I just finished reading The Media Equation by Reeves and Nass and Wired for Speech by Nass and Brave.
Fascinating! And probably useful whenever I get to doing some voice, animation and/or video-including interfaces.
From the Media Equation: Have some people watch news and entertainment programs on a TV with a sign on top of it "News Television" and news and entertainment programs on an identical TV right next to it with a sign on top of it labeled "Entertainment Television". Mix up which people see which programs on which TV. Ask people to rate the programs they watched, and they rated the news programs shown on the "News" TV more enjoyable, trustworthy, etc. than the ones shown on the "Entertainment" TV and vice versa. Stunning to me.
From Wired for Speech: Have some people listen to the same five positive book reviews read either by a single voice or by five different voices. The people who hear the same reviews read by five different people rate the books as more appealing, etc. than the people who hear the identical content read by a single voice. Again, stunning.
What follows are some of my notes to myself to remind me of the findings in brief.
From The Media Equation. (Generally, substitute "computer" for "person" in social psychology findings and get essentially the same results, hence 'equation'.)
Manners
Politeness: People give more positive and homogenous answers when a computer asks the person to evaluate the computer than when another computer asks to evaluate the first computer. Grice's Maxims for politeness: quality, quantity, relevance and clarity.
Interpersonal distance: Pictures of people presented closer will have more intense evaluations, pay more attention to them and remember them better.
Flattery: People flattered by a computer will believe they performed better and like the computer more, whether or not the praise is warranted. People will think they did better when a computer criticizes them baselessly than with cause. People will like a computer better when it praises them than when it criticizes them.
Judging: Performance praised by a computer will be judged better than criticized performance. Computer self-praise will be judged less valid than when praise comes from another computer. A computer than praises another computer will be liked more than a computer that praises itself. A computer that criticizes another computer will be liked less than a computer that criticizes itself; it will also be judged more intelligent.
Personality
Personality of characters: Most important are dominance/submissiveness and friendliness/unfriendliness, and they are readily identified by people.
Personality of interfaces: From text, people will be able to differentiate dominant from submissive interfaces and judge how similar or different they are from themselves and correspondingly like more or less the interface.
Imitating personality: People like a compuer that starts out opposite them in the dominant/submissive range and becomes more like them than one that is like them consistently.
Emotion
Negativity: People don't like negative media, but they pay more attention to it and remember it better. They remember material better when presented after negative media and worse when presented before negative media.
Social Roles
Specialists: Content from a source labeled "specialist" will be judged superior than from a "generalist" source.
Teammates: People teamed with a computer will feel more similar to the computer, judge it better, cooperate and agree more than people not teamed with it. (Teaming is as simple as a colored wrist band matching a colored bezel on the screen. Teaming can be peer, superior, inferior.)
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Monday, May 14, 2007
Conferences
Some upcoming IxD-related conferences
Creativity and Cognition 2007 http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/CC2007/
UIST2007 http://www.acm.org/uist/uist2007/
RecSys '07: Recommender Systems 2007 http://recsys.acm.org/
VRST: ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology http://www.vrst.org/vrst2007/
ICMI 2007: International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces http://www.acm.org/icmi/2007/
MobileHCI 2007 http://www.mobilehci.org
DIS 2008: Designing Interactive Systems http://www.sigchi.org/dis2008/
CSCW 2008: Computer Supported Cooperative Work http://www.cscw2008.org/
HCI 2007 http://www.hci2007.org
Ubicomp 2007 http://www.ubicomp2007.org/
SIGCHI 2008 http://www.chi2008.org/
Creativity and Cognition 2007 http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/CC2007/
UIST2007 http://www.acm.org/uist/uist2007/
RecSys '07: Recommender Systems 2007 http://recsys.acm.org/
VRST: ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology http://www.vrst.org/vrst2007/
ICMI 2007: International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces http://www.acm.org/icmi/2007/
MobileHCI 2007 http://www.mobilehci.org
DIS 2008: Designing Interactive Systems http://www.sigchi.org/dis2008/
CSCW 2008: Computer Supported Cooperative Work http://www.cscw2008.org/
HCI 2007 http://www.hci2007.org
Ubicomp 2007 http://www.ubicomp2007.org/
SIGCHI 2008 http://www.chi2008.org/
Monday, April 23, 2007
IxD books, articles
From postings to the IxDN Discuss list:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=IXDAreads
http://www.graphpaper.com/2007/04-01_interaction-design-style-my-ia-summit-2007-presentation
Designing for Interaction - Dan Saffer
Designing the Obvious - Robert Hoekman
Ambient Findability - Peter Morville
Digital Ground by Malcolm McCullough
Designing Interfaces by Jennifer Tidwell
Thoughts on Interaction Design by Jon Kolko
Sketching User Experience by Bill Buxton
Managing the Design Factory
Designing the Mobile User Experience - Mobile Interaction Design
Mobile Interaction Design - Jones and Marsden
Designing Interfaces - Tidwell
How Buildings Learn
The Architecture of Happiness
“Style is Not a Four Letter Word”, Emigre #62 by Mr. Keedy (magazine article)
Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things by Donald Norman
The Elements of Typograhic Style - Bringhurst
Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design
What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, And Design
Ajax Design Patterns - Mahemoff
Critical Mass, How One Thing Leads to Another - Ball
Ajax and REST Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach - Gross
Massively Multiplayer Game Development - Alexander (This book is awesome
when considering how to build persistent world community driven
applications, social networks, etc.)
1) Made to Stick - the Heath brothers (if I had to pick one ABSOLUTE
MUST READ book, this would be it)
2) The Long Tail - Anderson
3) The Paradox of Choice - Schwartz
4) Flow - Csikszentmihalyi
5) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Cialdini
\Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The
Principles of Screenwriting - McKee.
Catching the Big Fish
What Things Do
The Creating Brain -Andreasen
The Laws of Simplicity -Maeda
In the Bubble -Thakara
Designing Interactions -Moggridge
Managing as Designing - Boland/Callopy (even better the second time)
Unstuck by Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro http://www.unstuck.com/
Imitation of Life How Biology is Inspiring Computing, Nancy Forbes (2005)
The Human Use of Human Beings - Cybernetics and Society, Norbert Wiener (1956)
The Meaning of Art, Herbert Read (1949)
The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time - Hall
Learning from Stangers - Weiss
Making Comics - McCloud
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team - Lencioni
The Natue of Order: The Phenomenon of Life - Alexander
Basic Visual Concepts And Principles For Artists, Architects And Designers - Wallschlaeger & Busic-Snyder
Universal Principles of Design - Holden, Litwell, Butler
"Information Interaction Design: A unified field theory of design" byNathan Shedroff:* http://www.nathan.com/thoughts/unified/
"All watched over by machines of loving grace: Some ethical guidelinesfor user experience in ubiquitous-computing settings" by AdamGreenfield (Boxes and Arrows)* http://tinyurl.com/nw3mx
http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=IXDAreads
http://www.graphpaper.com/2007/04-01_interaction-design-style-my-ia-summit-2007-presentation
Designing for Interaction - Dan Saffer
Designing the Obvious - Robert Hoekman
Ambient Findability - Peter Morville
Digital Ground by Malcolm McCullough
Designing Interfaces by Jennifer Tidwell
Thoughts on Interaction Design by Jon Kolko
Sketching User Experience by Bill Buxton
Managing the Design Factory
Designing the Mobile User Experience - Mobile Interaction Design
Mobile Interaction Design - Jones and Marsden
Designing Interfaces - Tidwell
How Buildings Learn
The Architecture of Happiness
“Style is Not a Four Letter Word”, Emigre #62 by Mr. Keedy (magazine article)
Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things by Donald Norman
The Elements of Typograhic Style - Bringhurst
Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design
What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, And Design
Ajax Design Patterns - Mahemoff
Critical Mass, How One Thing Leads to Another - Ball
Ajax and REST Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach - Gross
Massively Multiplayer Game Development - Alexander (This book is awesome
when considering how to build persistent world community driven
applications, social networks, etc.)
1) Made to Stick - the Heath brothers (if I had to pick one ABSOLUTE
MUST READ book, this would be it)
2) The Long Tail - Anderson
3) The Paradox of Choice - Schwartz
4) Flow - Csikszentmihalyi
5) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Cialdini
\Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The
Principles of Screenwriting - McKee.
Catching the Big Fish
What Things Do
The Creating Brain -Andreasen
The Laws of Simplicity -Maeda
In the Bubble -Thakara
Designing Interactions -Moggridge
Managing as Designing - Boland/Callopy (even better the second time)
Unstuck by Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro http://www.unstuck.com/
Imitation of Life How Biology is Inspiring Computing, Nancy Forbes (2005)
The Human Use of Human Beings - Cybernetics and Society, Norbert Wiener (1956)
The Meaning of Art, Herbert Read (1949)
The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time - Hall
Learning from Stangers - Weiss
Making Comics - McCloud
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team - Lencioni
The Natue of Order: The Phenomenon of Life - Alexander
Basic Visual Concepts And Principles For Artists, Architects And Designers - Wallschlaeger & Busic-Snyder
Universal Principles of Design - Holden, Litwell, Butler
"Information Interaction Design: A unified field theory of design" byNathan Shedroff:* http://www.nathan.com/thoughts/unified/
"All watched over by machines of loving grace: Some ethical guidelinesfor user experience in ubiquitous-computing settings" by AdamGreenfield (Boxes and Arrows)* http://tinyurl.com/nw3mx
Sunday, April 15, 2007
TurboTax 2006
I just finished using TurboTax Deluxe 2006 on my Windows machine.
Overall, seemed about as easy as the tax code allows. Kudos.
However, there were a number of bugs and one noticeable inconsistency.
There were bugs that froze the app (adding a charity in It's Deductible), got me stuck with incorrect information getting stored (repeatedly asking for prior year's state tax paid with return, each retry adding another line and more dollars to the total amount of supposed tax paid), and some data entry flakiness (after adding a charity, the one before it alphabetically is selected in It's Deductable, after tabbing to the donation amount in It's Deductible the field would accept one digit until navigating away and back or clicking in the field's box).
All of these were surmountable (but the repeated tax entry could have really stung me if I hadn't figured out what was going on by looking at the tax form, making the correction manually, and concluding there was nothing more in that category that I needed to do so I could just stop there).
The inconsistency I noticed is how "none of these apply to me" is handled. In some cases, you have to check a box and continue, in other cases the topic is phrased "do any of these apply to you" and you click yes or no. The second way works out quicker, and I prefer it (I tend to read closely with the app... I can see how "none of these apply" as an option is a way to increase the likelihood that people read the options, but I don't imagine it takes much for people who don't want to read to learn to look at the last option if they don't think something applies to them).
Overall, pleased with an overall nicely done tool. If only the tax code were simpler...
Overall, seemed about as easy as the tax code allows. Kudos.
However, there were a number of bugs and one noticeable inconsistency.
There were bugs that froze the app (adding a charity in It's Deductible), got me stuck with incorrect information getting stored (repeatedly asking for prior year's state tax paid with return, each retry adding another line and more dollars to the total amount of supposed tax paid), and some data entry flakiness (after adding a charity, the one before it alphabetically is selected in It's Deductable, after tabbing to the donation amount in It's Deductible the field would accept one digit until navigating away and back or clicking in the field's box).
All of these were surmountable (but the repeated tax entry could have really stung me if I hadn't figured out what was going on by looking at the tax form, making the correction manually, and concluding there was nothing more in that category that I needed to do so I could just stop there).
The inconsistency I noticed is how "none of these apply to me" is handled. In some cases, you have to check a box and continue, in other cases the topic is phrased "do any of these apply to you" and you click yes or no. The second way works out quicker, and I prefer it (I tend to read closely with the app... I can see how "none of these apply" as an option is a way to increase the likelihood that people read the options, but I don't imagine it takes much for people who don't want to read to learn to look at the last option if they don't think something applies to them).
Overall, pleased with an overall nicely done tool. If only the tax code were simpler...
Saturday, April 07, 2007
TomTom navigator
Last summer I got a TomTom navigator system for my Palm Treo 650 phone -- map and software runs on the phone and there's an external BlueTooth GPS receiver.
It's been pretty excellent. Not perfect, but excellent.
On the plus side, it basically works the way it needs to. It gives directions well, shows maps and other useful information at the right time and right way, and helps me get where I'm going without much fuss.
Downsides on the interaction are few. It doesn't remember many recent destinations at all (just five), even though there is screen real estate for twice that many. It forgets if you've asked for a walking or no-freeway route if you quit the Navigator and restart it. It doesn't give any indication that it's about to say something -- it just blurts it out, which often interrupts conversations in the car. Small-time stuff.
Actually, the worst things are not so much about how the interaction works but the fact that it seems to expose Palm problems.
The consistently worst thing has been when navigating, I can't answer an incoming call with the button on my BlueTooth headset. I haven't actually figured out how to reliably answer in any way. Generally I end up having to return the call by leaving the Navigator app and listening to voice mail and calling back.
It fairly often crashes my phone and causes it to restart (fortunately never when driving or on the phone as I recall).
The map data is quite good, but new development and no left turn rules or map data have inconvenienced me a few times.
I'm not sure whether it's map data or navigator design, but there are a number of times (usually Ys -- merges or splits in roadways) that the direction given is different than what makes sense to me (I'd say go straight when it says to bear left), or doesn't give a direction when I think I need one. Fortunately, the visual display shows what I need to know.
There's some combination of turning the phone off and on and going in and out of the GPS BlueTooth range that causes the software to not be able to get the GPS signal. Relaunching the software generally fixes it.
A few nice notes:
Jane's voice is excellent. Clear and authoritative, but not pushy.
Other systems I've seen have said out loud things like "Off Route!" or "Recalculating" when you don't follow their directions. TomTom is silent while recalculating and shows a progress bar as it does so. As soon as it figures out what to do, it starts telling you.
It's been pretty excellent. Not perfect, but excellent.
On the plus side, it basically works the way it needs to. It gives directions well, shows maps and other useful information at the right time and right way, and helps me get where I'm going without much fuss.
Downsides on the interaction are few. It doesn't remember many recent destinations at all (just five), even though there is screen real estate for twice that many. It forgets if you've asked for a walking or no-freeway route if you quit the Navigator and restart it. It doesn't give any indication that it's about to say something -- it just blurts it out, which often interrupts conversations in the car. Small-time stuff.
Actually, the worst things are not so much about how the interaction works but the fact that it seems to expose Palm problems.
The consistently worst thing has been when navigating, I can't answer an incoming call with the button on my BlueTooth headset. I haven't actually figured out how to reliably answer in any way. Generally I end up having to return the call by leaving the Navigator app and listening to voice mail and calling back.
It fairly often crashes my phone and causes it to restart (fortunately never when driving or on the phone as I recall).
The map data is quite good, but new development and no left turn rules or map data have inconvenienced me a few times.
I'm not sure whether it's map data or navigator design, but there are a number of times (usually Ys -- merges or splits in roadways) that the direction given is different than what makes sense to me (I'd say go straight when it says to bear left), or doesn't give a direction when I think I need one. Fortunately, the visual display shows what I need to know.
There's some combination of turning the phone off and on and going in and out of the GPS BlueTooth range that causes the software to not be able to get the GPS signal. Relaunching the software generally fixes it.
A few nice notes:
Jane's voice is excellent. Clear and authoritative, but not pushy.
Other systems I've seen have said out loud things like "Off Route!" or "Recalculating" when you don't follow their directions. TomTom is silent while recalculating and shows a progress bar as it does so. As soon as it figures out what to do, it starts telling you.
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