Sustainability and HCI - Concept Map

Game Design - Mission IV - Idea - Grease Joint

Remember Pressure Cooker?

Of course you don't. It was a game for the Atari 2600 released in 1983 where you, the 'chef' on a burger place, had to juggle the take-away orders of three demanding clients. A screen showed you combinations of cheese, onion, lettuce and tomato that each customer wanted while a conveyor belt dropped patties on top of buns. Ingredients were literally hurtled at you and you had to either bounce them back or take them to a patty. If you matched a desired combination, the top half of the bun would be thrown at you so you could close a burger and take it to one of the three bags. If you filled either of the bags, you'd have points counted: 

Even though it was a fine concept (at least I loved it dearly) it saw very few remakes in the last 31 years. So I suggest a reboot on the concept: you're a burger-flipper on a grease joint and a waitress yells orders at you non-stop. You must assemble burgers at the fastest rate possible with making as few mistakes as you can - maybe throw in an extra ingredient and get creativity bonuses, but if you get an ingredient that doesn't "match" the combination, you lose points instead for poor taste. In the beginning you don't know what matches, so you will probably lose many creativity points, but trial and error will get you places (after all, practice makes perfect). We can throw in a few extra concepts like cooking levels (rare, medium or well done) to make combinations harder to master and maybe the waitress speaks in code like in old American diners. It's simple mechanics with lots of potential for fun (and frustration and trial and error, which are all part of engaging gameplay).

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Game Design - Mission II - Game Analysis

My favorite computer game is turning 20 years old this November. I know, that makes me a very old man. But it also means I'm a man of refined tastes, so bugger off.

The game I'm talking about was published by Maxis as SimTower but started it's life as ザ・タワー (Za Tawā or The Tower) in 1994. As is normal with Maxis games, it is a part Construction and Management, part Simulation, part Artificial Life and part Strategy.

It's a single player 2D game in a God model of sorts - instead of a birds-eye view, you see through walls into the houses, offices and other structures.

In SimTower, you build and run a mixed-use tower filled with offices, condos, restaurants, hotel rooms, cinemas, temples and even subway stations. Each level unlocks new structure types and reaching the following level requires using these structures while growing your tower's population. You must also balance your budget by picking rent prices and choosing when to build what.

It evolves from the original SimCity model in several ways, the first of which being that each inhabitant is an individual - you can name them and follow them around the tower throughout the day. This is not just a gimmick: knowing your tenants allows you to know how changes to the tower affect its inhabitants. Many of the features introduced in SimTower moved on to be staples of the Sim series.

The proximity of different types of structure affects the satisfaction their occupants feel: condos placed too close to offices lead to tenants complaining about noise, restaurants too far away from the lobby lead to poor business during weekends, elevators get busy during rush hour, which leads to busy corridors, which lead to lower real estate values, etc.

Some structures are only used sporadically: security lays dormant most of the time, but you'll regret not having a good security center placed near a staircase next time there's a fire or a bomb threat. Housekeeping doesn't share elevators with tenants, so they need their own service elevators with different rush hours and usage dynamics.

Speaking of which, I probably learned more about programming logic and about logistics tweaking the various elevator settings in SimTower than during mechatronics engineering school which, believe me, means a lot.

Experimenting with the new structure types unlocked at each level is a reward in itself: earning enough money and finding the right place to build a subway station or even a cathedral inside your tower is quite a personal achievement, believe me. It also allows for a very varied and game where you can express yourself creatively - there are strict rules, but finding your way around these to create real masterpieces is a true joy.

Since the game is extremely old and feels uncomfortable in newer processors and operating systems, it's a great excuse to dust off a very old computer or to install DOSBox.

I truly recommend this amazing time-waster that, although old, has yet to be surpassed at its own genre.

Evaluating Trust when Sending Money Online via Web vs. Mobile

Evaluating Trust when Sending Money Online via Web vs. Mobile

Abdullah Noman and Eduardo Ferreira Fontes Mercer
Tallinna Ülikool - 2014

Click on the title above to view/download the article in PDF format

Abstract. This research used self-assessments on trust and emotional reactions (hedonics) as well as pragmatic measurements to determine if the UX of two different access methods to the same money transfer service also affected the perception of trustworthiness of said service. It confirms Chu & Yuan’s (2013) observations on how interactivity can affect trust, but further observations of how trust will be affected by completing an actual money transfer instead of simply simulating a transfer order are recommended.

1.     Introduction

TransferWise is an Estonian-British start-up that intermediates currency conversions between peers. The users never interact directly with other users with whom they are converting their currency – price is set at the interbank rate at the moment of transaction and the user only enters with his money in the sending currency and receives the converted money in the other end of the transaction without having to deal with third parties. This approach eliminates many of the trust issues with converting money without involving a bank, retaining the economic advantages.

The service has been operating successfully for three years but only recently launched mobile applications – first for iOS and then for Android in early 2014. The main object of this study was to evaluate trust issues with both approaches to the same platform and, through comparison of pragmatic and hedonic measurements, try to determine if those can be attributed to user interface issues or stem from the different modes of access.

2.     The object of evaluation

TransferWise shifts all of the money-conversion operations to the web, eliminating the human factor in most (or all) steps but for the users themselves. This eliminates trust issues but also creates new ones – people are used to relying on banks for these operations and banks are typical last-century human-centered institutions. Eliminating the human operator on the other side can be jarring for first-time users and this can lead to mistrust.

According to Chu & Yuan (2013), perceived user-control, interactivity, responsiveness and connectedness affect trust and consumer behaviour online. The main object of this study was to determine if completing the same tasks on the same service using different access methods would lead to different levels of trust.

1        

2        

2.1       Design procedure

2.1.1    Procedure

Participants were invited to fill in a form asking for background information containing Yamagishi & Yamagishi’s General Trust Scale (GTS)-like questions. They then proceeded to visiting the company’s website and making a short heuristics evaluation, then completing a series of three tasks – send money to a saved recipient, locate a previous transaction and modify personal settings – using the TransferWise platform, both on the web browser and on a mobile phone. Video was captured of all on-screen interaction as well as from the participants themselves. After completing each task, participants were invited to select an emotion and intensity on the Geneva Emotion Wheel (GEW). At the end of all three tasks, participants took a post-mortem questionnaire containing more GTS-like questions to asses a shift in trust. A post-mortem interview was arranged individually to better understand emotional reactions and shifts in trust indicated.

Fig. 1. The Geneva Emotion Wheel

2.1.2    Apparatus and Materials

Two different access points were used, a common Windows PC running Google Chrome for web access and an Android phone running the native TransferWise application downloaded from the Play Store. A second mobile phone was used to film the interaction to an external memory card. Printed copies of the consent form, the background questionnaire, the heuristics evaluation form, three Geneva Emotion Wheels and the post-mortem questionnaire were provided to all participants.

2.1.3    Tools and Methods

Koyote Software’s Free Screen to Video was used in the Windows machines to capture on-screen interaction, while on the mobile phone, the native screen video capture capabilities of Android 4.4 KitKat was used for the same purpose. Yamagishi & Yamagishi’s GTS evaluation and Bänziger, Tanja, Véronique, Tran, and Scherer’s GEW evaluation methods were applied to the information provided by the participants. The post-mortem interviews were used to make sense of this hedonic layer of information.

 

Fig. 2. Screen Capture of Mobile App vs. Website.

2.1.4    Participants

Participants were nine people with almost-normal gender distribution (five men, four women) aged 21~35 years old. Participants were screened previously for reason to send money abroad – only those with family in other countries or other reasonable expectation to convert money to or from another currency in the next 12 months were invited to participate.

3.     Results and Discussion

In general, there was a shift in trust for the worst after using both web and mobile versions of the system, with a more pronounced negative shift in women and when using the mobile application. Post-mortem interviews revealed that the generalized shift in trust was mostly related to questions of whether the money would be delivered to the intended recipient, in the time frame promised and in the amount expected. This points to the need for a more detailed study with “live” money transfers that follows participants during the whole money transfer process, which can take several days.

GEW emotions also showed a negative shift when comparing web and mobile, with less-intense positive reactions and more frequent and more-intense negative reactions when using the mobile application. These were also reflected in the pragmatic evaluations, showing greater difficulty in completing tasks and, according to the post-mortem interviews, impaired by some user interface bugs and glitches. This perfectly reflects Chu & Yuan’s results in comparing E-Trust and interactivity.

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3.1       Recommendations

Pragmatic UX evaluation was invaluable in interpreting the hedonics results. Especially metrics like number of clicks and time to complete tasks, which explained shifts in trust related to poor user experience.

The GEW is a wonderful but confusing tool, both for participants and for evaluators afterwards. After the pilot test showed the Wheel itself had some poor UX aspects, it was decided that evaluators would recommend participants to pick a single emotion that better represented the task to be assessed and mark its intensity. This makes comparing emotional reactions difficult, because there are less overlapping data points between participants. Once again, the post-mortem interview allowed us to better categorize these reactions.

The main recommendation to TransferWise is to take Chu & Yuan’s conclusions in interactivity to heart and trying to make the mobile experience as complete and fluid as the web experience, this way saving the service from negative hedonic UX aspects.

It is also recommended to follow this study up with a more in depth one that follows the participants through the entire process of an actual transfer, as many of the participants questions on trust were left unanswered as this was a non-live test where no money transfer actually took place. A follow up study could also gather more statistically significant numbers, as the sample of participants for this study was rather limited.     

4.     Conclusion

The main conclusion we can take away from this study is that the same platform can produce different trust responses if accessed by different methods. In a user base that’s constantly shifting from web to mobile and back again, this is an important observation as designers must carefully craft the mobile experience to mitigate or eliminate perceptual differences that can lead to perceived untrustworthiness.  

5.     References

1.  Chu, Kuo-Ming, and Benjamin JC Yuan. "The Effects of Perceived Interactivity on E-Trust and E-Consumer Behaviors: The Application of Fuzzy Linguistic Scale." Journal of Electronic Commerce Research 14.1 (2013).

2.  Yamagishi, Toshio, and Midori Yamagishi. "Trust and commitment in the United States and Japan." Motivation and emotion 18.2 (1994): 129-166.

3.  Yamagishi, Toshio. "The provision of a sanctioning system as a public good."Journal of Personality and social Psychology 51.1 (1986): 110.

4.  Bänziger, Tanja, Véronique Tran, and Klaus R. Scherer. "The Geneva Emotion Wheel: A tool for the verbal report of emotional reactions." Poster presented at ISRE (2005).

Philosophy of HCI - Post-mortem

So, I broke the rules - I decided to write about the tools before my final impressions on the course. Why you ask? First, because I find that this post is a better closing chapter than that. I wouldn't want to sound like a band who plays a nice epic final song at a concert and then comes back for an encore and completely breaks the experience. Not that I think this is some epic Queen song, quality wise, but please, let's not spoil the metaphor with technicalities.

Second, because I wanted to speak of how my use of tools during this course influenced my view of my idle times. That's because the most important consequence of this course is I'll never see idle times the same way again.

When I (and most of us) think of human-computer interaction, we think of humans doing something to computers (action) and computers response to this (reaction) in a cycle of communication until a task is completed (interaction). But not all interaction is two-way, and not all interaction is initiated with a purpose, and not all interaction preempts reciprocation.
Computers try to communicate much more than we request of them - they're always telling us what time it is, how much battery is left, how many emails on God know how many inboxes are begging for your attention. And these can be passive information, but most often than not are not - computers are needy, greedy beasts - "Hey, look at me, there's a very important email from your mom you must give your undivided attention to, right now!"
And we also tell computers the most stupid stuff sometimes - why do we spin the mouse around when we are bored, bringing an idle screen back to life and spinning the hard drive up? Are we now begging their attention? Asking for an interruption? Or is this just payback for all those notifications in improper times - "Hey, look, I moved your mouse for no reason whatsoever - who's needy now?"
Maybe I fixated a little too much on our first experiencement, but I'd like to think otherwise - I think it opened my eyes to a whole bunch of interactions that we, interaction designers, neglect - incidental interactions, accidental interactions, non-reciprocated interactions.
All of these are communication and should be studied, improved upon. And now I have more than a fixation - I have a purpose. I don't think I can pretend my thesis will go the same direction it was going only six months ago. I have you to thank and to blame, Emanuele, for killing any chance of me writing anything other than these tiny neglected interactions I had paid so little attention to before!

What tools did I use during Philosophy of HCI?

What kind of question is that, I ponder? The interesting thing is that studying philosophy requires not much more than a brain (one would joke that a brain with a liking for knowledge, but I digress). I would argue that, before anything, I used my brain a lot.

Ha ha, funny, you'd answer, we all use our brains for learning; but do we? If you're in a simple listen-and-repeat mode, your brain is being taken for a ride - you go to a lecture, you listen (or you waste away playing silly games on your laptop in the hopes that whatever seeps in through the cracks in our concentration accounts for learning) and you then repeat ready-made concepts in a test. We've all been there - able to answer some questions on a given subject, but unable to think critically about it. But if you don't allow yourself to philosophize during a philosophy course, what else are you going to do? I have seen philosophy courses being taught that way - teacher blabbers philosopher's names and their schools of thought, students "learn" them, never think of what they had to say, game over. Not this course though - we heard of movies, football matches, idleness, but not of Spinoza, Kant, Deleuse, Nietzsche. Not much space for easily digested factoids on philosophy there.

So we were not taken for a ride - or maybe we were, but we had to pedal our own bikes this time. Like one of these nice GPS-enhanced countryside explorations Emanuele talked so much about, we were powering our own little exploration of the field and, in the end, our 'brain muscles' hurt, but have we seen some beautiful stuff in the way!

Another good friend of mine that I took to these rides was my trusty smartphone. Nowadays, saying "I brought a smartphone" is like saying "I wasn't naked" - we all carry these little buggers everywhere. But just like our brains, it's not having one that counts, but how you use them. From the very first "experiencement", I used mine as a chamber of isolation, pumping tunes into my head, as a source of easily searchable information, or simply a nice escape for my idle times. Oh, what effect this course had on what I think of idle times - but that I'll leave for another post.

Just as when riding a bike, I could definitely finish this course only using my 'brain muscles', but my trusty sidekick was there. When biking through the marshes and hills and woods of the subject, I could find solace - and distraction, and sometimes some cheap satisfaction during times of doubt by quickly Googling away some question - thanks to my phone. My sidekick. My side-brain. 

Analyzing Social Networks Using Gephi

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Social Computing Data Analysis - Will Facebook die out by 2017

The paper titled Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics by John Cannarella & Joshua A. Spechler (2014) uses epidemic recovery models (irSIR - infection recovery S = number susceptible, I =number infectious, R =number recovered) to predict the rise and fall of Online Social Networks using Google Trends search data in place of actual usage reports. It first tries to fit the model with the rise and fall of MySpace usage, then uses the adapted model to predict if the same effects apply to Facebook data and, therefore, when Facebook would see similar decline.

The usage of search terms to predict the spread of disease has been proven before and is the basis for Google's Flu Trends, which attempts to predict when and where flu epidemics will hit next. But the model does not exactly fit OSN adoption and the paper discusses some of the shortcoming of the model, but not all. The first shortcoming discussed by the paper is that, differently from diseases, people do not join an OSN expecting and/or making a conscious effort to leave them. People will remain members for as long as it is interesting to them, meaning the as long as there are enough friends using an OSN to justify being a member, they'll stay.

Another shortcoming (one that is not discussed satisfactorily in the paper) is that R, the number of people who recovered from a disease, is replaced by people opposed to join an OSN, both those who never joined in the first place and those who joined and left deciding to never come back. This adaptation is necessary because it assumes S+I+R = N, meaning it assumes population remains constant during the study and adding up susceptible, infected and recovered members gives you the full population. This carries two shortcomings:

First, you cannot consciously decide to resist/accept to be infected by a disease, but people make conscious decisions about joining/not joining an OSN all the time, decisions that can change with time (natural immunity can fluctuate, but not be switched on and off at will);

Second, internet usage numbers in the period have not remained constant, instead growing exponentially. The assumption of S+I+R = N is feeble at best.

The third (or fourth?) shortcoming is that the data includes a highly eschewed input, as Google Trends data shows a circa 20% jump around October 2012 that never recovered. This data was 'corrected' by multiplying all input after that date by a correction factor derived from their own projections of where the data points should be, without feedback from Google on what exactly is the nature of the change in data. The turning point in the search data occurs only after the correction factor is applied, putting into question how much of the reduction observed is actually bias generated by the researchers' own 'correction' of input data.

All in all, the paper interestingly draws a parallel between the decline of MySpace and historical Facebook usage data, but the predictions derived by the parallel must be taken with a big grain of salt.

Reference

John Cannarella & Joshua A. Spechler, Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics (2014)

Images: John Cannarella & Joshua A. Spechler, Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics (2014)

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Last 'Experiencement' - Describing the world in pictures, and back again in words.

During a week (I know, it was supposed to be two weeks, but I have a semi good excuse) I collected pictures that, to me, should synthesize the day. It is becoming more common than ever to express yourself in pictures - what was once the domain of the semi professional photographer or the tourist, that entity whose eyes and hands seem sometimes to be fused to a camera, is now an everyday happenstance thanks to the likes of Instagram and its super-easy way of destroying applying cheesy effects to otherwise good mundane pictures.

Instagram is most definitely not the only culprit of this renewed culture of communicating by pictures. There is 4chan, the western equivalent of the Japanese 2chan forums. It's an anonymous forum where people feel free to express themselves in slurs words and porn pictures, home to the meme phenomenon. Below, a rare image of a rather innocent 4chan picture thread (they are usually a lot less suitable for a blog post you want your professor and colleagues to see):

From there were born subcultures such as the demotivationals and memes, pictures that express an opinon in a zany way and can completely replace a reply in an internet conversation:

The pinnacle of this type of textless communication is the recent rise of Relay, an instant messaging application where instead of writing, you can search a collection of community-curated animated GIF images to express that hard-to-put-in-words feeling you want to convey. It's specially addictive when talking to close friends, with whom you already have strong non-verbal communication skills:

So back to my week. I had a very stressful week, I had visits (something I love, but can't cope very well with), shitloads of work, schoolwork and, in the weekend, a birthday party to organize. I see the narrative rather well in my sequence of images, but your mileage may vary (even after lightly describing my week, you probably won't be pointed to the same feelings those pictures express to me). These pictures carry a lot of prägnanz, as in they carry a lot more significance than their concise nature seems to imply.

As the culture of non-verbal expression sees a rebirth and more and more people use memes outside of internet context, it's fairly clear that this multi-dimensional forms of expression will only become more commonplace, as they allow us to express things where verbal communication simply falls short. Walk around the streets of Tallinn and you'll see meme faces pasted to light posts, announcing parties and sometimes even replacing spokespeople in advertising. The meme culture is here to stay (which only confirms Richard Dawkins' idea that the meme is the cultural equivalent of the gene, spreading our cultural phenomena in the zeitgeist the same way sex spreads our genetic material in the gene pool).

Moral Artifacts - Philosophy of HCI

What is an artifact? A man-made object, an archaeologist might answer. A product of the social behavior of an individual or group, a sociologist would reply. Anything that bears information about the culture of its creator, an anthropologist would muse. Technologists have a different approach - artifacts are byproducts of software developments, undesirable alterations in data, visual glitches. Apparently, some artifact did something bad to a technologist some day in the distant past and left a negative bias forever tainting their relationship.

Taking into view this bias, can an artifact be "bad" or "good"? Can it be "moral"?

If an artifact bears cultural information, it can carry the moral baggage of its creator. If it's the product of a social behavior, it can be intrinsically bad or good. It is so because there was such intent in its creation, or because it is so heavily shaped by its moral context that this moral bias cannot be extricated from the artifact.

But the most interesting interpretation of a moral artifact it that of artifacts that can shape morality through their usage. The most obvious example that occurs to me is the condom.

It began as a form of birth control for the 15th century nobility and swinged in importance as prophylactic and contraception for centuries, but the difficulty and pricing kept them from mass adoption until the 19th century, when it, although illegal in many places (damn you, religious morals!), became the most popular method of birth control. In these years, a surge in 'moral' rigidity made ignorance of proper sexual behavior (prophylaxis, contraception, abortion etc) widespread and the condom fought this surge in unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. But it wasn't until the 1910s when cement dipping and later latex made mass production of condoms possible.

In the '30s, the Anglicans relaxed their disapproval of contraception (something the Catholics are still to do) and the two World Wars made condoms still more important as American soldiers received a ration of condoms and were instructed on their proper use. This created a generation used to contraception and STD prevention. The free sex movement of the '60s would not be possible without condoms, nor would AIDS have been kept at bay in the '80s without them.

Even now, when we are in specially reactionary times (and for the first time in years we see condom fatigue in many cultures), condoms are an inextricable part of our culture, and it's difficult to tell who shaped whom: are condoms to blame for our sexual culture, or is it the other way around? One way or the other, it's undeniable: the condom is both a fruit of and a huge influencer of current culture and morals.

Analysing Eye-tracking Data - Sopo using iTunes

Unfortunately, from all the captures made by our team, only one did not go awry (the capture on the other two froze around 8 seconds into the video. The CSV files are there, but without capture, there's very little to make sense of them).

0:14 - Exercise starts

 - There is some hesitation as to how you create a playlist. User settles for right-clicking on the sidebar to the left and creating one from the drop-down context menu. Task takes 12 seconds total.

0:26 - Playlist created

 - Once settled with the right click context menu methodology, user clicks on the tab called Songs after scanning the sidebar for options and a quick glance at the tab list on top. She then proceeds to right click songs, scroll down the very long context menu and add songs to her playlist 

0:42 - Two files added to playlist

 - Then proceeds a long hesitation where the user scans the song list for a long while, seemingly unaware of the next task or unable to find how to go back to the playlist. This ends at 0:57, a full 15 seconds later, when user finds and clicks the Playlists tab. She quickly drags the top song to the bottom of the playlist, completing the task.

0:59 - Switched order of playlist

 - Again the user's eyes wander around the two axes of the application - the tab list and the sidebar - for indication on how to delete the playlist. She finally settles for the comfort of the right-click and deletes the playlist after 10 seconds.

1:09 - Playlist deleted 

The video seems to indicate a lack of controls for specific functions. After scanning the chrome, the user always settles for right clicking items and scanning through a (sometimes very long) list of actions until she finds the one she's looking for. These added steps and lack of affordance seem widespread in the app. 

Galaxy Sound - Music game

The idea is to have three sounds loops (beats, riffs, etc) playing at the same time. You interact with shapes (triangles and circles) to manipulate the loops (pitch, tempo, etc) so you can either keep them perfect (and keep a high score) or, just for fun, make some mistakes that shape how the loops will play during the next level.
The idea is that you experiment with small imperfections and the effect these have on your perception of sound while (hopefully) having fun.
It makes a lot more sense to see what I mean, so please go to the presentation to have an idea of the dynamics of the game:

Presentation in Google Docs

A (atypical) week in pictures

Cognitive experiences mediated by technology - Three examples

It's really difficult to come up with only three cognitive experiences mediated by technology. If you were born in the 90s, you probably know no other type. I was born in the late 70s but still, raised by a geek father and a very open-minded mother, I was exposed to technology in a way that most children raised in the 80s weren't, at least not in Brazil: I had an Atari, dad brought a computer home and started learning to code COBOL, I got to play tons of computer games and started coding myself at a very early age.

All that is to say that most of my cognitive experiences are mediated by technology in the electronic sense (the sense most people think of when saying technology). To filter out the crud, I'll focus on experiences that used to be analog to me until a few years ago:

Navigating is one of my passions. I love paper maps and moving around, and also love urban life and exploring the nooks and crannies of different cities. Until a few years ago, navigating using digital devices was cumbersome (it was only 2006 when I was still printing maps from Google Maps, itself an evolution of going to an airport bookstore and buying a city map). Back then, I'd plan a trip and prepare maps so I could locate myself within the city, waypoints in marker pen and annotations galore, like where to take the correct buses etc. Nowadays I use my smartphone for most navigation, from Google Maps for general mapping to Foursquare to find nice places to eat and drink and Waze to drive around with spoken instructions in Portuguese (it saves some cognitive overhead of listening to spoken English). Nowadays I'm infatuated with an app called Trafi Eesti (iOS and Android) which gives me public transit routes in a way that kicks Google Maps' ass! It can route in different public transit solutions and can also remember your favorite routes and stops so you know exactly when trolley 3 will pass Kaubamaja or the 11 will leave Kunstiakadeemia. Lots of love there!

Speaking of love (and since we'll be talking of long-distance relationships), my relationship with Cau began online and we had never seen each other's face for a long time before I finally decided to travel 500km to see her. We remained living apart for many months after that, communicating via social networking and smartphone apps. This has shaped the way we communicate even now: we love sharing links with each other so even if we're in the same room, we may send a Facebook message every now and then. We are constantly in touch via WhatsApp and, since I'm notified of her messages on my Pebble, I don't even need to be actively looking at my phone to know her whereabouts online and offline: if she posts something to my Facebook timeline, my wrist vibrates, ditto if I'm at work and she checks-in on Foursquare. It even sounds creepy told this way, but this is public information we choose to share (a whole tangle of complications itself, since most people's sense of privacy is completely distorted nowadays, but I'll leave that for another discussion). In a sense, our intimate space is the size of the distance between us, because we're never really apart thanks to technology.

We love watching TV shows together, but decided that, even though cable is very cheap in Tallinn, we'd become cord-cutters: most of the TV shows we like are easier to watch over Netflix, which is actually even cheaper than cable. So we instead subscribe just to fast internet and built a home-theater PC. It replaced the cable box, radio and my XBox 360. I now buy games online via Steam and a single box deals with everything entertainment-connected in the house: no extra remote controllers, no tangle of cables. It actually reduced piracy, as weird as it might sound: we never get frustrated that there's noting to watch on TV or no new games to play, so the urge to download movies via Torrents has decreased, instead of increasing a lot like I predicted it would when we decided to abandon cable and a game-dedicated box. Really unexpected.

There are many experiences more that were re-shaped by digital technology, but these are very poignant examples and I believe they illustrate the concept well. 

Phylosophy of HCI: Experiencement 1, Gaps of inactivity.

As this week's "experiencement" I decided to make a week of rides to work fully internet free.
The decision was not random: my apartment is fairly open-plan, meaning that me and my girlfriend work, cook and watch TV in the same space, so this experiment would be impossible from home.
Also, as I leave work at the same time as many colleagues, we usually take the bus back home chatting, so I wouldn't be able to really disconnect, at least not from the people around me.

The first day I failed miserably, and I'll tell you how. At first I thought that if I just sat down and "did nothing", stayed away from my phone and did not access any online or offline content, I'd be isolated.

But I did not count on my Pebble.

The Pebble is a smartwatch, that is, it's a connected computation device disguised as a watch. Most of the times it's innocently telling me the time and the weather. But it also shows me the number of unread emails, text messages and missed phone calls.
That alone wouldn't be a problem, if it was all the Pebble did. But it also buzzes a very perceivable vibration every time I get a Facebook message, a new email, an incoming phone call, a calendar alert, a WhatsApp chat.
This failure made me realize something very interesting that I had not noticed before: it's been almost one month that my phone has been on mute, as I no longer need audible notifications of anything, as the Pebble successfully eliminated this need for me. I'm hyperconnected, but in a way that's unobtrusive to other people around me.

It made me feel good.

In the second day, I left my "watch" behind. It allowed me to completely isolate myself from the internet, but not from ambient noise. It felt interesting to be immersed in the background buzz. I don't know if it's because of my long diagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder, but I'm quite used to daydreaming. I disconnect with the environment all the time, always going to my weird little internal, magical place. But by not being pulled back by constant notifications allowed me to go deeper into this, let's say, meditation.

On the third day, I wore headphones. Not with music playing, but just as a sort of earplug. It felt interesting to be in this extra sensory isolation. I almost dosed off, but not quite.

I traveled for 40 minutes in complete meditatory silence.

I must report that it felt a lot longer than using my phone.

By the way, talking about headphones, silence and background noise, I bumped into this while reading up for this post: John Cage composed a piece of music called 4'33" where he "performs" four and a half minutes of silence. Not pure silence, but that silence full of the little noises of day to day life. It's a beautiful thing, although you might not agree it's music. There's also an app now for you to record your own performance of 4'33" and to listen to other people "performing" it. I don't have an iPhone, so I couldn't try it.

But I'd love to.

Reading Assignment 2: Affective Diary

Affective Diary is the process of collecting information through the use of a portable computer (such as a mobile phone) and an array of sensors (cameras, biometric sensors etc) in order to make a detailed registry of all daily activities of a study's participant.

It is intimately related to the phenomenon of the Quantified Self Movement, on which I'm writing my thesis, so I thought this might be a good method on which to base at least some of my autoethnographic exploration of the topic.

The Affective Diary is, in a sense, an evolution of the blogging movement, which itself is an evolution of the need to keep diaries. While a person writing a diary has to remember, select and write down the data they wish to keep (or share, when blogging), the Affective Diary collects all: passive video capture, mobile context (GPS and GSM location, nearby wireless networks), mobile activity (calls, messages, emails), biometrics (heart rate, galvanic skin response, temperature, motion) and active capture (conscious decisions to note down a certain passage or to capture a picture, etc). It should also allow the user to capture emotions, that the system can the correlate to the context: happiness, gloominess, even hunger.

 Just like a diary, the Affective Diary is a good tool for self-reflection, but just like the diary, it can suffer from the WORN effect - Write Once, Read Never. While a diary can show itself useless because the self-editing can lead to the information you're looking for in the future not being captured, the Affective Diary suffers from the same effect for the opposite reason: too much uncategorized information can lead to an unreadable and unprocessable mass of information. 

It is also intimately related to sousveillance, the inverse of surveillance (sous meaning under while sur means over in French), the act of capturing video and audio of your environment (as well as other pieces of information). Sousveillance was a term coined by Steve Mann, who also invented Natural User Interfaces, High Dynamic Range photography, scratch input and many other HCI strategies.

In a sense,  the Quantified Self Movement, Affective Diaries and Sousveillance are different ways to look at the same phenomenon for different reasons: you sousveil to fight surveillance or to collect evidence (as in alibi sousveillance, where you generate evidence that no wrongdoing has taken place, like when installing a camera to your dashboard); you quantify to know more about your health and to understand the effects of your physical activities on your own body and you make an affective diary to keep track of your activities.

The Affective Diary was, not so long ago, a pipe-dream, impracticable because of the high price of the equipment involved and the extra weight. Nowadays it's much easier to make a comprehensive log with the stuff we already carry around and new products such as the fitbit and Google Glass are only expanding the capacity to collect more and more information about yourself and the environment, 24/7.

What remains constant is the researcher's capacity to analyse that data. The risk of the WORN effect is very big, the mass of information too impenetrable to process completely. Better tools and analysis strategies must be developed to make sense of all the information gathered through such methods, running the risk of turning all that collection moot.

References

Mann S, (2014). "Veillance: Beyond Surveillance, Dataveillance, Uberveillance, and the Hypocrisy of One-Sided Watching", Chapter 2, pp 32-45 in "Uberveillance and the Social Implications of Microchip Implants: Emerging Technologies", Michael MG and Michael K, editors, Information Science Reference

Machajdik, J, Hanbury, A, Garz, a, Sablatnig, R, (2011) "Affective computing for wearable diary and lifelogging systems: An overview" in "Proceedings of the ÖAGM / AAPR Workshop", Graz, Austria.

Ståhl, A, Höök, K, (2008). "Reflecting on the design process of the Affective Diary". In "Proceedings of the 5th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: building bridges" (NordiCHI '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA,

Operation War Diary - Case Exercise

Crowdsourcing, a term coined by Jeff Howe, author of the seminal Wired article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing", was an attempt to explain the trend among internet companies in the first half of the 2000 decade of tapping into their own public for content. in a 2008 article for Convergence, Daren Brabhan of the University of Utah defined it as "an online, distributed problem-solving and production model".

Many different definitions exist, but in a nutshell, any initiative, network or service where content or other facet of the product(s) is/are created by the general public can be defined as a type of crowdsourcing. Many of these include gaming components (badges, scores, etc) to generate incentives to users.



Some examples:

Foursquare

A location-based social networking where users "check-in" to venues. The gamified interface drives users to input information on their favorite places, generating a comprehensive database of the best places in town that can be filtered by interest.

Reddit
A news and entertainment website where users generate the content, comment and also vote news stories up and down, effectively replacing all parts of the editorial team.

Quirky
A website where users create new products that the company later manufactures and sells. Users suggest products, vote for features and even choose the name, price and tag lines for the ones that finally go on sale.

Wikipedia

One of the most accessed websites in the world, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia created and maintained by it's own users, who edit articles, verify sources and self-regulate the behavior of their own colleagues.

Operation War Diary brings this approach to cataloging and categorizing the diaries of several British military units in the First World War. These diaries are part of the National Archives catalog and are being digitized as part of the 100th anniversary of the Great War.

Users get access to these digitized diaries and, in turn, tag the pages indicating what parts of the pages refer to which days, every time a person is mentioned (first name, last name, rank and reason for being mentioned), any time a given place is mentioned, to what category a given entry belongs etc. This information will enable the researchers at the National Archives to better index and analyse the content of all the diaries being digitized.

In Wikipedia, where user-generated content is directly available to other users and affects the experience. For this reason, there's need for moderation (reviewing, content control and reversion of modifications) to control the quality of the generated content. In Operation War Diary, the quality of the content is obtained through redundancy: as many different users will tag the same pages, the level of confidence on any given piece of content can be measured by how many users agree or disagree on it. This way, the more users collaborate, the more trustworthy the final content is.

References

Brabham, D.C. Crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 14(1), February 2008.

Howe, Jeff. The Rise of Crowdsourcing. Wired., 2006.

Deterding, S. et alli. "From game design elements to gamefulness: Defining "gamification"". Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference. pp. 9–15, 2011

Oomen, J., and Aroyo, L. "Crowdsourcing in the cultural heritage domain: opportunities and challenges." In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies, pp. 138-149. ACM, 2011.

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Evaluating the User Experience Reading 1: Virpi Roto’s User Experience Building Blocks

In this review, I analyse Virpi Roto’s User Experience Building Blocks, a paper written in 2006 on the need to better define User Experience as a means to be able to evaluate UX (as opposed to simply evaluate usability, as this is a limited approach that does not address user experience as a whole).

The text begins by exploring established definitions of User Experience, such as Norman’s and Jordan’s goals. By drawing parallels between those two and Nokia’s own definition, he comes up with certain levels of experience: behavioral (functionality, usability), visceral (pleasure) and reflective (pride). Personally, I feel quite vindicated because, as an Industrial Design student, I felt there was too much value being put on the reflective aspects of  modern design (image, beauty, the need to belong) as opposed to the Bauhaus ideals of functionality dictating design (which I also feel is a limited view of things). A tripod of behaviour, reflection and pleasure makes so much more sense to me as the domain where a balance must be stricken.

The author moves on to attempt to identify the building blocks of experience, all the components that influence the subjective feel that experience is. By exploring different authors, he lists components that exist in different levels of abstraction, such as Hassenzahl & Tractinsky user’s internal state (experiences and expectations), system and context and, in a much lower level, Arhippainen & Tähti’s user, social factors, cultural factors, context of use and product. From Forlizzi, he extracts the reference period, as UX can be analysed as a long, multi-temporal attitude which can, itself, be broken in much smaller perceptions and sensations.

Using Hassenzahl & Tractinsky high level of abstraction as a scaffolding, the author, through empirical evidence collected during his analysis of mobile browsers, derives his own building blocks of User Experience, as follows:

• System is everything with which the user interacts, products, objects, services, people and the infrastructure. It avoids the reductionist pitfall of equating usability with user experience by, instead of evaluating a single product, making it part of a whole that builds the experience, hence system.

• Context is built of external systems and objects that, although not part of the system, affect the User Experience. It begins in the physical context (humidity, temperature, luminosity etc.) to social context (expectations, culture), temporal context (period dedicated to the Experience) and task context (what part the system has in the greater whole of achieving a goal for the user).

• The User itself is the last block, as its expectations and personal experience (which affect and are affected by the social context) will affect the User Experience itself. Its mood has great effect on the final Experience as well, because s/he might have lowered patience (affecting the perceived temporal context). Last but not least, he moves away from the user’s internal state to list user’s physical factors, both temporary and permanent, as affecting the Experience (i.e. the user can have only one free hand at the time, or only possess one hand, or none).

Bibliography

• Arhippainen, L., Tähti, M. 2003, Empirical Evaluation of User Experience in Two Adaptive Mobile Application Prototypes. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia, Norrköping, Sweden.

• Hassenzahl, M., Tractinsky, N. 2006, User Experience – a Research Agenda. Behaviour and Information Technology, Vol. 25, No. 2, March-April 2006, pp. 91-97

• Forlizzi, J., Ford, S. 2000, The Building Blocks of Experience: An Early Framework for Interaction Designers. Proceedings of Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2000). New York City, USA

• Jordan, P.E. 2000, Designing Pleasurable Products. Taylor & Francis, USA.

• Norman, D. 2004, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. Basic Books.
• Roto, V. (2006, October). User experience building blocks. In proceedings of 2nd COST294-MAUSE Workshop–Towards a Unified View (Oslo, Norway, 2006) (pp. 124-128).