16

Apr

First draft of my thesis, done! Kinda.

So as many of you know, I’ve been trying to get my Master’s thesis done soon so I can graduate this May.  Today I reached a bit of a milestone:  the first draft.   It’s not all I want it to be: it’s still missing a few figures, mostly screenshots to explain what’s going on.  That’s funny because the thesis is partly about how difficult it is to comprehensively describe pictures.   But I wanted to fire something reasonable off to my advisor so he can start editing it / tearing it to pieces.

If you’re interested, you can download it here [PDF, 4MB].  Only 58 pages 1.25 spacing.  Booyah.

The dude even looks like me :(

The dude even looks like me :(

1129 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

User Experience

/

08

Apr

Broken Alt-Tab and Web Applications

One thing that has recently become a problem for me is the loss of  usefulness of Alt-Tab.   For those of you who don’t know, Alt-Tab in the Windows world and beyond is the shortcut to quickly switch your active application (task switch).  But what happens when I can’t switch to my active applications, because they’re buried in my web browser?

The Problem – It’s not uncommon for someone who does real work with the corporate intranet to have several tabs open within their web browser with data sources, and a webmail tab. Add to that desktop applications like Microsoft Excel, and an instant messaging client, and we have broken workflow in Alt-Tab.

This effect will become more pronounced as more and more applications that we use daily sneak into the web browser – unless we launch everything from Adobe Air or Gears shortcuts on the desktop. That is not the case, since I’m much more likely to get to Google Calendar by clicking an Add this GCal link, than I am to launch it from my desktop.

User Solution – If the user wants to correct this workflow problem, they can open all of their working tabs as new windows.  The major issue with that is pre-loading the cognition of the task.  Odds are the user navigated to their document in an exploratory way, and didn’t precede that activity with the thought “I better open this in a new window just in case I find something I need to task-switch to.”

Last I checked (Firefox 3.0.8), there is no easy way to turn a tab into a new window in Firefox.  At least not without the Tab Mix Plus! add-on (via How-To Geek).   Though I understand “tab tearing” will be included in Firefox 3.1, and is already a standard feature in Google Chrome and Safari 4 (video link).

Potential Solution - The major web browsers that support tabs already support quickly rotating through the tabs using Ctrl-Tab.   Integrating the tab switching functionality (including preview screenshots, tab titles, and all of that) into Alt-Tab would be good.   The specific details of how that would look, feel, and interact would make a  great little M.Sc. topic. :-)

As a side note: The default built-in Alt-Tab application in Windows XP is fine (Vista Flip is even nicer), but there are a handful of better free replacements: one from the Microsoft PowerToys team, and an even richer one from Alex Avdonin.

1137 days ago Short URL 6 Comments

User Experience

//

13

Mar

Bridging the digital divide between rich and poor using cellphones.

Today is the 20th birthday of the World Wide Web, and in celebration there was this telecast on French TV from CERN about the future of the web. Stéphane Boyera’s five minute talk stood out as being particularly interesting to me.

There is a digital divide in the world, as there are 5 billion people that have never used the Internet.  Bringing them on board ought to be a priority for agencies involved with human development.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone needs access to a traditional computer. In much of the developed world, even in places where there is no running water, there are cell phones.  Cell phone networks cover 80% of the world’s population. I can attest to this fact in my travels to India. In the middle of the foothills of the Himalaya’s there was limited running water, sporadic electricity, no sewage, but every family has a Nokia with SMS and a web (WAP?) browser.

The idea that services (education, banking, emergency services, and the like) can be delivered via mobile platforms is the cause d’etre of this W3C working group.  From their website:

Mobile Web for Social Development (MW4D)

The MW4D Interest Group explores how to use the potential of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) on Mobile phones as a solution to bridge the Digital Divide and provide minimal services (health, education, governance, business,…) to rural communities and under-privileged populations of Developing Countries.

Amazing ideas, definitely worth checking out.  As with any good idea, there are a variety of challenges, from availability of information, software development, and information literacy of the population.

Though it’s a solution that will gain traction in the future.  From a developers perspective, if I have use cases that involve use by emerging internet populations, I better be thinking about mobile browsers and serious localisation. The BBC speaker at the same conference mentioned that 20% of hits to the BBC website from Africa already come from cellular phones.

1163 days ago Short URL Comments

User Experience

//

26

Jan

Job Hunting in Interaction Design

As of a few days ago, I’m looking for a new opportunity in interaction design, usability evaluation, user interface design, and related fields. In the last few years I’ve had a great deal of good contract experience, so I’m looking for a project management position … or at least a position at a firm where I have upward mobility.

So step one was to recreate my new resume, with some help from my friends! Step two is to look for openings. So far that has been a challenge, but optimism ensues – emailed abotu ten firms in the last few days that had openings for people like myself. There really are a lot of HCI-focused firms in Toronto and Waterloo, not surprising considering the number of quality soft-dev firms and Comp Sci grad schools in the area.

I went to a TorCHI meeting last week, met some good people there, indicated my interest at getting hired at CIBC or IBM :) Even my housemate has been trying to help me out. She was out with some friends having a drink, and was approached by a nice man who handed her a business card. She realised that he’s into the same thing I’m into, so she gave me the card at home and told me to email the guy. Thanks Kirsti, appreciate the help.

If you know anyone who is hiring or looking for people like me, let me know!

1208 days ago Short URL Comments

User Experience

//

21

Aug

Starting my tagging study!

So I’m starting my study of tagging, and searching with keywords.  Image search has lots of really interesting nuanced problems, but the ones that interest me involve the language of the image “tag”.

If you’re interested in participating, take a look at my little recruitment page:

http://grabka.org/internet/flickrsearchtagging/

It’s a multi-step process that starts with you installing some software, and sending me an email with your Flickr username.  After that, it’s all simple :-)

Take a look at the study page if you are interested in participating.  I need about 50 people to do this.

1367 days ago Short URL Comments

User Experience

///

23

May

Using Facebook in Polish

As of May 14, 2008 Facebook is available in a variety of languages, not the least of which is Polish. I really appreciate how community-supported the whole translation process was:

More than 450 Polish-speaking users on Facebook chose to be part of the effort to translate the site from English to Polish. Users who added the Facebook translation application were allowed to submit translations inline while browsing the site. The community then approved all translations through a voting system.

My first thoughts are that the results of this translation are very natural and usable, even for a non-native speaker like myself. Congratulations to the team! The selection of terms for words like “poke” and “wall” feel right, much like they do in English.

Unfortunately, a some of my Greasemonkey scripts that depend on Facebook content stopped working, including a cool script that highlights todays birthdays. Facebook developers, including those making apps and scripts, are going to have to deal with internationalising (i18n) and localising their applications.

If you’re curious what it looks like, scroll to the very bottom of your Profile page or Newsfeed page (if you’re an American or Canadian user), and you’ll see a little link that says “English” with an arrow beside it. Click the arrow, and behold the available options: Norsk, Deutsch, Francais, and more.
Facebook in Polish, selecting a langugage

Why not use English?

My cousin and I changed the language to Polish just for the novelty of it. So far, I have kept it the language setting simply because it’s a nice, daily way to interact with elements of my culture that I otherwise have little access to. Only after a few days use, Facebook in English feels a little less comfortable, and a little less interesting.

1456 days ago Short URL Comments

User Experience

//

20

May

Flickr Search Tagging – First Alpha Release

Introducing Flickr Search Tagging!

It’s a little utility that enables a couple of things:

  1. Let’s you to propose tags for images that don’t belong to you on Flickr. Contributing tags if you want to help describe the image is often not possible, unless: you’re the owner, you’re a contact of the owner, or the person has allowed very permissive tagging rights.
  2. Keeps your search queries around the tagging area. Queries are valuable, because you as a user took the time to contribute that text at some point. Now you can leverage that same text when you want to tag an image.
  3. Tag your images with the proposed tags, or delete the proposed tags.

If this sounds novel and useful, it is :) Or at least, that’s what I’m trying to prove in my thesis.

Continue reading →

1459 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

User Experience

////

01

May

Re-learning the Internet in another language.

Sometime around when I was 14 years old the World Wide Web showed up. and it seems that I have been developing with it ever since. So never, ever did I expect to be as lost on the Internet as I currently am: it feels like the one domain where I should be competent. With the help of an anonymous invite donor, I signed up for grono.net, a Polish social networking site akin to Facebook or MySpace. I thought the transition would be simple enough, and within an hour or so my profile would be set up and I’d be arguing about the merits of European hip-hop in no time. Boy, was I wrong.

Continue reading →

1478 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

User Experience

///

30

Apr

How Google is advancing the state of image search

If you’re interested in the state of the art of large domain (internet) image search, then undoubtedly Google comes up over and over again.

Google Image Search, with its simple interface and reasonable results, is the de-facto consumer-grade image search engine. Offerings from competitors are actually a little more feature rich, especially the MSN Live Image Search, but don’t resonate as loudly in academia or popular usage.

As an example, compare search results for “red corvette” from the big three: Google, MSN, Yahoo. MSN nails the exploratory task: no-refresh scrolling, quick access to filters such as “photos”, “black and white”, and image size options that feel a little more usable and natural than Googles. Yahoo! attempts some categorising and support for ontologies in their interface; while not perfect, it’s a direction highly praised in cutting-edge research.

Continue reading →

1479 days ago Short URL Comments

User Experience

//

27

Mar

Defining the human context for search and retrieval.

I’m trying to wrap my head around all of the information I’m reading about image search. Search, retrieval, information, data, all of these terms are loaded, and used differently depending on whether I’m reading an HCI paper, a text analysis paper, or a blog post about search engine optimisation (SEO).

In hopes of simplifying things, I’ve settled on a human-centred, conceptual definition of search:

Search refers to the process of a user developing a need, defining a query, retrieving information, viewing result(s), providing feedback, and refinements of those steps.

The end result does not have to be finding a single result. Occasionally, other steps in the search process, such as seeing a result set, can satisfy the users need. For example, if the need was to gain information (“What does a ’87 Oldsmobile Toronado FE3 look like?”) rather than find a specific image (“I need a picture of a black ’84 Cutty!”), viewing the result set may be enough.

Figure 1 is an illustrates the definition of search, in the human and interface context.

Continue reading →

1513 days ago Short URL Comments

User Experience

/

Proudly powered by WordPress
Theme: Esquire by Matthew Buchanan.

Switch to our mobile site