unity-design team mailing list archive

[Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Forwarding a note from Charline, who is commenting on a recent trip to
the CHI conference.

Mark

Today:

A couple of interesting presentations about *SOUND

Artificial Subtle Expressions:  Intuitive Notification Methodology of 
Artefacts.  *Takanori Komatsu, Shinshu University, Seiji Yamada, 
National Institute of Informatics, Kazuki Kobayashi, Shinshu University, 
Kotaro Funakoshi, Mikio Nakano, HRIJ

Authors discussed how artificial subtle expressions, simple and low-cost 
expressions like beeping sounds or blinking LEDs, could convey the 
internal states of artifacts to users like non verbal information.  In 
user testing, they found that people could read emotions in sounds and 
could decode sound according to their pitch, duration and intensity.

*Soundnet:  Investigating a Language Composed of environmental sounds.  
*Xiaojuan Ma, Christiane Fellbaum, Perry Cook, Princeton University.
This presents a project that aims at developing a sound language based 
on environmental sounds that we hear everyday.  They are creating sound 
vocabulary (nouns, adjectives, verbs) and create audible sentences and 
concepts, in addition to sound icons!

She works on aphasia, but I think her research could have some 
interesting applications.

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~xm/home/

These two papers appear very relevant to the multitasking paper I 
mentioned yesterday.  You will remember that in that paper, each task 
had a coloured dot that indicated the level of completion of the task as 
a form of notification.  Maybe sound could be used to convey the states 
of various tasks.

*MOBILE

Mobile taskflow in context:  A screenshot study of smarphone usage.  
*Amy K. Karlson, Shamsi T. Iqbal, Brian Meyers, Microsoft Research USA.  
Gonzalo Ramos, Kathy Lee, Microsoft USA, John C. Tang, Microsoft 
Research USA

Great presentation focusing on task flow beyond the desktop.  The 
authors were interested in the fact that the mobile phone is perceived 
by designers as an extension of the computer.  For example, you get 
email on your phone which is traditionally a task associated with 
computers.  But, the phone is not a small computer.  There is, in fact, 
an asymmetry of task flow between the 2 devices.  Phones are used mainly 
for reading, deleting and short replies.  Users have devised many work 
arounds to follow up with email tasks that start on the phone. 

What users did on their phone:

    * Email
    * Web
    * File management
    * Scheduling
    * Social networking
    * Media
    * Map


There are many contextual constraints when using mobile phone:  Many 
sources of interruptions and disruptions like network failure, output 
problems, input problems, missing functions, environment (for example, 
start an email on the bus and reach destination before it is completed), 
cost/benefit choices that will result from time to time in abandoning 
the task altogether.

What frustrated users most is when they cannot finish tasks that need to 
be attended to immediately or that lose their relevance later.  By 
contrast, tasks like email and web searches that keep their relevance 
are not perceived as so frustrating.  Media and maps were reported as 
being the most frustrating. 

Lessons learned:

    * Mobile task interruptions are inevitable - Design for interruption
      (provide saving states, reminders, etc.)
    * Some tasks suspensions are deliberate, for example, users read on
      one device and answer on another -  Design tasks to decompose into
      travel-size chunks.
    * Moving to PC to resume a task is common - Design for migration
    * State syncing is not enough - Design for the context of state
      changes.  Distinguish, for example, between resuming a task and
      restarting a task.

Important to think in terms of 'mobilizable chunks'. 

These design implications apply more generally to multi-device usage. 


These are the highlights for today!

C.


-- 

*CHARLINE POIRIER*
*User Research Programme Lead*
*Canonical*
*27th floor, 21-24 Millbank Tower*
*London SW1P 4QP UK *

*Tel: +44 (0) 20 7630 2491*
*Mob: +44 (0) 78 8695 4514*
*www.Ubuntu.com <http://www.Ubuntu.com/> <http://www.Ubuntu.com/>*
*www.Canonical.com <http://www.Canonical.com/>*

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