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The U&SA Book Chapter
announcements, software development, usability, writing & communication
October 10, 2003, 08:10 PM
I realized I haven't been posting much recently about what I've been doing for my actual job. For those of you that I haven't yet told, I'm in the process of writing a book chapter for an upcoming book on bridging the gap between usability and software architecture. You can even check out our preliminary abstract.
The chapter is about our experiences applying our U&SA technique to the NASA MERBoard project. It looks like I'll be first author for the chapter too, which is totally awesome. The current status of the actual writing is "completed first draft". If all goes well, the final, published book will be available for purchase next September.
Weblogs As Common Ground
internet, society & sociology
October 10, 2003, 07:41 PM
Last week, we had an SSS on weblogs. Unlike last year's hour-long talks, this one was more of a freewheeling discussion session. Neema provides a taste of commentary.
Chad made an interesting comment during the session. He remarked how being a weblogger had created a new kind of social relationship for him. Some of his friends and acquaintances he doesn't see very often, but he reads their weblog and he knows they read his. This creates a novel social dynamic when he does run into these people, since both he and his friend have certain knowledge in common from reading each other's weblogs that they can both refer back to and discuss.
Essentially, what Chad is referring to is a unique form of common ground that he and his weblog friends have established. Both parties in the conversation share a certain form of knowledge (the contents of the weblog posts they've both read) and thus can refer back to them without lengthy explanations of the concepts.
I ran into Chad at Entropy earlier that week, and experienced this phenomenon firsthand. I must say, it's neat to be actually experiencing these new social forms in the flesh!
Email Rob:
Friendster Trading Cards
internet, society & sociology
October 10, 2003, 05:53 PM
My friend Scott Davidoff and I were discussing Friendster this afternoon. Scott is not normally a big online communities fan, but he checked out Friendster since it relates to his CSCW project.
Now, one of the interesting (although not so surprising) phenomenons in Friendster is the "friend collector". Certain users of the system use Friendster as a kind of online popularity contest, where they invite just about anyone they know to be their friend just to rack up the number of pictures on their page. Scott and I have a mutual acquaintance (let's call her "Elise") who apparently engages in this practice. Although Scott barely knows her, Elise sent him a "let's be friends" invitation. Scott said, and I quote, "I felt like I'd just received an 'Elise' trading card!"
Turns out it's been called that before, but still, this has got to be the single best metaphor I've heard yet for Friendster. Perhaps they should capitalize on this concept and make a sort of mainstream "Magic: The Gathering"-style MMORPG with your friends (and friends-of-friends, and friends-of-friends-of-friends) as the game pieces.
If I wind up taking Game Design next semester, maybe I'll do it myself as one of my projects! ;)
Posted by sean on October 16, 2003 at 08:25 PM
friendster: the gathering trading cards. totally brilliant. if you do this i will give you money because it is so awesome.
Posted by sean on October 16, 2003 at 08:29 PM
speaking of friend collectors, see my satire:
http://www.cafeshops.com/kempleton.8003135
click Larger Images to read and see the details (poem on back)
(eeekk... please don't think of this as spam! sorry!)
sean
Posted by Elise on October 21, 2003 at 07:12 PM
hmph. I object to being labelled in this manner! Believe it or not, I use friendster as a way to keep up with old friends. Not ever having lived in the same place for more than 8 years, I tend to rack up a whole lot of old friends that I never (or rarely) see again. I tend to use the internet as a way to keep in touch with them, and friendster is one such way to do it. Most of the people on my friendster list are in one of two categories: old friends, or people from CMU who happen to be on there as well. There are a select number of new friends that I've met in Pittsburgh who happen to use friendster as well, but there's only a handful of them. The interesting thing is that those new friends actually use friendster as a way to organize social events through the bulletin board, which is actually kind of interesting.
In my defense, I'd like to point out that I added Scott because of our group project - I invited all three of them. Two of the people didn't even know what friendster was, and since we're proposing a familyster, it might behoove them to know what it is. ;-P
However, there definitely are people on friendster who use it to rack up pictures. But, I happen to know all the people on my friendster list and do actually keep up with them. The CMU people would be about as close to picture-adding as I get, but I still know them. ;-)
Love and Kisses,
"Elise"
Posted by Rob on October 21, 2003 at 07:53 PM
Hi "Elise",
Ack! Looks like I forgot my rule to "before posting anything to the web, first imagine what would happen if the worst possible person reads it and then decide if it's still worth it". Let this be a lesson to everyone else! :)
To respond, though: I knew when I posted this entry that I was, to some extent, describing a caricature of you rather than the real thing, which is partially why I didn't use your real name. I mainly just wanted to describe Scott's amusing (and frequently accurate) impression of Friendster.
If I caused any offense I apologize, and I happily defer to your correction. I hope you'll forgive me!
Posted by Elise on October 21, 2003 at 08:47 PM
It's interesting, I wonder at the impressions of friendster sometimes, as well as the type of people that use it. I think for most people it's something of a joke. For me though, I've actually talked to a ton of old friends since Friendster came about that I had no way of contacting in the past, simply because of the 6 degrees of separation idea.
I think of it in terms of todays' network society, so to speak. Our society is becoming increasingly independent of geography, and we just don't have the type of strong ties that we used to have. Well, we have less of them, I should say. Now, instead of who you know, it's how many people you know, which ties into Granovetters theory of the strength of weak ties quite nicely: nowadays the number of people you know gets you further in life than the quality of the relationships (i.e. job networking). I'm in the middle of writing a paper on this as we speak, so you'll excuse my academic self creeping in.
So is it really a popularity contest? Or is it more just the way things are nowadays? It's tough to say. It seems that some people out there sneer at those with lots of friendsters, and I have to wonder why. What is it about having a lot of friends (although I'd say weak ties is a better way of putting it) that is so offputting to some people? Is it really a mark on my character that I know a lot of people? Is it perhaps in the way that we define a 'friend'ster? Are friends the same as they used to be? Perhaps it's the way we look at friendster, is it a tool or a social system?
I guess it all goes back to language and the way we describe things, and the way that culture receives them. For me, who has moved intercontinentally several times in my life, and across most of this country off and on, it's a tool - a way of connecting myself with old lives, old selves, old memories that have begun to be forgotten. But, I suppose to people with more traditional lives, those who stay in one place while growing up and have families that are rooted in one area for good, and know people when they go home to visit their parents, it might be a bit different. They probably have access to their friends, after all, and see no need for such a technology. As such, it becomes an ego-boosting effort on the part of the people that are active in using it. It's all a matter of perspective, I suppose.
I am not truly offended by what you said or anything, never fear. I guess I just wanted to give another perspective.
"Elise"
Email Rob:
The Way We Really Speak
language, society & sociology
October 09, 2003, 11:06 PM
As part of our background research for CSCW, Dana and I are reading some social science articles on how people build common ground. "Common ground" is a term that refers to the customs, norms, and other background knowledge and experience that people in a group share that allows them to communicate efficiently (or communicate at all, for that matter). Common ground includes social norms as broad as "we will all speak English" to ones as narrow as "'that thing' refers to the sprocket wrench we were discussing earlier in our conversation". We feel that building common ground is an especially important area for us, since our particular problem, integrating usables into open-source software development, involves two groups that have a big problem with a lack of common ground.
Right now, I'm reading an article by Andrew Monk entitled "Common ground in electronically mediated communication: Clark's theory of language use". Monk's main point is that the ways we communicate with each other are much more socially-determined than you might think. To back up this claim, he describes Herbert Clark's theory of language use.
The classic model of human communication is very send/receive oriented. It goes something like this:
This model has been very useful, especially to communication engineers since it pretty much maps directly to the way two computers talk to one another. But the model breaks down when you examine how people really talk. The basic problem is that the model doesn't take into account the fact that the "code" people use to communicate isn't initially well-defined. With two computers communicating over a network, the protocols they use (such as TCP/IP, HTTP, etc) to exchange information have been precisely pre-defined by the programmers (or ginormous standards institutions). With humans, however, there are no such rigorously defined protocols. Sure, human languages are fairly well-defined, but the ways that people actually use these languages to communicate is not. The way people really speak is a process of negotating common ground. Monk gives an example in the paper:
Roger: Did you have oil in it
Al: Yeah, I-I mean I changed the oil, put new oil filters, r- completely redid the
oil system, had to put new gaskets on the oil pan to stop-stop the leak, and
then I put -and then-
Roger: That was a gas leak
Al: It was an oil leak buddy
Roger: Its a gas leak
Al: It's an oil leak!
Roger: on the number one jug
Al: It's an oil leak!
Roger: Outta where, the pan?
Al: Yeah
Roger: Oh you put a new gasket on it stopped leaking
Al: Uh huh
If you read over that conversation snippet (which really occurred "in the wild") and reflect on it, you'll notice that much of the meaning is being negotated rather than transmitted. The nutshell version is that conversation is much more like ballroom dancing than it is like sending and receiving computer messages. It's a process of speaking, receiving and processing feedback, clarifying, receiving more feedback, etc. In some sense, it's an iterative design process with really tight feedback loops.
Here's a picture of our revised understanding of language:
Again, what's really happening here is a development and negotation of common ground for the conversation. Unlike with computers, with humans the "protocol" is developed on the fly.
Monk also notes three types of common ground developed in conversations:
- Conversational conventions which are social norms that necessarily underlie all conversations (without them, we could not converse). E.g, "We will be as concise as possible" and "We will let the other person know when we don't understand something they said".
- Communal common ground are norms that spring from the surrounding culture and environment, such as "We will both speak English". These conventions relate most directly to online communities.
- Personal common ground is more specific to the particular conversation. These are norms developed between the two conversants previously or during the conversation, e.g. "We are going to lunch together tomorrow" or "The word 'Nish' refers to Newell-Simon Hall, the building on the southeast of campus with the green roof".
In essence, this theory is an interesting merge of classic cognitive, psycholinguistic approaches to understanding language and more sociological approaches, and appears to describe the ways we really use language much better than previous theories I'd learned while taking linguistics classes in undergrad.
More on common ground may be coming up soon (dunno if that's a teaser or a threat ;).
Posted by Rob on October 10, 2003 at 05:58 PM
It might be worth noting that Clark's theory extends the communication model of language rather than replacing it. You can think of all the arrows in the second diagram as all following the encoding-decoding process described in the first diagram.
Not sure I made that clear in the post...
Email Rob:
Welcome to Wiki
internet, usability, writing & communication
October 08, 2003, 04:50 PM
I set up a Wiki last night for Dana and I to use for our CSCW project (sorry, no link to the actual Wiki; it's an invitation-only affair for now). I happened across PmWiki (which is open source) when searching for options on Wiki software (through a Google text ad, no less) and installed it to give it a shot.
So far I'm pretty happy with it, both with regards to the Wiki concept and Patrick's implementation. It's even pretty usable, all things considered, which was something I was worried about. In fact, I was browsing the documentation for PmWiki and found that Patrick had actually done some user analysis for his system. It's not quite personas, but he's definitely on the right track.
I'm hoping that the wiki will help Dana and I collaboratively distill operational design principles and heuristics from all this social science reading that we are (supposed to be) doing, thus fulfilling Bob and Paul's (and our) vision for the class. We'll see how it goes, but in any event, if you're looking to set up a wiki of your own, I'd recommend checking out Patrick's offering.
Posted by Andyed on October 09, 2003 at 11:13 PM
If you'd like to poke around HCI related wiki, I've created an instance of pmWiki dedicated to "Chronicling visions of cyberspace and their realization".
Email Rob:
The Ivory Blog Bubble
internet, society & sociology
October 06, 2003, 10:13 PM
Oliver Willis asks whether webloggers are taking themselves too seriously:
During one of the Saturday sessions a member of the audience referred to the assembled crowd as "utopia". Now, yes, I loved the blog camaraderie but quite frankly I don't want to be the only black person in utopia. I was the only black person in that room, and was one of a few minorities. I'm not whining about that, but simply stating the fact that a technology that is mostly the pursuit of upper middle class white males does diddly to change the real world. I'm a geek through-and-thorough but when I hear tooth gnashing about issues like copyright as if they were the most important issue in the world - it tells me that the blog world is somewhat out of touch.Again, it is quite similar to the web bubble. For a while when you were inside the industry (as I was) it would be easy to think: everybody is doing this. When the truth of the matter is that they weren't and they aren't. The vast majority of Americans are not online, and even those that are online only a small portion of them are reading blogs, and an even smaller amount are reading politically oriented blogs. That small percentage does tend to be quite influential (particularly if they're a part of the media) but it is our duty as bloggers to understand that we aren't exactly changing the world yet.
A too-true point, and one that I don't have much to add to (for once). Just a single thought: Whose world are we changing? We should think about these things, much more than we do. Before our time to think has passed us by.
Posted by Dan on October 08, 2003 at 08:18 PM
I've been pondering this for about two days now since I read this post and have this to say: most innovations come from a handful of people and then a larger handful of people adopting it. It takes a long while for technology to be adopted. There've been some studies about this:
http://muextension.missouri.edu/explore/comm/cm0108.htm
TV is the famous example of this. Few people had TV sets until Milton Berle's Texeco Theater came on in 1948 and was the killer app that pushed people to adopt TVs.
http://www.forbes.com/2002/03/28/0328berle.html
Frankly, to my mind, blogging is just part of the internet. It's a way for non-coders to quickly and easily have a dynamic web presence. They are a more-easily-updated version of the personal home pages that exploded onto the web in 1995-6. There is a social aspect of it (you link to my blog, I'll link to yours), but we had Links to my Friends in '95-96 as well. I agree with Oliver Willis: a lot of it is hype.
That being said, it is useful and desireable to have a lot of people have easily-updatable and linkable web presences.
As far as blogging being elitist, right now, the web is locked onto an expensive machine and requires an expensive monthly connection in order to be unleashed. But it won't always be this way, the same way that the telephone is now nearly ubiquitious. Once the web is really in phones, cars, walls, clothes, medical equipment, etc. it won't be in the hands of just a small group of (mainly) white guys.
Posted by Rob on October 10, 2003 at 11:25 PM
Dan, as usual I agree with everything you just said.
Now that that's out of the way, the thing I found most interesting about this particular piece wasn't the conclusion that "weblogs are bullshit" (I don't even really believe Willis was making this claim; after all, he is a weblogger himself). Rather, I liked the reality check. We technologists (and I'm including designers and usability professionals in that category, here) have a tendency to assume, at times, that the issues we're facing and the problems we have to solve are the most important ones out there in the world. They're usually not, as you've made clear before.
I realize I'm preaching to the choir here, but in the past I've known several people who refused to grasp this point. And I've even been guilty of it myself from time to time. So, in short, I do believe in weblogs, and I do believe they'll change the world, for the better, in their own way. But I also see that they are only a very small part of a very, very large picture.
Email Rob:
Keep In Touch
aesthetics, design
October 05, 2003, 09:03 PM
As a follow-up to my wicked-cool scheduling application design, I've been working for the past few weeks on a new assignment, this time a design for a situationally-appropriate interface for helping people keep track of long-distance friends, lovers, and family. Jodi teamed me up with Elizabeth Windram, a very talented graphic designer, and Chun-Yi "Grace" Chen, a skilled industrial designer / product illustrator.
The basic challenge was to produce an application that could help remind users of the people they needed to get in contact with while also not demanding their full attention (i.e. popping up a dialog box that proclaimed "YOU HAVEN'T CALLED YOUR MOM IN 10 DAYS!" was unacceptable). The interface also had to involve components that could 1) be understood at a glance, 2) be understood entirely aurally, and 3) be understood without the use of vision or hearing.
We never came up with a name for our design solution, so for the purposes of this post I'll call it "Keep In Touch". You can view our design presentation if you have Flash Player (warning: ginormous 13.5MB SWF file).
The Flash movie was intended to be supported by our verbal discussion, of course, so I'll try to cover what might not be clear from just watching the SWF. Our goals for this design were:
- Not to demand the user's full attention (dictated to us by Jodi).
- Take advantage of more of the user's senses than just sight (also dictated by Jodi).
- Encourage, not force, the user to contact their friends and family.
- Give the user enough context about what was going on in their friends lives that they would actually have a reason for contacting them.
- Help the user avoid spending too much time talking to friends, so that they can also get other things accomplished.
Our solution is basically a screen saver that displays a collage of pictures of your friends whom you need to contact. Along with the pictures are a few images that are intended to give some context about what is going on in your friend's life right now. For example, the girl in the movie with the airplane next to her picture may be planning a trip abroad. At the same time, the system plays songs that are intended to remind you of the person who ranks highest on your "get in contact with" list (for instance, the song might be a favorite of the individual in question, or it may be one you often listened to with that person).
The second component of our system is an intelligent mouse that warms up to alert you to the fact that you need to get in touch with someone. It also plays the person's song, to remind you of who its alerting you about and to provide a link between the tactile and visual components of the interface. Additionally, the mouse tracks how much time you spend talking to someone (on AIM, for instance) and produces small bumps that give a rough measure of how long its been. This is intended to help you manage how much time you spend with each friend in a subtle, unintrusive way. The mouse is cordless and portable, so that you can carry it around with you and receive reminders when you're away from your computer.
The system determines who you need to get in touch with using a complex and largely-unspecified algorithm, but here's a few of the things it takes into consideration:
- How long it has been since you last contacted the person (determined through monitoring email, phone calls, IMs, etc.)
- What an "appropriate" amount of time would be before contacting the person. For example, you can and should allow much more time to elapse before contacting distant business acquaintances than you should for close friends.
- Whether an important event, such as a birthday or wedding, is occurring in your friend's life.
- Whether your friend is in a situation where they might want or need you to contact them (if they are feeling depressed, for instance). These last few might be determined by monitoring your friend's weblog or online photo journal, and thus our interface might be considered a futuristic news aggregator (Newsable 8.0! :)
So that's "Keep In Touch" in brief. All in all, I think we did a bang-up job on the project. Special thanks to Elizabeth and Grace for their great ideas, their awesome visual design skills (this project would be 10 times uglier if I'd had to do it myself) and for generally being great group members.
As usual, Dan has some great content demoing his project, BreakAway, if you want to read about more awesome products that you can't buy.
Email Rob:
Email Rob: