Interaction Research

Cool hacks: Wii remote and bluetooth for gestural tracking applications

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:11:12 GMT

Johnny Chung Lee at CMU has published several programs that exploit the Wii remote for head and finger tracking applications. As he points out, with more than 13 million Wii consoles sold, the Wii remote is one of the most common (and most sophisticated) computer input devices available today. And most of his hacks don't require an actual console: just a bluetooth-enabled PC and the Wii remote itself.

Check out his project page at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/ for more video examples and actual code.

Product concept: the Napkin PC

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 03:45:55 GMT

Maybe I'm just a cyber-steam-punk junkie, but I love the idea of e-paper. It's such a no-brainer. Make it flexible enough to download any feed or upload anything you need to jot down and low power and cheap enough to be pervasive, and it'll change the entire media industry.

I've already tried to sell my employer on giving the stuff away in bulk in order to own the advertising rights and content deals, but all I got was a virtual pat on the shoulder. Anyway, this concept design is very appealing (even if it never comes to market:) the Napkin PC.

Primary Personas and UI for Senior Citizens

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 23:12:21 GMT

There's an article in the Fall 2007 issue of Ergonomics in Design by two researchers from Florida State University who explored the relationship between ballot design and e-voting design. They reported that the system which was the most usable for older participants -- those with the most limited capabilities -- also resulted in higher performance for younger participants. (Link to pdf of the full article)

I'm tempted to go off on a rant about the problems with e-balloting in general and how Florida's screwups in ballot interface design changed the the course of history for much of the past decade, but I'll stay on topic by using this to illustrate a problem I run into sometimes when using personas in product development.

Personas are an incredibly useful tool for interaction design and setting requirements. (There's a lot of information online about them already so I'm not going to review the basics here.) Whenever I consult on a project, my first question to the product team is "do you know who your users are?" If the answer is vague, personas are a good tool for getting everyone on the team on the same page about the end users' needs. But whenever I've introduced this approach, I find there's a lot of confusion about the difference between "primary" and "secondary" personas.

I *think* the "primary" and "secondary" labels originally come from Cooper's groundbreaking work on using personas in design, but anyway: the division is that "primary" personas represent users whose goals must be satisfied, while "secondary" personas influence the design but aren't a focus of the design. Put another way, if you satisfy the needs of the primary personas, you'll end up satisfying the needs of the secondary personas as well. According to the research at Florida State, designing for seniors' needs mean that all groups benefit. Therefore, one could say that an persona based on a senior citizen for an electronic voting system is primary, and a persona based on the e-voting requirements of a twenty-something is secondary, because designing for the senior satisfies the needs of the younger crowd but the reverse is not true.

These labels don't work well outside the interaction design community: whenever I talk about "primary" or "secondary" personas, developers and marketers and biz dev team members invariably understand "primary" and "secondary" to correspond to marketing and/or sales targets. This completely confuses discussions about strategy.

Can we find a less loaded way of communicating this concept?

Event (CFP): Workshop on Designing Cute Interactive Media

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 22:42:15 GMT

It used to be that most web publishers worked hard to make their sites look "professional." A professional looking site still enhances credibility -- and that's still important for many institutions and services-- but there seems to be a rage for "cute" sites these days, especially among social networking sites (like Twitter, for example.)

As a design philosophy, "cuteness" can help make an interactive system more emotionally engaging. According to some (see Lorenz, for example) humans are hardwired to respond positively to cuteness, so this trait can be exploited to encourage users (and even developers) to act towards such systems in positive ways. So I was pleased to learn that next month's ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems will include a workshop on "cute" interactive media.

According to the CFP, "the main goal of this workshop is to provide designers with a better understanding of developing ways to enhance the positive experience and effectiveness of interactive media by utilizing the psychological and culturally developed effects of cuteness. We would also like to explore a range of interactive experiences involving the idea of cuteness and examine the related components. Based on these experiences, the next generation user interfaces can be built to take advantage of the cuteness factor and its unique effects on the experience which can establish and maintain more meaningful relationships with the users and encourage happiness, self confidence, motivate the user to action, and provide overall positive experiences."

The conference (and workshop) will be held in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 24, 2008. If you're planning to attend, please write a review and tell us what you learned!

Cubic multi-touch touchscreen interface

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 04:47:34 GMT

If you've played with an iPhone or a Wii, you've experienced the lure of the multi-touch touchscreen interface. Touch interfaces can be extraordinarily intuitive when they are implemented well --seductive, even.

So I was excited to see news about the release of the Fentix Cube, the first cubic touchscreen computer games platform.

The cube contains a large battery, an array of LEDs and crucially three accelerometers which can detect the pitch and yaw of the device, and sensors on the inside surface for touch control.

The creator, Andrew Fentem, says: "You instinctively know how to use it. The way you understand the world as a young child is through physical and spatial awareness, up or down. It's how you learn and communicate."

Read the BBC News article, or check out Fentem's site for more interesting prototypes http://www.andrewfentem.com/.

Thanks to CTP of Kineticworld.com for the tip.

Getting started

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 01:08:05 GMT

As a result of my educational background and professional experience, quite a bit of the content posted here will relate to internet interaction contexts, ranging from early console protocols to what people refer to as “Web 2.0” and beyond. But I don’t expect to limit myself to computer-human interaction, or web interaction design issues here.

Instead, I’ll start out with a few principles and broad definitions. We’ll revise these when necessary, but let’s just mark out a playing field for now:

Interaction: social behavior relating to the process of exchanging meaningful messages.

Interaction research: inquiry into the process of intentional message exchange between people (and between people and their technologic agents (technologies that can interact with humans and which are designed to take over human tasks)

(I’ll get to the intentionality thing later.)

Interaction research is necessarily interested in “interfaces”, because all intentional messages are exchanged through an interface of some kind. Even face to face communication occurs through the interface of our own sensory apparatus: auditory, visual, possibly even tactile and olfactory systems work to transmit messages into meaning. Usually, however, the term “interface” is reserved for technological artifacts of some kind, whether it be a specific communication technology (a computer, or a telephone.)

Other types of media, ranging from visual arts and music to clothing and architecture, are also interfaces for the exchange of meaning and therefore also represent an interaction resource. I’ll be writing or posting content about how people interact with each other directly, but will focus mostly on interactions mediated through media technologies, including computer contexts.

Technologic interfaces all have aspects or limitations that can restrict or enhance interaction when compared to a normative face-to-face interaction. The features and conventions of interfaces can be exploited to maximize the impact of a message. Understanding how interface impacts interaction is therefore one of the more pragmatic goals of interaction research, as it can identify how to exploit the features of a particular interface to best achieve a particular goal.

Interaction Research

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 03:55:21 GMT

One of the things on my to-do list for 2007 (and my sabbatical) was to start blogging about interaction research.

I meant (and still mean) to do this on the interactionresearch.com domain, but due to some wackiness with my employer's apparent inability to complete small business transations online without human intervention, I've been unable to set that up this week; it's still a placeholder. So I'm going to start here, instead.

More soon.