That’s right, we’re coming home today. China has been an interesting host and we’ll thank her kindly for the hospitality (I’ll share stories in another forum) but we are excited to return home. Our flight departs today at 4PM and arrives today at 4PM in Chicago.
Yesterday my presentation, “Designing for Augmented Cognition: Problem Solving for Complex Environments” was well received by everyone. A good portion of the presentation dealt with the pilot-cockpit research we’ve been working on for the last 2 years. After my presentation, I had an interesting discussion with a gentleman about the value of the old-school steam gauges that are still in use in the majority of today’s general aviation fleet. I think I’m going to need to better document my justifications for revisiting the cockpit interface metaphor. I’ve talked about the acceptance resistances exhibited by expert users of bad interfaces in the past and if this discussion is representative of the aviation community as a whole, I’ve got my work cut out for me. More on that later.
For the most part I am finding myself re-invigorated by our cockpit research. I’m planning on doing a little more work and then releasing our UI to the public as an open source initiative. I’m excited to participate in a larger open discussion. For now, though, I will spend a little more time dreaming. Now where’s that bottle of Ambien? See you all soon.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on July 26, 2007
Greetings from Beijing. Between jet lag and merciless schmoozing, I’ve been unable to get to posting as frequently as I’d hoped. Here’s an update:
- I have still not slept an entire night. My body clock is definitely discombobulated but I think it’s on London time. Hmmmm.
- The Conference opened on Tuesday with a Plenary Session that included an interesting speech by Dr. Takeo Kanade. He’s done some interesting stuff, including the robotic camera system used to take the matrix like shots of players in the Super Bowl. His area of focus right now is Digital Human Modeling. His premise is that the human is the weakest link in a system and therefore we should spend a good deal of time modeling human behavior and construction digitally. He’s already done some work cataloging and modeling human feet, hands, and gestures for a number of commercial clients. He created a machine that electronically scans feet (think 3D CAT scan) and provides an accurate shoe size. This machine is creating a huge database of the shapes of human feet. Dr. Kanade hopes to create a database of how feet change over 30 years of growth and use. He’s helped auto manufacturers create a passive monitoring system that can accurately predict what control you are going to touch based on the motions you begin making and your kinetic structure. My favorite project is a web site that allows mothers in Japan to describe a room in their house and then tell them all of the ways their child can get hurt in it. It’s part of his QoLT program. Apparently it’s quite popular. No English translation yet.
- Wednesday provided some very interesting sessions including HCI for Aviation, Social Computing, Smart Living Spaces, “Neurotechnology and Augmented Cognition Applications: Present and Future” and more.
- We had the most amazing Peking (Beijing) Duck for Lunch. Our friend Chong speaks Cantonese and found a famous restaurant about 5 minutes ($1.50 cab ride) from the Olympic Crater (are they really going to be ready for next summer?).
- I’ve finally got a presentation that I am proud of. No more nitpicking in PowerPoint for this guy.
- It’s 6:30 AM so now I have to go through my very artificial morning ritual.
That’s my report for now. This has definitely been an interesting expedition.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on July 25, 2007
It’s interesting how you experience a new culture. We’re getting a first hand view of China’s moral control of its citizens as they are blocking our access to Flickr.com. Here’s a thread that seems to go on and on about how mad people are about the whole thing. I suppose I can respect a country’s need to do what it believes is best for its citizens. Tim has already hacked the problem by VPNing to his friend’s house in Chicago. I’m working on downloading a program called Vidalia that will allow me to do something similar. We’ll have pictures to share soon.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on July 23, 2007
Tim Mills and I are off to speak at HCI International 2007 in Beijing, China. We’ll be talking about designing for Augmented Cognition. Specifically we’re talking about a fighter cockpit interface we’ve been working on for the last two years. We’ve been tasked with studying the information flow in the fighter cockpit environment. Our novel interface was designed for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. We’ll be posting about our trip all week including discussions about the interface. So far our trip has started off on the wrong foot. Our flight out of O’Hare (United 851) was delayed by 3 hours. Safety first, right?
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on July 21, 2007
Congratulations Chicago 2016 and the City of Chicago for the launch of the World Sport Chicago community site. A gift from us (identity, design, user interface programming) and Geneca (Drupal implementation and suave project manager) to the city of Chicago, we can’t help being excited by their mission to provide Chicago youth access to Olympic Athletics. We’re helping inspire champions for 2016!
The site is architecture simple now but this is only the first phase of development, much more is in the works. Stay tuned!
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on July 19, 2007
Here’s a question to you. Do you think that 508 Compliance provides the best experience for people with disabilities? We did some tests with blind respondents back in January of this year for a large online/brick-and-mortar retailer and I’m here to tell you it is not.
Most everyone has heard about Target’s lawsuit for not providing access for disabled individuals. Having seen their site translated by JAWS I can attest to the fact that the experience merited a lawsuit. But we also tested many other eCommerce sites and found that even the best still took 5 minutes to traverse one page. Section 508 Compliance, and for the most part the W3C Accessibility Standards, only mandates proper display of information so that it can be accessed by assisting devices. What is missing is an understanding that maybe the content presented to individuals with disabilities should be streamlined to be more appropriate to the medium they use to access it.
We did some research and found that in the United States today there are 10 million blind and visually disabled individuals. We’re still gathering numbers on what percentage of that group is purchasing products on the internet but it’s interesting to note that the number is expected to triple in the next 10 years as baby boomers age. This seems to me to be a significant enough number to incite retailers to start thinking about the problem now.
We’ve gone down the path a little bit by creating an applet that can detect JAWS (remember it’s not a browser, it reads the content in a browser) and swaps out the presentation style sheet accordingly. We’re also starting to understand what the blind consumer really shops for. We believe there is an opportunity for some thinking with regard to product descriptions. Blind people cannot use color and other visual descriptions to purchase products.
I think the most telling tale is that of Peapod. Peapod provides to-the-door delivery of grocery items in Chicagoland and other markets like New York, Washington, DC, and Boston. They offer a service that is not only desired, but required for those with visual impairments. Unfortunately, their site is not accessible. There are even classes that teach the blind how to navigate the Peapod site.
So what do we do? Well, this post is the beginning of a discussion. We will continue to explore and hopefully you will join us. We have already begun working with the wonderful folks at the Chicago Lighthouse to gain insight. Hopefully we can make the world just a little bit better for everyone.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on July 18, 2007
I talk to a lot of clients. My job is to convince them there is value in measuring and improving the ease-of-use (usefulness is another topic) of their applications. My job has gotten easier over the last 5 years because the concept has been mostly accepted, but I keep running up against the same question. If user testing is quantifiable why isn’t there a standardized metric through which we can compare sites against each other? I talked with my team and we embarked on a journey that began to understand what it would take to create a standardized usability metric. We’ve made some progress but realize that one company could not sponsor such a metric with any credibility.
So I asked Jennifer Hoppenrath to post on our favorite HCI forums to see what the temperature was in the various communities. She came into my office last week, sad face in tow, and explained that she had been flamed by every community she contacted. Apparently, standardizing the way we measure usability is a sales trick? I was flabbergasted that some posts even stated that their method of heuristic analysis was a competitive differentiator (yes, that’s a sales trick). Don’t forget that heuristic means “best practice” and therefore suggests a larger shared pool of wisdom. How can that exist if we don’t collaborate to manage the quality of our collective work?
I’m excited that the HCI community is passionate about their work, but I really think its time for us to pull our heads out of the sand and address our customers’ needs. Maybe do a better job? Why can’t we work together to create a standardized usability metric? I think everyone would win.
Posted by Joseph Juhnke on July 12, 2007
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