My Technology

I am not a big technology geek. I’m more of the old-fashioned book and outdoors type of person that loves nature and quality time spent with family. Yet, I find myself surrounded by it. I use it professionally and at home to support some of our daily activities, but don’t have a true emotional attachment to it. With one exception - my digital camera. I just love the fact that I can view the shots just taken and take more if needed. Or, simply just take as many as I want and delete the ones that are crappy. No money wasted of film – just reuse the memory card. It’s awesome! And that instant gratification within the grasp of your fingers, not to mention that I can edit photos and share with others (I have thousands of pics of my 19-month-old son). So, OK, I admit it, I guess I do love technology without really saying it out loud

Custom Built or Off-The-Shelf?

Here is a dilemma that many companies face when it’s time to acquire an application supporting some core business functions. There are many factors to be considered, including the company size, business needs, the functions to be supported, the uniqueness of core competencies, time constraints and, of course, budget.

I myself, working for a mid-size insurance company specializing in Workers’ Comp for long term care industry in selected states, have been exposed to both approaches and have seen heights and pitfalls of both. Due to the unique nature of our business model, we have been using a custom-built application for policy underwriting and billing. The advantage of the application is that it supports the diversified and custom-built product lines. However, the major disadvantage is that it hasn’t been designed well in the first place and has now become technologically obsolete. We are looking into replacing it and have looked into both options: custom made and purchase of ready product. We found a couple of products that could support our business needs with a minimal level of customization, but they greatly exceed the allowed budget. Some other products, will require a great deal of customization, but are within the price range. An alternative is having an entirely custom built application with an easy maintenance interface, which meets the budget requirements, but will be time consuming. So, this is where we are right now. Not yet in a hurry, but expecting something big to happen.

Consistency in Interface Design

Continuing on the topic of mental models and icons, one of the important rules to remember is consistency. How can an icon help create or support an existing mental model if it’s used inconsistently in a single interface? A recent upgrade to an ECM (Electronic Content Management) application used in my workplace resulted in a great deal of confusion among the users. I’ll skip all the bugs and other issues and will only point to one. Namely, a red ‘X’ icon, normally corresponding to “Delete” function can result in two different actions: ‘Delete’ in one place or ‘Remove from Workflow’ in another. So, what’s the fuss all about? Well, “Remove from Workflow” takes the document out of workflow and puts it in a virtual cabinet for storage. “Delete” removed the document permanently from the filing system and the database. This certainly will not help in building a good mental model of this application.
So, now what? Let the user deal with it…

Mental Models and Icon Design

In general, HCI practitioners define mental models as a set of beliefs about how systems work, which determine the course of interaction between users and computer systems. These beliefs are often enforced by real-world experiences, including prior interactions with other systems or applications. The significance of mental models is widely recognized, and many interface design guidelines highlight the importance of understanding and proper application of users’ mental models. For example, the Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines promote a design model in which the role of designers is to create interfaces that “support the user’s mental model” through incorporating such characteristics as familiarity, simplicity, availability and allowing for discoverability.

But can we actually design icons that support user’s mental models? Icons are usually perceived and interpreted by users in terms of their expectations or mental model of the system with which they interact. But finding the exact or close to perfect match between the user’s mental model and its graphical representation in an icon poses a true challenge.
Icons are cultural and context-specific, and for this reason very problematic. They can convey a different message to different groups of users who may have a different interpretation of the same icon within a different cultural set. For example, an icon showing the palm of an upraised hand in the United States signifies “halt” or “hold” while in Greece is understood as “here’s excrement in your face” to put it in a nice way.

A similar problem can be observed with icons that are based on words, such as “B”, “I”, “U” for ‘Bold’, “Italic” or “Underline” respectively as seen in Microsoft Office applications. These icons can make perfect sense for English-speaking users, but can be meaningless to everyone else. Of course, it is possible for users to acquire a mental model of MS Office applications that will help them associate these icons with their functions, but only through frequent interaction with the applications and building a new knowledge base of the system.

Some of the design theories emphasize that icons should resemble, as much as possible, the variables they represent in real life with an understanding that concrete objects and artifacts are easier to represent than actions. And it is also important to make icons visible to the users.
Designing icons that truly reflect the users’ mental models is a very difficult task. The cultural and context-dependent nature of icons presents a challenge in creating icons, especially in application to be deployed on a global scale. The richness of user experiences based on which they acquire and construct various mental models can be difficult to project even in small-scaled environments.

I love CSS

I have recently learned using CSS and really love it. It makes the HTML so much cleaner, more flexible and easy to maintain. It has so much to offer, I need to dig deeper into it and start playing around with it. Does anyone know any good tutorial sources for CSS?

Tog and Fitts Law

So, here is another authority on interaction design: Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini. In his article article “A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts” he advocates the importance of application of Fitts’ Law principle in the computer interaction design. He presents his arguments in a form of a quiz and claims it to be a reliable measure of every designer’s qualifications. The quiz questions relate to a number of design issues encountered in Microsoft and Apple products. According to Tog, the key to answering these questions successfully is the knowledge of and ability to apply the Fitts Law, which is what makes a good designer. Yet, it is rather doubtful that the quiz is a fair assessment of a designer’s skills as it only measures the ability to apply elements of one theory in the design process, which has its limitations and may not always be the best “fit.”

For each question in the quiz, Tog provides an answer with relevance to Fitts’ Law. Some of the argument make a lot of sense and are widely accepted. For instance, the emphasis on utilization of the valuable space offered by edges of the screen is one of the valid arguments. Tog indicates that this principle has been applied in the Apple menu bars positioning, which helps to avoid the bottleneck problem encountered in Microsoft design. Displaying labels below tool icons makes the icons larger, thus more easily accessible is also important to consider in the design process. Yet, designers need to proceed with caution when enlarging target objects doesn’t conflict with the uniformity of the design. It is also true that the target on the screen fastest to access is at the cursor location. Tog also argues that the four corners of the screen are next fastest to access target locations. Yet, the order in which the four corners are supposedly fastest to access doesn’t seem to be quite reliable based on my personal experience.

Tog’s article raises some other concerns as well. Namely, the argument implicating the advantage of circular menus over the linear menus is not quite convincing. Tog doesn’t provide any supportive evidence on how these menus help to convey the direction information into the motor memory. It also looks like the direction presented is counter clockwise, which is not the most intuitive direction order (most people follow the clockwise motion pattern). It is also noticeable that the entire article is written in a slightly condescending tone subtly implying the author’s authority and expertise in the subject matter while presenting almost disrespectful type of critique at times “stupid, stupid, stupid.”

Vision-based Games for Kids

When doing a research for one of my previous classes, I ran into an article on vision-based game technologies for kids that require more physical engagement that just hand movements. Since the video and computer game usage has been dramatically increasing among younger kids, it started raising issues related to the harmful effects of these technologies. Once of the major concerns is that extended computer use can negatively affect child’s physical development (aside from social or psychological development).

The traditional input and control devices, such as a mouse, keyboard or game pad contribute to the sedentary lifestyle among gaming kids. Vision-based games can help address this issue with the use of some simple computer devices, such as webcams and mikes. An example is a game called QuiQui’s Giant Bounce that uses a webcam and a microphone as control devices. The game is designed for children ages 4-9 and uses a 2D computer animated dragon as an avatar that mimics the player’s movements. It also uses voice as an additional mode of control: when user shouts, the dragon breathes fire. The movements and voice are registered by a camera.

This game’s interaction was designed by studying children’s natural gestures representing certain actions and response to those actions, such as running, jumping, swimming movements, flapping hands to imitate flying, etc. The challenge was to capture the variety of movements that can represent certain actions and make the avatar flexible enough to distinguish between different swimming styles, for example.

Unfortunately, I could not find this game anywhere on the market. I wanted to get it for my seven-year-old nephew, who would happily stay glued in front of his computer if he was only allowed to. However, you can download a demo from the QuiQui’s Giant Bounce website: http://www.cs.uta.fi/kukakumma/htmls_en/index.html and find out more about the game.