Topic 4 – Human centred computing: human interfaces

Exercise 4.1: Blog or Wiki design

1. When designing/managing content in a blog, the most obvious starting point is the use of tools such as categories and tags that come ‘out-of-the-box’ in practically all blogging software.  As well as being easy to setup, they are a well established convention that are looked for and understood by readers.  The comments section of a blog is the feature most relevant to the establishment of community and interaction between people – so creating content that facilitates discussion and then cultivating and responding to that discussion as it occurs is an important.

2. WordPress is the blogging tool that I use both for my academic blog (https://andyitc510.wordpress.com/) and my professional blog (http://designthinkage.com).  WordPress (like all blogging tools) primarily supports asynchronous conversations between people in the form of the blogs and the resulting comments trail.  In many ways, each blog is in itself an online community – having the elements outlined by Kim (2000a; 2000b) of

• Design for growth and change: The categorisation and tagging tools are fluid and can easily changed.  WordPress even goes as far as allowing categories and tags to be added in a ‘just-in-time’ fashion as part of writing a post – which makes it easy to evolve the structure of a blog as time goes on.
• Create and maintain community feedback: Tools are included for managing comments made on a post by having them held until they are approved, deleted or marked as spam.  References to a post are then automatically maintained via the pingback concept.
• Allow members to gradually take more control: Customisation of blogs through themes could be considered an increase in control to members.  WordPress themes are a big business now with many free and paid-for themes available.

In terms of the 9 design strategies (Kim, 2000a):

1. Purpose: this is set by the author and can be expressed in the WordPress title and tagline attributes.
2. Make the establishment of community easy: WordPress is a single-click install (if installed at all) and published to the web so anyone with a browser can participate.
3. A set of profile attributes are available which include things such as email and IM contact information and bibliographic information.  These can then be exposed by themes as required.
4. The roles in a blog are pretty well defined and not open to much evolution.  There is the author(s) and then those that participate in the discussion.  There could however be an informal arrangement where certain users help moderate and facilitate discussion.
5. Leaders need to be fostered: As above.
6. Community rules and mores need to be developed: This will be primarily dictated by the topic of the blog and the style and tone of the author’s writing.
7. Regular events help promote relationships: I suppose that regular postings could assist in getting a more stable community to form around a blog or collection of blogs.
8. Rituals help develop a more mature online culture: I’m not sure that this point is particularly relevant to a blog-based community.
9. A large community can sustain sub-groups.  WordPress.com is an excellent example of a large community which sustains sub-groups.  These pivot around tags.

Exercise 4.2: Hosting good conversations

a) 3 ways of of providing users with more control in an online community.  This is a difficult one to discuss because the control that users are after is very much a function of the community itself.  In generic terms, I would say

1. Provide easy visibility of interesting activity: Facebook does this very well.  By highlighting activity that users are likely to want to see, they feel more engagement in the community and a greater sense of belonging.  How often have you scanned your facebook news feed and found yourself making a comment or looking through a photo album?
2. Make identity visible and easily updated: As we’ve learned in ITC510 so far, our online persona is an important part of our involvement with an online community.  If users can easily see and maintain this their sense of control will be much improved.
3. Allow control over the visibility of contributions where appropriate: This is especially important when there is a varied audience in a community and the reason for Facebook’s restricted profile feature.

b) 3 rules/tips that I have experienced or found interesting

1. A feeling of ownership.  Participants become evangelists: This point brings to mind things that I have read about building communities around a product or an idea, particularly from Kathy Sierra.  This is summarised well in her ‘You can out-spend or you can out-teach’ post (http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/09/you_can_outspen.html).
2. Enable people to entertain themselves rather than being just the passive consumers of canned entertainment: This is related to what I wrote in my answer for Topic 3 around the use of engaging games to teach.
3. A host is like a host at a party: I find this a really useful metaphor.  A party has a emergent dynamic of its own – but this is a function of the people who are invited, the theme, the context it is held in and how it is facilitated by the host.  In the same way, a party can’t be ‘designed’ as much as planned.  You can influence the outcome but only have a limited degree of control.

c) Rules of engagement.  Although articulated in quite different ways and levels of verbosity, these are essentially the same thing.  Systems that facilitate communication between people need to provide a shared understanding of what is acceptable, which can vary vastly from community to community.  I would see less need for ‘rules of engagement’ when only document sharing is taking place as the conversation is much less articulated and direct so there is less chance for the kind of conflict that needs to be actively resolved.

Exercise 4.3: Social networking tools for your PLN

a)

i) Learning

My heuristics to judge how much a social networking site has potential as a platform for learning are:

• Topics of interest: Users should be able to create and  find topics of interest.  Topics should be able to be tagged by users to build up folksonomies.
• Asynchronous and persistent discussion: The system should allow asynchronous discussion to take place around a topic.  Discussion should be kept in an easily readable format that can be used by others who may not have been participants in the initial discussion for learning in the future.
• Searchable knowledge: Knowledge kept in the system should be able to be searched in multiple ways and returned in the form of meaningful results.

According to the heuristics above:

Platforms for Learning       Not platforms for learning (in a social context)

Facebook                               Yahoo

YouTube                                Bebo

Ning                                        Delicious (not directly)

LinkedIn                                Bubble.us

TeacherTube

Twitter

MySpace

RevYu

Flickr

SocialGo

Digg

Reddit

ii) Professional development in the workplace

My heuristics to judge how much a social networking site has potential as a platform for professional development in the workplace are:

• Independence from social utility: The system should not be able to be used for non-work-related social activity.
• Security: Knowledge built up by a network should be secure from the general public.

According to the heuristics above:

Platforms for prof development       Not platforms for prof development

Ning                                                        Everything else!

Social Go

b) I’ve created a profile on Bebo and Ning.  Ning was straight forward – Bebo on the hand wanted my life story!

c) I had never thought of it in those terms but I guess I do have a personal learning network.  I am a regular user of Facebook, Flickr, Skype, Twitter, Gmail, Google Reader, Google Groups, Delicious and Wikipedia and a non-regular user of LinkedIn.  I maintain my own blog which is probably the most onerous in terms of commitment among all of the platforms.  Generally, the closer a network is to ‘real life’, the harder it is to build and maintain.  This is why people need to spend hours on such sites.  Something like delicious on the other hand can be used immediately with no ‘investment’, but you are unlikely to find a new job or reconnect with someone you have lost touch with – so the effort reflects the significance of what you get out of it.  This also applies to low-commitment ‘networks’ such as what you might build on Google reader.  This is essentially a one-way conversation, as useful as it is and is a much weaker use of the term network.

Kim, Amy Jo 2000a Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities pp xiii-xiv PeachPit Press ISBN 0-201-87484-9

Kim, Amy Jo 2000b Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities pp xv-xvi PeachPit Press ISBN 0-201-87484-9

Topic 3 – Augmented reality, gaming and mobile computing

Exercise 3.1: The battle for Wesnoth

The ‘learn-by-doing’ interactive tutorial was engaging and informative.  I did run into problems on my mac however when I was asked to right-click and didn’t seem to be able to use ctrl to replicate this.  This actually stopped me from being able to recruit additional fighters and I found myself on the losing end in my first battle with the Orcs!

Exercise 3.2: Mobile computing research

What is the educational value of online mobile games and mobile social network access?

Online mobile games and mobile social network access allow students to learn in more direct, engaging ways and access information in ways that are less abstract and more related true to their context.

Don Norman (2004, pp. 129-133) deals with the use of games for education in his book Emotional Design.  He contrasts their traditional role of “mindless sport for teenage boys” with their 21st century potential for training and education.  He also makes the point that games used to involve single individuals but more and more are involving “groups, sometimes scattered across the world.  Communicating through computer networks.”

In their excellent literature review of games and learning, Kirriemuir & McFarlane (2004) argue that the current concept of “a sugar-coating fun” over educational material needs to give way to the design of educational games that offer the full engagement and sense of flow offered by today’s ‘non-educational’ computer games.  As an interesting point on social networking, they bring attention to the fact that the proportion of female gamers is growing and this may be due to the increase in social gaming.

Eric Klopfer (2008) takes this a step further by applying these ideas specifically to the use of mobile devices in a classroom context.  He argues that the mobile platform is ideal for learning games for all levels of education from primary school to university due to its portability, context sensitivity, connectivity and ubiquity.

A compelling example of the possibilities of of both mobile gaming and social networking for learning can best be seen in the new generation of augmented iPhone applications that are literally just being made available (officially available with iPhone OS 3.1 but available through Yelp as an Easter egg as of 26th Aug 2009).  AcrossAir is a real application for teaching people about London’s underground that will be available soon (http://www.acrossair.com/apps_nearesttube.htm).  Augmented ID is a concept video showing how social networking information might be integrated into augmented reality (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/augmented_id_augmented_reality_facial_recognition.php).

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

Klopfer, E. (2008).  Augmented learning. The MIT Press.

Kirriemuir, J., & McFarlane, A.  (2004).  Literature Review in Games and Learning.  FutureLab Series: Report 8.

Topic 2 – Virtual environments and cognition

Exercise 2.1: Virtual environments and cognition

I joined Facebook in 2007 and enjoyed the initial ‘honeymoon’ period when I got excited every time I got a new friend.  It didn’t take long before I crossed the threshold whereby there was just too much noise (which I personally think is around 30) and I was being notified of what people who’s names I could hardy remember were having for dinner.

I searched for CSU and got back a number of results, one of which was Colarado State University.  This prompted me to update my search to the specific “Charles Sturt University” which returned 108 results.  The first retrieved looked the most promising and had 710 members.  I joined and made it 711.  I then found ITC510 (after a couple of attempts – my mistake was to prepend CSU to the beginning of my search) and became the group’s 16th member.

a. I don’t have an ethical problem with Facebook.  You need to accept an invitation before someone can see anything truly personal or have you appear as a friend so I don’t see any issues.  The advertising is obviously quite well targeted to the information that you’ve provided as part of your registration – particularly your sex, age and location – although the groups that you use must almost certainly come into the equation as well.  My only issue would perhaps be with advertising to facebook’s younger audience – particularly when such detailed information is being used to manipulate such young and impressionable minds.

b. The University College London’s Visual Cognition Group is primarily concerned with “detection, discrimination and short-term memory of visual stimuli” (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2009).  Social cognition on the other hand describes how people process social information (“Social Cognition”, n.d.).  There is a close relationship between these two things as visual cognition will provide input for our social cognition, but is only one aspect of what drives our interaction with other people.  It is interesting to note that damage to the Fusiform gyrus in the frontal lobe can lead to the inability to recognise faces – an excellent example of where a breakdown in visual cognition could adversely affect social cognition.

Exercise 2.2: Virtual worlds and citizenship

Downloaded, installed and setup and account for second life. The concept of a starting look was useful as it lowered the barrier to entry.  After spending a few minutes exploring the many options for customising the appearance of my avatar I walked around the help island before removing my pants for a laugh and finding myself unable to put them back on.  I chatted to some of the other avatars but they were unable to help me with my lack of pants!

I used the search facility to teleport to IBM’s island and read some of their marketing billboards before finally finishing up at a party island where a large number of people were dancing to music that I couldn’t seem to here.

I found that the most engaging aspect of the experience was the fact that the other people in the game were really there – in a real, dynamic way.  It changed the nature of the interaction and I find myself behaving more as I would if I were actually there.  I think that this is where social cognition plays a big part.  The way that you respond to this type of environment is very different to something like a chat room and has much to with the way that our brains are wired to process social stimuli.  By creating an environment that resembles certain aspects of reality, this type of social network can tap into our natural social cognitive makeup to elicit specific types of experiences.

I also visited the Second Life Grid microsite.  This reveals much about Linden’s strategy – which seems to be going beyond gaming and their own development by ambitiously providing a framework in which companies can build their own virtual worlds.  They are also positioning Second Life as a platform for meetings, interviews and orientation for new hires.  I was a little skeptical at first but watched the video showing Ernst & Young’s cookie factory for training of their auditors.

Exercise 2.3: Create and record your online persona

Discussing the way in which we project ourselves to others reminds me of an excellent brand guidelines parody I saw last year from a graphic designer who had presented a brand style guide document – of the type typically created for corporates – for himself.  This can be downloaded in PDF format at identitystudios.co.uk.

The construction of my Facebook profile is something that I have been doing since joining in early 2007.  This is comprised of obvious things such as your profile photo and the applications that you choose to feature on your page.  It is also made up of more subtle and transient things such as the content and tone of status updates, photo comments and wall posts.  As Facebook is primarily a social environment for me, analysing my Facebook avatar is an exercise in analysing what I attempt to project socially.  My photos are informal and usually show me enjoying myself in some social context.  Most of my posts are jokes and reflect my attempts at a good sense of humour.  Again, my applications are novelty-based and added for their humour value.

The construction of my Second Life avatar was far more focused on its physical aspects.  This is simply a function of the visual nature of the environment – and someone only briefly dabbling in it doesn’t have the persistent artifacts such as photos and wall posts to worry about.  It seems that in an environment with no limitations, the men are all tall and muscled and the woman scantily clad and large-breasted.  I however was inclined to make my avatar look like my real-life self.  I’m not sure whether this is a reflection on my healthy self-esteem or simply a sign of my laziness!

I would say that I don’t have a persistent avatar across my ‘virtual’ social networks and environments.  This is for the same reason that I don’t have a persistent persona in my ‘real’ interactions.  I see this as a natural function of judging social feedback and adjusting yourself accordingly.  The way that I project myself at work is different (however subtle) from when with my friends which is again different to when with my family.  I think an excellent example of this is the fact that many people I know are feeling awkward as Facebook’s recent influx of the older users has them receiving friend requests from their mothers (“Facebook demographics: biggest growth in older users”, n.d).

Exercise 2.4: Online identity and your state of presence

Dick Hardt speaks about the history of online identity and the new approach that his company (among others) is taking to it.  His ideas are very much centred around issues of security and authentication – and although he explicitly mentions the word persona (and personi!), what he is describing has more to do with the mechanics of online registration and authentication than the actual persona that we choose project online.  I feel that the sets of information that his company’s technology enables to be shared are extremely reduced attributes that are at a lower level than those that truly define my persona for a given community.  To use examples from earlier in this topic, my Facebook persona may be quite different to that of my Second Life persona and even more different to my LinkedIn persona – but the information that could be shared by a system such as Hardt’s would in fact be the same between all 3.  Attributes such as name, date of birth, address, credit card number etc do not go very far to describing something as subtle and evolving as an online persona.

Hardt’s mentions of phishing, pharming, privacy invasion and identity theft was extremely brief and I failed to grasp how his solution made this better (I would in fact have expected it to make it worse given the fact that everything about you can be packaged up and sent via your browser without you – or however is using your browser – having to ‘manually’ identify yourself).

Phishing describes the practice of creating fake sites and using various means by which to get unsuspecting users to visit them and provide sensitive details such as banking credentials.  The most common example of this is the ubiquitous email from your bank asking you to ‘confirm’ your login details.

Pharming is a more automated means to achieving similar ends to phishing.  This involves manipulating the technologies that route traffic – particularly hosts files and DNS servers.  Recently, the machine I was using at work had a hosts file had been tampered with and many major sites had their domains redirected to spurious IP addresses.  Unlike phishing, pharming cannot be detected by a dodgy address in the browser address bar.

Privacy invasion is a broader theme than a specific practice.  Email harvesters which are then used to send unsolicited spam messages to someone’s email address are an example of privacy invasion.  Other examples my include situations where someone is able to find out information about you that you would rather keep private – this may even be basic things such as your date of birth.  This stencil are from Banksy springs to mind when I think of privacy invasion:

Banksy's "What are you looking at" piece

Identity theft is the act of doing something whilst pretending to be someone else.  This is usually mentioned in the context of financial fraud.  A personal example of this would be when my credit card was maxed out by someone buying domestic airline flights.  They were clever about it and only left a very short amount of time between booking and flying.  Luckily for me the credit card company footed the bill.

Visual Cognition Group. (n.d).  Retrieved August 17, 2009, from http://www.icn.ucl.ac.uk/Research-Groups/Visual-Cognition-Group/.

Social Cognition. (n.d.).  Retrieved August 17, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cognition.

Facebook demographics: biggest growth in older users. (n.d.).  Retrieved Aug 22, 2009, from http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/07/09/facebook-demographics-biggest-growth-in-older-users/.

Topic 1 – Underlying principles

Exercise 1: What is social networking.

When I think social networking I immediately think a) Facebook and then b) Linked In.  It is a recent phenomenon and almost seems like a fad – much like something such as reality TV.  In reality though, people have been using computers to facilitate social interaction for decades, usually a virtual form of something that already exists in ‘physical’ space.

As I mentioned in my introduction post, although I have already designed a site that facilitates a community – it did so in a fairly static way.  And as I am in the UX game, I am really hoping to gain a better understanding of the cognitive and social aspects of online communities.  A study into online communities and social networks will certainly change my professional practice by providing a framework from which to design interfaces and interactions in my day-to-day job.

Boxes and arrows is an online user experience magazine which I often refer to in my professional life and it has an interesting article titled “Social networks and group formation” (Singh, 2007).  In this article Singh discusses tie strength (strong, weak and absent) and then outlines the 3 competing theories for measuring centralisation (the importance of someone in a social network): Degree of point, control and independence.  In defining social networks he quotes Garton et al. (1997) as saying “a set of people (or organizations or other social entities) connected by a set of social relationships, such as friendship, co-working or information exchange.”

I didn’t find it as easy to come across good articles for online communities as for social networks so running out of time, couldn’t find a better source than wikipedia.  It used the definition (“Virtual community”, n.d.) “a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as newsletters, telephone, email, internet social network service or instant messages rather than face to face, for social, professional, educational or other purposes.”

In terms of developing online communities (as opposed to just supporting them), I think social network platforms provide the opportunity to build the weak links that really provide value to its participants.

Exercise 2: Social networking taxonomy.

I first really considered the concept of folksonomy when designing Barclaycard last year (http://www.barclaycard.co.uk/mybarclaycard/preview/).  One of the underpinning concepts of this design is the ability to analyse your credit card transactions to get a better understanding of your spending.  By matching merchant ID’s to transactions, we were able to create categories for transactions which could then be presented to users as a visual representation of their credit card statements (e.g. pie chart of their spending broken into groceries, bills, entertiainment etc).  In addition to this ‘pre-canned’ taxonomy for categorising transactions, we also allowed users to create their own tags for their transactions.  By then making these custom tags available to others in similar circumstances (e.g. informing a user that most people tagged transactions from a particular merchant as health care), a ‘Folksonomy’ was able to emerge which was a taxonomy created by all of the users of the system rather than engineered up-front.  The tag cloud seems to be one of the information design devices of choice when visualising folksonomies.

My categorisation/tagging scheme is my current social networking taxonomy but I expect that as I read the blogs of my fellow students that I will see categories and tags that I think make sense for a given topic and evolve my scheme accordingly.  This is a rudimentary form of folksonomy but still one all the same.

Exercise 3: An heuristic experience

1. I have chosen to review barclays.co.uk as this is the public site of the online banking system that I am currently designing.

2. Ran through the form – it would have been helpful to have more description information in context.  Even as someone who does these types of reviews fairly regularly I still always refer to it for clarification and examples.

3. Results are as follows:

Subject: Barclays public site: Nielsen’s Heuristic Evaluation
Sender: andrew.wight@gmail.com
From: andrew.wight@gmail.com (NHE)

system=Barclays public site
date=2009-08-11 17:15:40
comment=Heuristic evaluation of barclays.co.uk for ITC510
q1=6
c1=Follows typical conventions
q2=5
c2=Terms are typically simple and user-centric,
q3=6
c3=User’s current location in the site is well sign posted
q4=7
c4=Pages follow a consistent template
q5=6
q6=0
q7=5
c7=Login on homepage but no specific goal-oriented links
q8=
c8=Error messages are not specific enough
q9=5
c9=Error messages are immediate (rather than later in the process).  Better contextual help would prevent them further
q10=6
c10=Thorough help system – could be better utilzed inline rather than as a separate section.

Singh, S. (2007). Social Networks and group formation: Theoretical concepts to leverage. Retreived 6 August, 2009, from http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/social-networks.

Virtual community. (n.d.).  Retreived 6 August, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_community.

Hello there

Welcome to my blog for ‘ITC510 Online communities’, my final subject for my Masters of Information Architecture through Charles Sturt University.  My personal blog is at designthinkage.com.

I love architecture and all strands of design so a subject about social contexts and human-computer interaction really appeals to me. Seeing words like “congnition”, “human-centred computing” and “interaction” in the subject’s core topics make me think that this will be a great subject to finish up with.

The closest i’ve come to designing for communities so far is the ‘This is my AGA’ site that I did last year (http://www.thisismyaga.co.uk/) This is a community in a sense, but not one that really interacts with one another so i’m keen to explore this further. I’m also interested in mobile social contexts as there will be a lot of activity in this space over the next few years.

I’ll be using this blog to record my thoughts and learnings from the online learning records (OLR).  I’ve opted for many of the basic categories suggested by Ken (Introduction, OLR Exercises and POD work) as well as a category for Essays.  Tags will be done as I go along but I’ve added a “Thoughts” tag for additional comments and musings that I may make as we go along which do not strictly fall within the excercises.