...when 140 characters are not enough

Good morning/afternoon/evening or whatever it is. Just woke up from a three hour "nap" after a 17 hour drive back from Boston interrupted by a stop at Niagara Falls and the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, home of the "original" buffalo chicken wing so the trip was actually 23 hours door to door.

When I woke up, I realized I was having a dream that I was working on a Student Design Competition Surprise Bonus Round that was open to all students. We could either work solo or in groups of 2-4 people and we had two hours to re-iterate one of the designs from the presentation round. When will it end??? Glad I woke up.

So, CHI was all about answers to questions, asking new questions, pondering the questions yet to be asked and the answers that continue to elude. Here is my set of top ten lists. Maybe you could help out by adding your questions and answers in the comments section below.

Questions Answered

1. Bloomington and Boston are 1,037 miles away from each other (including our aimless wanderings).
2. It takes a lot of time to drive 1,037 miles.
3. There are a lot of beautiful places between Bloomington and Boston.
4. There are a lot of beautiful places in Boston.
5. I love Bloomington.
6. I love the people that live in Bloomington, especially my wife, children, family and dogs (who think they are people).
7. The rifts within the CHI community are very real and will probably never go away.
8. There are people in the design community that are grappling with how to manage these rifts. Thank you Jeffrey Bardzell!
9. The Indiana University School of Informatics HCI/design Master's Program is the bomb fo' shizzle. Thank you Marty, Erik, Eli, Jeff, Shaowen, past and future students.
10. I AM a designer!

Questions That Remain Unanswered

1. What am I going to be doing this summer.
2. What am I going to do after I graduate.
3. What am I going to do for the rest of my life.
4. Should I pursue a PhD?
   
5. Why do we spend so much time figuring out how to determine whether or not specific design is good?
6. How many teams from IU would have made it into the SDC if we were exempt from IRB approval like the other schools?
7. How different would our presentation have been if we were second year students?
   
8. What were the metrics used to determine rankings on the SDC Presentation round?
9. Did participating in the SDC Presentation round, missing two days of sessions and networking make me a better designer than if I had attended those sessions and networked with the design community?
10. Will the home electricity monitoring system formerly known as WattBot (and now known as "Watt Finder" ever become a reality?
    

New Questions

1. If four people sat in a car for eighteen hours in the driveway, would the bonding experience be as rewarding as if you drove over 1,000 miles?
2. If I could only go to one design conference next year, which one would I go to?
3. Isn't it really HHI to the power of C?
4. Why are the other schools exempt and we are not?
5. What other questions should I be asking?

This is Jay Steele in the comfort of my recliner in my living room on my reliable broadband internet access signing off from CHI2009.

PANELISTS:
Richard I. Anderson, Riander, USA
Killian Evers, PayPal, USA
Jim E. Nieters, Yahoo!, Inc., USA
Laurie Pattison, Oracle Corporation, USA
Craig Peters, Awasu Design, USA
A common question asked of successful User eXperience (UX) leaders is what “one thing” they needed to do in order to move their organizations into a position of strategic relevance. However, the answers often vary, posing a challenge to those struggling to fi gure out how to achieve the same goal where they work. In this interactive session, a subset of answers will be highlighted, then real world scenarios from around the globe – most presented by recruited conference attendees – will be evaluated to determine which “one thing” should be attempted in each case. The process of figuring that out will be explicitly addressed so that session attendees can leave better able to do so themselves for their own situations.

    •    [Jim] We need to let business know that we understand their problems, especially their big problems. Don't take on too much. Don't get diluted. At Yahoo! focused on a few problems and each resulted in generating approx. $50 mill. in revenue. UX just got moved into the marketing division. Loves it because they are now focusing on identifying and developing new ideas.
    •    [Laurie] You have about one calendar quarter to make an impression. Better pick projects wisely and make sure you can deliver within that time frame. Focus on something that they cannot figure out for themselves. Develop innovative ideas - usability methods that sr. management is not familiar with or knows how to implement. Make an impact on a big problem with a tool you are familiar with.
    •    [Craig] We often don't think about the individual contributors and the interactions they are having and that bogs down the process. Very important to interact with them as the UX designer. Example where Wells Fargo struggled with this. Several dozen people in UX group. Product manager experience with the group was inconsistent.
    •    [Jim] Team needs to have consistent practices so that customers/clients/product managers have a consistent experience.

UX is a young profession. How long do we have to go before we no longer say we are "young"? We have had to reinvent ourselves because technology is evolving and emerging so quickly.
[Jim] There is a real need within the industry right now to have a diversified skill set.
[Laurie] Program management can bring some of the rigor from the engineering side of development into the UX side of the house and encourage UX to be part of the overall process. metrics, processes, rigor, communication.

We are not in a position of strategic relevance but have been invited. What if you aren't invited? Look for opportunities to offer your support to prompt an invitation and when you are invited, make sure you make the most of it. Be aware of the "one chance" that you are getting. If the company simply does not value what you do, then you need to seriously consider looking for a different place to work.

What if the executive leadership is on board with UX but lower levels feel like it is getting forced upon them and they are providing substantial resistance.

What if you don't have a team bigger than one person.

The panel presented numerous real life scenarios where UX teams and practitioners run into roadblocks in the business world and shared their thoughts on what one thing they should do to overcome them. Very practical and realistic. Reminded me of numerous experiences I had at Corbel and even at Manulife. So important for UX people to get educated on the big picture of what the business is all about and immerse yourself into the product itself. Ask questions to gain insights. Become a user if possible or at least try to put yourself in that mindset. There are lots of compromises that must be made and without sufficient information it is hard to determine what gets worked on and what doesn't. This panel is very pragmatic and I think the comments they are sharing are extremely useful. Simple little things such as learning fundamental professional practices. When are principles compromised for the sake of corporate reality. I think about choosing battles to win the war. So important to understand the world of the people in other departments that you interact with. Find common ground and generate an understanding of what their perception of reality is (the stakeholders that you work with).

This is Jay Steele at CHI 2009 in Boston.

The first presentation was very interesting, insightful and well presented. I am definitely going to follow up with this paper and visit his websites to see what is going on. Several ideas as to how I might be able to investigate this further. Would like to see what could be done to develop some niche q&a sites and also investigate how this could be overlaid onto developments in the online (distance learning) education environment.

Facts or Friends? Distinguishing Informational and Conversational Questions in Social Q&A Sites
F. Maxwell Harper (presenter), Daniel Moy, Joseph A. Konstan, University of Minnesota, USA
This research examines the differences between “conversational” and “informational” question-asking behavior in several online question and answer sites, learning in the process about linguistic and social indicators of information quality.

Started out by talking about the importance of his chair. What would happen if the hydraulic lift in his chair broke? How would he find out how to fix it? Google Search does not come up with the answer. What about a Q&A site like Ask MetaFilter. Users get answers and can mark the ones they find most useful. Yahoo Answers - 90,000 questions per day = 2.7 mill web pages per month - equivalent to all of wikipedia. Turns into to a type of social conversational site where conversations are initiated in the form of a question like "what should you be doing right now?"

two types of questions in the world
    informational - asked with intent of getting information of fact or informational nature.
    conversational - intent of stimulating discussion

Do they differ in terms of archival data?
    developed analysis tool that asked people to evaluate questions that were gathered from numerous q&a sites. 95% of questions had consensus of what type of question was being asked. Identified archival value of questions - informational had higher overall archival value.
Structural differences - words - spam - list word and biwords (combination of two words) - patterns emerge that help to determine category of question. Ex. you more frequent in conversational, I more frequent in informational

mapping of q&a users can be used to develop a social network metric and identify quantity of relationships in conversational vs. informational

clustering coefficient - didn't get details of this

Machine Learning Approach
Ensemble Architecture - start with question and metadata - extract features - read features into specialized classifiers - send output of specialized classifiers - meta classifier - final prediction

classifying questions as conversational or informational is intuitive and useful.
It is possible to predict intent of asker with accuracy - could lead to a type of automated tagging
broadly applicable to online social media sites - ex. feature set (category, text, social network)
grouplens.org
communitylab.org

NSF grants

mimir: A Market-Based Real-Time Question and Answer Service
Gary Hsieh (presenter), Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Scott Counts, Microsoft Research, USA
Presents a market-based real-time question and answer (Q&A) service. A controlled field experiment shows that market can improve Q&A quality but can reduce social exchanges important to a community.

high number of "frivolous" questions - database was Microsoft's Q&A system
support is needed to help differentiate questions - serious and important questions can end up being overlooked
used economic markets as model for developing q&a market
possible options - enable signaling by allowing askers to offer something of value to incentivize answerers
existing synchronous q&a services - aardvark, twitter answers

desire to leverage real-time and market q&a

how will markets impact q&a?
developed control study to measure this approach - mimir
    im type application, filtering of incoming questions, created virtual currency value for exchange
design problems - preventing misuse, askers do not get answers (refund option)

impact on q&a
    created two groups - non-market and market
4 hypotheses of market system
    1.    questions in market are more serious and more important - small but distinct difference
    2.    answers are better, higher quality - yes
    3.    fewer answers per question in market - 3.2 vs. 2.1 - yes
    4.    will paying diminish sense of community - yes 3.04 vs 2.49

payment environment reduces social element and invites more serious answers

takeaways - need to offer both within a community to allow for development of social element

analyzing mahalo answers - allows both free and pay questions on same site

Questions in, Knowledge iN? A Study of Naver’s Question Answering Community
Kevin Kyung Nam (presenter), Mark S. Ackerman, Lada A. Adamic, University of Michigan, USA

800% increase in online q&a communities from 2006 to 2008

Prior work
    participation patterns for online communities
    motivations and incentives
    q&a communities

only 5.4% both ask and answer
users tend to specialize
little competition within a question - 1.3 to 2.5 answers per question
motivation - altruism, sense of ownership, disappointed with existing information, frustration, wants to help others find good info, business promotion, wants to become an expert, hobby

This is Jay Steele at CHI 2009 in Boston.

The last three pictures were taken by Jon Kolko. The first one is your obligatory press release shot. The last two were advance shots for all contingent outcomes. You can ignore the first of those two now!!!!!!!!!!

Wow, what a day. Actually, it started last night! Joe, Dane and I went to find an acceptable cutting tool to trim our poster. You would have thought we were getting ready to perform open heart surgery. There has never in history been so much discussion about the pros and cons of various cutting devices. Once we finally overcame that tremendous hurdle, we ventured off to the Hynes Convention Center in search of an acceptable straight edge and cutting surface. Fortunately, we succeeded at achieving these tasks much quicker. We found one of the conference rooms that had several large writing pads that fit the requirements nicely. Dane proceeded to carve away at the patient with ninja-like skills with much needed assistance from Joe. I provided emotional support and recorded images of the ordeal for archival purposes. I guess we are finally getting around to taking Marty's advice of documenting our work. With poster safely and securely prepared for display, we initiated it on the designated poster wall in accordance with all of the ritual and ceremony deserving of such a moment - along with some more archival documentation.

This afternoon, the moment we have been anxiously awaiting for over two months finally arrived - the poster presentation. All ten teams were lined up like kids at the elementary school science fair. Of course, before that, our team gathered in the Student Volunteer room to go over our game plan and get our stories straight. After all, we had to tell them three times to three different judges. So, fast forward back to the poster presentation. In the blink of an eye, there was Jon Kolko in the flesh and the competition was on - kind of. Only two of the judges were there but we started anyway. The third judge showed up shortly after we started. We went through our presentation three times, critiquing ourselves after each one and talking about what each judge commented on. All during the session, our classmates from IU came by to support us, give us a pat on the back or just a smile! It was a real morale booster to see everyone coming by. Dane was especially excited when Kate made a "surprise" visit disquised as Binaebi (well, she was wearing Binaebi's name badge). The session lasted 90 minutes but it seemed to be much shorter than that.

At 4pm all the teams gathered and apparently Jon got right down to business and announced the four teams that were going through. I could not be present for the moment because I had a student volunteer commitment at that time. My phone rang about 30 seconds after the announcement. It was Adam Williams calling to congratulate me for going through to the presentation round. Wow! A moment that I have been thinking about for a really long time just arrived. The team that I am a member of is going to be one of the final four teams to present at CHI. We are joining a very prestigous list of IU HCI/d alums that have achieved this honor. It is a rather humbling feeling and a wonderful challenge. It almost seemed surreal but it was most definitely AN experience!

I just got back from a late night meeting with Joe, Dane and Kevin Makice where we virtually tore apart every single element of our design and analyzed it with an electron microscope to determine what needs to be done to develop the most compelling design argument possible for the design we came up with. In spite of the fact that we have been working on this project for the past six months (hard to believe it has been that long!) I found myself uncovering even more new research material that further informed and inspired our design. We have a great framework for our presentation in the works and are ready to start pulling it all together tomorrow. Tons of work to do over the next two days but this is an opportunity that very few ever get to experience. We are all ready to put our absolute best into this design project and continue to push ourselves beyond where we ever dreamed or imagined we would be when we started this program last August. I am exhausted, excited, anxious, grateful and proud to be on a team and in a program that has encouraged all of us to become the designers that we are capable of becoming. Good night.

This is Jay Steele at CHI 2009 in Boston.

Judith S. Olson - UC Irvine

[these notes are rougher than I usually take - she was moving at a pretty fast clip. I tried to clean them up and fill in some gaps but this will have to suffice.]

Showed a picture of her presenting at CHI 86 with an overhead projector - it was rather humorous.

She took a look back at the perspective of the evolutionary history of the HCI field and identified topics warranting more research. She came up with Social Ergonomics after talking to a bunch of folks that have been in the industry for decades. Came up with list of 25 - narrowed down to four:

1. How to design a large activity
   Like information integration. Used writing a novel as an example.
   Like emergency medical care - from all participants points of view. Is the person's time and energy valued, are we treating the whole person, is the person informed
   An informed participatory democracy - all of the videos of the debates were made available to encourage transparency.
   How would we design this?
2. Generalize across field studies
   What domains are like other domains - air traffic control, subway control, nuclear power plant control
3. Human robot interaction - i.e. Roomba
   we are trying to make them look like humans but they don't have to, sometimes human characteristics are incorporated
4. Social ergonomics
   even small distance matters - statue of two men interacting, one wanting to get closer to make a point and the other pushing back
   

Ergonomics - what are the characteristics of humans' physical and mental capabilities that guide our design - physical, cognitive.

She is adding social to the ergonomics mix - derived from anthropology.
We are not aware of rules until they are violated - get in elevator and face the back. Most people ignore them until they are broken (behavior)

Categories of Social Ergonomics

• physics of space and reciprocity
  distance, sound, reciprocal
  >10 feet - public space, do not even need to acknowledge them
  >4 feet - social space
  >1.5 feet - personal
  <1.5 - intimate
• how you speak depends on distance to recipient
  
  • public - pronouncement
• social - greetings
• personal - conversation
• intimate - whispers, not much spoken
• closeness and eye contact commands attention - proximity
• when forced to be close, avoid eye contact
• conversation
• impression management
• time
• cultural, ethnic, gender differences
• in our language - "in your face"
• seating at 90 degrees is most comfortable
• sitting closer promotes cooperation
  

broken physics of space

• if people look small, we naturally tend to speak louder because of our understanding of space
• Showed example of situation where they used three monitors for group meeting so movement appears to be moving towards or away from each other
• they can see you without seeing them - someone lurking on a video teleconference
• assume we are all in the same time zone
• when someone believes the recipient is in a distance city they are more likely to deceive, less likely to cooperate
• zooming in makes people look too close

speaking

• 2 second break
• making and breaking eye contact
• gestures support content and meaning in speech, recipients understanding is conveyed
• video becomes more important for people who have less in common - language, culture, field of study
• eye direction will be intrepreted - location of camera in proximity of their eyes on monitor is very important
• codecs generate a delay and create a mismatch between video and audio - used prairie home companion news clip
• audio only - people forget you are there, doesn't allow backchannels

impression management - clothes, stance, cleanliness, actions, rituals - standing in line
height of monitor affects appearance of height
value of time affects use of video conferencing
attribution error

design your connectivity with social ergonomics in mind

radical collocation increases productivity - aware, available, ad hoc meetings - how to achieve the same effects remotely - virtual radical collocation

video walls - putting camera in the wall

virtual 3d environments - mimic reality

embodied social proxy - venolia (2008)
designing a large activity, building from field work, human-robot interaction, social ergonomics

remote physician as robot - mashes it all up

This is Jay Steele at CHI 2009 in Boston

I had the opportunity to sneak into the Doctoral Consortium to watch Kevin's presentation. It was enlightening to see how Kevin's research "target" has continued to evolve and morph through a process of narrowing and widening. Personally, it really caused me to reflect on how important and complicated it is to define your area of research. I thought it was very insightful that one of the faculty members said "You need to become the _________ person" meaning that it is so important to be focused on your area of research as it is what you are known by. She talked about Kevin considering being known as the Twitter person. There was some dialog about the pros and cons of such an approach - especially from the perspective of possible future employment opportunities or lack thereof if you end up getting "tagged" to just one specific thing. It is the never-ending specialist vs. generalist dilemma that exists regardless of field of study. It is one of the "big rocks" as choices you make will determine your course for years to come.

I wanted to take some pictures of Kevin presenting but the faculty chair actually came all the way to the back of the room to find out why I was there in spite of the fact that I was wearing a Student Volunteer t-shirt. When he saw I was from IU, he said it was fine for me to stay for Kevin's talk but re-affirmed that the session was closed.

The input and critique Kevin received was incredible from both the students and the faculty. I love that Kevin pulled up one of his "Boy Scout" slides in response to some of the comments he received and how he was able to spin off of what they said and use their input to expand upon the topic of discussion. I am not posting specifics of his presentation here intentionally because the consortium is a closed door session with an NDA feel to it. They are all the way at the furthest end of the hall opposite of the rest of the workshops and their food is in their room, so it is rather "exclusive". The brief experience I had there gave me more than enough incentive to set a goal of getting invited to a future Doctoral Consortium.

Thanks to Kevin for doing a great job and making me proud to be a student in the HCI/d program at the School of Informatics at Indiana University.

This is Jay Steele posting to you from CHI 2009 in Boston.

Presentation from Wayne Gray, RPI

Procedures we use to accomplish tasks that are important but not optimal. Use cattle roping example - horse and rider integrated into iceberg idea to lay foundation for usability versus functionality leading to a paradox of the active user.

The "Subjective Present" - fraction of a second where quite a bit is going on to connect things together. Actually observed how people scratch their head and noticed that after about 3 seconds, they either stopped or moved their hand or head. This is consistent across diverse cultures.

Embodiment Level Analysis - the time span at which cognitive, perceptive and action first occur.

Interactive Routines

Several views

Reality-based interaction - resource allocation costs expressed in currency of time - gets very finely parsed.

consider the memory as an attic where you store stuff that you aren't going to use for an extended time vs. memory as an active resource - garden hose, for the instance, use - not reflection

eye-hand span studies - making tea, music sight reading, walking on rough terrain - always about 0.5 to 2 seconds ahead

Information needed for interactive behavior should not need to be retained for more than two seconds

the interface is not a window onto the world - naive realism (Smallman 2004) - 3d good for shape recognition, 2d for judging relative position.

joint action - clark's active externalism and extended mind hypotheses - Topics in Cognitive Science

good theory - good applied problem

cogsci problems are good applied problems that have been overlooked recently within the hci community and there are strong reasons why they should be re-introduced into the community in a greater emphasis.

Presentation from Leanne Hirschfield, Tufts PhD Candidate
Emerging new interaction styles
tradeoffs - things should be based upon reality unless you make an explicit choice and know why you make that choice, focused on finding commonality of the different issues
total workload=semantic workload (task) + syntactic workload (interface)
Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy - measuring flow of blood in pre-frontal cortex
very suitable for hci - non-invasive, high spatial resolution, easy set up, robust to noise
eeg was commonly used, fnir has some distinct advantages, only been in existence since 1990's
use benchmark workload tasks - manipulate reality (interface) and keep the task constant
trade reality for efficiency in VR world to highlight an object the user is searching for by using an arrow to reduce barriers and not inhibit the experience.

That's it for now. May try to get back to this one later as it is touching on some very interesting topics that bring cognitive science and hci together in some very useful and helpful ways.

This is Jay Steele reporting from CHI 2009 in Boston.

Day One is over. We had Student Volunteer Orientation. It is a great group - very friendly and enthusiastic. IU is well represented and of course, the red t-shirt goes well. They are feeding us very well. Lunch was excellent.