Predictive Text Input in a Mobile Shopping Assistant: Methods and Interface Design

Written by: Petteri Nurmi, Andreas Forsblom, Patrik Flor´een, Peter Peltonen, Petri Saarikko

The authors put together a shopping list creator that specializes in predictive text and usability. They built a predictive text database and ran a usability test for both one and two handed use. The test showed significant speed improvement was achieved with both hands by using predictive text. Using predictive text improved the input error rate by 80%.

This paper shows that people have not put that much effort into grocery list building apps. I feel that this paper should have compared their database and correctness to other similar applications on the market. This also doesnt feel like a complete research topic to me. All the authors did was put a database together and rank items by frequency of use. Future work should include matching words to pictures and sorting lists by common food groupings. 

Multi-touch Interaction for Robot Control

Written by: Mark Micire, Jill L. Drury, Brenden Keyes, and Holly A. Yanco

The authors designed a multi-touch system for controlling a robot. The controls are detailed in the picture below. They argue that the multi-touch system allows for an infinite amount of control styles with a 2D interface while using a joystick or some sort of hardware controller limits you by the hardware itself. After designing their initial input software the authors ran a series of usability tests. This helped them narrow down how people will naturally use their software for control.

This input style is important as we expand devices we want to control but maintain few controllers. People carry multi-touch devices around with them on a regular basis, and this project helps expand the use of those devices. An iPhone can be used to control most anything because of its multi-touch capability. The biggest problem with touch based systems is the lack of precision. Until we develop more precise finger reading algorithms these types of input devices remain only for devices that don't have to be precise. Future work on this would be to update controls to be more natural and respond intuitively. 

Team Analytics: Understanding Teams in the Global Workplace

Written by: Jan H. Pieper, Julia Grace, Stephen Dill at IBM Almaden Research Center

The authors developed a program called "Team Analytics" written in Perl CGI scripts hosted on an Apache 2 webserver. This program displays the people in a world wide work group to the user. The visualization includes a picture of all the team members, a flow chart of who works for who, a pie chart of the distribution of groups, time zones everyone is in, and a "bizcard" that tells what everyone's exact job is. 

This development is quite a big step forward for international people working independently. It tries to tackle some of the biggest problems of working remotely, knowing your group. The fact that it can be launched from an email client really integrates it into a possible everyday use. Future use should probably include quick communication links, like chat or video chat. This seems like a great step in the direction of creating a suite of communication apps for remote location working.

PrintMarmoset: Redesigning the Print Button for Sustainability

Written by: Jun Xiao, Jian Fan

The authors put together a program called PrintMarmoset. The purpose behind this program is to reduce the amount of wasted paper that comes from sloppy web printing. PrintMarmoset allows users to easily erase, blow up, and select data from a website and print while maintaining the ease of use as compared to HP Smart Web Printing. The purpose of the project was to implement Sustainable Interaction Design (SID); to design things taking the environment and waste into account. It turns out that their product was well received and easy to use, saving a large amount of paper compared to commercially available programs.

I feel that this paper sheds light on the computer scientist's obligation to design not only for a good product, but one using SID. I think that a better avenue, as stated in the paper, is to improve digital copies of reading so there is very little waste, but this paper is primarily used to enlighten people to a way of thinking. To expand on this paper's research for the future would probably see continued breakdowns of web pages so that there is virtually no waste in printing when it has to be done.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum (Chapters 1-7)

The author starts the book our by talking about how things are designed. About how different things around us are designed poorly, not that they aren't doing their job, they just allow the users to make more mistakes than if they were designed well. He gives examples including a story of an airplane crash and his alarm clock being difficult to set. He then deviates to a more broad structure of saying that programmers don't understand design and don't care; they just want to put their features into the program and say that the users just aren't tech savvy. His ideas are described via the idea of the dancing bear. A bear doesn't dance amazingly, but it is amazing that it can dance. This is how programs were made in the early 2000s.

I feel that this book is much like Don Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things. The stress of the book is to design things well and make using them intuitive, otherwise people are not actually using the tool to it's fullest, and may not even want to use the tool. I also feel that this has changed in the last 6 years since the book was published. Design is stressed by all professors and we are instructed to create things that people can use easily, not things that just get the job done.

Gravity Sphere: Gestural Audio-Tactile Interface for Mobile Music Exploration

Written by: Jaakko Keränen, Janne Bergman, and Jarmo Kauko at the Nokia Research Center

The authors created a program called Gravity Sphere. It is essentially virtual shelves but for only music, using an accelerometer instead of motion sensing, and has limited visual feedback. The first instance created used the Nokia N95 and uses audio feedback for each targeted location to let the user know what they are accessing. If held in one position song samples will play that if chosen the phone will compile a play list. During the first of two tests the team found that their UI was poor and people could not understand how to use the Gravity Sphere properly without instruction. After being shown what Gravity Sphere could do the test subjects were very interested. For the second test the UI was upgraded to have a 3D arrow point in the direction the phone was oriented in the sphere and vibration feedback was given when the phone was moved enough for the phone to react. This setup was rated well and gave the user quicker control over their music than with a visual browser.

This is a great step in advanced control of phone input. Only having buttons on the phone is getting stifling when we have all these other input capabilities. The problem with this software is that sitting while using it would be somewhat awkward and it would take practice to understand exactly what the phone is doing and how it has mapped the music. I would probably continue with this use of the accelerometer but add in the abilities of the virtual sphere to branch this from just music control to a full form kinesthetic phone input style.

Designing Trustworthy Situated Services: an Implicit and Explicit Assessment of Locative Images’ Effect on Trust

Written by: Vassilis Kostakos and Ian Oakley

The authors put together two tests. The first test was to determine whether people associated more with local images than foreign images. The test they developed had people classify pictures as trustworthy or untrustworthy based on the picture being foreign or local. The results, as predicted, were that people associate more with images of local places. The second test was to determine what qualities contribute to a website's perceived trustworthiness. It turns out that the quality of the site was the biggest factor. The authors say that they will use these tests to help develop tactics to create websites that users perceive as secure.

This paper brings up important points on security. People have to be able to trust websites and be able to identify fraudulent ones. This test to me though seems like a usability test. The authors were just gathering research to point in a direction for development practices than toward any real product. The next step that I would take would be to test these designs with phishing websites in a controlled lab to see how well people react when they are not just asked if they trust it, if the information they are entering has a factor as well.

The VoiceBot: A Voice Controlled Robot Arm

Written by: Brandi House, Jonathan Malkin, and Jeff Bilmes atthe University of Washington

The authors developed a robot arm that could be controlled by a verbal joystick. First they made a 2D model on the computer and made sure they could control it. A test was run to find the best mode of control., forward kinematic (controlling each joint independently), inverse kinematic (designing for only an end result, not caring about individual joints), or a hybrid control method. The end result showed that people with limited experience, since it was a new devise to the testers, preferred an inverse kinematic design, not wanting to thinking about the angles of the angles of the arm and have it just work.

The robot arm is a hobbyist arm called the Lynx 6. It is controlled with two modes, position mode and orientation mode. Position mode controls the arm's position while orientation mode controls the gripper. Again, inverse kinematic design prevailed over other options when put to a usability test.

This project is very important to the expansion of handicap persons' capabilities. This allows people to control robotics and other things with simple verbal commands that are non-language specific. This would be very awkward to operate in public, but in a work environment it could boost productivity of handicapped people immensely. With further development this project could actually become user friendly and deployable to a commercial environment. Much of the work left to do on this expansion of the verbal joystick is in usability tests and tweaking algorithms to make the controls easier to learn and use.

VibraPass - Secure Authentication Based on Shared Lies

Written by: Alexander De Luca, Emanuel von Zezschwitz, Heinrich HuBmann; all from the University of Munich

The VibraPass is an authentication style invented to help enhance security past just using a PIN. A user enters their PIN through a PDA or mobile phone linked to the terminal via bluetooth. The user is instructed to insert a false number while typing their PIN if their mobile device vibrates. This becomes very difficult to exploit because a perfect recording has to be made and video taken of the input for the original PIN to be found.

This style of input is new and very useful. PIN right now are very easy to exploit by simple observational tactics, this prevents simple shoulder hovering and pocket cameras from being all that is needed to steal a PIN. The only real problem I see with this is having the user need bluetooth to link to the terminal. I know that this is more looking at a new way to interface securely, but I cant help but wonder how easy it would be to spoof connections to this terminal. I think VibraPass has practical expansion in the future, perhaps by utilizing more secure personal area networks.

“Pimp My Roomba”: Designing for Personalization

Written by: JaYoung Sung, Rebecca E. Grinter and Henrik I. Christensen

This group wanted to find out how personalization hardware affected users. Much research has been done in the past on software personalization, like the desktop, and the background in gmail, but not much has been done for hardware personalization. To do this experiment the group distributed 30 roombas to 30 different households. 15 houses recieved customization kits and vouchers for free roomba skins that they could order online. The other 15 houses were not informed about customization at all. 6 of the 15 houses that received customization stuff actually personalized their robots. Reasons for personalizing the robot were recorded by the team. The main reasons for personalizing was to either make the robot stick out or to make it disappear. In all cases where personalization occurred the owners felt closer to the robot and felt like it was more of an appliance than just technology doing stuff in their home. 

This is important to the acceptance of technology into the everyday household. Right now it is primarily "techies" that run modern tech appliances, and this is because they think they are cool. The general public sees them as high tech and expensive, not necessarily worth their value. By adding personalization this can be alleviated. The robots become everyday things that the owners enjoy seeing and are okay with their presence. This is important as the home moves towards being very technology based and computer oriented.

Sacred Imagery in Techno-Spiritual Design

Written by: Susan P. Wyche, Kelly E. Caine, Benjamin K. Davison, Shwetak N. Patel, Michael Arteaga, and Rebecca E. Grinter

The authors looked into programs that have been written for religious intent, primarily keeping track of prayer times. Seeing the lack in programs that are visually rich the group put together a program for informing Islams when to pray. The program was for a phone. It has a picture of a mosque silhouette, a sky that changes hue as the day progresses, a sun that travels across the sky throughout the day, and circles in the sky that line up with the sun at times when prayer is supposed to occur. The program was tested with Islamic people and found to not be religiously intolerant. After the field test people said that it was much better than just setting an alarm like most of them had done previously and that the visual reminders were very nice.

This paper is interesting to me. I feel that there is an open field for people to do work in the religious field as far as programming goes. Not many programs are written well for religious intent. But the opening is very limited; all of the stuff that I see as being developed are more app styled like with the iPhone than anything else. This paper felt more like a gimmick than an actual branch into another field for CHI.

Ethnography: Use of the climbing wall

I want to track use of the climbing wall at the rec center. The idea is to track how often a wall is climbed on, what rope used, the gender(s) of the climber(s), if there is a new route on the wall, and how much time the group spends at a single wall. If it is only me working on this I will only be able to monitor two or three walls adequately. I will plan to do the monitoring 2 hours a day 4 times a week myself, and add time and walls if other people want to do this as well. This will let us know who climbs what types of walls (e.g. - over hanging, slab, vertical) and for how long. I have talked to some of the wall staff and they are willing to help out getting data as well.

The Design of Everyday Things

Written by Donald A. Norman, this book takes the obvious and throws it in your face. Norman begins the book by explaining why things are designed the way they are in our world, what the compromises are between design and usability, and just how all of this gets ignored in the 1990 world the book was written in. He follows this up with a description of our own actions, the logic behind them, and why we interpret happenings around us the way we do. After this, Norman starts what I think is the meat of the book. Donald stresses natural mappings of things like stoves and faucets, the importance of visually understanding what to do, and creating a noticeable reaction to any sort of input. Then, he goes into human error. People make mistakes, this has to be taken into account when designing something. We need to minimize error and make it as impossible to destroy what is being accomplished.

To me this book seems dated. It is 20 years old. All of the points in this book seem to be common sense and already practiced, though I expect that's because Norman wrote this book and it changed the world of design. Simple with little clutter, visual reminders and clear directions, difficult to break; this is good design. The problem comes when putting all of this into practice. We know what things should be, but making them that way takes lots of time, effort, and money.