Building a Better World via the User-Centered Design of Technology

From Anita Borg Institute Wiki

Building a Better World through the User Centered Design of Technology Mary Czerwinski - Visualization & Interaction of Business & Entertainment - MSR

Cognitive Psychologist - Large display & virtual envirs.

Trends in HCI

   *Social computing
   *Mobility
   *Sensemaking across large datasets on the web
       -Leveraging machine learning
   *Information visualization
         -Bring the info to the user in a sensible format
         -Data analysis
         -Online gaming
         -Group awareness
         -Search results
   *Ubiquitous computing & sensors 

Social computing & user-centered design

   *Need to understand how people interact socially in the real world
   *Then see if it applies online
   *...

Social computing -

Product of a lot of people interacting in a computing environment

  1.Personal representations
        1.Facebook
              1.Allows us to put our personality online
        2.Neopets

  2.Large scale, distributed production
        1.Wikipedia
        2.blogosphere

Representations & perceptions online

Face to face interactions

How quickly do we make an opinion about each other? (extremely quickly)

50 % of the opinion of you on facebook is photo, then political bias, then religious bias

The new self-representation: it's worth money!

How is a person's perception impacted by the advent of online IDs?

   *Online opinions are made the same as face to face, but online are better because you get more info (religion, political, etc.)

SlamXR

   *Track your workout routes, where you went, how hilly it was, etc.
   *Can post to group
         o People who want to train like you can get ideas on how to match it

Pathfinder: Social Data Aggregation & Analysis

   *Scientists can upload data, & get help analyzing it

Blogosphere

   *Keyword tracker across whole blogosphere
   *BLEWSViews: How the Blogosphere reacts to the News (internal?)
   *Bellwethers show up at the top

Social Software Caretaker Back-End

   *New Complexity
         -Hundreds of thousands of computers
         -Seamless user interaction
         -Maintain complex social state

   *...

5-10 year challenge:

Integration of social * computer sciences

Eval. Of what sticks & is of value

What's useful sticks

Intuitive content creation interfaces

Mobile & embedded sensor inputs

Integration into products at all points

But especially for info workers

Infor Visualization Trends

Multitasking is hurting our brains - use different parts of your brain when multitasking, so don't get deep thinking, reading, analysis, so not developing skills that use those deep parts of the brain (she has studies)

   *Business visualization
         -DynaVis

   *Info Mgmt & Exploratory Data Analysis
         -[task gallery, scalable fabric, GroupBar]

   *Software Productivity
   *Entertainment

Major Research Challenges

   *Scale+
   *Multiple, heterogeneous data sources (fusion)
   *Spatial-temporal sense making+
   *Uncertainty+
   *Collaborative visualization+
   *Presentation of visualization results
   *Variety of display devices+

+ denotes area of focus

Large display: can show more stuff, but you can't get to stuff - lift the mouse mult. Times to get across screen

DynaVis

   *Animated transitions
         -Between chart types
         -For new data
         -For changed data
         -For sorted data

   *Direct manipulation
         -Manual sorting
         -Move data
         -Change data

FASTDash

For Agile teams, all in one room

   *Fostering awareness for Software Teams Dashboard
   *Increased communication
         -More opportunistic
         -More context relevant

   *Decreased used of shared artifacts
         -Stopped using Whiteboards & post-it notes

AdaptiviTree

   *Online pick-em games, like NCAA college basketball Match Madness, form a large * rapidly growing industry
   *Classic bracket visualization was designed for use on paper
   *AdaptiviTree adaptively deforms the representation of the tree & uses its shape to convey outcome info

GLEE - Graph Drawing Package

   *Draw complex graphs in near real time
   *Support for manual fine tuning being developed
   *Used by teams in VS & Windows Test
   *Sells in Windows Marketplace
   *Using GLEE to draw large phulogenetic trees
   *Escience team using this now

MyLifeBits

FacetMap - Faceted search of all your stuff

   *If you don't put any text search results, you'll hurt yourself
   *Need some visual, but if people know exactly what they're looking for, they can pick it out of text super easily
   *When people didn't know what to type, digging down multiple levels, even in less accurate facets helped them find it faster than text search. People who sometimes could find it easily with words sometimes would take longer through the visual search if they pick a facet that isn't the best for what they're looking for.

FacetLens

   *Explore large meta-data rich collection of stuff

HotMap

Info Vis Goals for Future

   *Visual representations that:
         -User human perception & pattern matching
         -User human spatial memory
         -User animated 

Major new trends in HCI include

   *Social software
   *Better group awareness
   *Machine learning of patterns
   *Info visualization
   *Sensing
   *Wearable devices & ubiquitous computing