In this week’s lecture we went through some further challenges for HCI in an opinionated discussion. First we looked at touch screens and gesture interfaces. Whilst they do provide a more natural way of interaction than traditional keyboard and mouse, I would argue that this naturalness is limited. There are only so many movements that can be done to perform functions, which feel natural with touch screens and gesture interfaces (e.g. flicking up to push a page out of the way). After that any extended functionality must be achieved by learning a kind of sign language, no different really to un-natural command shortcuts on keyboards. I guess it might turn out that gesture commands once mastered turn out to be quicker and less prone to error. But really the point is that at the advanced level they aren’t any more natural than a keyboard. Also touch screens need to develop a better feedback before the use with them becomes properly fluid. The Blackberry Storm tried to do it by turning the whole screen into a button that must be pressed to select anything, but surely that defeats the point of a touch screen. I think that this paradigm of interaction may be rather short and will be replaced by something better.
One of the other points of discussion was Bumptop; a new concept 3D interface, which uses a physics engine to simulate how real documents act and then allows you to manipulate the document objects in certain ways. I guess it’s supposed to make it easier to organize docs. The thing is there are blatantly ways of implementing this sort of functionality using command prompts etc in a normal desktop like "windows". It looks like it would take forever to find things. What’s wrong with a search bar? It’s almost like it’s on a level with just having all your documents scattered across your room in a more or less organized fashion. Computer operating systems are suppose to create solutions to file storage, not replicate clumpy real world ones prone to error. It may be better than having all your documents on the desktop like in picture (a), but who the hell is actually that disorganized. Plus check out vista and apple interfaces and the problem is pretty much sorted with their neat and tidy taskbars and shortcut bars. The one aspect I did like was the making important docs bigger, but this could be done just as easily on a normal desktop by right clicking and left clicking on a function that would call it. After the lecture I had a debate with a fellow student. He was responding to my point that you can’t be organized in mess. He claimed that people have ways of organizing things in their own mess, and that their mess can make them better at tasks. Well my response to that is that if they see organization, it’s not mess in the first place! Anyway really a rather trivial debate over a subjective matter, but quite amusing nonetheless.
In the seminar we re-designed the Sussex websites in groups. Some took a social networking “Facebook” approach, others a more functional approach. Generally people’s approaches were all quite similar and focused on a practical solution. This is because everyone agreed in large that the site should be informative rather than an area for fun, although many did suggest a social chat function. Our group suggested that since it’s a nightmare to find rooms on campus, it would be beneficial to have a 3D simulated virtual environment of campus that could take you from A to B in a video. Perhaps this could be linked up to student’s ‘Smartphones’. The exercise pointed out that the Sussex websites are very badly designed, and also since our solutions were similar that the course has worked to get us all to think in certain ways.
We also carried out some of our user tests for the Traveline project this week, with more to follow intensively over the next week. This turned out to be a revealing experience. It was alot more complex than we first imagined. We rented a room out in the library and brought our laptops in. After complications installing ‘Teamviewer’ (the software used to view and record user screen data over the internet), amendments to the script, problems with the quality of the “Skype” broadcast, problems with a foreign girl not understanding us, and so and so forth; we managed to get a number of users to successfully complete the tasks we set. This led to some useful data and the experience as a whole served as a step to better organization in later sessions. We realised that the complications (particularly the availability of user participants at set times) and over arching time constraints on the project, meant that we might not be able to hit our user number of 36 with a completely balanced demographic. Nonetheless our sampling will still be demographically led, and we will endeavour to get as many users as possible in order to get the most complete data and find all the problems in the sites. With another session today, hopefully we will learn even more.
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