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CHI Report, An Emotional Closing
aesthetics, design, usability
April 12, 2003, 06:53 PM
The final activity of the conference was the Closing Plenary, which was delivered by Don Norman on Emotion & Design. Don's speech was definitely one of the examples of a good use of the presentation format, which I briefly discussed earlier.
Don's plenary had three main points:
- Emotions are an important part of the user experience, inseparable from cognition, and are all too often ignored by usability professionals to the detriment of the profession.
- Science has begun to unveil the inner workings of emotion. We can confidently separate emotion into three main levels: the visceral level where we experience instinctive emotional reactions, the behavioral level where we act on our emotions, and the reflective level where our values, rationalizations, and emotional influences reside.
- Usability professionals should learn more about emotion and its relation to product design. If we continue to ignore emotions, we will continue to become irrelevant insofar as we are not directly affecting the desirability and emotional attractiveness of products that is so important in customer buying decisions.
Don illustrated these points with several examples of good product design. He admitted that people have different emotional reactions to these products and that designing for emotions are subjective. His response was to "deal with it". There is no reason to believe that products can be designed for everyone; often the necessary response is to design solely for a given target market.
The speech served to deliver several excellent points and an encouraging call to action. I've begun to see the seeds sown here at CMU for a more thorough understanding of this important new area; even within the MHCI program there are some who are interested in emotion and design. Kerry, for instance, is interested in fashion design for wearable computers, which definitely ties in to the emotion and self-image themes Don discussed. And I already mentioned several promising examples of work I heard of in the earlier panel session.
I'm looking forward to hearing more from this field, and maybe even having the chance to contribute.
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CHI Report, Recommender Systems
design, information, internet, society & sociology, usability
April 12, 2003, 04:40 PM
After lunch, I went with Mathilde to a short talk session on Recommender Systems. Three out of the four talks were interesting, so I considered it a pretty successful session.
The first talk was on how the ratings in systems like Amazon.com's customer-supplied product rating system can influence future customers ratings and lead to inaccurately high or low ratings for some products. The speaker studied a system called MovieLens, which looks similiar to an Amazon.com that only does theater movies. He found that around 8% of the time people would raise or lower their ratings based on the rating that was already present. Thus if users would rate a movie as 2 stars, but see a rating of 4 stars on MovieLens, they might adjust their rating, consciously or unconsciously, up to 3 stars. Though these individual effects may be slight, the inaccurracies may spread.
Another interesting finding he reported was that users could tell if a system had wildly inaccurate ratings, and that this would effect the users' opinions of the system. So if users found good movies rated low or bad movies rated high consistently, they reported a much lower opinion of the system as a whole. Unfortunately, he did only study a fairly extreme case of inaccuracy so it is difficult to say where the relevant threshhold value is.
The next speaker, David McDonald from the University of Washington School of Information, discussed a recommender system for group-ware tasks such as finding the relevant expert in a company who may be able to answer a given question. What made his talk particularly interesting was that he was using social networks to build such a system for a medical software company. Here are my main takeaway points:
- David built his social network through ethnographic observations. He discouraged the use of automated tools, such as tools that examine email sending patterns, since he felt these tools do not accurately approximate the real social network but instead are byproducts of the medium (a secretary may send lots of announcement emails to people she is not socially close to).
- He ran into a couple problems where one person was socially close to another even though few people knew it; they were buddies outside of work. Thus their connection didn't come out through his initial observations. Many users felt the tool should reflect their own personal social network rather than the socially perceived network of the entire workplace.
- Social networks are dynamic beasts, so the network had to adapt to changing social environments over time.
- The interface needed to provide a way to "escalate" the results, or expand and contract the number of recommended experts shown. Users reported that they often preferred many choices rather than a single choice, even if the single choice was in fact the best person to answer their question. They also wanted a good deal of control over the direction of the escalation.
The final interesting speaker was Thomas Erickson from IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He discussed visualizations of social activity, such as those produced by the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab (which I applied to, by the way, and never heard back from...). He had a few interestiing things to say:
- There are two purposes of social visualizations: one is for an individual's information, the second is to portray the social state of a group back to the whole group. The two should not be confounded, and frequently shouldn't be combined in one interface.
- A completely accurate visualization of a social situation may be bad; many situations depend on face saving, "first impressions", etc. The little white lies that keep our social lives going...
- Ambiguity is often useful in these visualizations depending on the user's information needs. Large differences can be exaggerated, whereas runs of similar-looking data may be compressed. This is probably true of most visualizations
One side comment I thought of while watching these presentations: talks such as these are useful for making a few small, well-argued points that are interesting enough to encourage your audience to look into the area in more depth (or just take away your main points). The speakers who tried to go into great detail and make complicated arguments quickly lost the audience, whereas those who had simple points that powerfully portrayed their message were more effective. More on this when I get to Norman's closing plenary.
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CHI Report, The Everlasting Twilight of the Idols
personal, usability
April 11, 2003, 08:02 PM
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CHI Report, Emotion and Design
aesthetics, design, usability
April 11, 2003, 08:01 PM
When I got in I went to a panel on Emotions and Design chaired by Jodi Forlizzi, a HCI and Design professor from CMU. Don Norman also showed up, since his new interest is in emotions and design. He opened the panel by discussing how emotions are tightly coupled to cognitive mental activities; he brought up a study that products that are more aesthetically pleasing are actually easier for people to use, even when all other factors are constant. More on Don later.
A number of interesting topics came up that I'd like to pursue in more detail. Here's a few of them:
- Gibson's theory of affordances which is intended to unify all aspects of the user, including cognitive and emotional responses.
- Jodi mentioned how emotions can both heighten the experience of using a product and get in the way of its effective use. How do we ensure we get the former and not the latter?
- Sometimes different emotions are coupled in ways you might not expect; for instance, disgust is frequently coupled with fascination, which explains why many people will linger so long over a disgusting scene, and talk about it at length afterwards.
- HCI as a field has a much higher percentage of women than many other technology disciplines. Someone asked if this accounted for the current attention to emotion. The panelists seemed to feel this was quite possible although emphasized that we shouldn't overgeneralize that "men are bad at emoting, women are good at it".
- I also recall a discussion at the Weblogs SIG about expressing emotions in weblog posts. I feel like these two areas relate, although I'm not sure how just yet.
- We have a tendency to anthropomorphize our products. One person wondered if we should design for this, the conclusion was that it could be good if it was done right. Little guidance was offered on what "right" meant though.
- Kees recommended educating designers in understanding and "getting in touch" with their emotions. I wondered, however, how easy this would be, since western culture in general tends to discourage display of many emotions and considers them "irrational". I was pleasantly surprised to find that Norman agrees.
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CHI Report, Awakening
personal, usability
April 11, 2003, 08:00 PM
My fourth day in Fort Lauderdale marked the last day of CHI 2003. I overslept and missed the first session, so I went to breakfast with Andrew instead. He is one of the winning Interactionary stars and quite possibly one of the greatest guys I've ever met. We talked about guy stuff: job hunting, relationships, etc. One of the things I like best about Andrew is that I find him so easy to talk to; he listens well and affords discussion even about subjects I wouldn't bring up with anyone else.
After breakfast I headed over to the conference center. On the bus I talked to a guy from Sprint's usability research team about his experiences as an HCI researcher in the industry as well as a little bit about U&SA (turns out he works with a guy who used to work with Bonnie and Len back when they first published the technical report). Hearing about his experiences reconfirmed my belief that constantly showing real business value (by contributing to a productive team, quantifiably saving the company money, etc.) is the most important activity for an industry usability team. He also mentioned that Sprint was working on a new process (called PACE) which was partially intended to help bring the usability people into the development process so they could have more real influence. Sprint, he said, was currently committed to delivering a quality product since they had recently released two market failures, so usability is prioritized above time to market. When time to market is most important, which is all too often, the usability people are often seen as actually holding back the release and are frequently dropped.
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CHI Report, Quote of the Day
funny
April 10, 2003, 11:46 PM
"I can't help feeling you're twice the man that I am."
-- Scott Berkun to Kenneth Berger
Apologies to Scott; if he ever finds this post I hope he takes it the way it was intended :).
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CHI Report, The Interactionary
design, personal, usability
April 10, 2003, 11:45 PM
Finally, I went to the Interactionary competition. Six people from the MHCI tribe were competing in a CMU team: Kelli, Andrew, Abby, Neema, Kevin Lee, and Kevin Fox. I swear I almost had a heart attack while sitting in the audience waiting for them to come up. After they'd finished Kenneth asked me the time; when I showed him my watch he said "my God, Rob, you're shaking!" I was incredibly nervous for them, and I didn't even have to go on stage.
But it all turned out for the best, since they won! We're all very proud of them; Bonnie even took us all out and bought the Interactionary team drinks at Hops. A great and well-deserved ending to a journey that took a lot of time and effort on all of their parts.
After we got back from Hops, we checked email at the conference center, then left for the CMU reception at the Marriott. Turned out there was no free beer at the CMU reception, so we crashed the Microsoft reception across the hall. I talked to several people at both receptions, which got exhausting for an introvert like me after awhile. Abby was getting tired too, so she and Neema and Matt and I left the party and went back to the hotel. We then went out for a night swim in the ocean. There was a storm going on far away; lightning flashed above the dark waters in the distance. It was a surreal and beautiful experience.
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CHI Report, Lunch and Games
life & times, usability
April 10, 2003, 11:44 PM
For the next session, I tried attending a session on e-Learning, but the points being made came across as fairly unsophisticated, quite a bit of rhetoric to back up very little insight. If the field is really at this level of maturity, then I can see why current e-Learning systems are not very good. Besides, I was starving since it was past lunch and I hadn't had breakfast.
After an overpriced sub from the Subway cart I went to an informal SIG on video games put on by a couple of guys from Microsoft. It was interesting although I didn't have much to contribute since I know so little about the field. One guy mentioned he was working on developing design patterns for video games, which sounds like an interesting idea. One of the organizers mentioned there was going to be a special games track at CHI 2004; I look forward to checking it out since there seems to be lots of interesting HCI research going on in this field.
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CHI Report, Magic Numbers and Cranky Usability Consultants
processes & methodologies, usability
April 10, 2003, 11:43 PM
The past two days were packed, hence the reason this weblog entry is appearing a day late. Yesterday I got up early enough to make the morning session, so I went to a panel on "The Magic Number 5: Is It Enough for Web Testing?". The basic premise of the panel rested on Nielsen's Alert Box assertion a few years back that 5 users is enough to test a single interface; after testing five users you should iterate and test again or you are just wasting your time since you'll start finding mostly the same problems over and over again. Jared Spool, Gilbert Cockburn, and Rolf Molich (Nielsen was supposed to attend, but he was ill and did not come to CHI this year) disagreed with this claim on the grounds that the number of users you need to test to find a significant number of critical errors varies with the complexity of the interface and the goals of your study and is usually much higher than five. Carol Barnum agreed with the number if the discount usability engineering method is followed, and Dennis Wixon from Microsoft was the black sheep who argued that the entire preoccupation with finding "all the errors" was stupid and everyone should use the RITE method.
The debate was spirited and enjoyable to watch, but I got the feeling afterward that the panelists were all shouting loudly at each other in agreement. Everyone seemed to believe that you needed to do highly iterative development to ensure problems found actually got fixed and retested (although Rolf called for a more robust discipline that could get the interface close to right the first time so we wouldn't have to do much user testing; I think Jared's sarcastic comment that "Yes, we can solve this problem right now by always building usable interfaces!" summed up the problems with this approach fairly neatly). Everyone seemed to believe that ultimately you should run as many users as you can to ensure many iterations and a more usable product.
Ultimately, I came away from the talk believing all the more strongly in iterative development while still holding out hope that we can design interfaces to be as initially usable as possible (through CI/CD, etc). I'm also even more convinced of the potential for RITE.
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CHI Report, End of Day 2
personal
April 09, 2003, 06:51 PM
In the evening hours I went to the CHI beach party with Micah and Matt. I was wearing the Nielsen shirt; several people appreciated the joke and one guy from IBM wanted to take a picture and know where I got the shirt. It's nice to be at a place where people around me routinely get the joke.
I ran into Kerry and Mathilde there and hung out with them for most of the evening. I sometimes forget how much I enjoy their company. Having them and everyone else with me has really made this trip what it is.
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CHI Report, Weblogs
internet, society & sociology
April 09, 2003, 06:50 PM
The final professional activity of the day was Micah, Andy, and Don's Informal SIG on Weblogs. It was a great experience; a lot of people came with widely varying backgrounds on weblogs, yet I felt that everyone took something important away from the session.
Lots of great ideas flew around. One woman was doing research on separating weblogs into genres; she mentioned they found that weblogs were much less anonymous, on average, than many other online mediums. I brought up a concern I've had for awhile that weblogs as a medium encourage the accidental sharing of personal details to people you may not ordinarily share them with. This is essentially a problem of visibility; unlike many other mediums, on the web you have very little sense of who your audience is and hence may be encouraged to share information with people that you might feel uneasy about if you were speaking face-to-face. Mathilde brought up the point that for many people (I'll call them "emotional exhibitionists" for lack of a better term) sharing personal information with strangers is part of the appeal. I agree (I've seen this with certain other webloggers I've known) but still feel that for most of these people, if they had the opportunity to stand in a room with all the people who would read their post online and shout out this same information, they might think twice before doing it.
We talked a lot about the benefit and disadvantage of having only a single "voice" or perspective in weblogs, as opposed to discussion boards that mix several points of view. One woman raised an issue I've also started to confront that there is no way to pull together ideas in a weblog; no way to find other posts that are "related" to this one or "part of the same thread". I can manually link posts together and I can categorize them, but this process is tedious and fixes the relations between posts statically. I'm not sure yet how best to solve this problem.
Finally, we talked about how there are few ways to locate weblogs by interest, search all weblogs on a given topic or written by a certain group of people, etc. There seems to be lots of potential for robust data mining in this area; weblogs have all the benefits and problems of any decentralized, grassroots method of organizing.
Micah, Andy, and Don put together a weblog where you can find more information on the session (of course :).
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CHI Report, Service Learning in HCI
charity, teaching & learning, usability
April 09, 2003, 06:49 PM
After lunch, I attended an Informal SIG (Special Interest Group) on HCI Service Learning. There were only three other people there (their names were Jonathan, Carol, and Anne), so it was a nice, small discussion group. We talked about experiences in teaching service learning; I discussed some of our findings in our TCinC studies. I would have liked to give a full presentation on our results and redesign ideas so the other members in the group could comment, but I had no suitable presentation prepared and didn't want to dominate the discussion. One interesting problem everyone else was running into that we don't seem to have is that students were having difficulty implementing the project designs they came up with. Our problem has been the opposite; students have no problems understanding the technology but are lost when it comes to understanding the organization.
Jonathan did ask how we could spread the concept of service learning to other academic institutions. I mentioned we were working on reusable lesson plans that should help integrate service learning into the curriculum, but that we were more concerned with solving our own problem at the moment and hadn't yet given a thought to everyone else's. We exchanged business cards at the end; I plan to bring them back to Joe and Matt to hopefully start a dialog on how to spread this stuff.
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CHI Report, Privacy, Security, and Trust
design, internet, usability
April 09, 2003, 06:48 PM
This marks the end of my second day here at CHI 2003. So many things happened; a thick swarm of ideas buzzed around my head, flew into my ears, nose, and mouth, got into my eyes and made them all watery, and generally became very annoying until I realized the analogy had gone too far and cut it off.
The first session I went to was on Privacy, Security, and Trust. Most of the talks didn't particularly interest me. One person had done a study of an online community in a small Massachusetts town and concluded that when you ensure people are using their real names, it tends to raise trust and civility while lowering people's willingness to disagree about controversial topics. Another woman had done a study on people's level of distraction while using cell phones, she found people tend to pay less attention to traffic lights while talking on their cell phones. Fairly common-sense stuff.
The one presentation I really liked was one on "Prominence-Interpretation Online". The doctoral student giving the talk, B.J. Fogg, argued that the credibility of a website was a function of two properties of the experience: the prominence of information (she must notice the information) and interpretation (she must make a judgment about the information). What's more, he did a study that found that the top factor people used to interpret information related to the design look and feel of the site, which was almost doubly more important than information design and structure. Which is disconcerting for those who expect that consumers in a market will make informed, researched decisions when assessing credibility. When asked whether we can design our websites to encourage a more robust credibility assessment, Fogg said he thought the only way to improve this situation was through educating people on their limitations and, in the meantime, make sure you have a nice site design.
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CHI Report, Day 1
processes & methodologies, software development, teaching & learning, usability
April 08, 2003, 09:58 AM
Yesterday was the first day of the Computer-Human Interaction conference at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which is where I'm currently located. Not a whole lot of academics yesterday; after I got in I mostly hung out on the beach and in the pool with the gang. We all remarked that so far this was the best conference any of us had ever been to :).
In the evening hours I went to the U&SA tutorial that Bonnie and Len and I put together. It was interesting to see the reaction of professionals to our material; so far I had only seen the tutorial presented to students. All in all I think it went well, although Len was concerned that people didn't seem as excited about the material as they were last year. The tutorial attendee's comments also confirmed some thoughts I'd had on the major problems with the tutorial:
- There was some confusion on what the distinction was between the scenarios and responsibilities (which are supposed to apply to all systems) and the sample architectural pattern (which may or may not apply to any given system).
- Before Bonnie gave an in-depth explanation about our Benefits/Tactics matrix, some people didn't understand what process we were advocating for applying these scenarios (should every system implement every scenario, or do you need to decide which ones make sense for your system?)
- One person raised an issue about reusable code support for the scenarios, which bears out my thought that people may like pointers to toolkits and frameworks that help implement the scenarios.
- Someone mentioned that we should look at existing patterns in the Gang of Four's book, etc. to see if there are more general solutions to our patterns. I'm kind of kicking myself here, because I've actually already done some preliminary investigations in that area and neglected to mention it. I had a chance to look smart in front of people in my field and blew it. But it is good to have confirmation that this is a good path to go down, although I haven't found many patterns that directly apply to our scenarios and am beginning to think the right way to do this would be to investigate existing solutions in working architectures and generalize from them.
- Someone was concerned with how we come up with the scenarios and how we distinguish between an "architecturally-sensitive usability scenario" and a "functional requirement". I have a simple criteria that we could use: has the scenario caused a "We can't change THAT!!!" situation?
- Someone also raised the issue of how we could test to ensure these scenarios are implemented in an architecture. This I actually hadn't thought of, but certainly appears important.
In other news, I went to the networking event after the tutorial. Talked to several people, many of whom I already knew, but some new faces too. Then several of us went out to eat around midnight. I'm having a lot of fun; it's great to be here in Florida with beautiful weather at a top-notch conference in my field. And the best part is I'm here with some of the best people I've ever known. What could be finer?
Posted by Dave on April 10, 2003 at 01:21 PM
(4) Ha Ha! <-- (Laughing at your lack of looking smartness). Sounds like your having some fun.
Go Rob...
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A World of Patterns
patterns, philosophy
April 06, 2003, 11:30 PM
I recently borrowed A Pattern Language from Micah, which I've mentioned before. I've started reading it, and I'm already excited; Alexander describes patterns in ways I'd never really thought of. To him they are a true language, a personal and shared understanding of how we live in the world. He also makes an excellent point when discussing how the patterns fit together:
In short, no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world, only to the extent that is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it.
This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.
Emphasis mine.
For those of us would-be creators who hope to change the world with our designs, I think these words are worth meditating on. The Law of Unintended Consequences is always in effect, and all too often we forget it.
On a different note, I'm heading off to CHI 2003 in sunny Fort Lauderdale bright and early (too early) tomorrow morning. Hopefully I'll have time to post a few weblog entries about any interesting memes I find there.
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Posted by Mathilde on April 14, 2003 at 02:07 AM
Cool weblog, Rob! Thanks for all the posts on CHI. I haven't checked your private entry yet...
I can't wait for Don's book to come out. But I thought it was Don Norman (not Normon)?
Posted by Rob on April 14, 2003 at 11:56 AM
Hi Mathilde,
You're right, it is "Norman". I had it right in the "Everlasting Twilight of the Idols" post, I just can't type :).
It's fixed now. Thanks!
-- Rob