Fitts' Law (correct spelling = +bonus points)

A + B log(1 + D/W)...and the heavens trembled. 

Fitts' Law is basically about how long it takes a user to use a device. So Fitts came up with this crazy equation that we still use today that helps us to design effective programs and devices that cause minimal time to the user.  Yay!

Usability considered Harmful (some of the time)

This paper is basically about the thought that usability evaluation is harmful because it can give meaningless or trivial results that can hamper the design direction. And they say the evaluation methodology should be appropriate for the actual problem. 

This paper seems like it has good advice for the purposes of making things that conquer a problem. But it seems strange that no one thought of this before because it seems like a real no-brainer to have a design that is appropriate for the problem.

Human centered design considered harmful

Another Don Norman foray into design principles...This paper is about how he thinks that design works better when there is activity involved with it and how people adapt to technology.  But overall he thinks that when design focusing on the activity involved will bring about the most benefits.

I think this is probalbly true. And my example of course is going to be the Wii. The Wii involves more activity than any of the other video game consoles and as such seems to be selling more than all the other consoles combined. People seem to like this idea of actually doing something with their body that reflects on the television screnn more than just pressing a button and it happening. This especially seems to affect people who were never reall into video games and it brings in a new market of users.

Ethnography considered harmful

This paper is about how these guys think ethnographies are this angelic gift that should not be tainted by trying to do them in a new way. They want it to be kept to traditional practices. 

As far as this paper talking about how how ethnographies need to be done the way they have always been done, sure...okay. But the people who wrote this paper need to stop writing papers or get someone who knows how to write papers to write one for them because they suck at it. Maybe then it will actually seem like it is written in english.

CHI '09 Urban Pixels: Painting the City with light

Ben

Nick

Patrick S

In this paper the guys were trying to make a new form of urban art that was interactive. The display they came up with is called Urban Pixels and it is basically a bunch of balls with white lights inside that can be placed on any surface and that can also communicate to each other and have a wireless network so they can be accessed from a laptop. You can also interact with the pixels by using a flashlight and shining it on them to turn each on individually or use a mobile phone to send a signal to them.

Overall i thought this paper was pretty interesting and it seems like the idea is cool. Since they are dealing with just low resolution arrays of these pixels you cant really make any patterns that are very detailed and that is kind of a downer.

Uist 07: Multi user interaction using handheld projectors

Ben

Devin

drew

This paper was about some guys who made a handheld projector system. The system works with these staple gun like projectors that you hold in your hand and the interface that is used is explored in a flashlight-like manner. Meaning you have to search for the things you want to find by moving the projector around, this is shown clearly in the video. The main thing they wanted to do was try and make file sharing and things like that easy to do, but I really only see this being used for entertainment purposes, mainly amusement parks. Although it did look kind of useful in office meetings, i just don't think i would want to have a projector shining in my eyes while giving a presentation. They also integrated things into it like privacy settings and a feature where the projector will shut off if it is pointed at someone, but that someone has to be holding a projector themselves.

Emotional Design

Ben

Brad

Josh

This book was about Don Norman contradicting what he said in earilier books. He goes on about how robots need to have emotion and how the design of things evoke emotions in people.

I thought this book was fairly interestingin the way it reminds me of other things that are interesting. His ideas on how robots need to have emotion so they can learn and adapt is a little scary. Although in Terminator and The Matrix the machines don't seem to have emotions they're just cold killers. He goes on and lists some rules for machines that he ripped from I, robot. Which kind of says to me he really doesn't have any original ideas in this book it's all already been explored in Sci-fi.

Diagram for Mini-Project

Larger

CHI 2008: Heuristic evaluation for games: usability principles for video game design

adam

ben

brad

This paper was basically about these guys who are trying to figure out general problems with usability in games and try and make this heuristics, or categories, of the problems that come up and how they can be found and resolved.

They looked at 108 PC game reviews for single player games in 6 major game genres from the Gamespot website. Once the read all the revies and listed the problems that came up the invented some categories for the basic problems as follows.

And then from this they defined some hueristics for how these problems could be avoided defines in this next table.

Once they had the heuristics they tested them with people to see how they would be used to identify problems and which heuristics would be used the most, and here were the results:

So they found that heuristic 9 was the most common problem, which is a lack of a tutorial or help. And overall the testers thought the heuristics were very useful for finding problems.

Overall I think this is a pretty useful system thet have come up with but right now it only extends to single player PC games. So they need to get console and multiplayer games taken care of as well.

The Man Who Shocked the World

Josh

Brad

Adam

This book was about Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist who came up with some ground breaking discovers relating to how people think and act in certain situations. The book is basically his life story and goes over some of his most famous experiments as well as his personal life.

I thought the book was a pretty interesting read, Milgram had some ideas that just seemed to turn things upside down so that things could be seen in a different way. He definitely thought outside the box. As to his experiments, I thought that his work on obedience brought a new light onto how people percieve authority and how much pain the are willing to inflict just because an authority figure tells them to. Another famous experiment of his I actually heard of first as Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon", which is a game where Kevin Bacon can be related to another actor through a series of film roles. And I thought this was a very interesting concept and I want to try and do it myself someday.

Don Norman's The Design of Future Things

Brad

Adam

Josh

This book is another in the infinite list of Don Norman's "The Design of..." series. He basically talks about what people would want to be able to have in the future, things like automated cars and robots. And how these things could be good or bad and what we have to do to make sure the systems don't fail and the world doesn't explode.

I thought this book was definitely better than the other one of his books we have read so far, "The Design of Everyday Things." And I thought he brought up some interesting ideas, like the car swarm and your kitchen telling you what you should eat. He references Minority Report, which has some of those things that he talks about in it, like automated cars. But some of the stuff just doesn't seem feasible. At least I don't see a car swarm working on the roads we have today, I think there would have to be brand new special roads built that work with the cars. I believe I saw this idea once somewhere before where the road would have like some junk inside it that would help automated cars along the road with traffic and things like that. Almost like it was running on a track, but it seemed more like it was just sensors or something that relayed messages about the other cars on the road. 

Overall, it was a pretty interesting read only to become disturbing at the end when he eats shrooms and talks to the Machine Archiver. Where apparently he gets inside the head of a sentient machine and tries to figure out how machines would design things for humans.

UIST papers: "Annotating Gigapixel Images" and "Foldable Interactive Displays"

ben

tyler

adam

Annotating Gigapixel Images:

This paper is basically about a group that has devised a way to go 

about and label these gigapixel images, which are extremely large 

images commonly used for geographic photos of the earth, label 

them with text or sound. The labels can denote regions, cities, 

or even something as small as a person and label that. Then it 

goes on to discuss how these labels should be displayed on the 

screen when panning and zooming. It details these equations for 

the different renderings in the paper.

Foldable Interactive Displays:

This paper was about a research team trying to come up with a way to
have cost effective and small space consuming displays. Essentially,
foldable projection screens that can move around. The title of the paper
is a little deceiving, you think it would be a kind of screen that you 

could fold up into your pocket and then take it out and use it anywhere. 

But this is just a projection screen that can fold up, you have to have 

a projector to put the images on it. Basically, the have 4 different types 

of foldable screens: a fan, an umbrella, a newspaper, and a scroll. And 

they put Rf emitters into these so that a projector could track where the 

screen was as you carry it around. You can also do things like flipping 

over your screen and the display acts accordingly by flipping your 

"paper" that your reading over. Also you can resize the screen, for 

instance, on the newspaper you can fold it up some and the display 

resizes accordingly. By adding additional LEDs into the display input 

devices can be used like a stylus to track user operations. Overall, this 

paper underwhelmed me because its seems very impractical to have 

projectors everywhere, and that's what it needs for this to even be 

useful. So the research seems pointless to me.

Ethnography

My ethnography was about trying to find a pattern in the purchasing of food at a food court based on ethnicity. I went to the Post Oak Mall food court here in College Station and watched where people ordered food from and recorded what ethnicity I believed them to be. There was four restauraunts: a japanese food place, a chinese food place, a pizza place, and Sonic. When I was finished I discovered that about twice as many white folk ordered from Sonic, the Hispanic and African American demograhics were about even across the restaurants in terms of ordering, and that Asians only ate the Asian food. So from this I concluded that maybe Asians only want to eat there own kind of food when given the option. And maybe that all the white folk going to Sonic may be because they like "all-american" food. So there is at least some semblance of a buying pattern among ethnic groups.

The Mole People

Patrick

Adam

Brian

This book is basically about a women who infiltrated the undground homeless scene in order to try and better understand the circumtances of them living there and to just see what their lives were like and the communities they built down there. 

I thought this book was a semi-interesting read. It didn't really strike me as having much to do with this class, but I did like the parts that were written kind of like a novel would be. There were some suspenseful moments and that's probably what i'm going to remember most about it, as well as, the last chapter were some emotion comes into play. Overall it was a decent read and I guess you could apply it to computer science by seeing that she kind of put herself into the shoes of the homeless and we should do that with our users.

The Media Equation

Comments:

Adam

Brad

Patrick


The Media Equation is about trying to relate how we interact with computers and media to how we interact with human beings. So several studies were done to try and prove this, like using computers that were polite or had a voice that had a dominant tone or submissive tone and how people reacted to those kinds of things. And it turned out they reacted similarly to how they would to real things.

I thought this book was very interesting, I can see how some of the things they talked about really happen when we use computers and how media affects us. The way pictures and motion are presented in a movie bring about some of the same emotions we would feel in real life if those things were happening. And ultimately understanding how these things affect us can help us to better design future products. Be it a robot that has manners or a movie that fully immerses you in it's universe.Some of the faults of this work are that the details of the experiments are laid out in the same way over and over again int he book so the start becoming tedious to read, because it's like you already read it before. But overall the book was enjoyable.

Don Norman's Design of Everday Things

ben

brad

brian

Don Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things was a moderately interesting read about how designs for things we interact with are difficult to use sometimes unless designed properly. He talked about how sometimes functions for a device are so hard to find it would be hard for a rocket scientist to figure out how to use. And he stressed that the designers of these devices that are difficult to use is the consequence of bad design and not user error. So if a door has a horizontal bar on it and it looks like you should push it but you actually have to pull it then your like "WTF? this door is stupid." Overall he had some very interesting things to say about design and user interfaces.
The faults in this book, though, lie with his constant barrage of examples that bore you to death. 1 or 2 examples for each idea would have been fine but he gives about 10. This work should be applied more to computers as well I think most of his examples were just for common every items, but it would be interesting to see it done for computers and software.

After reading the book I took a look at this Pentax camera and some of its functions and uses are pretty obscure. For one, to open the back of it and put film in you have to pull the circle on the left of the camera up until the back pops. There are no markings or indications for this, you just have to know. Also none of the knobs or numbers on it are labeled you just have to be able to recognize what the numbers stand for. Basically you have to be a professional camera person or have read the manual (if it even comes with one) to understand how to work it.