Jarrett Interaction Design

• self-discovery and reflection: sensing and feedback for yourself; can we change our behavior? persuasive technology
• sensors that can record human activity and internal processes; new feedback modalities like wearable screens
• how can we build new sensing systems? more effective ways to visualize/communicate feedback
• effort, aesthetics and playfulness, individual vs. family
• ubifit (fitness); sense activities that increase heart-rate; wearable sensor plus cell phone wallpaper display; garden blooms as you are more active; butterflies are meeting goals; reset after 7 days, keep butterflies; folks with glance-able display sustained activity; those without declined
• ubigreen (personal transportation); sense types of transportation; represent transportation type, amount of activity, and outcome categories; reset every 7 days, no persistance; same results as fit
• reflect2O (home water usage); one sensor that figures out usage per fixture/valve, real-time, continuous screen-based feedback; looked at both abstract and concrete feedback representations;
• time-series displays (daily and seasonal variation); individual comparison; fun/abstract/playfull
• findings: competition vs cooperation; gamification can be fun, but also distracting; educational, but may reward suboptimal behaviors; how available/accessible, ubiquitous or invasive
• goal: provide personal sensing and feedback to improve ourselves

• touchscreen typing challenges: reduced tactile cues; no travel distance; unintended input
• advantages: software -based, can adapt to use/user
• research: automatic personalization (adaptation)
• language models (autocorrect) are one example
• combine touch model with language model: adjust letter probabilities; this research focused on touch model
• study done on Microsoft Surface
• dimension 1: key-press classification; previous work = distance to centroid (not very successful); don’t just look at point and center of touch, but whole oval and angle, travel-distance, time-elapsed; focus on tip and center of finger up + x/y travel;
• dimension 2: visual representation (adapt model but not visual layout vs both); disable prediction after a typing flow interruption
• dimension 3: hand location; keyboard appears wherever you start typing
• Do they work? performance as well as subjective appearance; with or without visual adaptation; skilled typists with touch-screen experience, not told which would adapt; more adaptation when visual included; performance: non-visual adaptation is fastest, typists get better with practice, low errors (although at 95% confidence, much overlap); subjective: had to watch hands in visually adaptive, couldn’t tell difference between standard and non-visually adaptive
• future: combine with language, more classifiers, gestures added

HCIL Hero Award: Asher Epstein (Managing Director of Mosaic Investment Partners; former director of entrepreneurship program)

HCIL Google Best Student Research Awards: Chang Hu (crowd-souced translation), Dana Rotman (encyclopedia of life citizen science)
Honorable Mentions: John Alexis Guerra Gomez (compare evolving tree structures), Greg Walsh (online kistream)

Catherine Plaisant 25th anniversary award

I’m attending the annual HCIL Symposium today and tomorrow. I’ll be taking notes on this site. Stay tuned! You can follow my Twitter (@JarrettUX) or Instagram (JarrettUX) feeds as well, where I’ll be posting a few photos.

Ken Yarmosh of Savvy Apps did a presentation on poor design patterns in iPad apps. I’d seen an earlier version of this at UXCampDC Mobile, but he updated some of the examples.

Top mistakes in iPad apps:

• tab bar (content should drive navigation)
• heavy navigation stacks (should be flattened, stateless)
• split view headache (design for landscape orientation; it is good)
• inconsistent gestures
• over-heightened realism (skeuomorphism)
• too many controls

✪✪✪✪✩ Good examples. Repeat from UXCamp.

Saf Elmansour of EVOCA discussed how UX and marketing overlap and benefit from one another.

• Customer experience has become user experience.
• “Good UX is just good marketing.”
• UX ≠ UI
• UX designer = research and design
• UI developer = design and front-end development
• app developer = front-end and back-end development
• Example: Instragram = great UX, okay UI
• cool idea: on an elevator, the hold open button should have a “like!” visual and the close button should have a “dislike!” visual
• cool idea: display UX/UI in the manner of AC/DC
• create a Chief Experience Officer or a Chief Customer Officer

✪✪✪✪✩ Good visuals. Succinct.

Jim Sabia of AOL presented five mobile design principles

1. Share a common vision.
2. Keep it simple.
3. Remain focused.
4. Communicate frequently.
5. Document necessities.

✪✪✪✩✩ Nice list, nice visuals.

John Whalen, of Brilliant Experience, chaired a panel on mobile usability with Cory Lebson of Lebsontech, Jon Arne Sæterås of MobileTech, Olga Howard of OlgaHow.com, and Terry Hsiao of Hook Mobile.

• Wide-ranging discussion on usability techniques and the value of them in mobile.

✪✪✩✩✩ Basic, but well MC’d.