Paper Reading #11 - Contact Area Interaction with Sliding Widgets

Comments
Stephen Morrow
Miguel Cardenas
Reference
Contact Area Interaction with Sliding Widgets
Tomer Moscovich
UIST October 4-7,2009 Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Summary

At this point, it is eminent that touchscreen systems have started replacing the classic cursor based systems. A concrete example is the design of cell phones or now called smart phones. This paper talks about a proposed touchscreen widgets design that aims at solving some of the problems that users encounter with this shift to the touchscreen era. The current touchscreen widgets were developed for mouse or cursor based systems, and therefore users have encountered multiple problems with their input interactions. One of the main issues with touchscreen systems is the problem known as the fat finger problem, as well as the selection of multiple objects with a single touch. Moscovich presents an innovative idea to solve these problems. He claims the main problem is that current systems are designed to interact to the one-pixel selection point model. The proposed solution is to used an interaction based on area selection and sliding. This can resolve the ambiguity of which target the user wants to select. There is no need for hardware update to change this interaction. According to Moscovich, approximating the area selection with a circle instead of the one-pixel selection point works much better.
Discussion
This paper was very interesting to me because the last paper reading dealt with a similar issue, which is the fat finger problem. Although in this paper, the idea for fixing that problem is much more concise. I have a Samsung Fascinate smart phone that has an Android operating system, and it is interesting to see that some of the solutions proposed in this paper are actually present in my phone. The sliding mechanism is used in my phone for incoming calls, and when I want to unlock my screen. Pictures are shown to the right to depict this.

Book Reading #24 - Emotional Design

Chapter 1: Attractive Things Work Better

Summary
Norman expresses in this chapter that people tend to prefer attractive things, as they believe they work better. If a product seems to be aesthetically more attractive than the competition, people prefer to use that product.
Discussion
This chapter hits the nail on the central idea of marketing. If a certain product seems to be "prettier" than the other one, people buy those products. Another key issue that can affect this is the idea that people start purchasing products because they are aesthetically more attractive, but then they become more popular. Although there are tons of examples, I would like to pick smart phones as a perfect example. A smart phone might not look that pretty but its functionality might be better than the top of the line smart phones.

Book Reading #25 - Coming of Age in Samoa

Chapter 8: The Role of the Dance

Summary
In this chapter, Mead explains the importance of dance in Samoan culture. This activity seems to be the only one where people of all age groups and gender can participate in. In dancing the children are actually the main focus. The elders sit on the back and watch the children dance. In order to stand out, every child has to dance in a unique way to impress the elders.
Discussion
This activity reminds me when I use to dance in elementary school in holidays such as mother's day. The same hierarchy existed, the elders sat on the back and every single one of us tried to dance the best to impress the elders. The only difference was that we were all dancing alike. Of course, the elders were always cheering for their own children. I can sense the nervousness the children must have felt.

Book Reading #26 - Opening Skinner's Box

Chapter 7: Rat Park

Summary
This chapter talks about the experiments that are to this day practiced on rats to determine addiction to drugs. In particular, it describes the experiment done by Bruce Alexander, Robert Coambs, and Patricia Hadaway. They did not believe that the classic experiments done to the animals revealed anything about drug addiction. Instead, they thought classical experiments revealed that the environment to which the animals were subjected to affected the addiction. In order to test their hypothesis, they built a rat park in which rats had the freedom of moving around instead of being in a box. Their hypothesis was right, the rats that were placed in the park did not show any signs of addiction and instead rejected the drug.
Discussion
It is interesting when someone believes to have found a flawed experiment, creates a new experiment and proves their hypothesis right. This same thing happened to these scientists, as they did not believe that animals were actually needing to come back and get more of a certain drug. By creating a whole new environment where walls were painted with trees and other things, they were able to prove that the environment itself was the factor for the animals to come back for the drugs.

Paper Reading # 10 - Ripples: Utilizing Per-Contact Visualization to Improve User Interaction with Touch Displays

Reference
Daniel Wigdor, Sarah Williams, Michael Cronin, Robert Levy, Katie White, Maxim Mazeev, Hrvoje Benko.
UIST October 4-7, 2009, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

Summary:
This paper presents a system called Ripples which deals with visualizations in direct-touch display systems. The main purpose of Ripples is to help with the feedback problem in touch displays. Even though this is a known issue, not much attention has been devoted to this type of research. The authors believe the so-called "fat finger problem" created frustration in users since it lacks a way to attribute unexpected results to their actual causes. One of the main problems with the fat finger is missing targets. Another key issue is that depending on the hardware of the application, a user may not feel a feedback on a click.
Discussion:
With systems moving quite fast to touch displays, I believe this area of research has an enormous field of study. It will be interesting what kind of discoveries will be made that can help us develop better applications for touch screen tv's, smartphones, tablets, computers, etc. In particular, the focus of this paper is interesting because when a click does not perform the action it is supposed to the user typically gets frustrated. Therefore, a feedback mechanism that allows you to know if an action has been taken sounds great for debugging know issues.

Book Reading #23 - Opening Skinner's Box

Chapter 6: Monkey Love

Summary
This chapter talks about Harry Harlow's monkey experiments. Harlow was able to prove in his experiments that a monkey preferred a soft cloth surrogate mother than a milk-bearing one. Slater also describes Harlow's life as he got married for the first time, when he had an affair, his divorce, and his second marriage. Animal rights activists claim that Harlow's experiment were extremely cruel, although we have to admit we were able to learn a lot from them.
Discussion
I think in his experiments, the ends justify the means. Slater writes in this chapter how social service agencies, the birthing industry and other industries were affected by Harlow's findings, for the good I would say. Some of the findings might appear very obvious to us now. However, it is very interesting to see the different variations that Harlow played with in his experiments.