I attended the VISSW 2011 workshop last sunday. It was fun, but a few of the papers exhibited a painfully familiar pattern: they put together a plausible-seeming user interface but didn’t evaluate it with a user study. I left frustrated, with no sense of whether the ideas of the interfaces would be good or bad [...]
I just finished submitting my reviews for WWW and, as has happened several times before, not one of the papers I reviewed had even a remote chance of acceptance. Nonetheless, each such paper got three reviewers carefully writing down the (same) reasons why it wouldn’t get in. I wrote in a post last year about [...]
A couple of days ago Adam Pash at Lifehacker posted a criticism of “everything buckets”—applications aimed at gathering every kind of information you work with into a single place. I can’t resist responding as the article touches on some of the issues that have framed my past 15 years of research into information management. It [...]
Seeing the Future by Mining the Past: The Exact Average UIST Paper by Bernstein, M.S., with the largest contributions from eigenauthors Hudson, S., Balakrishnan, R., Myers. B.A., Feiner, S., Hinckley, K., Rekimoto, J., et al. History repeats itself: computer science research continuously reinvents past work. Thus, to predict the future of UIST, we trained an n-gram [...]
When someone describes a person as a “messy” or “tidy”, we can instantly guess something about their appearance, their personality, and the way they organize their physical and digital artifacts – around the house, office, or on their computer(s). There is little disagreement around these definitions, and many stereotypes (both positive and negative) are commonly [...]
I call it “Regression to the LOLCat”: when our friends and followers on Facebook are split across high school, college, sports teams, and professional life, it’s tough to find content to post that will satisfy them all. We either develop niches (like posting professional items on Twitter and personal items on Facebook), or post content [...]
While Situational Awareness (SA) theory [1] has primarily been applied to analyzing how people act in highly time-critical military and industrial roles, such as how fighter pilots assess their aerial and tactical situations to decide what maneuvers to make, it may also serve as a useful theoretical model to inform the design of future personal [...]
I argued a few weeks ago that Facebook’s Like button got the incentives and multiplicities wrong, leading to a social experience that feels very isolating. There are simply too many sites for us to Like, and too few of my friends doing the Liking. Well, let’s adjust those incentives. I’d like to introduce you to [...]
My last few posts have discussed structured data for end users. Given the glaringly obvious (at least to me) benefits of structured data, there must be some barrier in place that is preventing its pervasive use by end-users. Identifying the barrier is the crucial first step to breaking through it. I’ve argued that the (technical) [...]
In a post last week I argued that the key to making structured data pervasive on the web was tools that make it easy for people to create interesting data visualizations that share their data by default, without adding effort. This prompted a pair of responses that I’d like to address here. One, from Glen [...]