Blog Category: human-computer interaction

Parts of a vision

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IDEO released a concept video of three ebook-related designs: one (code-named Nelson) for reading and analyzing data, one (Coupland) for managing the social context of reading, and one (Alice) for interactive hypertext fiction. While these themes are certainly relevant to computer-mediated reading, the video breaks little new ground.

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There is no Ink in Inkling

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Inkling is an iPad textbook app through which textbooks books can be purchased, read, and annotated. It has a pleasant user interface, and (as of this writing) a small collection of what look like high school or intro college level textbooks on a range of topics. This content seems to have been either developed, or heavily adapted, for the iPad app. This makes for a smooth reading experience, loosely anchored on the book metaphor. In addition to reading per se, the app offers some standard navigation and annotation features, but these are works in progress.

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Timing thoughts

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I’ve written about Google Instant before, but Daniel Tunkelang’s recent post triggered some additional reactions. Daniel writes that Instant is good because

Users spend less–and hopefully no time–in a limbo where they don’t know if the system has understood the information-seeking intent they have expressed as a query.

thus, the argument goes that by saving the user a few hundred milliseconds (and the need to press the Enter key), users will be better off because they will get feedback on the queries they run more quickly, and thus will be able to find the things that they are looking for more quickly.

I am not sure that the accountants and the psychologists would necessarily agree, in this case.

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The dynamic Duo

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According to ubergizmo.com, Dell demonstrated an iPad-sized tablet device with a fold-out keyboard that runs Windows 7 at the Intel developer forum. While convertible tablets running a Windows OS are nothing new, it’s a bit surprising that Dell is starting to market one right now to compete with the iPad.

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Instant success?

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So I fired up IE-8 and I tried Google Instant. It’s fast: as fast as I can type, it’s showing me search results. Mind you the results aren’t always sensible, but they are delivered quickly. It works great for short queries such as looking for a popular sense of some word. In this case, it saves me the trouble of hitting enter. Nice, but not earth-shattering.

When I am looking for something less obvious, it guesses wrong. For example, the query “information processing and management” (an academic journal) first produced a set of results for the partial string “”inform” that match informatica.com. Nice, but not the journal. After I typed “information,” it showed me the wikipedia page for “information” (oh the irony) and a bunch of other links highly-associated with the term. But no journal. “information proc” produced a bunch of hits on “information processing.” Better, but not what I am after. Completing the second word and pressing the space bar yielded a number of links to “information processing theory,” which also happens to be the top query suggestion. But no journal. Only when I typed “information processing and” did I get the results I wanted.

So what are we to make of this new addition to Google’s bag of tricks?

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Affect and design

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Daniel Tukelang wrote an interesting review/commentary on Clifford Nass and Corina Yen‘s new book on affective computing, where they cite many examples that biasing results toward one’s expectations can improve users’ satisfaction with the results. Another class of responses (that is also well-documented in the affective computing literature) is the tendency for people to anthropomorphize computers.

Daniel’s conclusion is that it’s relatively straightforward to use these techniques to deceive people, to subvert personalization, to mislead rather that to inform. I’ve got two reactions to this work, one related to system design, and one more specifically to information seeking.

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Twitter for iPad

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I played a bit with the Twitter for iPad app (announced recently on the Twitter blog), and found it a pleasant experience for casual use, but not particularly well-suited for more intensive use that involves multi-tasking. The slide-over pane organization is elegant and more usable than TweetDeck for iPad’s browser. It works particularly well for reading web pages in portrait mode: pages can be zoomed to hide the ads and show just the main column in a reasonably-sized font.

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Gaming learning

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If you’re in the business of conveying information to people, you might be interested in engaging their interest to cause them to seek out more information and to deepen their understanding of the data. That’s the premise that Nick Diakopoulos is trying to explore with some interactive visualizations of demographic data.

Nick (a former FXPAL Intern) is exploring the design space of interactive, semi-automated visualizations that can be put together quickly and yet leverage the kinds of interaction design characteristic of computer games.

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App as silo

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A little while ago I wrote about the lack of details in reports of iPad/eBook use for education; I am happy to point to an article that gets it right. Joel Mathis surveyed some recent efforts by universities to use the iPad to replace some more traditional educational materials. He reported on some specific apps that one university was considering using (although the textbook app by ScrollMotion appears to be in development, as I wasn’t able to find any details on this app other than the Februrary 2010 announcements. According to another article, the tool would integrate multimedia textbooks with note-taking and other features. Does that mean that the notes would be attached to the textbook app, or could they be exported and integrated with notes on other materials?

This is a specific instance of a more general pattern of data use on the iPad: with each app holding on to its own data, it’s difficult to see how to manage notes and annotations across several applications that are required for one’s studies or work.

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HCIR Search Challenge

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The fourth HCIR workshop was held this past weekend at Rutgers University in conjunction with the IIiX 2010 conference. This was, in my opinion, the best workshop of the four so far. Part of the strength of the workshop has been the range of presentations, covering more mature work in traditional 30 minute presentations, a poster and demo session, and, new this year, reports from the HCIR search challenge.

From the web site:

The aims of the challenge are to encourage researchers and practitioners to build and demonstrate information access systems satisfying at least one of the following:

  • Not only deliver relevant documents, but provide facilities for making meaning with those documents.
  • Increase user responsibility as well as control; that is, the systems require and reward human effort.
  • Offer the flexibility to adapt to user knowledge / sophistication / information need.
  • Are engaging and fun to use.

Participants would be given access to the New York Times annotated corpus which consists of 1.8 million articles published in the Times between 1987 and 2007, and they would be expected do something interesting in searching or browsing this collection.

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