You can always change this. » hci

Why is a white-text-on-black theme a poor choice?

roman — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 18:24:10 +0000

Try to read such text in low light, such as in the evening with just a little reading lamp on. Try a wider paragraph width, larger line-spacing. A 150% of this blog will make it too.

Then look away from the text. You won’t see a thing, but just nice blinds, all ‘burned’ into your retina. The recovery of vision seems much longer than from a black-on-white scheme (reading a newspaper on a direct sun).

And why do I then use the scheme? It looks good. But after this experience, I am considering a change to basic.

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Devastating honesty in Marcus Duveskog’s research paper

roman — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 08:17:38 +0000

I had an opportunity to collaborate on a paper with Marcus. His project, briefly, is about assisting a change in behavioral patterns of youth in Africa. By the means of application development, participatory design, and incremental implementation-evaluation cycles, he aims to affect the ways people talk (or do not talk, currently) about HIV.

That is a great societal motivation, hard context [!], and a good plan. At the moment Marcus is focusing on reporting his experiences with carrying out such a project. It happens to me only rarely that I see something like this in a research paper:

The contact hours with the students in the multimedia clubs were reduced for a number of reasons. For example, finding the person with the key to the lab took time, students were unexpectedly sent home when school run out of funds, or sessions collided with other events as important football games or a minister visiting the school.

This only is an example, his paper (currently under review) is full of such quotes. There are two great things about this. One is the down-to-earth honesty, putting things in way they did happen, in a way that the reader immediately catches the embarrassment and challenge the researcher had to undergo.

The other interesting issue here is that we (in the so called developed part of the world) are so used to comfortable settings of our design projects that we do not anymore realize that something like deciding whether the storage format of graphics should be vector or bitmap can be a difficult decision to make.

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Effects of gaze interaction on user experience and immersion: a paper and a conference presentation

roman — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:47:14 +0000

As I mentioned earlier, we started working on gaze-aware interfaces during autumn 2006. One of the fruits of that research has now been published in the proceedings of the International Conference on Computers in Education, ICCE 2008 (paper is here).

We did a simple questionnaire-based analysis. The results of the analysis show some promises for implementing gaze-augmented problem-solving interfaces. Users of gaze-augmented interaction felt more immersed than the users of other two modes – dwell-time based and computer mouse. Immersion, engagement, and user-experience in general are important aspects in educational interfaces; learners engage in completing the tasks and, for example, when facing a difficult task they do not give up that easily. We also did analysis of the strategies, and we will report on those soon.

We could not attend the conference, but didn’t want to disappoint eventual audience. We thus decided to send a video instead of us. Have a look at it here. It feels that making the video was actually more time demanding than going to Taiwan and delivering the presentation. In addition, the lack of feedback is also worrying. Finally, we are not really media professionals, and you can hear and see it in the video (feedback of what could have been done better is welcome, use comments please!)

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Season of Usability: mentoring two projects

roman — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:28:48 +0000

As I mentioned earlier, I am participating as a mentor in this year’s Season of Usability.
Selecting the students was very hard. There were approximately 8 applicants for each of the two projects, and unfortunately we had to reject applications of excellent guys and gals.

I am mentoring in two projects, namely in Improving HDR imaging with Qtpfsgui and in Improving Jeliot user interface and workflows. In the Qtpfsgui project, Vladimir started redesigning the user interface to improve the preview by letting the users modify the settings of operators and see instantly the outcome. In the Jeliot project, Sharad started big by studying the pedagogical principles of program animation and their effects on the design of user interfaces.

From the research point of view, the Season of Usability is an interesting way how to raise awareness of the usability issues in the OSS community. So far, they have been greatly overlooked. Being part of this is a great experience in itself.

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Phone lines come to an end in Kainuu and Lapland in Finland: fears of many follow

roman — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:52:38 +0000

According to news, Lapland’s entrepreneurs tremble for safety should phone-lines be dumped . The transfer of by-wire services to wireless is a process going on for a while in Finland. Especially in scarcely populated areas, the cost of keeping 50 000 lines up are high, while the transfer to gsm and wireless services is not.

It is a logical step from the operators. However, conventional phone is often the only connection a grandma living alone in Kainuu area has with the rest of world. Previously during this year we have been doing some usability research with computer users of age 70+, living in Kainuu area. Seniors use the traditional phone, all of them have serious troubles using a mobile phone (not mentioning using a computer). Answering a mobile phone-call is maybe ok, but anything behind that is a pain. Now, the lines will one day become deaf, and the only alternative is a mobile phone?

Consider this anecdotal situation we witnessed: a grandma loses her mobile phone at home. She uses her normal phone to phone her son to phone her back on her mobile phone so she can find it when it’s ringing. This illustrates the attitude well, a super small, hated, mobile phone, left somewhere. Soon, it will be the only connection to the rest of world.

PS: I hope there is a thick line to Justus’ office.

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Looking for definition of engagement (HCI) in Finnish

roman — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:09:53 +0000

When you want to find an equivalent of engagement in Finnish, you better don’t consult a dictionary. It becomes a truly linguistic journey.

First of all, I am not looking for meaning of engagement as a promise to marriage. I am after the meaning of the word in the domain of HCI, computing and gaming. As in ‘I was so engaged playing 8-puzzle that I forgot I am controlling it using my eyes only’. Or as in ‘We build a interactive system that is more engaging than just viewing the animation passively.’

It turns out that Finnish does not have a good translation –single word– describing the multidimensional meaning of ‘engagement’. Here are terms that we found corresponding only partly with the umbrella term of engagement:

aktiivisuus, aloitteellisuus, innostuneisuus, sitoutuneisuus, osallistuminen

None single of them is engagement. It would be interesting to do a study that would measure how much each of these terms describe/contributes to the original engagement. Something like ‘Rate the game in the following dimensions’. Any proposals?

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Student openings at OpenUsability

roman — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 07:46:51 +0000

I will be participating as a mentor in this year’s Season of Usability. SoU is a series of sponsored (up to $1000) projects where students interested in usability apply to work for three months with some open-source software to improve its usability. There are nine very interesting projects, have a look at the openings, and apply!

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Troubles with MBP: no more silent presentations

roman — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:03:12 +0000

Yes, same here :( So in the chain of troubles, what is this number?

However, this was not the last one. After the fan was fixed, spacebar started to feel kind of dumb on the sides of the key….

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More troubles with MBP: DVD stucks in

roman — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 07:35:46 +0000

It seems like the troubles with the MacBook Pro laptop continue. After a relatively longer period of peace, only occasionally interrupted by a slight overheat of the machine, the laptop decided (am I thinking about it as a of live being?) to not eject a dvd I was previously watching.

Nothing seemed to help. Again, after a couple of searches, this worked: you need to restart the laptop, holding down the trackpad’s button, AND having the machine tilted forward. Well, it worked for a second try. My trust in the machine again dropped, while my trust in gravity has been reinforced. Is anybody from Apple reading this?

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PPIG 2007 in Joensuu: Extended deadline

roman — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:25:02 +0000

Organizing committee had a meeting today and decided to extend the submission deadline for PPIG’07. The new deadline is 3.5.2007. Welcome then to submit your paper about any (and sometimes psychological) aspects of software development!

I can see several papers coming from edtech group:

M.T.: I taught Python first, how was it and how it was not?
I.J.: Touch the variable!
J. N.: POOm: an online debate about programming.
A. M.: Chico, a new programming language.
J. R.: You guys too: a comparison with CSED.

So, just blast off!

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