matt poland > blog

User experience researcher @ User Research International. In the middle of a lover's quarrel with words and technology. Musings about UX, digital humanities, books, music, and esoteric Italian liqueurs in more than 140 characters.

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‘I Wish My Baby Was Born’ by Tim Eriksen, Riley Baugus, & Tim O'Brien A painful and cleansing song after the last week. "That's someone's blood / there on his feathers"

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‘Desire’ by Talk Talk is my new jam.

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‘Black Vest’ by Lee "Scratch" Perry and the Upsetters is my new jam.

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There is a clear warning from the history of technology. It is not sufficient to provide a tool with potential if there is no understanding of how that potential can be realized. Many a clever invention has been termed 'before its time' because the inventor did not see how to build a transition from what was known and in use to what was new.

-- John Bennet (1971), "Interactive bibliographic search as a challenge to interface design". Quoted in Colleen Cool & Nicholas Belkin (2011), "Interactive information retrieval: history and background," In [_Interactive Information Seeking, Behaviour and Retrieval_](http://sils.unc.edu/news/2011/kelly-iir-book). Complicated citation, good advice.

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‘Lose It (Actress Remix)’ by Moire New EP from Werkdiscs. Not their most compelling EP, but Actress can't help but make it better.

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Because I apparently have nothing better to do, this is for all the UXers out there.

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‘My Kingdom’ by Echo & the Bunnymen is my new jam.

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If one is to talk to experts in a meaningful way about their interactions with structure in their task environments, one must know what that structure is and how it may be organized. One must also know the processes actors engage in and the resources they use to render their actions and experiences meaningful. This perspective provides new insights for the design of conceptually meaningful tools and work environments. It implies that their design should take into account the ways actors can achieve coordination with the dynamic behavior of active work materials.

Hollan, Hutchins, & Kirsh (2000). _Distributed cognition: toward a new foundation for human-computer interaction research._ From a think-piece about applying the distributed cognition theory from psychology to human-computer interactions. Has a few implications for user research, maybe. [[DOI](http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/353485.353487)]

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‘Vital’ by Grouper Of this week's new records, new My Bloody Valentine was ok but I love Grouper's The Man Who Died in His Boat.

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...I have no qualms about saying that a well-designed liberal arts education offers the best outcomes even in terms of employability–but “well-designed” in this case means, in part, that the connections between what you study and what you do in life must be indirect, flexible, and unpredictable. ... Now one problem might be that liberal arts institutions aren’t actually producing [graduates who write, think, and speak well], and another might be that there aren’t enough students prepared to become those graduates. Yet another might be that there is some better way to couple the spirit of the liberal arts to practical or problem-based learning. Those are different issues. But what we could do is give those employers more reasons to believe that they’re generally right, to tell more specific, concrete or illustrative stories about how almost anything that a liberal arts student studies can have a payoff–sometimes in what that person does directly at work, sometimes in how they approach life and its catalyzing relationship to work. Not as a promise that a particular major has a particular utility, but yes, as a series of assurances of the generativity of liberal arts for the economy, for the society, for the world. Those stories have to be more than vague hand-waving or enigmatic koans in order to give sympathizers something to fight back against the push to reduce higher education to a meanly-imagined vocational core.

-- [Timothy Burke](http://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/2013/01/31/the-usefulness-of-uselessness-redux/), contra [Pat McCrory](http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2013/01/mccrory-criticizes-liberal-arts) et al., on the "usefulness of uselessness." I look forward to his expanded thoughts, and am reminded of that essay I want to write about how all information scientists should study poetry first. Hat-tip to [Ryan](https://twitter.com/rybesh).

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‘(Don't Worry) If There's A Hell Below We're All Gonna Go’ by Curtis Mayfield Hat-tip to Kayleigh for finding this. Go forth and funk, my children.

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The Conversation

 In my User Interface Design class today, we were talking about the dialogue that goes on between the user's intentions and the system's responsibilities. I was reminded of a paper I read last semester that, to oversimplify and paraphrase, talked about the importance of making UIs better "conversation partners." [Horvitz et al. (2003)](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=636798), written by some prolific people at Microsoft Research, specifically talks about modeling human attention in HCI, and how interfaces that are "bad conversationalists" -- interrupting your train of thought with pop-ups, not giving feedback when you have some input -- can lead to an increase of cognitive load on the user and keep the UI from optimizing the user's ability to pay attention. They call that specific form of turn-taking interaction with the interface "mixed-initiative interaction": > "..."mixed-initiative interaction," in which both users and computers take turns in contributing to a project or an understanding. The turn taking of conversational dialogue is a prototypical example of mixed-initiative interaction. Psychologists have found that people engaged in conversations rely on attentional cues to signal when a contribution is going to be offered or has been accepted. We have sought to endow computers with an analogous ability to recognize and emit signals to guide the nature and timing of contributions and clarifications in support of mixed-initiative interaction." (57) One of my particular interests is in how interfaces can be designed to promote attention, rather than distraction. It's something that I'm trying to think about as I start work on the design project for that class, and continue work on my Master's project: how can we design interfaces so that, when there is interaction between the system and the user, that interaction is respectful, intuitive, and responsive? **A modified version of this post appeared on the [course blog](http://inls718userinterfacedesign.blogspot.com/) for INLS 718.**

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So, after avidly reading several reviews of the last book I set out for Wikipedia to spoil the rest. I just wanted a bird’s eye view of the Last Battle, foretold lo these thousands of pages ago. I was surfeited on an extensive plot summary, which revealed none of the haste its author(s) must have felt to get through a 900-page book in less than a week. I had gotten what I wanted, but I felt a pang as I clicked out of that equivocal tab. After all that spilt blood and ink, I'll be damned if it didn't seem like a satisfying ending. I call it a funny feeling because it contained my whole bundled relationship with these books, tugging me into memories I hadn't recalled in ages.

From [my new essay at __Splice Today__](http://www.splicetoday.com/writing/wheel-of-time-book-series-finale) about the Wheel of Time, text-based roleplaying games, and my sense of ineffable loss at the series' end.

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Introducing History Lab

Do you remember starting to write a history paper in college, staring at the cursor on a blank page wondering where to start? For some the process of analyzing primary and secondary sources, figuring out their context and relationships between them, and turning that into a written argument is intuitive. But for many it’s a black box out of which professors expect a coherent paper to appear without really specifying how you’re to go about doing it.  **History Lab** is a digital humanities/technology-enhanced learning project that aims to fix the “black box” problem of teaching historical research methods to undergraduates. It will be a Web application that will supplement classroom instruction by helping students organize sources and visualize their relationships using mind map, timeline, and other interfaces. Though it is still in the planning phase, the goal of History Lab is to help instructors teach students how to take the disciplinary stance of the historian towards sourcing, corroboration of evidence, contextualization, and written argumentation. My involvement with History Lab began when Pam Lach, the lab manager for UNC's [Digital Innovations Lab](http://digitalinnovation.unc.edu/), told me I should meet with [Sarah Shields](https://teachingthemiddleeast.wordpress.com/), a UNC history professor who has been dreaming of making an application like this for quite some time. Luckily for both of us, she gets a design spec and a working prototype and I get a Master's project out of the deal. I'm excited to work with her and my advisor at SILS, [Ryan Shaw](http://www.aeshin.org) -- whose expertise is the organization of digital historical information -- on a project that engages my longheld fascination with history and newer interests in user research and interface/interaction design. I'm hoping to blog regularly here about History Lab as I progress through the design process. I've also started a Twitter account, [@HistoryLabUNC](http://www.twitter.com/historylabunc), so I can witter on with the active community of historians there about how an application like this could work. In the meantime, check out [my initial slide deck](http://mattpoland.net/files/history-lab/20130124%20HL%20Deck.pdf) (opens a PDF) for a conceptual overview of History Lab (hopefully I'll get around to posting them on SlideShare).

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‘I Was a Stranger’ by Smog An oldie but goodie. "I was worse than a stranger, I was, I was, I was well-known"

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"Are [Interaction] Designers Crazy?"

[](http://tapbots.com/software/tweetbot/) Terence Eden, in a [blog post](http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/01/are-designers-crazy/) that got pretty highly ranked on Hacker News, wonders: are designers crazy? He says, >"I'm just trying to understand what drives the innate desire to be "pixel-perfect"." And then, > "Will users notice that images aren't a bespoke designed for their platform? Will they care?" I reacted strongly to this post because it spoke to some reservations I have about my own visual design sense. Especially when you're new to Web or software design and you see the clean, intuitive work of a [Mark Jardine](http://markjardine.com/) or a [Linda Dong](http://www.lindadong.com/index.php), it's hard not to think that in order to be a successful designer that you have to have that pixel-perfect sense. That your Photoshop skills have to be black-belt level from the start. I'm certainly not going to discount the importance of aesthetics in interface design -- there's even a strain of human-computer interaction research that focuses on the "hedonic" properties of good design (for example, Hassenzahl et al. 2000 [[DOI]](http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/332040.332432)). But the most important thing I've learned about design in working on projects and in courses at SILS is that the _feel_ of an interface is at least as significant to the user's experience as how it looks. People always extol Apple products because they're intuitive -- this is at least as much about how you move through the interface as how it looks. To return to the two designers I cited above: [Tweetbot](http://tapbots.com/tweetbot), the Twitter app Mark Jardine designed, works so brilliantly on iOS because it feels native to that platform. Meaning, it was designed to take advantage of modes of interaction like tapping and swiping, and as such feels more natural than other Twitter apps. Linda Dong's [Dangers of Fracking](http://dangersoffracking.com/) page works so well as a narrative because you just keep scrolling and are continuously surprised and informed as you go. These interfaces are visually stunning, to be sure, but they are successful because they use the affordances of their media intelligently. So, when I wake up in the middle of the night worrying if I'll make it as an interface designer because I'm a little bit color-blind, I remind myself that feel is at least as important as look. This is one of the insights of user experience design, and one of the reasons I like information architecture and interaction design so much.

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Now and then the narrow bandwidth of lists presented on computer screens and bullet points on PowerPoint slides is said to be a virtue, a claim justified by loose reference to George Miller's classic 1956 paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two." That essay reviews psychological experiments that discovered people had a hard time remembering more than about 7 unrelated pieces of really dull data all at once. These studies on memorizing nonsense then led some interface designers to conclude that only 7 items belong on a list or a slide, a conclusion which can be sustained only by not reading the paper. In fact Miller's paper neither states nor implies rules for the amount of information to be shown in a presentation (except possibly for slides that consist of nonsense syllables that the audience must memorize and repeat back to a psychologist). Indeed, the deep point of Miller's paper is to suggest strategies, such as placing information within a context, that extend the reach of memory beyond tiny clumps of data.

-- Edward Tufte on the classic "7±2" heuristic that's applied to user interfaces in lists, number of menu options, you name it - inappropriately, he says. I've always been skeptical about how Miller's heuristic is applied in Web design, and the [discussion in Tufte's forum](http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0000U6) is vigorous and interesting. Well worth reading for design/UX types.