User Experience and Windows 8, link to Steven Sinofsky's post.

Steven Sinofsky is an author of an informative MSDN blog. His recent post about user experience and the new Windows 8 operating system provides an interesting, detailed "back-history" of the development of the Windows UI over the ages. Steven's post is worth setting aside a chunk of time to read and reflect!

Creating the Window 8 User Experience

 

BTW, the numerous comments from readers of Steven's post are worth skimming.

Quick Post: Link to a UX Gold Mine - Official Usability, User Experience, and User Interface Guidelines from Companies

Take a look at a a Usability Geek blog that is a repository of guidelines from an assortment of well-known corporations. I'm bookmarking the page for reference!


Official Usability, User Experience, and User Interface Guidelines From Companies
Justin Mifsud, Usability Geek, 9/19/11


RELATED
Usability ABC


Thanks to Ben Ullman for the link!

Revisiting Good Blogs: User Interface Engineering (Albrecht Schmidt, University of Stuttgart)

Albrecht Schmidt is a professor at the University of Stuttgart. His main interests include novel user interfaces and innovative applications for ubiquitous computing. His blog, Albrecht Schmidt - User Interface Engineering, serves as his note-pad, full of ideas, deep musings, and great links, including links to good scholarly papers. Below are a few of his posts:

Guests in my multimodal interaction class   
I'd love to take Dr. Schmidt's Multimodal Interaction class!  In this post, Albrecht highlights the presentations of  Nigel Davies, Marc Langheirich, and Rui Jose,  all members of the pd-net project.

Call for Papers:  Symposium on Pervasive Display Networks

Closing Keynote at AMI2011:  Beyond Ubicomp - Computing is Changing the Way we Live
(Pdf version - worth taking a look!)


Percom 2011 in Seatle, keynote


RELATED
PD-NET
"The PD-NET project aims to lay the scientific foundations for a new form of communications medium with the same potential impact on society as radio, television and the Internet. The goal is to explore the scientific challenges and to assess the new technologies required to enable the emergence of large scale networks of pervasive public displays and associated sensors. This display network will be designed and implemented to be open to applications and content from many sources and thus provide the foundation for work on a new global communications medium for information access and interaction." 


Note:  One of my interest is public displays in public spaces.  If you are interested, take a look at my Flicker collection, Ubiquitous Sightings of Urban Screens: Interactive Displays, Kiosks, and Digital Signage.

A few links: GizmoWatch's 10 Interactive User Interfaces for the Future, CNN's Eatocracy, EVA 2010 and More!

Here's a quick link to a recent Gizmowatch post, Ten Interactive User Interfaces for the Future.  Bharat, the authro, reviews a variety of interfaces, input methods, and interaction techniques, such as Skinput, a water-based touch screen, a muscle-computer interface, air gestures, brain-computer systems, and even a mud-tub interface.


I was fortunate to see some of these interaction techniques and interfaces when I attended CHI 2010 this past April, and plan to share some of my photos and video clips from the conference on this blog soon.


Totally Unrelated


Online connection for foodies
Eatocracy is a new website within the CNN pages that provides news- and more- about all things related to food. The categories on the site include "main", "news", "bite", "sip", "make", "think", and "buzz".  The best part, in my opinion, is the heirloom recipe collection index, where people can upload and share family recipies and the stories behind them.

Here is the description of Eatocracy from the website:

Eatocracy  "is your online home for smart, passionate conversation and information about food news, politics, culture. We'll highlight regional and family recipes, dive into restaurants and food shopping, chat with celebrity and local chefs, and show you what's for dinner around the world tonight. Grab a place at the table and read with your mouth full."

Enjoy!

(The above is a repost from The World is My Interactive Interface)

Coming Soon

--More about 3D TV and Interactive TV

--Highlights from CHI 2010 (better late than never!)

--My experiments- SMARTTable, a game, interactive timeline prototype pictures...

--A post about Lieven van Velthoven's interesting Post-WIMP explorations - here are some links that he recently sent me:

• 3D birthday invitation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOP5aIoS9o
• Virtual overgrowth in the real world: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuJPoUpBIKU
• Make race tracks for virtual cars with any real stuff you can find: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1K3og8qLcA
• Smoke Pong: Pong, ONLY for smokers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwrsVo5p2_E
• Webcam Airmouse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57kTrKJHOjM 
• MusicalNodes: the visual music library: www.musicalnodes.com, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czQdhfA__UY (will be published at EVA2010)

As I took a peek at Lieven's video links, I noticed an interesting video mash-up Lieven created from the open-source code from the RadioHead's House of Cards music video and his One Million Particles app. I'll post them soon.

I'll try to get video, pictures, and commentary about EVA 2010.  EVA stands for Electronic Visualization and the Arts. "Electronic Information, the Visual Arts, and Beyond.

FYI

I'm in the process of sorting through and re-organizing my blogs, which have been around for over four years!  During this time, my blogs have attracted a growing number of readers. Because of this, I'd like to make things a bit user-centered.  So expect to see little changes here and there.  I promise I'll give my readers warnings in advance if I make any serious changes! 

If you are new to this blog, you should know that my blogs started out as on-line filing cabinets, open to the world.  Although there is a bit of overlap of material and some cross-posting between the blogs, they are arranged to serve as a paper-less way of keeping track of things that I've learned through my coursework, conference attendance, readings, and research. Since emerging technologies are high on my list of interests, I also use my blogs to share interesting things that cross my path.    

  

I changed the name of my World Is My Interface blog to The World Is My Interactive Interface.   "Off-the-desktop natural user interfaces, interaction, and user experience" are the main topics of the blog.  It sometimes includes information about ubiquitous computing and DOOH, otherwise known as Digital Out Of Home.

I plan to tinker with my TechPsych blog later on. It focuses on topics that are useful to psychologists, educators, special education teachers, speech and language therapists, health and wellness professionals, and parents.

Feel free to leave comments, as I welcome your input.

Ubice = Multi-touch On Ice at the Nokia Research Center in Finland (Video + Pic via Albrecht Schmidt)

Albrecht Schmidt posted a link to the following video on his User Interface Engineering blog -
watch how the multi-touch surface is built from ice blocks:



The following pictures are from Albrecht Schmidt's User Interface Engineering blog:


What a great idea for a "Winterfest"!    They should take it to the next level:  Multi-touch ice sculpture.


(Cross-posted on The World Is My Interface blog.)

Adam Greenfield's Encounter with Fashionable Urban Screens

Curious?  I posted about it on The World Is My Interface blog, along with links to Adam's blog post and related information:

Adam Greenfield's Encounter with Fashionable Urban Screens: "jnd: An emergent vocabulary of form for urban screens"

Albrecht Schmidt's User Interface Engineering Blog: Great Links, References, and Resources

I really like Albrecht Schmidt's User Interface Engineering blog.

Albrecht Schmidt is a professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen who focuses his research on "novel user interfaces and innovative applications enabled by ubiquitous computing." Dr. Schmidt previously headed something called the "Embedded Interaction Research Group" at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich.

Albrecht Schmidt will be working in collaboration with Chris Kray's group at the Culture Lab at Newcastle University in the UK. The work will focus on creating and building interactive appliances. He also mentioned the work of Jayne Wallace, one of the researchers at the Culture Lab, who creates digital jewelry.

The best thing about Albrecht's recent post was his short list of references:

[1] Wallace, J. and Press, M. (2004) All this useless beauty The Design Journal Volume 7 Issue 2 (PDF)

[2] Jayne Wallace. Journeys. Intergeneration Project.

[3] Kern, D., Harding, M., Storz, O., Davis, N., and Schmidt, A. 2008. Shaping how advertisers see me: user views on implicit and explicit profile capture. In CHI '08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008). CHI '08. ACM, New York, NY, 3363-3368. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1358628.1358858

Another recent post that I like was "Teaching, Technical Training Day at the EPO". The following topics were covered during a training event at the European Patent Office in Munich, Germany:

• Merging the physical and digital (e.g. sentient computing and dual reality [1])
  
• Interlinking the real world and the virtual world (e.g. Internet of things)
  
• Interacting with your body (e.g. implants for interaction, brain computer interaction, eye gaze interaction)
  
• Interaction beyond the desktop, in particular sensor based UIs, touch interaction, haptics, and Interactive surfaces
  
• Device authentication with focus on spontaneity and ubicomp environments
  
• User authentication focus on authentication in the public
  
• Location-Awareness and Location Privacy

I liked the references that Dr. Schmidt posted, given my growing interest in topics related to interactive wireless sensor networks:

[1] Lifton, J., Feldmeier, M., Ono, Y., Lewis, C., and Paradiso, J. A. 2007. A platform for ubiquitous sensor deployment in occupational and domestic environments In Proceedings of the 6th Conference on international information Processing in Sensor Networks (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, April 25 - 27, 2007). IPSN '07. ACM, New York, NY, 119-127. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1236360.1236377

[2] Naohiko Kohtake, et al. u-Texture: Self-organizable Universal Panels for Creating Smart Surroundings. The 7th Int. Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp2005), pp.19-38, Tokyo, September, 2005. http://www.ht.sfc.keio.ac.jp/u-texture/paper.html

[3] Schwesig, C., Poupyrev, I., and Mori, E. 2004. Gummi: a bendable computer. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vienna, Austria, April 24 - 29, 2004). CHI '04. ACM, New York, NY, 263-270. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/985692.985726

[4] Wigdor, D., Forlines, C., Baudisch, P., Barnwell, J., and Shen, C. 2007. Lucid touch: a seethrough mobile device. InProceedings of the 20th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (Newport, Rhode Island, USA, October 07 - 10, 2007). UIST '07. ACM, New York, NY, 269-278. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1294211.1294259

[5] Campbell, A. T., Eisenman, S. B., Lane, N. D., Miluzzo, E., Peterson, R. A., Lu, H., Zheng, X., Musolesi, M., Fodor, K., and Ahn, G. 2008. The Rise of People-Centric Sensing. IEEE Internet Computing 12, 4 (Jul. 2008), 12-21. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MIC.2008.90

If you take a peek at the Culture Lab website, be sure to look at the Ambient Kitchen, designed to support older people with memory difficulties:

The Ambient Kitchen probably be a great way to help busy families get meals on the table, too!

Also look at Jayne Wallace's digital jewelry website The following pictures are of a neckpiece that triggers digital visits of silent film sequences on digital displays in its vicinity:

Some of Jayne's digital jewelry was created in response to "physical, clinical, social, and emotional dynamics of memory loss".

I hope you enjoy exploring Albrecht Schmidt's User Interface Engineering blog and the Culture Lab website!

Touch Screen Interaction in Public Spaces: Room for Improvement, if "Every Surface is to be a Computer"

Via Technology Supported Human-World Interaction

With Win7's "multi-touch" capabilities, Bill Gate's statement that every surface will be a computer might come true, but from what I can see, we have a long way to go before we get it right!

One of the concerns I have about "touch" screen interaction in public spaces is that not much thought is given to the environmental factors surrounding the system. The system that is tested for the first time after installation might work just fine, but not when it is put to use under a variety of conditions or situations.

EXAMPLES (I've recycled a few of these from previous posts.)

Touch Screen Kiosk/Display in Upscale Shopping Area, St. Thomas(?)

I came across this system when I was walking around in St. Thomas with my husband. I wasn't sure what to make of it. There wasn't anything on the large display, and I couldn't tell from a short distance if the two smaller displays were active. I noticed that the display had an awning of sorts, so the fact that the display would be used in a sunny location had been considered. Unfortunately, the awning didn't solve this problem, as you can see from the pictures below:

CLOSER UP

As we approached the display, it was almost impossible to see what was on the screen. In fact, we weren't sure what the display was all about. It looked like something you'd see at an airport check-in, not in a lush tropical setting.

Below is a shot of my husband, trying to see what is on the screen. This photo shows exactly what the screen looked like at the time:

The next picture tells it all. You can see that there is some sort of alphabet on the right side of the screen, but the reflection of my husband is easier to see. We couldn't figure this one out.

The following clip demonstrates how environmental concerns, such as wind and "sideways" rain, can make an interactive display at a shopping center difficult to use. During this clip, you can hear me muttering about the difficulties I had interacting with the information on the touch-screen display. It is possible that the system wasn't working well because of the exposure to the elements.

WIND AND SIDEWAYS RAIN

You can see that the navigation system was confusing. At the end, the entire screen turned red, and I gave up.

The next video-clip is of a touch-screen map at the Cleveland Clinic hospital. I was with my elderly aunt and my sister, and we were trying to figure out how to get to a restaurant. We never found it.

Although the screen was easy to see, the application was... crazy!

In my opinion, an interactive wayfinding application should run on a larger display and support two or more people, since many hospital visitors often run in pairs or small groups.

Usability, Accessibility, and User Experience in a Win7 Environment

Microsoft's newest operating system, Win7 (beta), allows for multi-touch interaction and application development. From what I can tell from the news from the Consumer Electronic Show (CES 2009), touch and gesture interaction holds quite a bit of interest among consumers and application developers alike.

Hopefully people will think carefully about user experience and usability factors when developing the applications we'll be using in the not too distant future!

Because of my background as a school psychologist, I’m interested how touch/gesture applications can address accessibility and universal usability issues.

I wasn't able to locate user experience or usability information for Win7. Here are a few links from the Microsoft website that I think are worth reading:

Touch Interaction Guidelines

How to Design a Great User Experience

Designing with Windows Presentation Foundation

Accessibility

According to the research from Microsoft, ”more than half of all computer users experience difficulties or impairments related to accessibility, and are likely to benefit from the use of accessible technology. Moreover, approaching software design with the flexibility and inclusiveness that are the hallmarks of accessibility often results in overall improved usability and customer satisfaction.”

Regarding touch/gesture interaction, know that “19% (24.4 million) of computer users have a mild dexterity difficulty or impairment, and 5% (6.8 million) of computer users have a severe dexterity difficulty or impairment.”

Christian Moore, from the NUI-Group, shared this nice graphic that depicts the various fields that intersect or converge with interface design, which I think is useful when thinking about how we will design, develop, and use emerging technologies:



Concepts such as accessibility and universal usability can fit into this design!

For more information regarding multi-touch, see my previous post, "For Techies and the Tech-Curious: Multi-touch/Gesture from the NUI Group"

RENCI at Duke University: Multi-Touch Collaborative Wall and Table utilizing TouchLib; More about UNC-C's Viz lab...

RENCI is a multi-disciplinary collaboration between several universities in North Carolina, with centers located at the Europa Center, Duke University, N.C. State, UNC Chapel Hill, East Carolina University, UNC-Asheville, UNC-Charlotte, and the Health Sciences Library at UNC-Chapel Hill. Many of the centers focus on visualization and collaborative technologies, and have been involved in multi-touch "surface" computing.

The pictures below are from the RENCI center at Duke University:

Duke Multi-Touch Collaborative Wall

The multi-touch wall is 13 x 5 feet, and utilizes six high-definition projectors, resulting in a combined resolution of 5760-2160, and supports multiple users. According to information on the RENCI website, the design is scalable and applicable to non-flat surfaces. The wall system runs on Windows and Linux.

(Photo by Josh Coyle)

(Photo by Josh Coyle)

DI, or Direct Illumination is used for touch detection in both the wall and the table for detecting touch. A separate instance of Touchlib runs for each of the 8 cameras used to detect touch. A gesture engine interprets the information about touches on the screen as gesture events. Each camera is handled separately for image processing and blob tracking tasks.

Graphics from the RENCI Vis Group Multi-Touch Blog

Here is cool picture of the "Multi-touch Calibration Device", which uses a built-in TouchLib utility.

Additional information can be found on the RENCI Vis Group Multi-Touch Blog.

FYI

Touchlib is a multi-touch development kit that can be found on the NUI-Group website.

"Touchlib is a library for creating multi-touch interaction surfaces. It handles tracking blobs of infrared light, and sends your programs these multi-touch events, such as 'finger down', 'finger moved', and 'finger released'. It includes a configuration app and a few demos to get you started, and will interace with most types of webcams and video capture devices. It currently works only under Windows but efforts are being made to port it to other platforms."

If you are interested in creating your own multi-touch table, the NUI-Group website and forums are a great place to start.

Related:

If you follow my blog, you probably know that I've taken several graduate courses at UNC-Charlotte. Some of my professors and a classmate or two have been involved in some exciting visualization research over the past year. (If you are serious about multi-touch and other visually-based applications, it is worth taking some time to familiarize yourself with visualization and interaction research.)

News from the UNC-Charlotte Vis Center:

At the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, RENCI is a collaboration between the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, the Center for Applied Geographic Information Science, and the Charlotte Visualization Center.

11/06/2008
Robert Kosara’s group wins two awards at IEEE VisWeek Caroline Ziemkiewicz and Robert Kosara won Honorable Mention (the second highest award) at the IEEE InfoVis Conference for their paper, “The Shaping of Information by Visual Metaphors”. Also, Alex Godwin, Kosara’s student, won Best Poster for his submission, “Visual Data Mining of Unevenly-Spaced Event Sequences”.

The Vis Center is pretty fascinating, as you can see by the group of visitors at an open house.

If you are just as fascinated by this stuff as the guys in the picture, here are links to some recent papers by UNC-Charlotte faculty affiliated with the Vis Center:

The Shaping of Information by Visual Metaphors (Caroline Ziemkiewicz and Robert Kosara)

Evaluating the Relationship Between User Interaction and Financial Visual Analysis (Don Hyun Jeong, Wenwen Dou, Felsia Stukes, William Ribarsky, Heather Richter Lipford, Remco Chang)

Visual Analytics for Complex Concepts Using a Human Cognition Model (Tera Marie Green, William Ribarsky, and Brian Fisher)

Video of OLPC's Social Features

Take a look a One Laptop Per Child's Interactive User Interface:


Here is a video about OLPC's social features:




What do you think?


Somewhat off-topic:
Who's your user- Usability Rap Video, via 90percent of Everything via Information Architecture Television