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.