ANXIETY

Ben Cowan’s paper on Wiki anxiety and wiki Usability challenged the view that so called ‘digital natives’ are better prepared to take advantage of IT and are better equipped to embrace innovations than their elders who’ve learnt IT later in life. Evidence suggests that some students are forced to face high levels of anxiety on a regular basis when technology is made essential in the learning experience. In particular, he says, an assumption made by lecturers that students will be familiar with (or at least enthusiastic about) collaboration technologies may well be counterproductive. Unsurprisingly, Cowan demonstrated that high anxiety levels correlate with low Usability ratings – more surprisingly, increased experience with the wiki system did not appear to alter these scores much at all. Cowan suggests this highlights the importance of the quality of experience over the quantity, and that this is amplified in an collaborative environment.

EMPATHISERS VERSUS SYSTEMISERS

William Hudson’s focus on gender, empathy and design drew on the work of psychologist, Simon Baron-Cohen, who has studied the Asperger’s mind in depth. Hudson distinguished between empathisers, who understand relationships and can easily perceive ‘state of mind’ and current emotions; and systemisers, who understand physical relationships between objects and are able to perceive how things work. Technology tends to attract systemisers, who are typically male, and this is also true of technological design. The design process, where a key attribute is the ability to understand the views and needs of others, is therefore impoverished by a preponderance of systemisers. According to Hudson this explains the ‘self-as-user’ outlook which inhibits much technological design, and his research suggested ways to overcome this, including training in empathy for systemisers; empathy-assistive technology. Oh, and getting more women into design.

EMOTIONAL CAPITAL

A paper given by Sas, Dix et al from Lancaster University looked at the ‘dramaturgical capitalization of positive emotions’ in Facebook: in other words, a review of what constitutes a memorable moment of Facebook use; what emotions are associated with these moments; and how to design to accommodate them. Their diary study revealed that the most prevalent memorable experiences were recorded as private communications between close friends through which people give and receive emotional support, laugh out loud, relive the good old times and anticipate future memorable experiences. Importantly, while private communications engender connectedness, public communications offer entertainment. According to dramaturgical theory (a sociological perspective which argues that human actions are dependent upon time, place, and audience) these themes are made more real – capitalized – through a process of sharing, validation and giving and receiving feedback. The end result of this dramaturgy is increased emotional capital: positive feelings, memories and a sense of wellbeing. Sas’ paper suggested ways to develop a deeper understanding of the design elements which allow for capitalization of positive emotions, and how this could contribute to design guidelines for better User Experience in social contexts, and not at least to the experience design in general.

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SENSE AND SENSITIVITY

Interaction with computers has progressed well beyond seeing and hearing. Screens and sounds are going to be around for a long time yet, but touch and even smell are entering the field as important sensory channels for technology interaction. Then there’s emotions…

SenseSurface from Girton Labs, is a tiny computer hardware platform just 2mm thin (plus battery) for embedding in paper, card or adhering to the human body. The paper version can sense touch, motion and heat, and can record data for up to one year. A new type of manufacturing process has eliminated the normal copper printed circuit board and so makes the hybrid paper computer, very thin, flexible, writable and robust. Current development work is focused on time-sensitive Sticky Notes for Alzheimer’s patients, although the earliest application will probably be medical sensing plasters for the skin. On a less serious note, Scent Whisper is a responsive jewellery project that provides a new way to send a scented message by fusing emerging technologies with perfumery, to create a new level of experience and wellbeing, and as a novel communication system.

Further out on the horizon, bodyLAB was a series of exercises which explored the wider social nature of communication and the many channels – movement, gesture, expression – which we use both consciously and unconsciously to communicate. There’s no technology there yet, but the formal process of studying body language is progress towards building this into future devices, one such example being the University’s Computer Laboratory’s ‘mind-reading’ machines: computers which implement a computational model to infer mental states from individual’s facial signals. The goal is to enhance human-computer interaction through empathic responses, to improve the productivity of the user and to enable applications to initiate interactions with and on behalf of the user, without waiting for explicit input from that user; and similar ideas were apparent in some of the gaming technologies on show.

ENTERTAINMENT AND COMMUNICATION

Nor is it all about work and productivity. Microsoft’s much vaunted surface technology was much in evidence, although not in the ways you might expect. TellTable employs Surface Technology to provide an interactive storytelling experience, helping to stimulate creativity and self-expression by children. The storyteller(s) can manipulate various digital characters and sceneries on Surface, which are created by capturing and editing real world elements using a camera. At the grown-up end of the spectrum, Dynamic Personality and Emotion Synthesis is an animation toolkit plugin that automates lifelike digital character content creation, supported by a Software Development Kit that automates the control of run time character behavior. Used differently, the table allows childred to explore the physics of light by manipulating everyday objects on a DIY interactive surface. Point, reflect and refract light beams, observing what gets filtered out by different colours simply by opening the lid of the coloured boxes to see what’s been caught.

SOCIETY, HEALTH AND WELLBEING

Individual interaction is being overtaken by the interactivity needs of groups and whole societies. MealPlanner tackles unhealthy eating through a new meal planning system aimed at giving individuals the knowledge and control they need for changing their food-related behaviour. Nokia’s HealthRadar is a project developed in India together with Manipal University which enables the reporting and tracking of contagious diseases, thus helping medical authorities address the negative impact on the population. Closer to home, a new tool from ArgentVision enables anyone with an elderly relative to communicate from the internet, even via Facebook, simply by sending a message to a set top box which displays the message across the television screen. No action is required of the older person, but the connection is there.

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The researchers point out that moving from the visual to the auditory modality brings many challenges, one of the main ones being the change from space to time representation. Graphically, information is represented through space, whereas sound is fundamentally temporal, and this presents interesting design challenges, such as how to support efficient indexing of information for easy retrieval, how to support navigation and orientation in an auditory interface. These challenges require a shift in design perspective that must be driven by a deeper understanding of the pros and cons of each modality.

Sound delivers a great deal of information that we use almost indispensably in our everyday interaction with the world. Yet such benefits do not extend to our experience with computers in particular and technology in general: we believe that our research will contribute knowledge to bridge such gap in the field.

Constructing Relational Diagrams in Audio: The Multiple Perspective Hierarchical Approach, by Oussama Metatla and Nick Bryan-Kinns is the winner of the International Excellence Prize, which will be presented at HCI 2009 in Cambridge this September.
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This collaboration with leading human interface research centers provides additional support for NEC’s existing HI development designs, and incorporates “Usability modeling” as an important new tool for efficient, low-cost development of easy-to-use HI for a wide variety of products.

In July 2009, the establishment of Usability guidelines covering e-government related issues raised a great deal of attention towards improved Usability. In the HI development field, providing easy-to-use products that meet the demands of a diverse range of users is now taken for granted and assuring the effectiveness and validity of these products is increasingly important. However, the vast majority of conventional HI evaluation has taken place only after a product is delivered, not at an early stage of development when changes in HI are easier and cheaper to make.

Consequently, NEC has systematized the process of HI technology development into design and evaluation categories. NEC has decided to complement the strength of its existing system-based organization with an innovative human-based approach that analyzes user behavior models and psychological mechanisms. The globally renowned experts of PARC and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon in the cognitive psychology field are now contributing to this new human side of NEC’s HI research and development.

NEC, PARC and Carnegie Mellon announced the results from their partnership at the 2009 HCI International Conference in San Diego on July 24th.

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The HCI Bibliography is a free-access bibliography on human-computer interaction with over 48,000 records, mostly with abstracts and links to full text. The HCIBib search service has performed over 4.7 million searches since 1 December 2006, serving thousands of users worldwide, who have also displayed 1.8 million interactive tables of contents of conference proceedings and journal volumes.

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Earlier this month I opened CREATE 2009, a forum for academics and practitioners to share creative and innovative ideas for human computer interaction (HCI).

The conference’s theme was ‘Creative inventions and innovations for everyday HCI’ so to start things off I outlined my four step approach to help designers find more creative solutions to their problems.

I have been interested in creativity since I was an academic at Loughborough in the seventies and even carried out some experiments on how to stimulate creativity. At that time, HCI was focused on computers as business and technical tools, and major emphasis was placed on the efficiency and effectiveness of the interface and resulting interaction. Then, as now, the traditional computer industry had a rather narrow view of design and creativity.

My experiments suggested four steps which could help designers break out of their set views of the problem and potential solution.

Step 1. Research, research, research.

Although many people identify a ‘eureka’ moment when they make the conceptual breakthrough, it has to be based on solid groundwork and a detailed understanding of the problem. Luck helps but in the words of the golfer Gary Player:

“the more I practise, the luckier I get.”

Step 2. Identify constraints and show stoppers.

How often have you been told to ‘think outside the box’? I don’t know about you but I find that very hard to do. It’s as helpful as saying, ‘now come up with a great idea’. So my approach involves ‘knowing the box’.

Identify all the constraints and limits you can. In most organisations you will have lots of people to help you with this, especially senior management. A day or so before the conference, the stock market jumped with the news that fifty four year-old Steve Jobs was back at Apple after illness. Although many senior managers are grey haired men, they are not all like Steve Jobs. Many of them suffer from an aging male disorder known as ‘hardening of the categories’. They will enjoy telling you in detail how it can’t be done.

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