Monthly Archives: April 2007

What happens if you ask the customer (user)?

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Dell started some time ago a web page where the public was asked for comments on improvement (http://www.ideastorm.com) – by now the list is quite impressive – at least in length. Such open community processes are really exciting to watch. I am curious which of those suggestions are implemented and how successful it is to listen to customers direct responses. If it works well others are probably trying it, too…

To make the most out of these suggestions and comments it seems essential to perform a detailed analysis (perhaps taking into account temporal dynamics of the conversation additionally to the content) – looks like another really interesting field for text-mining.

>What happens if you ask the customer (user)?

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Dell started some time ago a web page where the public was asked for comments on improvement (http://www.ideastorm.com) – by now the list is quite impressive – at least in length. Such open community processes are really exciting to watch. I am curious which of those suggestions are implemented and how successful it is to listen to customers direct responses. If it works well others are probably trying it, too…

To make the most out of these suggestions and comments it seems essential to perform a detailed analysis (perhaps taking into account temporal dynamics of the conversation additionally to the content) – looks like another really interesting field for text-mining.

Don’t wash your dishes before loging on to the computer

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This morning I washed my dished (manually in a kitchen sink) and afterwards (with dry hands) I tried to log on to my computer using the finger print scanner. My thumb did not work anymore. Looking closer at my thumb it seemed clear that this looked temporarily different as it was in the water for 10 minutes. A few minutes later the thumb is back to normal, but I already logged using a password. What do I learn from this – If I will do a ubicomp project in the kitchen (similar to things we did in Munich) I will not use finger print scanners for authentication.

What would happen if I had to wash dishes before entering the US ;-)

>Don’t wash your dishes before loging on to the computer

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This morning I washed my dished (manually in a kitchen sink) and afterwards (with dry hands) I tried to log on to my computer using the finger print scanner. My thumb did not work anymore. Looking closer at my thumb it seemed clear that this looked temporarily different as it was in the water for 10 minutes. A few minutes later the thumb is back to normal, but I already logged using a password. What do I learn from this – If I will do a ubicomp project in the kitchen (similar to things we did in Munich) I will not use finger print scanners for authentication.

What would happen if I had to wash dishes before entering the US ;-)

Panel on Users as Producers at Schloss Birlinghoven

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In the castle on campus Ute Schütz and Michael Krapp from IAIS and SCAI organize a public panel discussion on citizen journalism and Web 2.0 trends. The discussion looked at the topic from several angles including technology, content, and communication. I had the honour to be on the panel with Wolfgang Back, Frank Patalong, Moritz „mo.“ Sauer and Thomas Tikwinski.

On issue was how much blogs are (mis)used to transport information or to do advertising. The web seems to be to many people a very believable medium. This reminded me of an article I read some time ago on story-telling o n the web (Miller, J. 2005. Storytelling evolves on the web: case study: EXOCOG and the future of storytelling. interactions 12, 1 (Jan. 2005), 30-47. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1041280.1041281). I think something along this lines would an interesting project with students.

The questions what is going to change in the near future on the WWW brought many trend statements out, but for me it is amazing that most of the infrastructure and technology we need to make this happen is out there. One comment which I think is really true is that it is more an more about content and communication again. As Thomas said before the panel – most of the great things that are called Web 2.0 have been in the original proposal for the WWW (e.g. annotations by everyone or users as editors) – but now technology is finally there that people can use it.

>Panel on Users as Producers at Schloss Birlinghoven

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>In the castle on campus Ute Schütz and Michael Krapp from IAIS and SCAI organize a public panel discussion on citizen journalism and Web 2.0 trends. The discussion looked at the topic from several angles including technology, content, and communication. I had the honour to be on the panel with Wolfgang Back, Frank Patalong, Moritz „mo.“ Sauer and Thomas Tikwinski.

On issue was how much blogs are (mis)used to transport information or to do advertising. The web seems to be to many people a very believable medium. This reminded me of an article I read some time ago on story-telling o n the web (Miller, J. 2005. Storytelling evolves on the web: case study: EXOCOG and the future of storytelling. interactions 12, 1 (Jan. 2005), 30-47. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1041280.1041281). I think something along this lines would an interesting project with students.

The questions what is going to change in the near future on the WWW brought many trend statements out, but for me it is amazing that most of the infrastructure and technology we need to make this happen is out there. One comment which I think is really true is that it is more an more about content and communication again. As Thomas said before the panel – most of the great things that are called Web 2.0 have been in the original proposal for the WWW (e.g. annotations by everyone or users as editors) – but now technology is finally there that people can use it.

Girls’ day at Fraunhofer in Birlinghoven

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In Germany there are still too few girls and women interested in studying technical subjects – it may have different reasons but I think trying to convince young girls that technology is really exciting is a good way of addressing the problem.

We had this morning 7 girls visiting our lab. Matching our current teaching at B-IT (and using the test implementation Dagmar made ;-) we offered the topic “The computer knows where I am – how does this work”. First we played a mini geocaching game where they had to find a bag of jelly babies behind the castle.

After they had some experience with GPS and an electronic map we explained how it works and even parse together a NMEA-0183 sentence. We also discussed some application ideas, e.g. kids monitoring with GPS. The discussion, in particular the privacy issues that came up, were quite interesting.

I can really see that for some projects running focus groups with kids could be fun for them and a great value for the projects.

>Girls’ day at Fraunhofer in Birlinghoven

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In Germany there are still too few girls and women interested in studying technical subjects – it may have different reasons but I think trying to convince young girls that technology is really exciting is a good way of addressing the problem.

We had this morning 7 girls visiting our lab. Matching our current teaching at B-IT (and using the test implementation Dagmar made ;-) we offered the topic “The computer knows where I am – how does this work”. First we played a mini geocaching game where they had to find a bag of jelly babies behind the castle.

After they had some experience with GPS and an electronic map we explained how it works and even parse together a NMEA-0183 sentence. We also discussed some application ideas, e.g. kids monitoring with GPS. The discussion, in particular the privacy issues that came up, were quite interesting.

I can really see that for some projects running focus groups with kids could be fun for them and a great value for the projects.

Why shopping is fun – thoughts on intelligent user interfaces or why n=1 is not enough

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Some weeks ago I saw for the first time one of the intelligent scales in the wild (=outside the lab). At that time I was really impressed how well it worked (sample size: n=1, product: banana, pack: no-bag, recognition performance: 100%). Last time I was too late so there was no time to play or see other people using it – but today I had some 5 minutes to invest.

The basic idea of the scale is simple and quite convincing. The customers put their purchase on the scales. A camera makes a guess what it is and the selection menu is reduced to the candidates that match the guess of the camera. Additionally, there is always a button to get all the options (as in the old version without the camera). It appears that this should make things easier.

I observed people trying to weigh different fruits and vegetables in bags and without bags (obviously I tried it myself, too). It did not work very often but interestingly people did not care much. It looked as most people did not really realise that this is meant to be an intelligent user interface. They probably just wondered why the display is showing always different things, but as they are intelligent themselves they found a way to deal with.

Overall it seems that it does really well on bananas which are not wrapped in a bag (my initial test case) and does not too well on many other things. I think the scales are an interesting example of a invisible interface.

Overall this is again a remainder that user tests that are small may be utterly wrong.

>Why shopping is fun – thoughts on intelligent user interfaces or why n=1 is not enough

Posted on by
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>

Some weeks ago I saw for the first time one of the intelligent scales in the wild (=outside the lab). At that time I was really impressed how well it worked (sample size: n=1, product: banana, pack: no-bag, recognition performance: 100%). Last time I was too late so there was no time to play or see other people using it – but today I had some 5 minutes to invest.

The basic idea of the scale is simple and quite convincing. The customers put their purchase on the scales. A camera makes a guess what it is and the selection menu is reduced to the candidates that match the guess of the camera. Additionally, there is always a button to get all the options (as in the old version without the camera). It appears that this should make things easier.

I observed people trying to weigh different fruits and vegetables in bags and without bags (obviously I tried it myself, too). It did not work very often but interestingly people did not care much. It looked as most people did not really realise that this is meant to be an intelligent user interface. They probably just wondered why the display is showing always different things, but as they are intelligent themselves they found a way to deal with.

Overall it seems that it does really well on bananas which are not wrapped in a bag (my initial test case) and does not too well on many other things. I think the scales are an interesting example of a invisible interface.

Overall this is again a remainder that user tests that are small may be utterly wrong.