Jason Hong's Confabulations

Good introduction to running a user study Discussion of guidelines for user observation From User Observation: Guidelines for Apple Developers, by Kathleen Gomoll & Anne Nicol, January 1990 User testing covers a wide range of activities designed to obtain information on the interactions between users and computers. Most user testing requires considerable expertise in research methods, as well as skill in using complex data collection tools. For example, user testing techniques include: interviews, focus groups, surveys, timed performance tests, keystroke protocols, and controlled laboratory experiments. Of the many user testing techniques available, user observation is one technique that can be used by anyone with a concern for including the user in the product development process. User observation involves watching and listening carefully to users as they work with a product. Although it is possible to collect far more elaborate data, observing users is a quick way to obtain an ob...

http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/automator.html Introducing Automator, an innovative application that helps you streamline challenging repetitive manual tasks without programming. It works like a robot inside your computer.

Joe Konstan from University of Minnesota is interviewed on ACM Ubiquity about Recommender Systems, Collaboration, and Social Good. http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/interviews/v6i10_konstan.html Joe on recommender systems: We have, and this is work that dates back to '99 or so, studied explaining to users what the system was doing as a way of helping them understand whether they should trust the computer systems' recommendations and we found that most of the explanations that were intuitively appealing to a computer scientist, things that got into the statistics and the processing, completely turned off ordinary people. At the same time, really simple three point charts or analogies were much more compelling to the average user. Joe on research recommenders: I've got a student who's working with a couple of other people that built a prototype of a research paper recommender. You can tell it which papers you've already read and it will recommend papers that you should read...

http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/business_news/41632.html Symantec's report released this week reveals businesses suffered an average of 13.6 attacks per day overall in the second half of last year, up from 10.6 daily attacks in the first six months of the year. During that period there were 1,403 new vulnerabilities discovered, marking a 13 percent increase from the previous six months. ... [P]hishing, with a 366 percent increase over the six months ending Dec. 31 compared to the six months preceding, is among the fastest growing threats. Symantec expects that phishing will continue to be a very serious concern over the next year. ... Jupiter Research retail analyst Patti Freeman Evans told the E-Commerce Times that phishing is still a relatively small-scale threat today, but if online retailers don't take steps to stop it then it could become a huge problem for e-commerce.

http://nytimes.com/2005/03/19/technology/19wifi.html In 2003, the Secret Service office in Newark began an investigation that infiltrated the Web sites and computer networks of suspected professional data thieves. Since October, more than 30 people around the world have been arrested in connection with the operation and accused of trafficking in hundreds of thousands of stolen credit card numbers online. Of those suspects, half regularly used the open Wi-Fi connections of unsuspecting neighbors. Four suspects, in Canada, California and Florida, were logged in to neighbors' Wi-Fi networks at the moment law enforcement agents, having tracked them by other means, entered their homes and arrested them, Secret Service agents involved in the case said. More than 10 million homes in the United States now have a Wi-Fi base station providing a wireless Internet connection, according to ABI, a technology research firm in Oyster Bay, N.Y. There were essentially none as recently as 2000, the f...

http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3749354 How does innovation happen? The familiar story involves boffins in academic institutes and R&D labs. But lately, corporate practice has begun to challenge this old-fashioned notion. Open-source software development is already well-known. Less so is the fact that Bell, an American bicycle-helmet maker, has collected hundreds of ideas for new products from its customers, and is putting several of them into production. Or that Electronic Arts (EA), a maker of computer games, ships programming tools to its customers, posts their modifications online and works their creations into new games. And so on. Not only is the customer king: now he is market-research head, R&D chief and product-development manager, too. ... BMW's efforts to harness the creativity of its customers began two years ago, says Joerg Reimann, the firm's head of marketing innovation management, when it posted a toolkit on its website. Thi...

http://www.wordlock.com/ Not directly related to hcisec, but a very interesting idea with a good insight. I wonder how secure it is in practice, since it seems easier to guess a word than to try all numbers. ---- "On March 10 at the NASDAQ Market site in New York City, Staples held its Invention Quest™ final judging event. The winner is the WordLock™ -- a combination lock which uses easy-to-remember words instead of numbers." Step 1: Start with your list of words based on your theme. List can be any 4 and 5 letter words. Step 2: Unforgettable. Software program takes list of words as input. Creates list of final wheels with 10 letters per wheel. Maximizes number of word combinations. Step 3: Ready to manufacture

Contest for this year is out. http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/UIST05contest/ This year we chose the manipulation of objects in 3D scenes as the subject of the contest. We will make sample scenes, tasks and a required output log format available in early spring. In a live on-stage competition at the conference new scenes will be given to participants who will then compete to complete the tasks in minimum time with maximum accuracy. Audience preferences will also be taken into consideration. All the materials and quantitative data will be saved in a repository.

NYTimes has an article about some of the impacts of phishing on EBay, and how EBay is fighting back . "At first those e-mails were a joke with the misspellings and mistakes," said Mr. Alofs about the phishes he received a couple of years ago, when the practice was relatively new. "Now with the copyright statements and the logos, they look so real. I don't know how you'll ever tell them apart." For eBay, phishers are more than just an expensive irritation. EBay is among the five companies most frequently targeted by phishers, according to David Jevans, chairman of the Anti-Phishing Working Group, an industry association that includes eBay. Like phishers who go after customers of credit card issuers, those who target eBay users sometimes try to capture credit card numbers as well as general personal information. ... "EBay is purely virtual," Mr. Jevans said. "They live or die by e-mail." ... EBay is reluctant to discuss its security measu...

NSF has a handy search engine for showing the list of recent NSF CAREER award recipients. Here are the results for the Division of Intelligent & Information systems (IIS) , and here are the results specifically for human-computer interaction .

http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1047671.1047688 David Patterson, Berkeley professor and ACM's current president, has just written this two-page manifesto called SPUR (which, probably coincidentally, is a name of one of his previous projects). ... What we didn't realize, however, was that when you connected your PC to the Web, millions of computers around the world could now access information on your computer, whether you allowed it or not. This insecure concoction leaves us open to computer crime, and potentially even to computer-assisted terrorism or war. Just as business embraced the Web five years ago, criminals are doing so now. In 2004, 1% of U.S. households were victims of successful phishing attacks. According to a recent poll, 17% of businesses received threats of being shut down by denial-of-service (DoS) attacks [2]. Indeed, one company refusing to pay extortion spends $100,000 per year to defend against DoS attacks. ... In my view, we have taken ideas from the 1970s and ...

I was invited to give a research talk at Intel's Usable Privacy form last week, over in Hillsboro, Oregon. I decided to give a rant on ubicomp and privacy . My main points: We should push client-centered ubicomp more Local sensing, local storage, local processing Better user interfaces when sharing personal info We should examine how people already manage their privacy today Better support for projecting desired personas Build plausible deniability in We need better privacy risk models Rapid prototyping tools Analysis methods Metrics for privacy We need better ways of aligning all stakeholders Figure out sustainable business models Support app developers

I was at a post-wedding party this afternoon, and was entertaining some kids with my Kyocera smartphone (ie the "geekphone" or "oh my god how big is that phone?" phone). What was really amazing was that these two kids from taiwan, around 7 and 11, just picked up playing a bunch of these games even though they could barely read any English. Through trial and error, and presumably some learned experiences with interaction design patterns, they just started figuring out how to play the various puzzle and action games I have on my phone. Simply amazing. I don't think I'd be anywhere as successful (or as absolutely fearless) playing foreign-language games.

http://www.kernelthread.com/software/ams/ This guy crafted some interesting visualizations and hacks based on a sensor built into Apple PowerBooks. Apple added a feature called Sudden Motion Sensor (SMS) to the PowerBook line in early 2005. The sensor attempts to prevent data loss by parking the heads of an active disk drive after detecting a "sudden motion", which could be due to strong vibrations or a fall. ... AMS Visualizer is a logical graphical extension of the amstracker command-line tool. It displays a 3D image of a PowerBook 15 that appears to "hang" in space. ... This example creates a window displaying a bicycle wheel. The window is "stable" in the sense that if you rotate the PowerBook left or right, the window compensates by rotating itself by an equal amount in the opposite direction in an attempt to remain in its original orientation with respect to the ground. The bicycle wheel rotates too — independently of the window. ... The "pertur...

http://www.illegal-art.org/video/wizard.html I have no idea whether this re-envisioning of Harry Potter is any good or not (the image of Harry Potter looks a little creepy), but this is a very interesting idea. Wizard People, Dear Reader is an unauthorized re-envisioning of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, by Brad Neely. To experience it, viewers need to get a copy of the first Harry Potter movie (known as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in Europe) and watch it with the sound off, replacing Neely's narration with the original soundtrack.