Topic 7 – Devices for display and interaction

Exercise 7.1: Smart screen interface study

Dan Saffer provides an introduction to the mechanics of touchscreen devices in his text Designing gestural interfaces (2009, pp. 12-16).  He starts with a general architecture for gestural systems according to systems theory of sensor, comparator and an actuator.  The sensor is the part mentioned in the HowStuffWorks article given in the OLR question, which for the iPod touch is a capacitive sensor panel.  When the user touches the screen, a portion of the charge stored in the coating material is transferred to the user, decreasing the panel’s capacitive layer and triggering a touch event (Saffer, p. 15).  Saffer also mentions other methods for implementing touchscreen sensors such as resistives with two layers pushed together and surface wave using the interruption of ultrasonic waves.

The activity detected by the sensor is then passed on to the comparator, which in the iPod touch is the gesture software mentioned in the HowStuffWorks article.  The comparator compares the current state of the system to the previous state and makes a decision as to what needs to be done as the result of the input.

Finally, this decision is fed through to the actuator which performs the appropriate action.

One of the things that struck me most about the iPhone the first time I used it was the smoothness of the interaction when browsing websites.  I worked with iPaq PDAs in 2002/2003 and although these represented the state-of-the-art in mobile browsing at the time, it was still an excruciating experience.  The multi-touch ‘pinch to shrink’ and ‘stretch to zoom’ gestures allow the user to get their bearings on a page and then easily zoom in deeper to relevant content without becoming disoriented.  This is a simple but powerful use of natural gestures which made the iPod touch/iPhone so superiour to the competition of the time.

Exercise 7.2: New devices, aged care and people with disabilities

This question is very topical for me at the moment.  I am currently redesigning Barclays online banking system and we will be spending an entire sprint (4 week chunk of effort in the Scrum methodology) updating and testing the system for accessibility.  This includes designing for and running testing sessions with users who have visual impairments, motor impairments and cognitive difficulties (such as severe dyslexia).  The participants we will be testing with use a range of assistive technologies including:

• Screen readers
• Text-to-speech systems
• Keyboard-only navigation
• Voice-recognition software

I’ve had some experience with most of these technologies, but voice-recognition is not something I’ve explicitly designed for before.  WebAIM is a source that I often refer to for accessibility resources and their Motor Disabilities: Assistive technologies article (n.d.) has an excellent introduction to these devices.  It defines voice recognition software as “software that allows a person to control the computer by speaking”.  The article also makes the point that although the disabilities and assistive technologies used to support those disabilities are extremely varied (in their thousands), almost all assistive technologies for motor disabilities work through or emulate the keyboard.  This means that by designing interactions that support keyboard accessibility, you are creating a system that will be accessible to users with motor disabilities.  It finishes with a mention that navigation in as many key strokes as possible is an important part of this.  The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines define what is considered keyboard accessible (“W3C”, 2008).

Saffer, D.  (2009).  Designing gestural interfaces. Sebastopol: O’Reilly.

Motor Disabilities: Assistive technologies.  (n.d.).  Retrieved October 1, 2009, from http://www.webaim.org/articles/motor/assistive.php.

W3C. (2008). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. Retrieved October 1, 2009, from http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/.

Topic 6 – Designing for usability, sociability and sustainability

Exercise 6.1: Design rules and your CSU forum experience

My first subject at CSU was ‘INF440 Introduction to Information Architecture’.  As someone who was in the middle of a career change to a specialisation that was new and uncommon, the forum for this subject invoked a sense of belonging, worth and satisfaction as well as a sense of loss when it closed.

• Purpose: As the introductory subject for a new masters course, it was unique for the participants as almost everyone was starting a Masters of Information Architecture.  This was in contrast to the other more general subjects that would make up the course over the next 3 years as they contained students from varying courses and degree types.  Because of the unique purpose of this subject, everyone’s introduction was interesting.  Each unique background and reason for taking the course fed into the group’s understanding of what Information Architecture was and what could be done with it.
• People: The course was primarily made up of students with some type of background in the library/information sciences.  As someone from an ITC background who had only ever worked with Information Architects in a web development environment, this was actually surprising to me.  In hindsight however, perhaps the fact that it was offered by the school of Information Studies should have given that away.
• Community size: With around 20 participants (not including any lurkers that may have been lurking!), the size was small enough that you could remember previous contributions and construct a mental image of most of the participants.  It was also large enough to ensure that a steady stream of conversation was maintained.

Exercise 6.2: Wiki and Moodle design

Visually, the interface had a very ‘old-school’ appearance and it took me a few minutes to work out how the site hung together.  From an interaction design perspective I don’t think that the interface did enough to surface recent activity – instead this lay buried under various categories – which would have provided more dynamism to the interface and in turn encouraged more participation.   On reflection however, the concept of housing a number of powerful paradigms for social interaction together in one interface (wiki, blog, forum, calendar) has a great deal of potential.    I had a poke around the forums, which were a little dusty with the last activity being from 2007!  I then added a blog entry and tagged it with the existing tag of ‘OLR exercises’.

Although a Moodle shares the common attribute with a wiki of being able to anonymously edit content, a Moodle also brings a sense of the individual that a wiki does not.  A Moodle seems to be a meta-tool which incorporates a number of paradigms for social interaction, including those of the wiki, whereas the wiki focuses only on the creation of content without a sense of contributor.  If I could sum it up succinctly – a wiki is about content, a Moodle is about people, content and conversations.

I think that the presence of “likeable” features is a combination of good usability, sociability and sustainability as advocated by Preece and Kim.  Ultimately, what is likeable is that which is useful to someone in achieving their goals, which are of course closely related to the broader goals of the community.  This was illustrated in the reading material for topic 6 by the robustness principle of ‘Task conformance’ which is the measure to which the system’s features completely and adequately support the user’s tasks.  If the features of a system are closely aligned to this goal-directed behaviour then those features will be deemed “likeable” by its users.

Exercise 6.3: Trust and reputation, how is it achieved?

I will consider this question in regard to Google and YouTube.  Don Norman addresses trust in his landmark book Emotional Design (2004, pp. 141-143).  He lists reliance, confidence and integrity as the qualities of trust.  Both Google and YouTube are platforms that service a massive amount of requests, so reliance and confidence are established over many successful interactions over an extended period of time.  For Google, trust is built each time someone types in a query and finds what they were looking for in the first few results.  This trust is what they then so cleverly use to sell pay-per-click traffic to advertisers.  YouTube similarly build trust through the qualities of reliance and confidence by firstly having relevant content for most searches and then allowing users to find that content.  Norman’s final quality of integrity is satisfied differently by these two platforms.  Google clearly demarcates their paid traffic with its ‘Sponsored Links’ label, this provides transparency to users which prevents trust from being eroded by the presence of these paid links.  YouTube resists the temptation to promote their ‘Featured Videos’ first on the homepage and instead gives the slot to ‘Videos being watched now’.  They also keep paid-for content clearly separate further down in the site.

Google has done such a good job in the quality of its search results and usability of its results pages that people actually talk about “Googling” something.  Once something gets enough momentum it almost becomes accepted wisdom.  YouTube is a more socially-based platform which relies on content submitted by members so is heavily dependent on the early adopters and technology enthusiasts to ensure that a base of content is gathered that can then appeal to the pragmatists, conservatives and skeptics.  This makes sociability an important attribute and as well as the usual social features of comments and user-generated content, features such as ‘Videos being watched now’ add a dynamic community element.

Usability, sociability and sustainability draw mainstream users by creating accessible and dynamic systems with low barriers to entry that clearly satisfy the goals and concerns that these mainstream users have.

Norman, D. A. (2004). Emotional Design. New York: Basic Books.

Assignment 1 Essay

1. Major published works and conference activity over the last 10 years

Ward Cunningham has been involved in a number of major innovations over the past 15 years including Extreme Programming and design patterns.  His major contribution to the development of online communities however has been the conception of the concept of a wiki (“Ward Cunningham”, n.d.).  His initial “published work” was the publishing of the WikiWikiWeb to his consultancy’s website in 1995 but he followed this up with the publication of the book The Wiki Way in 2001.  In addition to his published work he has also been a keynote speaker at the WikiSym conference in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Jenny Preece’s current research is concerned with the design and management of online communities, particularly in terms of their the sociability and usability (“Jenny Preece”, n.d.).  Her major published work is ‘Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction’, published in 2002 (which being an interaction designer I happen to own).  In 2000 she also published Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability.  There is sketchy information about a book titled ‘User interfaces in the Real World’ that was published in 2007 and now appears to be out of print.  In 2005 she was Education Co-chair for the CHI conference (Computer-Human Interaction) (“Human computer interaction: Beyond human-computer interaction” 2007).  I also found a reference on Amazon to her contributing to the ‘Communities and Technologies 2005: Proceedings of the Second Communities and Technologies Conference, Milano 2005’.

2. Evolution of ideas

The evolution of the wiki can be clearly seen by looking at Cunningham’s original wiki project (which is still live at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki nearly 15 years later) and then contrasting this to Wikipedia, currently the most famous example of a wiki.  The original vision can be found within the first few lines of the landing page and reveals the beginnings of the wiki concept, “Wiki is a composition system; it’s a discussion medium; it’s a repository; it’s a mail system; it’s a tool for collaboration. Really, we don’t know quite what it is, but it’s a fun way of communicating asynchronously across the network.” (“Front Page”, n.d.).  Fifteen years on, Wikipedia represents a body of knowledge generated by millions of people.  Alexa shows that yesterday (28th August 2009), 10% of all global internet users visited the site (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org?range=5y&size=large&y=t).

*** Update ***

The man himself has offered some addition insight into inspiration below in the comments.

The development of Preece’s work is decidedly more subtle given the fact that she is an academic addressing a broad topic rather than someone responsible for a specific technology.  There are definite hints in the titles of her publications to a journey from more ‘traditional’ human-computer interaction to the broader and more holistic fields of interaction design and user experience and sociology.  This can be seen from ‘A guide to usability: Human Factors in Computing’ (1993) to ‘Human-Computer Interaction: Concepts and Design’ (1994) and then ‘Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability (2000)’ and finally ‘Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction’ (2002).

3. Light-bulb ideas

Cunningham started the project as an Apple Hypercard stack with information about certain keywords.  If there was no information for a particular keyword, Hypercard would create a new card for it.  Although this is a very simple concept, this is the essence of the wiki and the fundamental idea that he fleshed out when creating WikiWikiWeb.

In ‘Online Communities’ (2000) Preece brought together the usability focus of human-computer interaction field and the broader human focus of sociability.  This is articulated in the introduction to the book “… enable you to understand the interrelationships between people’s behaviour online, sociability and usability.  People’s interactions create online communities, and developers can influence their success by how they design policies and software” (Preece, 2000).  This marriage of usability and sociability was a powerful and novel approach which Preece is still pursuing today.

4. Change managers for other workgroups.

Preece and Cunningham’s have had two very different careers.  While Preece is a researcher and academic, Cunningham has had a varied career in industry and held various senior posts related to a range of specialisations.  Based on this it would appear that Cunningham is an excellent change manager and has successfully implemented change at the highest level in some of the largest corporations in the world.  It is difficult to comment on Preece as a change manager however due to the academic nature of her work.

5. Shared experiences, synergy and context.

As an interaction designer with a background in programming I can relate well on many points to both Cunningham and Preece.  As mentioned above, I actually own a copy of Preece’s ‘Interaction Design’ text.  I work for a company who practices large-scale agile development (http://www.conchango.com/ and http://blogs.conchango.com/tags/Agile/default.aspx) so I deeply appreciate Cunningham’s contribution to Extreme Programming.  I also have an abiding interest in design patterns (particularly their use in interaction design).  Although my affinity with Preece is based on my interaction design interests rather than anything to do with online communities, I am increasingly becoming interested in the contextual and social aspects of design so can appreciate her work in this area.

Preece, J.  (2000).  Online communities: Designing usability, supporting sociability. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons.

Ward Cunningham. (n.d.). Retrieved August 29, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham.

Jenny Preece. (n.d.). Retrieved September 6, 2009, from http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Presenters/Jenny_Preece.

Meet the authors. In Interaction Design: Beyond Human-computer interaction. (2007).  Retrieved September 6, 2009, from http://www.id-book.com/

Front Page. (n.d.). Retrieved August 29, 2009, from http://c2.com/cgi/wiki.

Collwer, J. (2005, August 9). Kim Bruning discusses Wikimania. Wikinews. Retrieved from http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Interview:_Wikinewsie_Kim_Bruning_discusses_Wikimania.

Topic 5 – Online community building and social architects

Exercise 5.1: The many faces of you

My online identities:

• Google profile
• Facebook
• Designthinkage.com blog
• ITC510 blog
• Skype
• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• Couchsurfing.com
• Google groups (seems to be quite seperate from the standard Google profile information)

Whether I show a “persistent” or “multiple” identities is a difficult question to answer when phrased that way.  I consider myself as showing multiple facets of a persistent identity – which contains qualities of both persistence and multiplicity.  As I’ve mentioned in earlier OLR questions, my Facebook identity is more focused on fun whereas designthinkage.com (my professional blog) obviously needs to have a slightly more serious tone to it.  These are both genuine attributes of a single persistent identity but are moderated to match the context.  This is consistent with how I would behave in the ‘real’ world.

What your online identity communicates is based on the context of the community.  If in a social network where questions are being answered, things such as how long you have been a member and how many questions you have answered help other members to judge the quality of your responses.  ‘Softer’ things such as the name and photo you choose for yourself also communicates how approachable your are and how serious you take yourself.  Ethically, someone’s identity online should not be a function of their race, gender or other attribute unless relevant to the community in which they are engaging.  This is one of the great things about the anonymity of the web.

Even an attribute such as a picture of yourself can vary wildly between communities.  Take for example a photo that you might have for yourself on Facebook compared to the image that you wish to project to a network of your professional peers.  The photo of you wearing a Mankini and holding a beer might be good for a laugh among friends but might be a career-limiting move if used as part of your professional identity!

Exercise 5.2: Social architects and online games

1. Being a bit of a buzzword, “Social architecture” can be a little hard to define.   Most references to it seems to popup sometime in 2007 (around the time social networking starting to hot up) and be in close proximity to words such as information architecture, user experience, social media, sociology and even “ideation”.  I would define social architecture as “the design of virtual systems that facilitate and encourage specific social interactions”.

2. As I feel like I have already joined almost every social network available at some point over the last 5 topics I’ve decided to just go with the suggested communities for something new.  Whyville does a great job at initially engaging you.  You create a little avatar and before you know it you’re halfway through the registration process!  ShuffleBrain was interesting as it leverages your existing Facebook profile – which relates to the discussion earlier in this topic around the reuse of a persistent identity.  I tried a pattern matching game and found it really engaging.  It even used my Facebook photo to show me where I scored on the scale.

The key difference that I see between these two communities is that Whyville is a self-contained environment with a community of members that has been built up from scratch.  ShuffleBrain on the other hand utilises the existing facebook community to provide an instant access to participants by leveraging the identity that they have already spent much time creating.  This model of building identities and then sharing their information with applications on request has been wildly successful for Facebook and not only allows ‘sub-communities’ to spring up quickly but also increases the appeal and interest of Facebook in general.

3.

Community	Objectives	Rules of engagement	Unique features
Whyville	To provide children an environment where they can interact with other children and play games. There is an educational focus to the site and their is a focus on learning and safety.	Being a community specifically for children, these are more explicit than typical rules of engagement and focused on specifics rather than the general spirit of the community. Examples of this are the requirement that children under 13 years of age obtain consent from a parent before engaging in the community. In addition to this, the chat policy discourages the usual suspects of profanity, racism, bigotry etc as well as forbidden the disclosure by anyone of information that could identify a user.	The longevity of the community is one of the unique features of Whyville. In addition to this is the fact that this community exists for specific age groups – meaning that the population of the community would have turned over several times since its inception in 1999. The visual nature of the interaction is also quite unique. Although this has since been by done others such as Second Life, it must have been one of the first and most successful to adopt this mode of interaction.
Shuffle Brain	Shuffle Brain is community built around the playing of ‘brain games’. Although the game play itself is a solo activity, community is fostered through the element of competition and comments around specific games.  As the Shuffle Brain website puts it “…creating games that keep you sharp and socially connected”.	Doesn’t seem to have an explicit set of rules of engagement. Sitting within Facebook however I suppose that it must comply with their broader guidelines which is titled the ‘Statement of rights and responsibilities and can be found at http://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=design#/terms.php?ref=pf. This covers spam, viruses and malicious code, bullying, content with nudity or of a hateful nature and interestingly a clause specifically regarding the marketing of alcohol-rated content.	Shuffle Brain is unique in that it is made up of two groups – game creators and game players. The emphasis on the game creator’s both encourages an additional sense of connection as well as giving more credence to the use of the games as serious tools for brain development.

4. Founding out about who is behind Whyville was actually rather difficult.  The about us section of the website didn’t shed much light so I took a cue from the small print at the bottom right and Googled “Numedeon”.  Their website is a bizarre virtual reception room which as an information architect made me cringe and remember the mid 90’s when metaphors stretched to their limits in an attempt to use them for navigation.  Although I can find precious little about who is behind Whyville, according to my definition of a social architect above, the Whyville creators can certainly be considered social architects.

Shuffle Brain was founded by Amy Jo and Scott Kim (I assume they are married) and seems to have investment from some major venture capitalists.  Given that she is listed as being an “expert in online social architecture” and he is a puzzle designer, it appears that they manage the site on an ongoing basis.  In addition to Amy Jo’s impressive list of clientele and her bio actually explicitly mentioning the words “social architecture’, the site has been designed with a definite social agenda in mind, so I would say that they are indeed social architects.