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.