supernovel

HCI Reading Group – A success!

snoflingor — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 05:51:08 +0000

The first meeting for the HCI reading group was a great success. The “Direct Manipulation Interfaces” article by Hutchins, Hollan, and Norman generated a lot of great discussion. For the time being you can follow our discussions at our blog:

http://hcireadinggroup.wordpress.com/

Some fellow HCI students and I are in the process of building Ruby web application that will (hopefully) be the new home to the reading group blog. Here’s a sneak peek of what it looks like

Disaster’s & Accidents: Human Error by Design

snoflingor — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 05:36:25 +0000

I am a disaster junkie. It started innocently enough with a childhood fascination with volcanoes. I was ecstatic when I felt my first earthquake in San Francisco, devastated when I missed out on F3 tornado that ripped through downtown Fort Worth, TX, my hometown, in 2000. Growing up in gulf (of mexico) state meant great coverage of hurricanes (the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 still has the highest body count of any U.S. natural disaster.) My fascination is not limited to natural disasters alone. I own the “I Love Disasters” issue of Murder Can Be Fun, the “infamous zine of bizarre death, murder, mayhem, crime, disaster,…” (now out of print) which includes an account of the great Boston molasses flood that killed 51 people. I developed an interest in plane crashes in college visiting this site for cockpit transcripts and other info (they list September 11th as the the worst aviation disaster in history but the collision of two 747′s on the Canary Islands is still #1 in my heart.)

So, yes I have a “thing” for the cataclysmic. And guess what? So does HCI, by way of psychology and engineering, specifically human factors (because what’s the number one cause of engineering disasters: human factors!) This doesn’t mean blame the dumb pilot, ship captain, or whomever. On the contrary human factors practitioners (HCI can be considered a sub-discipline or specialization in this field) seek to understand in part the design flaws that led users to err. Take the Canary Islands crash I mentioned earlier (583 dead–yikes!) In The Design of Everyday Things the Don (Donald Norman that is) explains that there were misunderstandings between the pilots and air traffic control that led to the crash (read the cockpit transcripts for yourself.) Surely innocent charts and graphs couldn’t lead to death and destruction? Think again–Edward Tufte blames the Challenger explosion on crummy overhead projections (see The Challenger: An Information Disaster from his book Visual Explanations.)

Can’t get enough of this stuff? Check out the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) RISKS Digest (they even have an RSS feed–sweet!) As for myself I’ll be eagerly awaiting next spring when I will (hopefully) take a class called Human Errors and Complex Systems Failures in the Industrial Engineering & Operations dept. here at UMich.

March 22, 1977 crash of Pan AM 1736 and KLM 4805 in Tenerife, Canary Island

Contextual Inquiry – Physical Model

snoflingor — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 04:05:05 +0000

“Physical model – represents the physical environment where the work tasks are accomplished; often, there are multiple physical models representing, e.g., office layout, network topology, or the layout of tools on a computer display.” (Wikipedia, Contextual Design)

I did this in Omnigraffle (of course). The cool office furniture stencils are from Graffletopia. Who doesn’t *love* faux woodgrain?

HCI Reading Group

snoflingor — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 03:15:50 +0000

The first meeting of the HCI Reading Group I started is this Friday. I’m looking forward to digging into some meaty HCI topics. Though I’m enjoying (for the most part) the foundation classes, not being in an HCI focused class has made me feel a bit detached from my future discipline. I’m not sure how many people will actually show up on Friday but the email list is about 30 members strong. We have a wiki so SI alum and other interested parties (like you) who can’t attend meetings can keep up with readings and post their 2 cents. Our first reading will be:

E.L. Hutchins, J.D. Hollan, and D.A. Norman, “Direct manipulation Interfaces”, in User centered system design, D. A. Norman and S. W. Draper Eds., Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 87-124, 1985.
http://hci.ucsd.edu/120/direct-manip.pdf

What I’ve been doing the past month

snoflingor — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 04:15:11 +0000

I’ve been naughty and haven’t posted in awhile. Surprise, surprise I’m in grad school and late October is midterm season and I got busy. In addition to papers and tests I was putting together a GROCS proposal, a grant offered by the digital media commons here at umich. The grant funds projects developed by multidisciplinary teams that promote collaborative learning through rich media. My team includes, a health informatics master’s student, two School of Public Health masters’ students and myself. Below is the abstract for our project. My group will find out in a few weeks if we get funded or not so keep your fingers crossed for us!

Casepedia: A Web-Based Case Study Repository Enabling Collaborative Learning.

Little research exists on the usage of Web 2.0 technologies in medical and health education. Despite the lack of evidence as of yet, we believe in the collaborative benefits of Web 2.0 features can enhance case-based learning. Based on the results of a contextual inquiry, we envision eventually creating a rich, user-structured repository of medical narratives that provide the medical community a dynamic collaborative educational channel. A moderated reputation system can manage the credibility of contributions, and subsequently, the site. This prototype will also allow patients to browse or search for clinical scenarios of their interest, as well as to reflect their vision on the cases and directly connect to the contributing physicians or other patients who share similar health concerns or interest. Our goal is to enable discourse beyond blogs and wikis through a flexible platform that can transform the way users contribute loosely structured content to repositories.

Time Waster: Google Image Labeler

snoflingor — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 04:10:41 +0000

Google Image Labeler is an addictive game that entices people like you and me to waste time on the Internet going through images that come up in Google’s image search results and labeling them for fun. You are paired with someone else online, given 2 minutes and away you go typing labels into a text box as fast as you can think of them, getting points when you and your partner’s labels match. After a few attempts I got to a 669 ranking for the day. It’s strange how addictive it is considering your points get you absolutely nothing. The genius (MacArthur Genius) who concocted the game is a professor at Carnegie Mellon named Luis von Ahn. He is speaking at SI on Thursday, I found out about the image labeler via an email advert for his lecture. His research focus is human computation and he proposes games to produce this computation. Below is the description he wrote up for his lecture:

Construction of the Empire State Building: 7 million human-hours. The Panama Canal: 20 million human-hours. Estimated number of human-hours spent playing computer solitaire around the world in one year: billions. A problem with today’s computer society? No, an opportunity.

What if this time and energy could be channeled into useful work? What if people could play computer games and accomplish work without even realizing it? What if billions of people collaborated to solve important problems for humanity or generate training data for computers? My work aims at a general paradigm for doing exactly that: utilizing human processing power to solve computational problems in a distributed manner. In particular, I focus on harnessing human time and energy for addressing problems that computers cannot yet solve. Although computers have advanced dramatically in many respects over the last 50 years, they still do not possess the basic conceptual intelligence or perceptual capabilities that most humans take for granted. By leveraging human skills and abilities in a novel way, I want to solve large-scale computational problems and/or collect training data to teach computers many of these human talents. To this end, I treat human brains as processors in a distributed system, each performing a small part of a massive computation. Unlike computer processors, however, humans require an incentive in order to become part of a collective computation. Among other things, I use online games as a means to encourage participation in the process. In this talk, I will describe my work in the area of Human Computation.

Runnin’ on Rails

snoflingor — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 03:48:43 +0000

Spent most of the day working on a login dialog for my ruby app. Searching on the web I found out there is a handy little login generator. Alas this is a class assignment so I have to do it the old fashioned way. So far I’m doing ok, at the very least I’ve completed the assignment due for this week. If I can find out why I keep on writing NULL values to the database instead of real data I’ll actually be able to add a new user. Resources online are ok for Ruby, hopefully will get more robust as the Ruby on Rails catches on. Here’s a pic of my app so far. Definitely need to make those buttons prettier.

The Contextual Inquisition

snoflingor — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 03:16:55 +0000

Contexual Inquiry project – so far so good

snoflingor — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 02:22:19 +0000

With 2 interviews and an interpretation session done my contextual inquiry group project is well under way. For those who don’t know, contextual inquiry is a step-by-step method for getting accurate user data to build user-centered software. You physically go to the user’s work space, interview users, observe users working, and collect “artifacts” such as screenshots and forms. After data collection you create models of the users work and communication processes and use these to come up with recommendations for a more efficient workflow. Then you design software to support this workflow, though for this project we will stop short and only make recommendations. The methodology is strong but the book is a snooze. It’s full of ugly tables and weird icons. The book it is very specific about the colors of pens and sticky notes to use for building diagrams, such is the importance of this that they tell you what alternate colors to use if you have a team member who is color blind, yet the entire text is in black and white. Moving on…as stated in the title of this post, our project is going quite well. I interviewed the president of the client company this Tuesday and I must say I did a very good job. I probed, I nodded, I gave off an air of confidence and ease. Later that week I ran a tight little interpretation session where we reviewed notes taken during the interview. Of course none of this would have gone smoothly without my utterly dependable and focused teammates.

Omnigraffle, I heart you

snoflingor — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 01:42:15 +0000

Went to an Omnigraffle demo today. Not sure if this was fortuitous or not as I could see myself wasting many hours playing with this diagramming tool. Since it’s made exclusively for the Mac it’s real purty and easy to use. I thought I had won out big time by scoring a free version of the latest Adobe Suite but now I’m having second thoughts. Illustrator is powerful no doubt but boy is it scary if you don’t use it all the time and know all its tricks. How could a program make drawing a line so difficult? Now I just have to scrounge up the $48 dollars to buy the darn thing (the box that directs you to the educational store is very inconspicuous, makes you wonder if they want you to find it at all.) I also need to buy the text editor I’ve fallen in love with. Alas, if freeware were also bestware I wouldn’t have to factor these software purchases into my limited budget.