Backward Highlighting

Title: Backward Highlighting: Enhancing Faceted Search

Author(s): Max L. Wilson, Paul André, m.c. schraefel

Summary: The authors of this article discussed how they implemented and performed a user study on a relatively simple idea. In a faceted search, such as itunes, cascading user selections are usually pushed deeper into into a search filter, with no regard to the past selections made before them. Basically, what it means, is if you looked for a Composer of a certain piece of music, upon selection of that composer, the user interface would also "backwards highlight" preceding categories that matched the selection that you chose, such as era or Genre. The authors also incorporated something called "grouped highlighting", which isn't really made very clear as to what it means, but they tested that also in the user study. According to their user study, the backwards highlighting technique allowed users to retain more information than traditional directional faceted searches.

Shaun's Opinion: I thought that this was a rather interesting paper due to the simplicity of its idea, and the relative ease of implementing it, even on existing systems. I think that if backwards highlighting were to be implemented, even from personal experience, it would make searching for particular types of music much faster. It would also allow someone to learn something about the music they like that they may not have known.

SideSight!

Title: SideSight: Multi-“touch” Interaction Around Small Devices

Author(s): Alex Butler, Shahram Izadi, Steve Hodges

Summary: The authors of this article were aiming to improve upon the existing problem of the constant shrinking of the screens of handheld devices, and the desire for improvement of existing touch technology used on those handheld devices. They came up with the idea of creating a virtual touch surface by using Infrared sensors on the sides of the device, using the IR light reflected off of a person's finger to create a "touch" input. Not only was the surface much larger than the device, but it was also capable of handling multiple "touch inputs" at once, allowing for specialized gestures.

While the testing of the device went well, even without special regard to outside light noise, the improvements made to the device were not particularly robust against that outside noise, and in particular were only very useful when the device was placed on a flat surface.

Shaun's Thoughts: I thought the idea presented by the authors was a very novel idea to a growing problem in the world of technology. The system appears to be easy to implement and capable of being very robust and useful. However, the fact that it is not very useful outside of a flat surface environment makes the further research and development of this idea absolutely essential before deeming it a great find. Most people don't interact with their handheld devices, phones especially, while it is lying on a table. All in all though, still an intriguing idea.

CRAFT, and not the macaroni

Title: CRAFTing an Environment for Collaborative Reasoning

Author(s): Susanne C. Hupfer, Steven I. Ross, Jamie C. Rasmussen, James E. Christensen, Stephen E. Levy,Daniel M. Gruen, John F. Patterson

Summary: The authors of this article attempt to explain their goal of reducing a lot of the redundant and wasteful research time that goes into a lot of collaborative reasoning, such as corporate research, wiki's, etc. Since collaborative reasoning typically involves several people, and evolving goals and interest avenues that must be explored, there are usually some areas of that research that could be greatly sped up if access to previous research on the same topic was made easily accessible. So the authors set about to create a client program that could be used to accomplish this task, by allowing users to create certain objects and entities that could describe collaborative reasoning topics, and they called it CRAFT (Collaborative Reasoning and Analysis Framework andToolkit). This program would basically speed up the research process by providing a vital link to past research done through the creation of machine-interpretable entities, as described above.

Shaun's Opinion: I think this article is a very good attempt at creating a more efficient research mechanism for corporations, especially. Even in my own work I have seen examples of wasted time (and money) used on researching topics or products that have already been thoroughly researched by someone else within the company. However, I do think that the "entity" system could probably be made into more user friendly terms and perhaps layout. This system could be broken down into companies or products or people, etc, instead of making it too generic to be very useful.

IUI: Musical Chord Sequences

Title: Data-Driven Exploration of Musical Chord Sequences

Author(s): Eric Nichols, Dan Morris, Sumit Basu

Summary: While I am not a musical expert by any means, I will attempt to summarize this one the best I can. The creators of this article basically wanted to create a system that would allow musical artists to better explore their creativity and the music of others with a simple computer interface. But, instead of using a genre slider, like say from County to Rock, Hip hop, etc, they use a chord based slider interface. They use several formulas to achieve the result of the grouping, called "chord clustering", which allows them to use the slider tool that they have developed to achieve a smart database of chords based on the user's slider choices. The authors performed a user study to judge the effectiveness of their tool, including a demonstration of the tool, and a questionnaire that was filled out afterwards. Users seemed generally satisfied with the tool, although some expressed interest in an even greater level of control over the music selected.

Shaun's Thoughts: It is hard for me to form an opinion on this article, not having enough experience with musical instruments or playing anything to form an opinion on it. However, the fact that I was not able to acquire much information from this article may mean that the article was a bit too complex for a non-musical person to understand. I do think that the tool that they created is very useful though, as far as leading to new creative exploration possibilities for the musicians that would use it.

Emotional Design By Donald Norman

Title: Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things.

Author: Donald Norman

Summary: The book begins, as the last one did, with a few examples of things that Dr. Norman likes around his house, either for their aesthetic value, sentimental value, or practical value. For example, he has a practical teapot, a teapot that would burn your hand if you attempted to pour hot tea from it (called the masochist's teapot), and a teapot that is very pretty but not very practical. He then goes into describing the different aspects of products that exist in our everyday lives cause us to either love them, hate them, or be indifferent to them. For instance, many people love Apple products because they spend more time working on the aesthetic design of the product than say, HP or Dell would. While Apple may not have as large a market share, as say, Microsoft, they have an extremely loyal customer base. In comparison to Microsoft, who has a very large customer base, but without much loyalty, because users get frustrated with their products or find them boring or unpleasing to work with.

He stresses several different factors that come in to play when a product is introduced to market, and its likelihood of success, as well as the different parts of the human thought process that judge a product. The first and most basic thought process is the visceral level, which consists of subconscious instinct and primal drive, such as eating or breathing or being aware of your surroundings. The next level is the behavioral level, which determines the way you go about your daily tasks, such as brushing your teeth or tying your shoes. The next and highest level is the Reflective level, where in depth thinking occurs, and humans are able to contemplate the meanings of things at much higher levels, such as thinking about whether the routine you follow when you drive to work everyday is really the most efficient, or if it could be improved upon.

Shaun's Opinion: As usual with his books, he spends a great deal of time elaborating needlessly over some moderately difficult concepts. He uses a great deal of examples, which is quite helpful, and most of his concepts make a lot of sense and I believe have a lot of real-world value, however he isn't very concise in getting his point across. Basically, the level to which he writes over and over again about the same concept (or maybe slightly changed) is enough to make a person get bored halfway through the book. While I still think this is a great read for anyone who is going to design software or any kind of products, it could definitely be a lot more plainly-put.