Ethnography considered harmful

So I recently read the controversial paper about ethnographies being considered harmful and I have to say that I couldn't really understand the argument. I understand that the reason this was accepted into CHI was so that the experts could blow it out of the water but why does CHI feel like it needs to address every loon out there who thinks the techniques are a waste. I could understand maybe if it was Don Norman or some other CHI hot shot causing the stir but it's not. It seems like CHI has some security issues or something and isn't comfortable with itself. I dunno...

Fitts's Law

So after reading the paper regarding Fitts's Law, I gained a lot of insight on how efficient design is accomplished for mouse based/touch based applications. The idea behind Fitts's Law is this: closer and bigger is faster. :-) Fitts's Law tends to favor objects that are at the edge of the screen are easier to get to because you can just fling the mouse in no time to get to the edge. Also, the magic of pie menus was revealed to me. I think it is interesting that I don't know of any GUI framworks that even offer a pie menu. I wonder what the reason behind that. If it is indeed more efficient, I would expect a company like Apple to implement a version in Cocoa since it is apparent that they know a thing or two about Fitts's Law because their Dock is a shining example of Fitts in action.

Usability Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful

So i recently read the paper "Usability Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful" and it provided a lot of arguments that were counter to the ideas that we have been learning all semester. Basically, instead of pandering to the users (who may or may not know exactly what they want), objects should be designed by experts and there should be some learning on the users' parts. I tend to agree with this position because I feel like there are too many devices that cater to the lowest common denominator and that is a bad thing.

SearchTogether - A Collaborative Web Search

This paper tackled a problem that almost everyone has engaged in at one time or anything. That problem being using an instant messenger client or email to share links with others. This could be problematic because there is no organization to the process. SearchTogether is a remedy to that problem. SearchTogether integrates instant messaging and email functionality into with the sole purpose of sharing search results with others. For instance, if Grandma was recently diagnosed with diabetes you could use SearchTogether to share some interesting search results with Grandma. When starting the client, you would choose Grandma as a recipient. All pertinent information will be sent to Grandma when she logs on. Or, if Grandma happens to be on the computer at the same time, search results can be passed in realtime.

When I first started reading the paper my first reaction was "This is so bizarre. Who wants to search with multiple people?" but after reading more about the details it became more clear that this type of technology could fill a need that current technologies cannot satisfy.

The Man Who Shocked the World

The reading for this week is the story of a man named Stanley Milgram. Milgram is a psychologist who conducted a number of social experiments and exposed a lot of interesting tidbits about human nature. The book described a number of Milgram's experiments and their results including the Small World experiment and of course his infamous shock experiment.

I found the book to be very interesting as Milgram's methods were pretty exciting. Milgram was constantly riding the line between ethical and unethical behavior and that can lead to some interesting reading. There were parts though that I felt like were dragged out a little too much. The book could have easily lost 25 pages and still could have been entertaining and informative.

Trusting WiFi hotspots

The CHI2008 paper I chose had to do with the public's trust in WiFi networks in public places. The paper was written by Tim Kindberg, Eamonn O'Neill, Chris Bevan, Vassilis Kostakos, Danae Fraser, and Tim Jay. As internet-connected mobile devices are becoming more widespread, people are finding themselves looking for internet connectivity. The goal of the researchers was to discover what kind of trust users put into unknown hotspots and how easily the users could be fooled into believing that a hotspot was safe. There were two main hypotheses: first, hotspots with a "welcome page" that displayed an image local to the establishment would garner trust from users. The other hypothesis was the exact oposite: hotspots with an image not local to the particular establishment would be less trusted by its users. A control was set up where an image was displayed that had no bias to a specific location. The methods that the researchers took to explore their hypotheses included spoofing wifi hotspots and allowing users to connect to them. The user was said to trust the website if he/she entered in his/her mobile telephone number. A user was considered less trustworthy if he/she visited the site without entering a phone number. The results offered evidence toward their second hypothesis that users trust hotspots less with an image not local to the establishment. There was no significant evidence for their first hypothesis that users will trust a hospot more if there is an image local to the establishment.

ProD framework

The paper I read was about the ProD framework. The paper was written by Ben Congleton, Mark S. Ackerman, and Mark W. Newman of the University of Michigan. ProD is written in Ruby on Rails and is designed for use in public kiosks and other places where users can come and go. Proactive displays are machines that select its content based on the users that are present. The idea behind ProD is that the content being displayed is constantly changing based on the users that are present and also the choices the users have made. What drives ProD are the three P's: Presence, Processing, and Presentation. When users are identified as present via bluetooth, magnetic card, RFID, etc, a list of users is generated. That list is then passed through a governance module to determine which if any users take priority. The list is then populated with information stored about particular users. Users then select the type of content that they are interested in seeing. ProD then filters the list of users, relationships they may have, content preferences, etc and presents it on the screen.

ProD is a very interested concept that highlights the social relationships that can be formed through web services. Many examples were included in the paper which used services such as Flickr, Google Maps, Facebook, others. ProD bridges the gap between the social relationships that are formed online by presenting them in a digestable manner in the real world.