doing and gets intimidated. She wishes there were a concise way for her to figure out her workout routine with tutorials readily available. She also is trying to diet and would like a way to keep track of her calorie intake.

Points System:

Joe feels at home at the gym. He loves going and he has to go at least five times a week or else he does not feel satisfied with himself. He knows his way around and is interested in finding new, fun exercises for him to do. He also has friendly competitions with his friends at the gym to see who can lift more/do more/etc. He wishes there were a way to keep track of this so that he could truly compete with his friends and make a game out of going to the gym.

Personal Training:

Professor Jay values exercise. He does not love working out, because he has just gotten bored of it. But he tries to go to the gym three times a week, especially since the facilities at Northeastern are so convenient for him to go to after he gives his lectures. He’s just so stuck in his ways after having the same workout routine for so long. He wants a way to generate a new routine so that going to the gym can be more interesting for him.

Use Case #1:

Task: Personal Training/Tutorials

Functions:

Specialize user’s workout according to user’s level of ability

Choose the muscle groups user wants to work out

Specify goals in terms of minutes, calories burned, weight loss, etc.

User may choose more cardio/more strength training

System will design a custom workout for user catered to the machines in the Marino Center specifically

Each workout has a tutorial video automatically attached to it so that it is easily accessible

Links:

View Past Workouts

View Daily Challenge

Once user begins a workout, can log progress

Your Profile (points system)

Objects:

Database of workouts/tutorial videos

List of muscle groups/goal choices

Constraints:

User must have a GENERAL idea of what they want out of their workout

System must have an algorithm that can create a custom workout based on any combination of these factors

System must be updated according to Marino Center machines

Use Case #2:

Task: Gamification of the Gym Experience

Functions:

Each time user logs a workout, they earn points

User has the option of sharing points with the Northeastern community

User can view others’ accomplishments and like/comment

User can earn badges for completing certain workouts

User can check into Marino and see who else is working out at the same time

Links:

View “My Profile”

See friends’ profiles

Badges

Leaderboards

Workouts

Objects:

Database of points system/ other users

Leaderboard

Constraints:

Other users must opt in to make their profiles public for this to be social

Use Case #3:

Task: Calorie Tracking

Functions:

User can enter food intake in order to keep track of calories

Depending on a weight loss goal, the system can generate a certain number of calories to limit to that day

Can keep track of foods based off of certain meals

Store “favorite” foods for easy access

Links:

Food Intake

Weight Progress

Workouts

Profile

Objects:

Food Database

Calorie Calculator

Constraints:

Database can only access so many different types of food

May have to just enter pure calorie # if food is not found in database

I made my wireframe in Axure and you can find it here.

#homework 4 #homeworks #homework

Reading 5

Set 1: Styleguides

The Yale Style Guide is a very extensive guide on designing for the web. It features chapters on the process, usability, information architecture, interface design, site structure, page structure, page design, typography, editorial style, forms and applications, graphics, and multimedia. The Motif Style Guide is aimed for “application development, widget designers, user interface designers and window manager designers” (Marshall). It features a section on how to design menu style, dialog widgets, drag and drop facilities, interaction and interaction markets.

One thing that I found interesting to discuss in class is the idea of flexible page widths, mentioned in the “Page Design” section of the Yale Style Guide. Flexible page width is something that is increasingly more relevant now that more users are viewing sites on a mobile device, ranging from an iPhone to a Kindle to an iPad. I am interested to know how web designers account for all of the different resolution sizes they may come across. Last semester in my Interactive Foundation class, we learned how to write responsive CSS code of our websites, where we would specify in the style sheet that once the site window is smaller than a certain number of pixels, the page should resize itself. To do this for multiple different resolutions and to change other elements on the page seems like a tedious thing to do, but definitely something that is worth doing considering the amount of mobile users today.

One other thing that I found really interesting from the Yale Style Guide and would like to learn more about is typography. I’m really intrigued by Graphic Design, and I am curious to learn how one knows that one type fits harmoniously with another type. Typography on a web page is definitely a small detail that can be easily overlooked, but simple things such as the line length and justification can really make a difference for the overall reading experience of the user.

Set 2: Accessibility

The first reading provides guidelines from the National Center on Universal Design for Learning. It extensively details how to design a curriculum for the purpose of learning, broken down into three principles: providing multiple means of representation, providing multiple means of action and expression, and providing multiple means of engagement. The second reading is called Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and features instructions on making content accessible by making it perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.

One interesting thing I found from Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is the idea that one should make all functionality of content accessible by a keyboard interface. I certainly use a number of keyboard shortcuts that are second nature at this point, but I generally do not consider keyboard shortcuts a necessity. I am curious to learn how you can determine which functions you make accessible by keyboard and which you do not…at what point do you draw the line?

Just a somewhat humorous thing I found in Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is the fact that they explicitly state not to design content that induces seizures. First of all, who thought it would be a good idea to have flashing, blinking images in the first place? Secondly, I wonder at what point they decided that was a necessary thing to include in these accessibility guidelines.

Additional Questions:

Think about the interfaces you have explored in your homework and the interfaces you have built for your course web site and team project page. In what ways are those interfaces following the style and accessibility guidelines and in what way aren't they? Now that you know a little more about style and accessibility, what would you change about these designs?

The interface I built for my course website has very consistent navigation and though there is not too deep a structure to the site as a whole, it is always clear how to get from one page to another as well as an indicator of which page that you are currently on, which is something that was mentioned a lot in the style guides. One flaw of the Snapchat interface that I was investigating is that sometimes I find myself “lost” within the app—this violates the principle mentioned in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: “Provide ways to help users navigate, find content, and determine where they are.” Snapchat does this, but not in the most effective way. It could benefit from more descriptive titles and more descriptive icons that indicate the use of the app more clearly.

What are the affordances of Leap Motion versus Kinect? What do those affordances imply in terms of the types of applications they would be best for? What novel applications would you use Leap Motion for?

Leap Motion is apparently 200 times more precise than a Kinect. It relies on small gesture of the fingers rather than entire body movements. It also has no perceptible lag between a user’s motion and the perceived motion on the screen that he/she is interacting with. This clearly demonstrates how much more advanced Leap Motion is than Kinect and would allow for the types of applications that Kinect just does not have the accuracy/precision to allow for. For example, in the case of remote surgery, I would not really trust the technology from a Kinect alone, just because I know that it is not as responsive and relies on much larger gestures than the Leap Motion. Leap Motion, on the other hand, exhibits an incredible reaction speed and precision that I would much rather trust for that scenario. I would be really interested in using Leap Motion for the drawing feature and creating three-dimensional artwork on a computer. I have worked with programs such as Google Sketchup before in order to make 3D models and I do often find myself annoyed with the limited features of the mouse. If I want to move an object, I cannot move it and orbit around the space that I am using at the same time—but it appears that Leap Motion would allow for that. It would also be really cool to play around with the drawing features where you simply make gestures with your hand and it records not only the 2D line-drawing you’ve produced but also the 3D representation of it as well.

#reading 5 #reading #readings #responses #reading responses

Reading 4

The Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 5: “To Err is Human”

1) This chapter discussed the idea of human error, and as the title suggests, how making errors is a very natural thing to do. Norman talked about slips versus mistakes, and how slips are more common and divided into multiple categories. He then went on to describe the structure of tasks—which are then divided into deep, narrow, shallow, and wide tasks. A diagram shows the possible decisions one can make in a seemingly simple game of tic-tac-toe really has a lot of different possibilities and that decision tree is indeed a wide and deep structure. Norman discussed the relationship between social pressure and errors and mentioned an instance of two planes that crashed, killing 583 people due to these sorts of pressures. The chapter closed discussing how to design for error.

2) Something I found really interesting was how social pressure (along with poor design) is responsible for a lot of human errors. The fact that social pressure caused 583 people to die in one plane crash (from two planes that were taxiing!!!) and 78 people to die in another instance when a flight crashed at takeoff is appalling to me. One of the reasons cited in these incidents is that they had already been delayed for some time so people were getting impatience. The social pressures of what impatient people might do led to so many deaths! That’s crazy.

3) Something I found confusing was the discussion of models of human thought, and how there was the multi-exposure theory of memory. I did not really understand that analogy to a camera and having a composite of all of those faces. I know that it was recognized as an inaccurate description of memory, but still I did not really understand how that could work as a model of memory in the brain.

Chapter 6: “The Design Challenge”

1) This chapter discussed the challenge that faces design and opens discussing the natural evolution of design. Norman talks about forces that work against evolutionary design, such as the demand of time or individuality. Next, the evolution of the typewriter and the design of the keyboard is explained. Norman also explains the main reasons why designers do not always make the best decisions, citing that they put aesthetics first instead of usability, they are not the typical users of the product, and their clients may not even be the end users of their products. Another item that is looked at specifically in this chapter is the faucet, which is an object this is often designed very poorly. Two problems that often get designers are “creeping featurism,” adding so many features to a product that it becomes excessive and unusable, and “the worshipping of false images,” worshipping complexity because it is aesthetically pleasing. The chapter ends discussing all of the design problems that arise with computer systems.

2) Something I would like to discuss in class is idea of designing products for special people. Specifically, the idea of designing things for left-handed people. Left-handed scissors, knives, rulers, etc are hard to come by. I feel like left-handed users are often forgotten about—not necessarily by designers, but by people who purchase these types of items in bulk, for example a teacher purchasing materials for a classroom. Left-handed people might have trouble using things that are designed for right-handed people, but I would not really consider that a “special” case. But if that presents its own unique problems, then designing for the deaf or blind or wheelchair-ridden people must be incredibly difficult.

3) A funny thing I read in this chapter was when the idea of how designers are not necessarily their typical users was being discussed, and Steve Wozniak said users of his product that came with a 40-pag-manual “won’t be daunted, because, initially, most will be ‘techies’” (Norman 156). This is funny to me because first of all it is ironic, considering, Apple products are among the most user-friendly products out there today. Also, the fact that Wozniak made a pretty inaccurate prediction is humorous because he is obviously a very smart man, but that was not necessarily the smartest design choice.

Chapter 7: “User-Centered Design”

1) The final chapter discusses user-centered design, which we have already addressed in class. It outlines the major point of the book which “is to advocate a user-centered design,” making sure that “the user can figure out what to do,” and that “the user can tell what is going on” (Norman 188). In this chapter, he basically summarizes all of his main points from the previous chapters of the book. He ends discussing the connection between design and society.

2) Something interesting I’d like to discuss in class is the idea of how the way in which you write (pen and paper vs a keyboard vs a microphone) changes the style of writing. Norman mentions how when quill and ink was used, writing was tedious and it was difficult to correct mistakes, so sentences were thought out more carefully. Once writing tools became more readily available, the speed of this process increased and writing becomes more disposable. Personally, I know that there is a big difference between writing things down and writing things on the computer. When I have a large writing assignment, I rarely will start in on paper, but I find that when I do, I am generally more focused and value my sentences more than when I am typing. I type really quickly and often mindlessly…sometimes sentences that I type do not make much sense but my fingers move too quickly and I do not catch it until later. (Coincidentally, that sentence was not a great one)

3) Something else I found interesting is designing things so that they are deliberately difficult to use, such as the door in the school for handicapped children that prevents them from going outside without adult supervision. I would like to think of some more examples of products that are designed so that they are not so easy to use.

#reading #readings #responses #reading responses

Homework 3

Starbucks in Curry Student Center – the line

Introduction

The act that I chose to observe was people ordering coffee and other drinks at Starbucks. I chose this because I know that whenever I go to Starbucks, there is generally always a long line and it can be very frustrating to stand and wait with a heavy backpack and wait for people to place their order. I think that this interaction would benefit from having some sort of kiosk or smart phone app that would help you order and pay without going up to the counter. The Starbucks app already exists and works pretty well because you can load money onto it and scan the app instead of giving cash/credit card. However, the Starbucks in Curry does not actually have the mechanism to scan the app so they have to put in your information manually, which sort of defeats the purpose of the convenience of the app. The Process

waiting in line

large line developing after i ordered

Generally, when people go to the Starbucks in the student center, they stand on a line that goes up a ramp, which accrues pretty quickly. Then you wait for each person to order individually, because generally, there is only one person working the cash register. Then, after you order your drink, you still have to wait for them to actually make it, so you move over to another area to wait for your drink. And at that point, there’s no way to know which drink is going to be yours, unless you had a sense of how many people were waiting before you got on line. I went through this process myself and it took approximately 8 minutes from the time that I got on line to the time that I got my drink. The people who I observed were mostly students from what I could tell, but I know that professors and people who work in the student center also frequent this Starbucks. The artifacts involved in this process generally involve a wallet, the cash register where the employees input the orders (which I believe is a touch screen). Occasionally, a smart phone gets involved if the customer has the app, but as I stated earlier this current location of Starbucks does not yet have the proper technology to use that tool at its fullest capacity.

customers waiting for their coffee

The Users

I spoke to five students about their experience at Starbucks. I spoke with a senior communications major, two sophomore health sciences majors and two sophomore physical therapy majors. Most of them visited Starbucks multiple times a week, if not once a day. The senior communications major said that she comes once a day and uses a Starbucks gift card, but when I asked her if she had the app she said no. I told her that you could use the app as a gift card and she said she feels weird using it. However, I asked her if she would be more likely to get the app if you could order drinks from your phone, and she said yes. One of the health sciences majors said there is almost always a line when she comes here, and she is “joyous when there isn’t a line.” When I asked her if she would use an app that would allow you to order from your phone, she said that would be especially useful because the employees would be less likely to mess up your order by mishearing you. One of the physical therapy sophomores was the one that told me that you could not use the app here, so that is why she doesn’t have the app.

Conclusions

This interaction would best be improved by a smart phone application that would allow customers to order drinks from their phone, which would then be sent to a kiosk that the baristas see. Once a drink is ready, the baristas will call out the number of the order as well as check off that the order has been completed, and the customer will be alerted. I thought this would be better than just a general kiosk where you can order your drinks because there would be a line for using that as well. I believe this would help customers waste less time waiting on less, provide a more accurate ordering experience, and be a more organized process for everyone involved.

#homeworks #homework

Reading 3

Ethnography Readings:

1) The first ethnography Reading by Fetterman gave an overview of ethnography, describing it as a method by which one can describe a group or culture by immersing oneself in the culture and observing the local people. Fetterman walks through the process of fieldwork and discusses the different steps an ethnographer goes through: entering the country by being welcomed by a member or by assuming a role in the community, observing the participants, and interviewing the participants. Fetterman discusses his own experience living in Israel. The two ethnography studies investigate what people really use their camera phones for and how people organize materials they store on the surfaces of their refrigerators. The last ethnography reading discussed the idea of rapid ethnography, a form of ethnography designed for researchers with a limited amount of time, considering traditional ethnography studies involve an ethnographer working for 6 months to a year.

2) Something I think would be interesting to discuss in class is the use of camera phones today. The camera phone study was released in 2005, so obviously cameras on phones as well as phones in general have advanced a lot since then. I would imagine that camera phone usage crosses over (if not takes over completely in some cases) with digital camera usage. My iPhone photo library is a conglomerate of beautiful pictures of my experiences in the past year and a half as well as completely random photos, such as one of shoes I took while shopping to send a friend.

3) I also think it would be interesting to discuss the function of refrigerator surfaces. First, I think it is really intriguing just to talk about how people “design” their traditional refrigerator surfaces—what sort of things they put on and in what type of organized system, if at all. Second, I know that some people had suggested for the Team Project some sort of “smart fridge” that keeps track of when your food spoils or helps you find recipes—I am curious to see if people really believe that would be useful. The “Notes on Fridge Surfaces” study states that “feature-rich interactive panels on fridge doors offering portals to current events, recipes or online encyclopedias (often no more than vertically mounted PCs), come across as unwieldy attempts at combining information technologies and household appliances without properly considering people’s real-world practices.” I believe that I have seen fridges on the market with TV/interactive screens on them and thought “why would anyone need that?” I think it would be interesting to hear if other people in the class would believe that could be a successful item or not.

Task analysis, use cases, and scenarios Readings:

1) The first reading was Task-Centered User Interface Design: A practical Introduction by Claton Lewis and John Rieman. The first chapter discussed the steps involved with the “Task-Centered Design Process,” which involved figuring out your goals and who your users are, look upon other existing interfaces that have been successful in order to make your own design, create mock-ups and prototypes to then test with users, and then finally to build the design. The second chapter talked about “Getting to Know Users and Their Tasks,” which involved getting in touch with your users, know specific details about the tasks that need to be performed, and using the tasks to shape your design. The second reading was a brief overview of use cases, which is a description of a user’s interactions with your website in terms of the user themselves, the interaction and the goal of the user.

2) Something I think would be interesting to discuss in class is the idea of “plagiarizing” designs that comes form the Lewis/Rieman reading. It suggests, “you should find existing interfaces that work for users and then build ideas from those interfaces into your systems as much as practically and legally possible.” But I feel like a recent issue is that the boundaries of what is legally possible to “plagiarize” are really fuzzy. The Samsung-Apple case is a good example of one company essentially stealing another’s interface and design—and you could argue in favor of either side, but what I think it comes down to is that basically every smartphone you see today mimics the design of the iPhone, so they cannot hold that much of a claim on that anymore.

3) Something that I found a bit confusing but also would be interesting to discuss is the idea of participatory design and how in Europe, designers work with users as opposed to only for them. This seems contradictory what we’ve been talking about in this class so far and about not asking users what they want, because they generally don’t really know what they want. But I would be interested to find out more about the success of European design versus the success of American design, particularly in instances where European designers work with the users.

Additional Questions:

As a student what do you think are the strengths and drawbacks of MOOCs? What would you want to see in a MOOC interface to best suit today's students' needs?

I think that MOOC’s can be incredibly useful for the purpose of learning about virtually anything you want, but at your own pace, in the comfort of your own home, and without being limited by physical space in a course for you. Specifically, I am familiar with Khan academy and the advantages of that system in particular. I know that Khan academy is geared towards middle school-aged kids trying to learn conceptual subjects such as math. The best part about Khan academy is that kids can go at their own pace, which is better than the traditional classroom where everyone is expected to learn the curriculum at the exact same time. We know that in actuality that never works, and that is what causes students to fall behind and think that they are “bad at math.” I believe that MOOC’s can be very powerful tools for helping students achieve the same success as their peers, but just at different times. Its drawbacks are definitely that it does not have a very personal feel to it, so one-on-one interactions with the professor do not seem very accessible in MOOC’s , which I believe are really important when you are learning a subject. Also, my roommate took an online course last semester which I thought was a bit peculiar considering we are at college, we might as well be actually physically attending class if we are paying for it. I think MOOC interfaces could be improved upon if they are supported by multiple professors and TAs who could provide the opportunity for more individual feedback.

#reading #readings #responses #reading responses

Homework 2: Good Design vs. Bad Design

Bad Design #1:

The elliptical that I use most often at the gym has a pretty bad interface, in my opinion.

What annoys me most about this interface, is that there is no "Pause" option. The only thing you can do is just stop going for, at which time the main screen will say "Pedal Faster" and ultimately, the machine just turns off. There is no indication of system status at this point. I think it would benefit from having not only a pause button, but a visualization of how much time you have to stop briefly to refill your water bottle, or tie your shoe for example. Another problem is the reset button. I find the reset button to be sort of useless. I think a Pause/Stop button should replace it there, because you could hit pause once to just pause it and then twice if you really needed to reset. Rarely do I need to reset a workout, and too often, I do it by accident. When I do it by accident, there is no redo option. There is no recoverability in this sense. It doesn't even ask me if I am sure I want to reset it. As soon as I hit the reset button, it automatically resets. Additionally, the buttons are not very responsive. They're operated by a very light touch, and physically, you have no idea if you are even doing anything because they are not even buttons, just sensitive spots on the interface. Generally, this problem is solved by the visibility on the screens, which usually respond to your touch, however, I think an actual physical response to the button could be more helpful.

Bad Design #2: Snapchat

Snapchat is a photo sharing application that allows you to send pictures quickly to your friends for 1-10 seconds, and then the photo goes away. It's useful for quick, funny, communication purposes. At a first glance, this design is pretty straight forward. The icon at the bottom right indicates your "inbox," and the one on the right indicates more menu options. The center button is for taking photos. However, if you hold down the center button, you can also take a video. The first time I realized this was purely by accident, when I pressed down on it for too long. This was pretty bad in terms of predictability. It is also not consistent across any other photo/video taking software I have used on my iPhone. There is always a visible option to switch to video, which was not apparent here. Additionally, once you have taken the photo, you can draw on it, or type a message.

It's sort of clear that you can draw on it with the pencil icon in the top right, but the typing feature is totally hidden. You access it by simply tapping on the picture in the general vicinity of where you want the bar of text to come up. But it is not predictable and I've found out about this feature by accident as well.

Next, there is a pretty useless feature where you can view a list of your friends.

You hit "My Friends," and then come to this screen:

The only reason why this page is useful is for adding friends, which is a feature that can be accessed at the top right with the plus sign. Otherwise, whenever you select one of your friends, what I would predict to come up would be an option to send a photo to that person. Instead, it opens a page in your browser app with the person's "Snapchat Profile," which I find to be completely useless. Snapchat seems to have a consistent problem with predictability. I have often found myself sort of lost in the app as well.

Good Design #1: Tumblr App

I think this is a really good design, especially in terms of Learnability of the app. Each function is pretty clearly illustrated, which is good for first users of the app and doesn't require a lot of memorization for well-versed users.

This is the first screen that comes up, which is my dashboard. The icon representing it is a home button, which is a pretty familiar symbol, a predictable one considering it is consistent with the non-app version of Tumblr, and clearly highlighted to show that you are on that part of the app. The next tab is tags, which is indicated by the symbol for a price tag. A small metaphor, but the point comes across, and again, it is consistent with the website.

This layout is really clear, pretty minimalistic, but it gets the point across. You can either search specific tags for specific types of posts, or browse through their suggestions. Next over is the section that represents your own Tumblr "profile." This is indicated by the symbol for a person, with a little lightning bolt next to it to indicate when you have notifications. This lightning bolt is a relatively new feature that they didn't have on previous versions of the app, so it's a nice way to know when someone has liked or reblogged one of your posts.

Finally, there is the option to create a post.

This makes use of a few metaphors for the things you may want to post, but is very clear and consistent with the interface on the main website:

Overall, I find using the app to be a very usable experience.

Good Design #2: My iPhone headphones. A problem I often come across with earbuds is forgetting which bud goes in which ear. If I put the wrong earbud in the wrong ear, they are often uncomfortable or something feels off with my listening experience. The headphones that came with my iPhone have the controls and microphone on the right earbud, something that allows me to know immediately which earbud goes in which ear even if I am fumbling around in the dark or in a rush.

This is something that can be easily learned after one or two interactions with the headphones. It's a very simple interface but an efficient one. Additionally, the buttons that control the music/Siri on your iPhone from the earbuds are pretty consistent with the features on the interface of the iPhone itself. You press and hold the control button on the headphones to access Siri, just as you would press and hold the button on the iPhone itself. You press it briefly, once, in order to pause music, and briefly once again to play it again. To skip a song, you press twice in a row, which is sort of mapped to the icon for skipping a song (two arrows). To go backwards, you press three times, which I find to be a bit of an inconvenience but it is a feature that I use rarely.

#homeworks #homework

Reading Response 2 (part II)

The Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 3

1) This chapter was entitled “Knowledge in the Head and in the World.” Initially, Norman discussed how there is a lot of information that is readily available in the world that we do not need to commit precisely to memory, such as the exact details of the coins that we use every day. He then went on to discuss the power of constraints and how the more constraints that exist, the simpler it is to retain memories. Next, Norman talked about how many things we have to memorize and be able to recite on any given basis and the logic behind how we choose to back up that information, such as storing a safe code in a telephone book. He discussed memory in the head, including memory for arbitrary things, relationships, and through explanation. He then discussed memory in the world, talking about the challenge of reminding yourself to do things as well as natural mappings.

2) One thing I think would be interesting to discuss in class is how Norman predicted the PDA, which later transformed into the smart phone. Norman expressed a need for a small device, which would store all of your events, and to-do lists, which would be portable and able to connect to your computer. He knew that the technology for such a thing was available and predicted that it would be commonplace in the near future. Obviously, he was correct. I use the Reminders and Calendar apps on my iPhone, which I sync through iCloud to my home computer and to any browser where I can access my iCloud. This is incredibly useful to me—but I rarely stop to think about what I would do without it. I can barely imagine what I did before I had my iPhone to remember things. How did I remember anything? Of course, I wrote things down…in fact, I still do write things down for extra reinforcement into my brain. However, I feel that if my Reminder/Notes/Calendar apps were taken away from me at this moment, I would have a very hard time remembering what time my classes were at or when my advising appointment is on Thursday or where that lab is! It’s something I certainly take for granted.

3) Something that I found annoying was that Norman brought up the issue of how poorly designed the knobs are for stoves, and I don’t think much has been done to change that in the past 25 years! I’m staring at the knobs on my own stove in my apartment right now, and every morning, despite the fact that I use them every day, I still have to check which knob corresponds to which burner. They are divided to the left and right burners, which is helpful, but I always forget which refers to the front burner and which refers to the back one. I have caught myself as well as my roommates turning on the wrong burner and letting a pot sit there, unheated, while the wrong burner heats up nothing for five minutes. We’ve done this multiple times despite the fact that we have lived in this apartment since September! Clearly something is wrong there.

Chapter 4

1) This chapter was titled “Knowing What to Do.” It discussed how the design of objects should lead the user to automatically know what to do—first giving an example of a Lego policeman on a motorcycle, with 13 distinct parts that each only belong in one place. He then talked about doors and how it should be immediately clear whether you should push or pull a door, even though most of the time it still remains unclear. Norman also mentioned how physical, semantic, cultural and logical constraints as well as affordances exist to make it easier to interact with objects. He brought up the problems with switches and how even light switches, which have a relatively simple function, are often impossible to navigate precisely. He finally discussed the importance of visibility and feedback, including the principle that sounds often provide very useful feedback when using everyday things.

2) One thing I think would be interesting to discuss in class are the cultural constraints that Norman talks about. He states, “each culture has a set of allowable actions for social situations” (Norman 85) but in terms of these issues, “there are as yet no accepted conventions or customs for dealing with them” (Norman 85). I think this is still a problem that exists. I’ve traveled to a handful of different countries and every time I first arrive, I feel very uncomfortable and on edge because I’m afraid to do something that will identify me as a tourist, as an outsider, that defies local conventions. How do we address this? I also think it would be interesting to discuss more of the socially unacceptable behaviors for our society, such as facing the wrong way in an elevator, or giving a random stranger money for no reason.

3) Towards the end of the chapter, Norman lists a few ideas that his students came up with that would add more visibility to everyday devices. One of the ideas includes displaying the names of television programs on each station. Obviously this technology is pretty widespread today, however, it is not ubiquitous to all television-viewing experiences. In my apartment, we have Husky Cable, which comes straight from the port in the wall to our television. There is no cable box, therefore, the only controls we have for the television is the remote it came with, which has no guide functionality or any buttons to preview what is coming on next or on the next channel. In fact, there is nothing on the screen that indicates what is currently on television. It only lists the channel number. It would be incredibly more useful if it could also name the Channel itself, as well as what is currently on TV. I know this technology exists---why do I need to purchase a cable box in order to have that one function?

#reading #readings #responses #reading responses

Homework 1

My first idea is to have some sort of app that makes it easier to go to the gym, or exercise in general. Often, I find that people find the gym an intimidating place to go to if you have not gone before. There are a lot of different machines and it seems like everyone who goes to the gym is already familiar with how everything works. It can be intimidating for a first time gym-goer to figure out what to do, and people are hesitant to ask others for help. I think it would be useful to have something that would help design a workout for you, tailored to your individual goals and based off of your own level of experience with working out, as well as help introduce you to the different parts of the gym with tutorials and explanations. You could keep track of your workouts and the progress that you've made over time. It could also include an option for tracking how much food you've eaten and tell you what to eat if you want to lose a certain amount of weight in a given period of time.

My second idea would be to design something that helps you plan your trip to the supermarket. I often get seriously overwhelmed when I enter supermarkets these days--Shaws on Huntington is a good example. It's an enormous store with so many aisles to go down. I have found myself running back and forth just to find one thing, like soy sauce, which is really frustrating. Obviously the people who work at the store should know where everything is, but they are hard to find on busy days and sometimes they don't even know. It would be interesting to have a screen on your shopping cart that could help you plan your trip around the store so that you find everything that you need without passing something up by accident or going down unnecessary aisles. You could enter your shopping list and it would generate the best path for you to take in the store that day. It could also encourage users to get a store card and you could unlock certain savings if you use the system frequently, so it would benefit the supermarkets as well.

My third idea is to create a more efficient equation editor. My roommate is a Chemical Engineering major, so she has to type up a lot of reports that involve long equations, including math and chemical equations. She always complains that it is nearly impossible to write equations in her reports. The equation editors that exist in Microsoft Word and Excel other programs are really hard to use and sometimes she just resorts to handwriting a lot of things. I would like to design something that would make it easy to write equations quickly and efficiently.

#homeworks #homework

Reading Response 2

Usability readings

1) Introduction to User-Centered design gave a brief overview of user-centered design, user experience design, and then discussed the principles of usability and why it is important. Usability 101 gave another introduction to usability, defining it using the five components of learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, and satisfaction. 10 Usability Heuristics discussed ten heuristics that are useful for user interface design.

2) I think something that would be interesting to discuss in class is how focus groups are not as useful for identifying usability problems as user testing is. The Usability 101 link states, “Listening to what people say is misleading: you have to watch what they actually do.” This reminds me of the quote about the invention of the car, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." When I first heard that quote in the context of how to design things well, it seemed counterintuitive to me that you wouldn’t want to hear what people have to say about a design. But the truth is that the average person does not necessarily know what is best for design, and the best way to find out what works and what doesn’t is to just watch users truthfully interact with something, and gauge their reactions from there.

3) One thing I found confusing, also from the Usability 101 link, was the fact that testing 5 users is enough to identify the most important usability problems. That seems like an incredibly low number to me. I understand why it may be easier to do that as opposed to a large, costly study, but I would imagine that 5 users would not be enough to represent the proper range of people that would be interacting with a design.

The Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 1:

1) Chapter 1 is called “The Psychopathology of Everyday Things.” In this chapter, Norman introduces how everyday things, even as simple as doors, can prove to be difficult to use when designed poorly. He gives examples of poorly designed doors, telephone systems, washing machines, refrigerators, etc. Norman then discusses the principles of visibility, mapping, affordances, conceptual models, and feedback, and how they are each essential for understanding good design. The last section of the chapter discusses the paradox of technology and how in theory, technology is expected to make things easier and more enjoyable, but often is initially introduced in too complex a way for users to understand.

2) Something I think would be interesting to discuss in class is the paradox of technology. Technology is advancing at such a fast rate today and we are able to do so many new things, but how do we introduce that to users in a way that is not overwhelmingly complex? I think a good example to bring up is the iPod, which clearly took over the market of mp3 players when it was first introduced. The concept of storing 1000 songs on one small device as opposed to carrying around a CD that held around 15 songs was pretty radical and I think Apple’s design did a good job of introducing that new concept to people.

3) Another interesting thing to talk about would be car radios. I think there is still a big problem with the interface of car radios, especially because a lot of cars now integrate touch screens into the console to control the radio or the heat or the navigation. Yes, touch screens are an advanced part of today’s technology and most people are comfortable using them, but in terms of operating a car radio while driving, I don’t think a touch screen is the safest option. It requires too much of the driver’s attention actually looking at the screen when they should be looking at the road.

Chapter 2:

1) Chapter 2 is called “The Psychology of Everyday Actions.” It discusses how people react when they do not know how to operate things properly—often they blame themselves, or the find the incorrect thing to blame, and this leads to misconceptions of how things work. Norman talks about naïve physics and how we naturally have certain conceptions of how the world works that make sense, but are actually wrong. We make decisions based off of these misconceptions and use things improperly as a result, as seen in the thermostat example. Norman explains the nature of human thought and explanations, and the seven stages of action and how they can be used as a design aid.

2) One thing I think would be interesting to discuss in class is how people form mental models of how things work that are generally incorrect. I can understand how this can be true, because many things that we interact with daily are very complex, so we cannot possibly understand the mechanisms behind most things if we are not experts in that subject. However, I remember learning last semester in my Interactive Foundation course that people have a high amount of confidence regarding their perceptions of how things work—but they are usually wrong. Why do we feel that we understand things so well? These misconceptions obviously lead to incorrect use of things…so how can we use design to illustrate how things actually work?

3) Another thing I found interesting was the projector example, when Italian, German, and English speaking people are all trying to work a projector for fourteen minutes until a technician can fix it. This reminds me of times when I have been in class and a professor has had an issue with the projector, or with the computer, or with the lights in the room. These issues have occurred frequently in my computer science classes, which is ironic, because obviously my professors of computer science should be familiar with working all sorts of complex technology. The problem is, they are familiar, in fact, they are experts in the field of technology, so clearly it is not their fault that things are going wrong, it is a design flaw in the technology itself.

Additional reading response questions

What experience do you have with each of the rapid prototyping tools? If you were going to prototype something for this class today, what would you choose and why? Which would you like to learn more about and why?

The only rapid prototyping tools I have experience with are the web tools. I have made websites using HTML & CSS and a little bit of Javascript, all through Dreamweaver. If I were to prototype something for this class I would use Dreamweaver because it is what I am most familiar with. I would like to learn more about the Google/MIT App inventor because I’ve always wondered where to begin if I were interested in making an App. Also, Axure seems like a really powerful tool for designing things for the web or mobile devices.

What works well about Captchas. What problems have you had with Captchas? How would you improve it?

Captchas work well because they do solve the problem of determining the difference between a computer and a human. I’ve generally only interacted with the distorted text Captchas, and I find that they’re pretty hard to read. I understand that is the principle of distinguishing between humans and computers—they have to be hard to read, but often I will have to refresh a captcha multiple times before I can read it. I would improve it by altering the program that distorts the text. Sometimes the image is grainy and just really unclear so I would try to increase the visibility of captchas without making it any easier for a computer program to break it.

#reading #readings #responses #reading responses

Reading Response 1

Week 1: Readings on HCI and User-Centered Design

General responses:

HCI-

1) This reading outlined the fundamentals of Human-Computer Interaction. It introduced the concept and described it as a whole as a “discipline concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and with the study of major phenomena surrounding them” (ACM SIGCHI 1996). It mentioned how it is truly an interdisciplinary field that combines aspects from computer science, psychology, sociology, anthropology and industrial design. The reading then discussed its concerns and how it studies a machine side and human side in communication. It then went on to describe the history of HCI and how it is expected to develop in the future. The final section discussed the how the content of HCI is organized and described what each section is concerned with.

2) One thing I think would be interesting to discuss in class is the idea of “embedded computation,” (ACM SIGCHI 1996) which is the idea that computation will become integrated into objects that we use every day other than the computer, including cooking appliances and window blinds. This reading seems to have been published in 1992/1996, so it is a bit out of date, but it did recognize that this has already begun to take place. Obviously technology has come a long way in the past 6-10 years, and computing has been integrated into many aspects of our everyday interactions—so much so that we probably do not even realize it. This sort of integration, I believe, is called ubiquitous computing, a concept that was introduced to me in my Interactive Foundation course last semester, which I think would be another interesting thing to discuss in class.

3) Something I found annoying was the fact that this was initially written 10 years ago. For literature on technology, this is pretty old. It does not even discuss the idea of mobile interaction because I suppose no one had a firm grasp of what cell phones would one day be capable, but I wish it had been updated to be a bit more relevant today.

User Centered Design

1) This reading discussed the concept of User-Centered Design and, more specifically, User-Centered Design regarding web development. It introduced the definition of User-Centered Design as a “philosophy and a process,” (Katz-Haas 1998) that concerns itself with usefulness and usability. It listed guidelines for usability, including visibility, memory load, feedback, etc. The reading ended with a guide to developing a user-centered website, consisting of six steps: 1) involve users from the beginning, 2) know your users, 3) Analyze user tasks and goals, 4) Don’t settle on a final direction too soon, 5) Test for usability repeatedly, 6) and to learn more, where it listed more resources (Katz-Haas 1998).

2) One thing I think would be interesting to discuss in class is how to know your users. The reading mentions that you should know how much experience your users have with computers, the web, the domain, etc. (Katz-Haas 1998). I think it would be interesting to explore how to design an interface that is both usable for people like my grandparents while also being engaging for younger people who can pick up things much more quickly.

3) I found it annoying that the reading mentioned that good User-Centered Design is more usable if it has good legibility and is pleasant to use and look at, while I do not really find the layout of the reading to be that enjoyable to look at. It is definitely easy to read and clear, the fact that the alignment reads all the way across the screen of the window irritated me because I like to have a large window open in my browser.

Kinect Videos/Reading

1) The YouTube videos and the article on Spectrum all dealt with Kinect Hacks—programs that people had written utilizing the software from Microsoft’s Kinect 3D sensor. This relatively cheap software has allowed people to do things ranging from a puppet controlled by the silhouette of your arm to a robot that can drive navigate itself around obstacles or cut a banana using your motions. The possibilities seem endless for what people are doing with this software.

2) One really interesting thing I saw included on the Spectrum article was an instance where they were exploring the options of gesture surgery. Being able to control surgery remotely would help if someone has a highly contagious disease that a doctor should not be exposed to. I would be interested in discussing the possibilities of how this software could be used in the medical field and to help people across the world.

3) Another interesting thing I got from this was how easily it is for people to access this technology and share it with others. The open source software is a great incentive for people to hack around with the technology available and create interesting things. Also, it seems that people are very eager to share what they are working on on sites like github, or the one person working on robots at MIT who wanted to sell cheaper software so that people could assemble their own robots at home.

Additional reading response questions:

What is HCI? What is User Centered Design? What is the difference between the two?

HCI is an interdisciplinary field that combines elements of computer science, psychology, sociology and anthropology and industrial design to deal with how humans interact with computing systems. User-Centered Design is a type of design that puts the person at the center of design, rather than the thing itself that is being designed, and concerns itself with usability and usefulness of a design. The difference between the two seems to be that HCI is much more broad than User-Centered Design. HCI refers to the interaction between humans and computers in general, and User-Centered Design is concerned primarily with thedesign of the user’s experience.

What other uses have you seen for Kinect? The example videos you saw were fantastical or fun, but what practical applications can you think of for the Kinect? Why would this applications be useful or novel, and what practical issues could it address?

I once attended a very small concert in my town where the band performing had used the Kinect to capture visual information about the space and the motions of people in it and translated that into a really dynamic and interesting visual aid to their musical performance. Practically, I think the Kinect could have great uses in hospitals or large businesses for transporting things without needing a staff member to take them from place to place. For example, if a lot of blood samples needed to be sent from one floor to another, a robot attached to a cart could transport them and this would create more time for doctors and nurses to be working with patients directly.

#reading #readings #responses #reading responses

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Carly Moss