UID Teatime Blog

Being the last person on the planet who is not an avid Harry Potter fan (hey, I like the boy wizard well enough –!) I’m probably the worst person to write about this but –

J.K. Rowling has built an impressive personal web site to satisfy everyone’s deathly hallows withdrawal.   It is part news blog, part wizard encyclopedia, and part graphical adventure game; the site is stocked with mysterious elements which draw the curiosity but do not divulge their contents to the casual passer-by — cell phones that dial, locked ID cards and numerous light switches, dials and portals to destinations that could only remind me of my first experiences with Myst.  I have not managed to figure out any of the riddles or codes to unlock the contents hidden therein, but assume that they are there for the most studious of Hogwarts pupils.

The interesting thing about the site (pertaining to UIs) is that Ms. Rowling has carefully designed multiple versions of the site for accessibility reasons.   In addition to her main Flash site, which has stereo sounds of spooky owls hooting and wind blowing, she has an sighted-only site which textually describes the audio being played at every moment.  This accesible version also supports text enlargment and motion reduction. But in addition to these features, she has a completely separate,  text-only version of the sit

With the jury still out on Flash’s accessibility features, we commend Ms. Rowling for her dedication to reaching out to all her fans.

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It takes the right tool for the job.  If the Giant Knife turns out to be the tool for your job, we in the UID group really don’t know what kind of line of work you are involved in.  Nor are we sure we really want to know.

This 85-tool knife apparently contains every tool the company makes.  But you are unlikely to be able to fit this in your pocket unless you are a kangaroo or wear giant overalls - it measures 8.5″ wide and a little over 2 pounds 11 ounces.  Read about it here.

This knife immediately prompted a discussion among the UI research nerds in our group about similar uber tools for HCI researchers, software engineers, social scientists and usability engineers.  If you had to design the ultimate weapon for our professions what would it contain?

Uncategorized swiss army, uber tools

If a new article posted to Digg gets 1000 digs in its first hour, is it going to be the next Big Thing? Or will it be another dud, cast to the vast piles of forgotten memes?

G. Szabo and B. Huberman of HP’s Social Computing lab sought the answer to this question in “Predicting the popularity of online content“. For their analysis, Szabo and Huberman tracked the popularity of 7,146 videos posted to Youtube and 1.3 million links submitted to Digg over the course of 30 days (for youtube) and six months (for digg).

Based on their analysis, Szabo and Huberman note several interesting trends.  The core finding of the paper surrounds confirming, relatively unsurprisingly, a positive correlation between the number of votes a post receives within its first few hours (digg)/days (youtube) and the number of votes it ultimately receives during its lifetime.  What is slightly less intuitive is that the significance of the (linear) correlation is significantly higher when the votes are log-transformed — that is, when the log of the number of votes a video or link receives in its first hours are compared to the log of votes it ultimately receives.  (We guessed that this might be explained by the same causes that drive the Zipf power-law effects seen in web site visitation patterns). This observation drives the authors to build 3 linear estimators using log-transformed votes for extrapolating an item’s popularity based on its initial popularity, and to analyze the average-case performance of each on a held-out test set.

Although the majority of the paper explains itself clearly, the results section becomes thick in statistical detail and is difficult to interpret.  By my interpretation, one of the models outperforms the others, but depending on what you’re trying to do, its performance may not be good enough.  If your goal is to determine whether a link or video is going to be hot (within a certain confidence interval) you might be in luck; using these models might help.  But, if you want to compare relative likelihood that one article will ultimately surpass another (e.g., rankings) the loose error bounds (and “multiplicative error”) suggest you’d better wait a little longer.

While discussing the main point, the paper also outlines a number of simpler but similarly interesting statistics: Digg articles typically “saturate” in popularity very quickly — typically within 5-10 hours (up to a day), while Youtube videos tend to continue to grow in popularity over weeks.  A different observation surrounds how the amount of participation on these sites fluctuates cyclicly by hour of the day and day of week - with activity decreasing in evenings and week-ends.  The authors come up with a clever technique to cancel out these cycles from their predictions by re-defining time as “the interval of time required for the all articles collectively to accrue a certain number of votes”.

During our tea discussion, we arrived at a number of questions the authors outline as future work: why does the popularity of articles exhibit this behavior? How much of this is determined by the popularity versus the items themselves? Asked another way, if one (hypothetically) artificially inflates the number of initial votes on a particular item chosen at random, how much will its ultimate popularity be affected by this initial inflation? Finally, what if we added content features to our predictors, could they fare better?

Since it’s hard to predict the answers to these questions, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see….

Uncategorized online media, prediction, social filtering

Multi-touch computing stand aside, behold: multi-cocktail interfaces!  The clever people at Microsoft’s Applied Sciences group devised a cute hack to let their Surface table detect how full your beverage is using a simple principle of optical refraction: the presence of a liquid (such as water or your martini) changes the amount light bends as it passes through your glass into the surrounding air.   To take advantage of this change of index of refraction, the researchers built special cocktail glasses with slightly peculiar conical protrusions inside that offer the proper angles to allow infrared light from the Surface’s IR camera to be reflected back at the camera proportionally to the amount of drink you have left to enjoy. (We noted that by taking up volume in your glass, this conical protrusions offer the additional “benefit” of making your drink look fuller than it actually is –)

We won’t comment on possible long term uses of such technology, but the video mentions using it to inform waitstaff of more opportune times to come offer you another drink.  We just hope the “wait staff” comes in the shape of an anthropomorphized office contrivance that appears out of nowhere and asks  “It looks like you’re getting tipsy. Want some help?”

(We were also impressed by the virtual bubbles that flow around your glass that you can play with and pop, rivaling the unparalled gratification of popping virtual bubble wrap.)

(Full video on youtube.)

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Many thanks to Karger for linking us the Matrix on Windows XP video. Now while this is only a parody, I can’t help but think of another hopeless movie UI, namely that of the “UNIX System” seen in Jurassic Park. When animation is combined with some amount of modality, users must wait for the animation to complete before they can make it go away or proceed with the task at hand, giving the raptors more time to break in. Only lucky no one was hurt in this case.

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1. New York Times Reader

www.nytimes.com is building a news reader in Adobe AIR whose purpose is to bring readers digital content in an aesthetic as close to a newspaper as possible - “the way it was meant to be.”  The product isn’t released yet, but NYT does seem to have a Windows Vista based reader for download that may have been intended to serve a similar goal.  I’ll wait for the AIR version thank you very much.

What does the Times want in terms of readability that they can’t deliver properly in HTML and JavaScript?  They want their own font and they want a column-based layout with columns wrapping around images AND they want the interface to survive resizing the window to any size - including a mobile device size.  Text has to re-hyphen itself automatically, the layout must recalculate the number and width of columns and reposition and resize images appropriately.

My personal opinion is that the layout was incredibly attractive.  Even better than a newspaper.  Hopefully they’ll have demo soon so you can see for yourself.

2. Adobe Flex Catalyst (code name “Thermo”)

This project was announced at Max 2007 one year ago and is now in quazi-Alpha.  It’s a platform for developing Flex/AIR applications geared towards supporting a work flow that better integrates designer contributions and developer contributions.  Most importantly, it allows designers to create interactive components for which code is automatically generated.

The interface for designers is basically Photoshop on even more crack than it already was.  For example.  The designer can just draw a line and a shape somewhere near that line, select it all, right click and pick “make this a slider” and presto! they’re made a custom slider without writing code. Same with buttons and text areas and other widgets that have a graphic design and interactive design element

I get the impression that there is a huge overhead in learning the system, but apparantly, that’s okay because designers go to school to learn every last feature in Photoshop.  I don’t know how Photoshop/Catalyst developers treat discoverability, but I would be keen to know.  Anyway, here’s the obligatory video link.  Although I was underwhelmed by it.

Side notes:  I accidentally heard a talk by a guy named Peter Marx, who some members of the audience had confused with God.  Apparently he was the creator of involved in World of Warcraft (he was CTO for Vivendi Games).  He also had a big hand in witnessed the release of Ultima Online while he was at EA.  (Clarification thanks to Peter, see his comment.)  Personally, I would have been more impressed if he’d said he invented Free Cell.  Anyways, he was talking about virtual worlds.  He said that publishers strive to make their games usable and discoverable because if they don’t the volume of calls they get on customer support lines will drive them out of business.

He said that the two biggest factors in the enjoyment of games is

1. representation of people, aka avatars (I guess he read Snowcrash)

2. representation of places - football stadia, the streets of new york, whatever.

Particularly he pointed out that the yellow “line of scrimage” on televised football actually came out of video games like Madden.  He also said that games like Madden have better visual representation that actual game TV broadcasts. That’s probably true, and kind of scary - virtual worlds are competitive with the real world.

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Tea Today was full of reports from the CSCW conference and the OMC meetings from last week, both of which touched on the use of cell phones for gathering information.

At CSCW, The Georgia Institute of Technology presented a system called EatWell. EatWell provides a shared diary of experiences that people can use to report, or listen to reports about, different places to eat or buy food in a community. Since the system was intended to be usable by low-income communities, it uses a voice interface that can be used by any phone.

At OMC, a number of systems were presented leveraging the availability of mobile devices to gather information in infrastructure-poor areas. Ushahidi allows individuals to report information in crisises using SMS messages. The pilot was used to track post-election violence in Kenya earlier this year.

Gathering information using calls and text messages on mobile phones presents interesting usability challenges. Voice messages can provide large quantities of data, but in largely unstructured ways that are difficult to scale. It seems implausible that EatWell could be scaled to serve hundreds or thousands of messages in a usable way.

Satisfaction and community seems to be one of the real victories of systems like EatWell. Many of the participants in the study said that they enjoyed sharing the information together.

Text messages present their own difficulties for usability. One difficulty is simply the encoding of data. Some systems, like Unicef’s RapidSMS, rely largely on the encoding of messages at the user-level. This can potentially allow systems to scale, but causes a dillema for improperly formatted messages.

The group proposed crowd-sourcing and AI algorithms to help remedy these difficulties, seeing as the cost of a three SMS POST-ERROR-REPOST interaction can begin to cause problems for users of a system designed to be used in developing nations.

What other novel ways could already existing, but poorly structured, data channels in our infrastructure be leveraged in interesting ways?

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Facebook didn’t make a public announcement about it, but they actually preempted Google’s flu tracking and with stronger results.  Instead of using search keywork terms, they used wall posts and status updates akin to “i am soooooo sick,”  to indicate flu infection.  This is just hearsay from a Facebook employee, but he told me that they found the correlation but didn’t know what to do with it, hence no PR around it.

Another Facebook curiosity is facebook.com/lexicon - it plots words’ and phrases’ appearances on wall posts and status updates.  It also uses Adobe Flex.

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Hooray!  Today is World Usability Day!  According to the World Usability Day website, “World Usability Day was founded to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use.  Each year, it has a specific focus and is honored around the world on the second Thursday of the month of November.”

It’s a great chance to direct our attention toward usability in general.  Often we find ourselves so comfortable in day-to-day activities that we don’t notice when something is difficult to use.  We only think about usability when we encounter something contrary to our expectations - like doors that open the “wrong” way.  The Museum of Science in Boston is hosting some events planned for the celebration, as are many other places around the world.

Uncategorized tea, world usability day

Google Flu Trends uses Google’s query logs to detect breakouts of the flu in the United States, sooner than the Centers for Disease Control can.  Apparently flu-related search queries (like “flu symptoms”) are strongly correlated with actual flu rates, and the spike in search queries can be detected quicker than the spike in doctor visits (which is the data that the CDC relies on).  The New York Times has a good graphic comparing CDC data against Google’s data for the last few years — including a surprising spike back in October 2003 when 8% of doctor visits were flu-related.  Presumably because the vaccine didn’t cover the right set of viruses that year.

Google may not know everything, but they sure know a lot.  This may also be cited as an example of “collective intelligence” — the masses (in this case unwittingly) knowing something that’s costly for an institution to learn, and demonstrating what they know by their collective behavior.  The Times article ends with a nice quote from Tom Malone.

Sadly, the y axis of the graph in Flu Trends is unlabeled.  What are these data points?  Queries per day?  Are incidence rates in Florida comparable with incidence rates in Massachusetts?  If I want to move to a less flu-ridden climate, where should I go? It’s not obvious from the UI.

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