Session with Mr. Xavier Ochoa

During our session of HCI course on 24th of april we had the opportunity meet Mr. Xavier Ochoa from Ecuador. Mr. Xavier Ochoa is a professor in Ecuador who works in a research center with his team. He mainly focuses on developing new ways of human-computer interaction technologies for low budget.

He expressed that as developer it's our task to put humans in center and that we should give attention to all kinds of audiences to solve their problems using the knowledge we gathered in our life.
During his presentation he showed the students a few prototypes his team has developed that are targeted for people who can't afford to buy expensive technologies. For instance, his team has succeeded to build a prototype for movement detection. While this technology exists today, it's done using very sophisticated and expensive technologies. In his case they were able to build it by using cheap devices like web cams and gloves. It's really astonishing achieving the same for much lower budget. Providing solutions for such challenging tasks is something that we as developers should aim for in our lives.
Making technology accessible for all people is another challenge he discussed about. When developing a technology we should also keep those people that are psychically limited in mind. These new challenges bring new ways of thinking and looking at the technology. Instead of being narrow-minded we begin to have a broader vision on future technologies.

I want to thank you Mr. Xavier Ochoa for his great presentation and taking our attentions to the possibilities we
can achieve by thinking in different ways. I wish his team good luck with his research.

Google+ redesign

Hey, everyone We have seen some recent changes made to Google+. As you all know Google is trying its best to take its place as a serious player in social network market on the internet. Many years ago there was not much of a competition in this field, if you still remember the days of Myspace being the only dominant player. But as years have passed there started to appear other competitors like Facebook that ultimately dethroned Myspace and totally buried it in its grave. So what was the problem with Myspace? Well, it couldn't see the needs of the new generation of people and was unable to adapt itself to the changes. In that time Facebook came along and offered some great ways to socialize our life. It was a great success and still is today. Like in those days the market has some other players as well but these are in minority. As you all know Google has been very interested to dive into this market. It has tried many ways but none of them succeeded. Some says these were trial and error tactics of Google to find the right solution. So Google had announced last year its new social network called Google+. In its initial release it had many cool ideas like circles, hangouts and a hybrid like system of Twitter and Facebook. These ideas sound great but in order to be successful Google had to persuade people that its social application is different and innovative while still looks familiar.

Capgemini presentation: CHI in action

Last Tuesday professor Duval invited some people from Capgemini to our lesson to present a mobile project they were working on. The goal was showing that the things we’ve seen in our lessons do apply in the real world. And I must say, they succeeded.

On the history of HCI

The day before yesterday, professor Duval told us a little about the history of HCI. As always, IT history sounds too incredible to be true. Yet, it is. A story of vision, opportunities and a glance at what might lie ahead.

Paper prototype Iteration 2

0. Introduction
This blog post contains the second iteration of our paper prototype. For this iteration we evaluated the changes we discussed in the first iteration to see whether they’ve caused the desired effect.

1. Method
As in the first iteration, we did some user tests with the paper prototyping method. The purpose this time was to test whether the changes after the first iteration leaded to the desired improvements.

We combined the paper prototyping with a little survey we conducted after each user interview. That way we hoped to get an honest opinion of the test users regarding the usefulness of the application and some design choices we made, whereas only paper prototyping doesn’t really investigates this. The survey contained some general questions concerning the user-friendliness and usefulness of the application as well as some design choices. We added the design choice questions to check whether some design decisions we had some doubts about where indeed right.

The usefulness and user-friendliness questions came from the CSUQ questionnaire.We choose this questionnaire because it is not particularly long and really focuses on comfort of use and efficiency of the interface. We've dropped some questions, for example those on error handling, because they didn't really apply to our prototype and we didn’t want to browbeat our test users, as we also wanted to ask some questions concerning design choices. The complete survey can be found in our previous blog post.

Update planning & Gantt-chart

We have updated our Gantt-chart and made planning on how many hours we will work on differerent tasks. Below you see these two tables for all tasks.

Figure1: Final Gantt-chart

Figure2: Planning

Questionnaire

The questionnaire we want to use combined with our usability interviews is partially an adapted version of the CSUQ questionnaire. We choose CSUQ because it is not particularly long and really focuses on comfort of use and efficiency of the interface. As a complement to the interviews it gives more general and direct information than for example a QUIS questionnaire (at least for this application). The scores go from 1 to 7. We grouped the questions by theme, because that way we are better equipped to draw some conclusions.

Planning

This post contains our planning for the remainder of this course. The most important aspect is perpetually improving our design in different iteration using UI evaluation techniques. There are 2 big course-defined deadlines remaining: a final presentation of our work is expected for May 15th, a final report by June 1st.

Featr storyboard

Because our application changed from Rankr to Featr, is seemed useful to reiterate on the storyboard. We developed a new one, (mostly) according to our current version though some minor improvements in the prototype have not been taken into account.

We explicitly started from our prototype. Henceforth, the storyboard is quite detailed and might even seem very cluttered. This is due to the effort to fit everything in the small boxes and still keep it readable (more or less). It does however, give an idea about how to operate our application.

Featr user scenario

John is a 40 year old business manager. He receives on average 150 mails a day, is active on Twitter and Google+, follows blogs which could be interesting for his company and is in contact with his colleagues via Yammer. Handling all this streams of information separately would take him too much time, so he uses our Featr application to save time.

After his lunch break on Monday, John starts Featr and all new messages are shown on the main page. He first wants to process his mails, so at the right sidebar he only selects mail as a source of messages. He has 44 new mails. 8 of the mails concern a new project ‘X’ the company is starting, so he tags them with the name ‘project X’. There are also 3 very important mails coming from his boss. He gives these messages priority level 1. 11 mails absolutely need to be handled before leaving the workplace, so he drags them to ‘Today’ on top of the left sidebar. The user-defined deadlines pop up and he drags them further to ‘At  work’. Another 13 just need to be handled today, so he drags them to ‘Before sleeping’. The other 20 mails are dragged to ‘Tuesday’ -  ‘At work’.

Next John chooses to process all other incoming messages so he checks the ‘All sources’ button of the right sidebar. Next he drags the messages to the deadlines he chooses. John also drags some useless messages directly to the trash-folder. When all messages are processed, John switches to the ToDo tab pane using the tabs on the top and selects ‘Today’ - ‘At work’ on the left sidebar to see which messages needs to be handled before he leaves the workplace. He first handles some messages from his boss who have priority level 1. John opens the messages in a pop-up by double-clicking them. When he wants to take an action like respond to a mail, the application will redirect him to his mail client. He then handles all the messages with a ‘project X’-tag. Next he needs to go to a meeting so he will have to handle the other messages some other time.

Just before going home, he processes all new messages and handles all the messages that needed to be done before leaving the workplace. He then goes home to his wife and kids and has lunch. After reading a bed-time story to his children he handles all messages that he needed to look at before going to bed. He can then go to sleep knowing he has responded to everything that needed to be taken care of.