Jason Hong's Confabulations

Bill Buxton has a YouTube channel with some amazing videos of old sketch-based systems, it's a great resource. Thanks to Gabe Johnson for pointing me to these. http://www.youtube.com/user/wasbuxton

Larry Tesler gave a fantastic talk at CHI for his Lifetime Practice award . He presented a summary of his work in helping to develop the modern GUI, and focused specifically on modeless interactions and cut-copy-paste. It was really fascinating listening to all of the subtle issues and design challenges in something that we now take for granted. One example that really struck home was a description of how modes worked in Engelbart's NLS system . To delete a word, first you might hit "d" to put the system into delete mode. Then you might hit "w" to put it into select word mode. Then you could use the mouse to select the text you wanted. Then you would hit an accept button on the mouse to confirm the action. Compare this verb-noun approach to the noun-verb approach we use today, where we simply move the mouse to the right place, select the text (ie the noun), and then hit delete. Much simpler, less error-prone, and fewer clicks. I also liked Larry's takeaw...

1. Guaranteed performance levels, so that the system never locks the user out due to thrashing, virtual memory swapping, or cpu overload. For example, have the system always reserve (say) 10% of CPU exclusively for user interaction, so that the UI will always be responsive. 2. A "Wikipedia" like approach for collaborative user interface design, so that open source software developers can actually get real designers into the game. Make it so that it is possible to have a clean separation from back-end and front-end, and that anyone can go in and offer feedback and alternative designs. 3. Make it so that I can "patch" my own UI to fix bugs. For example, Intuit Quickbooks maps Ctrl-A to opening all accounts, instead of selecting all text like every other system out there. I still make this mistake despite using the software for almost two years. Alternatively, make it easy to send the patch to the developers, so that they can apply it and fix it in their next release.

A few weeks ago, Mark Bregman, Executive Vice President and CTO of Symantec, came by Cylab and gave a talk on Symantec's approach to customer-centric innovation . He made a nice distinction between invention (which we researchers are very good at) and innovation (getting products out into the marketplace that people really want). He also made a statement that really resonated with me. After studying how people use backup systems, Symantec took a step back and thought more about what people really needed (and not what they said they wanted). It turns out it wasn't really backup that they needed, it was reliability , and backup was just one way of offering that. I like this high-tech variant of " People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill . They want a quarter-inch hole !". I'll find some ways to incorporate this idea more into my classes.

This Saturday Morning Breakfast Club comic strip hits a bit too close to home. http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1582

A fun read about a scientific conference held in World of Warcraft about World of Warcraft. Thus began the first scientific conference held in Azeroth, the online universe inhabited by millions of people playing World of Warcraft. Anyone who has been part of a conference's organizing committee knows that some glitches and mishaps are just unavoidable. And as usual, the problems that actually did occur were unforeseen. It was a success nonetheless. By the end of the third day, a real scientific exchange took place, I married one of the conference participants, and within an hour of the wedding, we were all dead. ... With fireworks bursting and confetti still drifting all around the dancing mob of wedding guests, Catullus announced the final event: a massive attack on Sentinel Hill, an Alliance stronghold. As we surged over the hills around the unsuspecting fort, everyone yelled, "For Science!" Bainbridge had enlisted the help of Alea Iacta Est, the largest guild in Azerot...

This is an interesting article showing various visualizations of four different HCI conferences: CHI, UIST, InfoViz, and AVI. There is certainly an element of belly gazing going on here, but I also think it's interesting what kinds of conclusions can be drawn from the different visualizations. http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a789632485~db=all~order=page The authors also present some strategies for producing key publications: Have the right idea at the right time Collaborate with other senior researchers Supervise a good number of (good) students Publish in the right conferences

This is a digital online book that demonstrates a variety of user interactions. It's really beautiful and well done. http://www.rubenswieringa.com/code/as3/flex/Book/

In his book A Deepness in the Sky , sci-fi author Vernor Vinge describes the profession of Programmer Archaeologists . The basic idea was that in the far future, pretty much every piece of software you could imagine has already been created. So, rather than creating new software, the job of the Programmer Archaeologist would be to search for software close to what you wanted, and then adapt that software for your particular needs. There is a forthcoming paper at UIST2007 (User Interface Software and Technology)that takes us a step closer to this world. Entitled Assieme: Finding and Leveraging Implicit References in a Web Search Interface for Programmers (PDF) , it describes a search engine that provides not only documentation of APIs, but also finds snippets of examples. A nice idea, and well-executed.

"Death by PowerPoint" is a phrase the military likes to use to describe those presentations that cause your eyes to dry out and the drool to start coming out of your mouth. Being a tech-oriented HCI person, I figured we could actually develop heuristics, and possibly even a tool, to help address this problem. Here's my list of heuristics that, all of which I think could be built as a plug-in for PowerPoint: Fonts too small (try to stick to at least 24 points) Too many animations Too many sub-bullets Too much text on the slide Unreadable color combinations Too many lines in a bullet Too many fonts on the slide Ugly fonts

Alon Halevy is a former professor of computer science at University of Washington, now at Google. This latest entry from his blog on databases and HCI struck me as interesting for two reasons: It is tempting to push these problems [of how users work with structured data and their information seeking needs - JIH] to the HCI community, but I would argue this is a mistake. These problems will not be high enough on the agenda of the HCI community (there, if your device doesn’t move or perform magic, it’s uninteresting), whereas for us they are crucial for identifying good research directions and evaluating them. As a community, we need to find a way to encourage research on usability and to learn from the HCI community how to evaluate such research. We need to bring this agenda squarely into our conferences. The first interesting point is that he sees HCI primarily as being interested in wickedly cool devices. This isn't too far off the mark, unfortunately so in my opinion. The secon...

Our paper entitled CANTINA: A Content-Based Approach to Detecting Phishing Web Sites was presented at WWW2007. Phishing is a significant problem involving fraudulent email and web sites that trick unsuspecting users into revealing private information. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of CANTINA, a novel, content-based approach to detecting phishing web sites, based on the TF-IDF information retrieval algorithm. We also discuss the design and evaluation of several heuristics we developed to reduce false positives. Our experiments show that CANTINA is good at detecting phishing sites, correctly labeling approximately 95% of phishing sites. Paper: PDF Presentation: PPT

While at CHI2007 this past week, I got into a discussion with some old friends about how difficult it was to program Java on mobile phones. In fact, some students working with me have decided to switch from J2ME to FlashLite , because it was faster to do prototypes and because the GUI looked so much better. I can't help but wonder if Java is making the same mistake it did with desktop GUIs and web browsers. It's hard for me to name compelling Java applets that run in the browser (perhaps the best one I know of is GoProblems ). The fundamental problem with Java is that it makes it hard to create attractive GUIs. It just doesn't make easy things easy. Unless J2ME developers get their act together, my prediction is that J2ME will fail on mobiles too.

I just saw this great talk by Michael Shamos detailing an investigation (that he was part of) into 18000 undervotes in the 2006 election in Florida . Although I couldn't stay for the whole talk, it looks like there were fairly substantial HCI problems, in terms of the ballot design. When Shamos showed the actual ballot screen in question, I actually didn't see that there were two separate races being shown. The race at the top of the screen was the one that had the huge number of undervotes, but was visually overshadowed by the second race, which had a larger header and had more people running. Of course, the button to go to the next screen is right under the second race, so I could see how people could have easily missed the race that is currently in dispute. It strikes me that we really need a single ballot design, one that can be massively user tested to ensure usability and understandability. A key problem, though, is that ballots and voting machines are done on a local ba...

Jefferson Han, the person whose work on interactive touchscreens has been all over YouTube and featured at the TED conference , has founded a startup to commercialize his technologies. I think it's interesting that large interactive screens have been around for quite a while. For example, Stanford's iRoom , Fraunhofer IPSI's iLand , the old Liveworks (that commercialized the LiveBoard), Smart Technologies (that sells SmartBoards), and MERL's DiamondTouch , just to name a few. I remember being the session chair for Jefferson when he presented at UIST 2005 , and thinking that there were two key differences. The first is that the technology is cheaper than anything else out there. Ridiculously cheaper by an order of magnitude. Most large interactive displays cost thousands of dollars, whereas Jefferson's work only required a cheap sheet of plexiglass, a projector, and a camera. It's cheap enough that I've been trying to encourage students in my classes to bui...

From an ACM Queue article written by John Canny entitled The Future of HCI . (Disclosure: John was two offices down from me at Berkeley :) ) In spite of their unfamiliar content and methods, HCI courses are strongly in demand in university programs and should be part of the core curriculum. At a recent industry advisory board meeting for U.C. Berkeley's computer science division, HCI was unanimously cited as the most important priority for future research and teaching by our industry experts.

I've been chatting with many of my friends and colleagues about an issue that's been bugging me for a while, namely whether academic research has any role to play in the emerging Web 2.0 . I've been slowly coming to the conclusion that the answer is not much. I had a similar discussion with other researchers at HotMobile a few weeks ago. When the web first came out, pretty much every systems researcher ignored it because it was so ugly. The web was not very sophisticated in terms of distributed systems, HTTP lacked elegance, HTML conflated many different ideas, and so on. There were also not any really new ideas with the web, as evidenced by the fact that Tim Berners-Lee 's first paper on the Web was (probably rightfully) rejected from an ACM conference on hypertext. I'm sure one thing that really irked researchers about the nascent web was that it completely ignored the large body of work in hypertext and distributed systems that had preceded it. Even in 1997, as ...

A huge collection of different kinds of infoviz maps. Very cool, some of them look like Jackson Pollock created them. http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

HCII 12th Anniversary Celebration Thursday, April 20, 2006 Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Carnegie Mellon has been at the forefront of human computer interaction research since the field's inception. The early book by CMU professor Allen Newell and CMU alumni Stu Card and Tom Moran coined the field’s name in the early 1980s. We created the first Human-Computer Interaction Institute in 1994. Help us celebrate 12 years of HCI Institute progress by attending a one-day seminar with distinguished speakers from the HCI community followed by the 50th Anniversary of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon! You are welcome to join all events, including the Spring Carnival festivities! Link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blind Very interesting, I would never have thought of it this way. I wonder if there are ways of building information visualization tools along these lines too. Color blindness is usually classed as a disability; however, in select situations color blind people have advantages over people with normal color vision. Color blind hunters are better at picking out prey against a confusing background, and the military have found that color blind soldiers can sometimes see through camouflage that fools everyone else. Monochromats may have a minor advantage in dark vision, but only in the first five minutes of dark adaptation. ... The United States Military has found that color blind individuals can be more easily trained as snipers due to the fact that they are more acutely aware of differences in texture and pattern and thereby less likely to be fooled by camouflage patterns.