Are maps better than text for presenting information on mobile devices? That was the question explored by Karen Church, Joachim Neumann, Mauro Cherubini and Nuria Oliver in a paper (about to be) presented at the WWW 2010 conference, they present evidence that in some cases a textual display of information supports people’s information needs more effectively than a map-based one.

The two interfaces were evaluated over the course of a month of use “in the wild” (but in Ireland, not in in Spain). Each participant had access to both interfaces, and was shown how to use them to ask location-specific questions, which would be answered by others nearby. Availability of answers was communicated via SMS messages.

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The slides for our CHI 2010 talk on workplace communication tool use are now available online. In the study, we explored people’s use of workplace communication tools, and found that new tools don’t replace previous ones, that multiple similar tools coexist, and that people’s communication patterns shift over time. Please see Thea’s earlier post for additional details on the research.

Overall, the talk was well-received, but I thought one question from the audience might warrant some additional comments. The question focused on our use of the word “workplace” in the paper (and in the title) while still discussing some aspects of communication that seemed not quite work-like.

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A while ago I wrote about the general threats to one’s privacy posed by search engine histories. It appears that the threat is more than theoretical, as researchers at INRIA and UCI have shown recently. They were able to exploit security weaknesses in the Google Web History used to generate personalized suggestions through what they termed a “Historiographer” attack.

Google appears to be taking the researchers’ warnings seriously, and has modified some of its services to use HTTPS. Not all aspects have yet been secured, however.

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Last month I had to use the ACM Word template to format our IIiX 2010 submission, and found that document to be flawed as a template because it did not use styles to specify appearance, and thus did not make an easy-to-use template. I took the liberty of generating a Word template (.DOT) file that I believe captures the formatting requirements correctly but does so in a way that makes it easy to create new documents from it. Note that this template differs from the CHI template (on which it is based) in some ways, most notably in the numbering of sections and in the formatting of references.

I would like to make the template available on the ACM site for use in future conferences, and am open to suggestions as to how to do that. In the meantime, here is the new template. There are a number of conferences coming up that use this template.  Please let me know if you have any problems with it, or find any incorrect styles.

Here’s a problem that had me puzzled for longer than I care to admit. I have a C# application that periodically makes rather light-weight calls on a web service. To be a good UI citizen, the app makes the calls on a background thread, and the standard .NET HttpWebRequest mechanism is used to make the calls. The thread maintains a single queue of requests, processes one at a time, creating a new HttpWebRequest object for each, and the results are returned to the UI (if necessary) by a callback.

My problem was that intermittently the calls were timing out (I’d set a 10-second timeout on them). Furthermore, when I examined the server logs, the requests were arriving and being processed, but often much later than they were sent, sometimes by as much as a minute. Yet when I attached a sniffer to the client machine, it showed the request packets leaving the machine right when my program was sending them. What on earth was going on?

The use of Twitter at conferences seems to be growing, and I think we are beginning to see some limitations of the current tool suite with respect to making use of tweets at a conference in real time. At CHI 2010 I was not able to participate much in live-tweeting because I did not want to carry my heavy Thinkpad T61 around all day, and my iPhone wasn’t up to the task. While the iPhone was adequate for checking e-mail and using the CHI 2010 schedule app, the battery would run down by the end of the day of intermittent use. Furthermore, the screen wasn’t large enough to take notes, type tweets in a timely manner, and to keep up with the stream of tweets from other attendees. In fact, in some cases it seemed that people who were following the conference remotely had a better grasp of the breadth of activity in the sessions than I did at the conference.
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Stacy Branham who was an intern with us last summer gave an excellent talk at CHI 2010 about the study that she ran of how people use ReBoard. I’ve written about the study before, and the papers are available here and here. But the slides are interesting in their own right, and tell a complementary story.

First, there are the CHI Madness slides:

Let the slides auto-advance for the best effect.

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Paper still plays an important role in many tasks even in this age of computers. This phenomenon can be attributed to paper’s unique advantages in display quality, spatial arrangement flexibility, instant accessibility and robustness, which the existing computers can hardly beat. However, paper lacks computational capability and does not render dynamic information. In contrast, cell phones are becoming powerful in computation and communication, providing a convenient access to dynamic information and digital services. Nevertheless, cell phones are constrained by their limited screen size, relatively lower display quality and cumbersome input methods. Combining the merits of paper and cell phones for rich GUI-like interactions on paper has become an active research area.

Here at FXPAL, the Paper UI group currently focuses on cell phone-based interfaces and their supporting techniques to link paper documents to digital information and enable rich digital interactions on physical paper through content-based image recognition algorithms. We started  research in this area several years ago (see our project page for more details), and our recent on-going projects include EMM and PACER.

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A lot of people (like me) will use the iPad as an e-reader, among other things. It’s a good opportunity to play around with what a e-book actually can be, since the iPad offers things that Kindle can’t (color, animation…). I vote for more like this, please:

It’s in the iTunes store here.

David Karger made an interesting proposal on the Haystack blog about the efficiency of CHI reviewing. Using an ROC analysis of reviewer scores for CHI 2010, he found that when there is consensus between the first two reviews that a paper in question scores below 2 of 5, that there is no need to solicit a third review for it.  While this method would have caused the rejection of 6 of about 300 papers that weren’t actually rejected, it would save almost 500 reviews.

The question is, is this tradeoff worth it?

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