Touché
cmu.edu
cmu.edu
What I tend to see in this demo is how to make a doorknob unintuitive, how to make music player functionality undiscoverable, how to accidentally lock yourself out, how to frustrate a user whose mental model of the sensor is incorrect.
I realize you have to approach new technology and interaction paradigms optimistically, but all I can think of is my own frustration when an ill-considered neato-feature is foisted on me when I least want it.
Like blue LEDs and touch sensitive buttons that lack a physical button (eg atmel q-touch).
I just wouldn't blame the tech for bad implementations.
Consider me an optimist though, I have faith in our fellow developers... even if there are a few blemishes on their record.
I get the feeling in certain cases, it's technology in search of a problem. That's ok (and even necessary) as long as I don't have to put up with it shoehorned in places it doesn't really fit.
in academic research that's the rule rather than the exception. The nature of research makes it very hard, even impossible, to predict what is going to have applications in the future and what those will be. To name an example, touch screens were also written off as an (awkward) curiosity for decades.
I agree with the "I hope it isn't forced on me", but that's a wholly different discussion. That's a common theme with technology: in the beginning you can choose and it all seems great, later on you're considered odd if you opt out because "everyone is using it". But that's not the fault of the researchers or of the technology, but of the way society handles it.
>> in academic research that's the rule rather than the exception
That tells you something about academic research
BLINK... BLINK... BLINK...
The only thing more satisfying than a duct-taping or LED-ectomy is the idea of finding the designer and "re-educating" them... in a deep, dark pit, lit only by blinking, ultra bright LEDS.
The same could be said about touch technology. And usually is, for the first week someone uses it the first time. My friend, a good sysadmin, was often asking me how am I able to figure out how those Android interfaces work, then the other day he got an iPhone, and he was complaining and complaining... until he stopped, after a week or so.
I think discoverability is a bit overrated. Lots of things around us are bad at it, and people learn by showing to each other how to use the stuff. And as long as stuff behaves predictable, we can quickly grasp the patterns, no matter how nonintuitive or counterintuitive they are.
Or maybe I'm wrong, given how often I have to show people how to do things like setting the timer on the microwave or reconfiguring a VCR or whatever, given that they own it for like half a year and for me it's a first time I see a particular model (or sometimes even entire class of devices) and I don't have (nor have a need for) a manual. I don't know, maybe some people have troubles building mental models based on reasonable expectations about what a machine can do (I observed it strongly in one case). Anyway, I'm surprised by this phenomena, given that I once had to show to a good sysadmin how to set a clock on his microwave, 'cause he couldn't figure it out (and long he tried).
I used to work at a hospital with an automatic elliptical revolving door (I assume it was designed that way so you could push a gurney through it). On the one hand: automatic revolving door, shiny! On the other hand: they had to post a sign telling people how to walk through it.
Not to mention, watching my kids learn different doors has been amusing. I would think intuitive is the wrong word, so much as simple determination will get you through most any door.
It seems more likely that around 50 years ago the technology and literacy rates had finally advanced enough that push/pull signs could be easily attached to commonly used doors.
I mainly question if it is truly a sign of a problem, as seems implicated by it being brought up. Still seems to me that it just happens because the cost for doing so is essentially nil.
Second: The reason for the exterior doors to open out is rather obvious (once you've considered the reason). Yet it was not originally in building code. This implicates that many places do it "wrong." Or, at least, they did years ago.
The first claim really just leads to "most people do not pay attention to such every day things." Even if you get it wrong, you only lose a second at a door. The penalty just isn't high.
The second is to say that it isn't like people were making flawless doors in the past. (Though, I particularly dislike "pocket" doors. I think those have fallen out of favour, thankfully.)
* Of course, I look at my house door and remember that residence entrances open in. Maybe that fundamental inconsistency is the true culprit here... :) I realize there is a good reason to keep the hinges internal to a house. So... not sure what to say about that.
This has nothing, what so ever, to do with whether or not a door is intuitively designed. Also, whether or not you lose a second opening a door is irrelevant (and you've just given the excuse for 1990's enterprise software UX - as long as it's possible to complete a task, who cares if it's easy or intuitive. Everyone, it turns out, but it took a while to hammer that point int).
The point is that "we" have the knowledge to design a door that is clearly and immediately usable (without losing a second) by anyone who's ever used a door - but sometimes "we" apparently chose not to use it. That is the conundrum outlined.
Your point that we have the knowledge to make doors that are immediately usable is just something I don't believe. I've seen people use doors incorrectly that fit the guidelines of that book. Hell, I think I've done so myself. And, I argue that this is almost completely related to the consistency of how a door opens. Not the handle. (e.g., after years of living in a high rise where the entrance opened out and all I did was go to public buildings where all doors open out, not too shockingly, I was more prone to opening house doors incorrectly.)
My argument was never that "so long as it is possible..." The argument I put forth was more that the cost for getting a door wrong is ridiculously low, so people don't put that much thought into it. On either side of the isle. (Well, designers want doors to be pretty.) Your 90s example is attacking things where the cost was actually high, but the designers didn't care.
I think you can basically sum up my viewpoint with the common attack on intuitive designs that nothing is truly intuitive in and of itself. Pretty much everything is leveraged on something you have previously learned. If it seems intuitive, it is really just familiar. In the case of doors, the familiar behaviour trumps any design decisions. (If you have some good studies against this, by all means I'm game to read them. More than just the book that started this thread, though.)
Glad to see Bret Victor's important rant[1] resonating as well.
Does anyone have any tips about getting involved with this area of work? Any good forums or open source projects?
[1] http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
Some nice stuff and communities can be found at http://nuigroup.com/forums or http://hackaday.com/
(btw: Bret Victor apparently pulished his rant _after_ Touché had been submitted to CHI.)
(I remember seeing this video when it was posted months ago as well, but thanks for clarifying the timing as to which event came first.)
Do a PhD :) ralphman has it spot on. Even the non-academic companies who do this (Disney Research, Microsoft Research, etc.) will usually prefer hiring PhDs.
Doing a PhD in HCI is fun, challenging, will drive you insane, and is very rewarding! (I dropped out of mine after 2 years to do the startup thing but intend on going back :) )
You might want to look at Atmel's maXTouch capacitive sensors. In particular what's going on with the noise floor, or signal to noise that's a relevant factor for resolution [1]. And a side band attack btw.
Infrared sensors are affected greatly by environmental infrared, so dual transmitter types and fast switch sampling and interferometric approaches.
You'll need to consider high sampling rates both in the time and frequency domains.
There's other stuff but I'll keep mum about that.
I'm reminded of #66 on the Evil Overlord list - My security keypad will actually be a fingerprint scanner. Anyone who watches someone press a sequence of buttons or dusts the pad for fingerprints then subsequently tries to enter by repeating that sequence will trigger the alarm system.
Ah, sign of the times. This list was compiled in 1996.
As this approach uses only a single electrode (which is why it is so cool), the data it offers is quite limited compared to more complex sensor layouts.
In real life, such a sensor would need to work reliably even if I wear different shoes, have dirty hands, etc. Therefore, its false rejection rate needs to be very low. Which leads to a high false acceptance rate, i.e. several other people with similar capacitive footprints may open my door, too.
[1] http://chrisharrison.net/projects/capacitivefingerprinting/C...
For some reason, it's creeping me out. I'm afraid to see one of those next big thing named Lundi, Ball, Tisch or Hora. It's like we're robbing our languages of their meaning, bit by bit, for commercial purpose.
We can do better than that, can't we?
And we also gain new common words from brands that become generic, like Tabloid or Bikini.
Bikini isn't a brand that became a generic word. It is a loan word from the native Marshall Islanders(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll), that was stolen for a brand then became generic. Which ironically proves his point.
It is. The fact that the brand name itself was derived from an existing proper noun doesn't change that fact.
And speaking of language abuse, I feel that some day the verb 'steal' will be synonymous with every possible offense. How does one steal an island name?
I'm curious where the sensors were placed for that one (I couldn't see them on the guy's arms) and if say, getting caught in the rain or a really dry day, would throw it on the fritz.
Dentist: How dentist grips the tool indicates how it behaves. Eg. control speed of a rotary tool like a drill based on a grip.
Doctor: Patient giving doctor feedback with their hand.
Military: For some guns, one finger on the trigger does a single shot for precision, two fingers does bursts for rapid fire.
For instance, would finger-flipping or self-stimulation be considered "noise" to such a system, or would the system be configurable or adaptive or "fuzzy" enough to make successful interpretations of various deviant forms of model human behaviors? (I'm wondering the intersection between these types of interfaces and the training (or, say, auto-designing) of them via neural networks.)