Valve Releases Data

As I talked about in a previous post, Valve has a system set up to get data from users that use their games. Today, they released a report of some of the game data from one of their newer games. It's not interface data, rather it's gameplay data, but it's representative of the kind of data collection that could be brought to bear by modern networking technology.

Waving at your Phone

Check out this patent application.

A communication device may include a lens and processing logic. The lens may receive a gesture made by a user of the mobile terminal and the processing logic may identify the gesture. The processing logic may also generate a command based on the identified gesture, where the command instructs the mobile terminal or an external device to perform a control action.

Essentially: Gesture at your phone to navigate.

(via TechCrunch)

Evaluation

This week's reading put me in mind of the Steam content delivery system's fabled statistics gathering functionality.

Steam is a framework for buying, downloading, and playing various games. It is rumored that, behind the scenes, there is massive data collection in place, sending back reports of what players are doing in the games, presumably to help improve the experience. It's not talked about, but occasionally Valve, the company that makes Steam, will release an update that fixes something, citing their statistics gathering as the tip off that there was a problem.

I can only imagine this kind of information gathering becoming more and more useful, as computers are becoming pretty much always online, and software updates are being done automatically in the background. For Steam, since the data being collected is recreational, there are no real privacy concerns (presumably, they don't send back personally identifying information, though really, no one knows for sure,) but for other applications, this could be a problem.

However, with the right EULA and the right data retention policy, this risk could be mitigated.

On the other hand, speaking as a paranoid end user, I'm thankful for my outgoing firewall.

Shoogle

Here's something else that's cool. Shoogle is a system for generating tactile and auditory feedback regarding the state of a handheld device. The user shakes the device and it feels and sounds like there are objects rattling around inside. The objects can be a metaphor for waiting messages, or battery power remaining, etc.

Bar of Soap

This is cool.

Despite being similarly to soap device talked about in class, this is something else entirely.

The basic idea is to determine a user's intent by how they hold the device. So, if the user holds it like a phone, it would go into phone mode, etc.

I can't really think of anything to elaborate on that. It sounds like a cool opportunity for some machine learning.

Specific Contributions, etc

So, we turned in the paper today.

Here are my personal contributions to the assignment, as requested for last week's weekly blog posting. I would have posted this then, but we weren't actually done with the project yet, so it would be like nailing Jell-o to a wall.

In the final paper, my section on maps didn't appear because of space issues and it was hard to relate back to the main thesis. I'm glad of this. The paper is better and more focused because it's not there.

In addition to taking notes during the interviews and observational portions of the study and taking part in group editing sections, I found the photos in the essay that weren't taken by Ryan. I also made significant edits to the introduction.

I only got to see the very final version shortly before it was turned in. Wes had done some pretty awesome formatting the night before. I'll see if I can get him to send it to me so I can post it here.

Assignment Progress

We met as a group on Sunday and made significant progress on the essay. I'm working on a section on possible revisions to the paper handouts that show bus routes. This is somewhat perpendicular to the main topic of our paper, as it stands, so it could be that it's not included at all. My group is meeting again tonight to put our sections together and get everything finalized for tomorrow.

I found some nifty Creative Commons photos on Flickr of status displays in at bus stops in other countries. One of the common features seems to be that they're high up, which could dissuade vandalism.


Photo by Pete-Barr-Watson

(His Flickr username is "pete." That's awesome.)

Collecting Data

So, we went out and interviewed people today. We got some good responses from people waiting for the bus, and one good interview from one of the bus drivers.

Turns out not a lot of people were displeased with the systems currently in place for figuring out what bus to take. They planned their routes online in advance, so it's doubtful bus stop redesigns would help them in that area.

However, we did get complaints about buses being late or early, or being full and passing them by. So, some kind of alert system could be more useful. Meeting again with my group this weekend.

Bus Stops

So, I had my first real meeting with my group today. I've been feeling somewhat sick, so I unfortunately missed Tuesday's class. (I hope it's not Strep.)

Presently, it looks like we're going to be observing how people figure out what bus to take, when they get to a bus station. It'll be a combination of observation and interview. We'll then propose better ways of designing bus stations. Exciting stuff!

I set up a wiki for us to keep notes, etc.

Visuwords

Visuwords:

Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary — Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.

Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections.

Visuwords™ uses Princeton University’s WordNet, an opensource database built by University students and language researchers. Combined with a visualization tool and user interface built from a combination of modern web technologies, Visuwords™ is available as a free resource to all patrons of the web.

Looks really cool. It presents connections between words and ideas in a somewhat straightforward way. It'd be cool to see a network for the same meanings for two different languages, to visualize the differences in the topology.

Daylight Savings Time

My phone automatically updated its clock for daylight savings time. A fantastic feature, and one that I expect in all my timepieces. I haven't set a clock in my life.

However, it also updated my alarm clock settings, making an 8 AM alarm wake me up at 7.

This seems to be a feature designed only to make me angry.

Assignment 2

For this project, I've joined a team of four others. We met briefly on Thursday and it seems that we're going to be observing the use of the buses. Presently we're considering using city buses, as it would show a wider spectrum of activities. This will be fun. I'm looking forward to getting started.

Midterm

Check.

Keyboard vs. Mouse

We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:

Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster.

People new to the mouse find the process of acquiring it every time they want to do anything other than type to be incredibly time-wasting. And therein lies the very advantage of the mouse: it is boring to find it because the two-second search does not require high-level cognitive engagement.

It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.

--Ask Tog

Very interesting. I wonder if this could be corroborated. I certainly feel that the keyboard is faster. I wonder if I've been wasting my time.

Grading

It'd be helpful to know how I've been doing on the blog posts and on the assignment I turned in last week. I don't want to wait until the end of the class to find out that I've actually been supposed to be doing something completely different.

Overcomplexity

This week's reading put me in mind of a problem I've witnessed in the interfaces around me. That is that, in a quest for increased functionality, device or software designers will make the interface more complex than it needs to be. My parents recently bought a new microwave. On my last trip home, I wanted to boil some water for tea. However, I was stopped by a microwave with something like 18 buttons and a little digital display.

The old microwave had three control surfaces. A latch on the door allowed the whole system to be turned on or off by the very intuitive action of either putting food in or taking it out, a dial allowed for selecting a cooking time, and another dial allowed for selecting the cooking intensity.

Not the microwave I'm talking about

With the old microwave, my most basic interaction with the device (boiling water), was three steps:

1) Put the mug in and close the door, priming the system.
2) Check that the intensity is on "high," and if not set it to such.
3) Set the cooking time to three minutes by use of the dial.

If I was defrosting food, the procedure was:

1) Put the food in and close the door.
2) Check that the intensity is on "defrost," and if not set it to such.
3) Set the cooking time to the appropriate interval.

With only three control surfaces, and a largely stateless, analog machine, the procedure could never get longer than three steps.

Not the other microwave I'm talking about

However, with the new microwave, I still haven't figured out the intended procedure for boiling water. Presumably, there's a way to coax it into an "Enter time" mode, thus making use of the digit inputs, but the only way I've been able to do it is:

1) Put the food in and close the door.
2) Press the "clear" button until whatever is on the display is replaced with 00:00.
3) Press the "add minute" button until it's the desired cooking time rounded up to the minute.
4) Press "start."
5) Wait until the cooking time is up, if non-integer minutes are required.
6) Press the button to abort the cooking procedure.

The new machine has a number of features, like a "popcorn" button or a "defrost" feature. However, these functions were available in the old microwave, by use of the intensity dial. The new interface makes the rarest interaction as hard to perform as the most common one.

Photos of microwaves used under the Creative Commons license. Attributed to the persons to whose Flickr pages the images link.

The designers of the microwave either thought that the new interface would make the microwave easier to use or that buttons were more modern than dials. However, the old interface is much more intuitive. The same surfaces that are used as controls to set an input variable are the displays to show the status of the variable. The machine is stateless, so there's no different input modes to shuffle. When you approach the machine, you don't have to make sure what state it's in before you start inputing data.

This has caused me to become frustrated. I cannot say whether this is a general reaction to this microwave, as my parents seem fine with it, but my response was very negative.

Self System

The lecture on Thursday was pretty darn cool. One of the highlights was the video of the Sun Self System. It really sparked my imagination.

Basically, it's a programming environment with no edit/run modes. All editing happens in runtime. Objects can be deconstructed and their properties and methods dragged around like so many Legos.

The only problem in my eyes was that it was discontinued in like 1995. I wished there was something like it still. I searched around for keywords that I thought would result in projects in the same vein as Self. And, lo, what was the first hit but Self itself!

Discontinued means something very different in software as compared to hardware.

So, I quickly downloaded the Self OSX binary and installed it. I ran the demo snapshot and it opened an OpenGL window and I was in. It had the same demo used in the video, with gas particles in a tank, bouncing around.

Click for larger image

I played around with the controls a bit, but I couldn't get the hang of it. It's a very different method of programming from what I'm used to.

I don't think I'll ever use it again, but it's a interesting idea. I'm sure it will give me perspective in the future, if I'm tasked to design an interface.

Hyperland

Today's lecture put me in mind of a documentary I watched a while ago. Thanks to the wonder of Gooogle Video, I can share it with you.


"This is a fantasy documentary. The pioneering work shown in Hyperland, however, is very real."

Hyperland is a documentary from 1990, written by Douglas Adams and featuring fourth Doctor Tom Baker. It talks about a hypothetical future of interactive multimedia, where the world's information is collected and organized with hyperlinks. Tom Baker plays a smart agent, who helps Douglas Adams to make sense of the information available to him. The vision of the world wide web is highly visual and has a lot of video elements. This could have been to make it interesting for television, but it also makes it even cooler that I'm watching it on Google Video.

I haven't watched the whole thing in months, but about six minutes in, there was a list of hypothetical names for the world wide web that I quite fancied:

Dynabook
Hyperspace
Cyberia
Infinite Virtual Address Space
Intelligent TV
Interactive Television
Interactive Multimedia
Hypertext

It's hard for me to tell, in retrospect, which of these were meant to be facetious, if any.

Interview with Ted Nelson at 8:05. Vannevar Bush and Memex segment at 9:30. The whole thing is worth watching.

Hall of Shame: WebReg

For my hall of shame entry, I would like to nominate WebReg. It has irritated me from the first day I tried to sign up for classes, and it hasn't gotten better since. It serves a function that most people use only three times a year, for about four years. Because of this, it has given me plenty of time to forget its idiosyncrasies between registration periods. Every time, I have to partially relearn the structure, the process, and the pitfalls to avoid. The system is not obvious to new users, and it doesn't represent the most efficient way to sign up for classes, even for returning students.

First impressions are key, as usual. Upon logging onto TritonLink, the user is presented with the following screen:

This is a cacophony of information. There's two announcement blocks, one for deadlines and one for school news, no less than eleven tabs at the top of the page, some kind of alphabetical index at the bottom (which I'd never even seen until I started writing this essay), and ten boxes of links. The links are named in a way that doesn't make it obvious what you're going to be taken to when you click them. The mood of the page is best described as hectic, with a real designed by committee feel to it. The most indicative part of the page being the UCSD Emergency Status indicator.

I cannot think of a reason for anyone to need or want to know that we are experiencing a normal level of emergencies. If there was a more severe emergency, and the only way UCSD could get the word out was via the website, I would hope it would manifest itself as more than a differently colored triangle below the fold of the main page of Tritonlink.

So, the next step, in my mind, is to click on the academics tab. Clearly, adding a class is an academic subject. The user then sees this block, prominently located on the next page.

The obvious next move is to click on “Add/Drop/Change.” However, instead of being directed to the Add/Drop/Change function of the site, the user is instead given a list of help topics regarding class changes. There's two topics, “How to Enroll in Classes” and “How to Add a Class.” The user picks the first one, because it's first, and is show the following guide:

Notice how the third step for the “How to Enroll” instructions is “Enroll.” This action was obvious to the person writing the instructions, though I have no doubt that this was one of the same people involved in the original WebReg project. I experienced much frustration and infuriation the first time I had to sign up for classes, and again to lesser degrees each time I've had to do it.

There's more to the painful learning process, but eventually the user understands that the enrollment process is divided into two applications: One for finding a class to enroll in (Schedule of Classes) and one for enrolling in it (WebReg). As a result of this, the user has to keep switching between the two applications. For a novice computer user, this means actually navigating back and forth between two sections of the website. Even for an advanced computer user, comfortable with keeping multiple windows open and using them, this is a ridiculous situation.

The problem is compounded by the fact that the Schedule of Classes application doesn't talk to the database of class assignments. The only way to know if a class you're looking at conflicts with a class you've already signed up for is to either sign up for it and click the “Weekly Planner” button and check for conflicts or keep yet another window open with your schedule. There's also no indication of which classes will be helpful for the user to graduate. This shows the interface for searching for classes, which lacks an option to simply show classes that will help, instead overwhelming the user with a variety of search options for every possible situation.

The university, college, and major requirements are all on separate pages in other parts of the website, each of which will probably need to be referenced during the enrollment procedure.

This shows my setup for enrolling for classes. I have, in various windows, WebReg, the Schedule of Classes application, the Cognitive Science major requirements, the Muir college graduation requirements, the UCSD Graduation requirements, a list of classes I've taken before, and a calendar showing the classes I've signed up for so far this quarter. Even with two screens, I still have to shuffle through windows to organize my thoughts.

If I was tasked with recreating the class enrollment system for UCSD, I would integrate these two applications and create a smart wizard for picking classes that will help toward your degree. There would also be a more prominent “Enroll in Classes” button on the main Tritonlink page, and class search results would be tagged with what requirements they satisfy as well as whether they conflict with classes you've already enrolled in.

So, in conclusion, WebReg and its sister application Schedule of Classes are accepted only because people have gotten used to them. New students have a hard time grasping the system, and even returning students would benefit from a more streamlined system.

Multitasking

I've heard a lot about multitasking in regards to the "internet generation." Supposedly, we're able to simultaneously attend to numerous information streams and interact with all of them competently. This is mentioned in the book in box 3.1, "Sliced Attention." I have personal experience with this. I've seen students in class on laptops, looking very much like they're taking notes, when really they're reading email or looking at Facebook.

I used to bring my computer to class, to take notes on. The potential benefits are very alluring. It's easy to think that being able to take notes and organize them using any of the numerous notetaking applications out there would make the whole lecture experience more effective. Not to mention being able to reference the class website, look up confusing topics for further clarification, and record the lecture for later review. However, in practice, it falls apart.

I can't count the number of times I would start the class attentive, find something to look up, and spend the rest of the lecture browsing Wikipedia (invariably finding a path to something entirely unrelated.) It's far too easy for the computer to turn from a tool to a distraction. I've not found a mystical ability to focus on two things at once. If I'm doing something else, my work on a primary task suffers greatly.

That's why I now bring only a notebook and a pen to class. The only computer I use in class is the one in my skull. Using laptop in class is certainly an idea whose time will come, but current implementations aren't sufficient and are actually detrimental, in my opinion. Without the internet and its wealth of distractions, there's nothing that a laptop can do that a notebook can't in this situation.

Solutions would have to incorporate either a different teaching style or a different notetaking method, or both. Obviously, in a more project-based environment, there would be a great use for computers. However, in your average 200 person undergraduate class, there's not a lot of opportunity for project work without overtaxing the TAs' grading muscles.