What do we mean when talking about the “chrome” in a user interface design? An attendee asked this question during a recent course on Visual Design for Mobile and Tablet. Whenever someone asks us a basic question, I assume that many more people want the answer as well — and thus, this article on chrome.

• Definition: Chrome is the visual design elements that give users information about or commands to operate on the screen’s content (as opposed to being part of that content). These design elements are provided by the underlying system — whether it be an operating system, a website, or an application — and surround the user’s data.
• Not coincidentally, “Chrome” is also the name of Google’s web browser, though I don’t use the term in that sense here.

I don’t know who came up with the term “chrome,” but it was likely a visual analogy with the use of metal chrome on big American cars during the 1950s: the car body (where you sit) was surrounded by shiny chrome on the bumpers, tail fins, and the like.

Similarly, in most modern GUIs, the chrome lives around the edges of the screen, surrounding the middle area, which is dedicated to the user’s data.

Chrome at Different System Levels

Following are some examples of chrome, which vary depending on the “underlying system”:

• On a Windows PC, the underlying system is the Windows operating system. In Windows 7, the chrome consists of the Start button, the task bar, the system tray, and the recycle bin. We might also consider the gadget area to be chrome, particularly if a user simply sticks to those gadgets that ship with the system. (As many do, due to user inertia and the power of defaults.)
• When using application software, such as a word processor, the chrome is found in the menu bar, the ribbon or toolbars, rulers, scrollbars, and various specialized panes, such as Word’s thesaurus bar or Photoshop’s palette of color swatches.
• In a web browser, the chrome includes the URL field, the browser toolbars, the browser buttons, the tabs, scrollbars, and status fields.
• In a mobile app, the chrome often includes a status bar across the top of the screen and a tab bar with command icons across the bottom. Sometimes, there’s also a navigation bar below the status bar.
• On a website, the chrome includes navigation bars, footers, logos, branding, the search box, and so forth.

Chrome Obesity: Don’t Eat My Pixels

The penalty of chrome is clear: chrome takes up screen space, leaving less for the target content or data. This is particularly bad on mobile devices, where screen space is at an even higher premium than on tablets or PCs. But even on my 30-inch desktop monitor, the combined Windows and Excel chrome means that I can see only 67 rows of data in a spreadsheet instead of the 80 rows that would theoretically fit on the screen. Thus, without the chrome, I’d be able to review about 19% more data.

The spreadsheet example shows another downside of chrome: it accumulates as systems are nested within layers of other systems, each with its own chrome. Let’s say, for example, that you use Facebook. Within a typical desktop browser window, the user’s Facebook wall accounts for only about 48% of the web page; Facebook’s chrome and wasted screen space eat up the remaining 52%. (According to our definition, advertising isn’t true chrome — because it’s useless — but it’s still overhead, so I’m counting it here.) When you further subtract the browser and OS chrome, the user’s wall is allowed less than 40% of the screen space.

When I analyzed a range of website homepages 9 years ago, I found that the actual content was allocated a paltry 20% of the user’s screen. On today’s bigger monitors, the relative overhead consumed by OS and browser chrome is less bloated, so the 40% allowed by Facebook is probably fairly representative of major websites.

Because cumulative chrome often eats more than half of our pixels, one guideline is certainly to beware chrome obesity.

A second guideline is to consider ways of temporarily hiding parts of the chrome and reveal it only when needed. Doing so is dangerous, however, because what’s out of sight is often out of mind — and you definitely cannot rely on short-term memory in user interface design. Chrome that comes and goes works only if you:

• Use a simple and reliable operation to reveal the chrome (don’t use gestures that are obtuse or subject to accidental activation).
• Offer rock-solid consistency so that the hidden chrome’s existence is drilled into the user’s long-term memory through excessive repetition and the absence of any deviations or exceptions that would undermine learning.

Chrome’s Benefits

Although expensive, chrome has considerable benefits:

• Chrome empowers users by providing a steady set of commands and options that are always visible (or at least easily revealed if my guidelines are followed). Chrome also stays in the same spot, liberating users from having to locate it. Further, users are freed from the whims of particular web page or content designers; that’s one reason the Back button is one of the most popular features on the web. Chrome might be overhead in terms of screen pixels, but it’s power at the user’s fingertips that serves as an immediate escape hatch from obnoxious or useless web pages.
• Chrome offers a set of generic commands that work on all the different types of content and data that appear within its framework. Because it’s always the same, users have less to learn, meaning that they can focus on their real-world needs rather than on the computer.
• Chrome promotes consistency and standards in the user interface, which facilitates learnability and makes users feel even more in control of their experiences. (Of course, this applies only if you follow the standard, rather than invent your own weird chrome to confuse users.)

On balance, chrome is good for usability. Just don’t overdo it.

Written by: Jakob Nielsen
Posted by: Situated Research

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Many companies approach us and ask, “I want to maintain and update my own website. What CMS system do you suggest?” When reviewing content management systems (CMS) with clients, we go over the pros and cons of the most popular systems, and evaluate their background and website capabilities to ensure that the correct CMS system is selected for your company. Sometimes a CMS system is not the solution for a company, and an affordable monthly maintenance program is more appropriate.

Following, we discuss the pros and cons of three major CMS systems: Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.

Drupal

If you are the type of person who would rather hand-code the content of your pages than use a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get, similar to document editing software), or if you enjoy tweaking the code that makes up the framework of a website, then Drupal is probably for you. This advanced CMS closely resembles a developer platform, rather than a traditional CMS.

While this system can be used by non-developers, developers will likely feel more at home here than in the other two. However, being more developer-friendly does not automatically make it more user-friendly.

There are dozens of additional functions that can be used to develop in Drupal in comparison to WordPress or Joomla. Every published piece of content (called a ‘node’ in Drupal) has its own set of commands and tags. These commands and tags can be accessed elsewhere (allowing similar functionality to be repurposed without having to be reprogrammed), which makes for a very intense experience (whether or not you know what you’re doing). For those that are not very technical, this can be the trial of their lives. For people who live in code, they can literally get lost developing some very cool websites.

While Drupal websites can act and function in some pretty neat ways, they are sometimes limited by not always looking that great. Just about any look and feel can be built into Drupal, but the nature of the tool puts emphasis on the back end functionality of the website. We have seen few websites built in Drupal that look and feel as good as they function. You can see this in the theme directory on the Drupal.org website, in comparison to other CMS websites such as WordPress. It is a shame, because with all of the development advancements of the software, it would almost be perfect with a stronger design interface and improved usability.

Drupal Pros

• Extremely developer friendly: great if you love coding
• Strong community to help discern the dozens (hundreds) of available functions and tags
• Can be used to create some awesome websites that can outperform the majority of sites around the Internet

Drupal Cons

• Not as designer-friendly or user-friendly, and hard for someone with little code experience to make the leaps required to do the very cool things for which Drupal is known
• Theming of Drupal has been a big limitation (until recently), perhaps because it has been developers (not designers) that are making the themes
• Getting a Drupal website published could cost you more time, and thus more money, than WordPress or Joomla

Joomla

Joomla blends some of the ease of use for beginners with some advanced coding capabilities. Designers will often choose Joomla because of the amazing capabilities that its engine has in making websites look fantastic. Newcomers to Joomla (and website management) will love the fact that it is very easy to use, and is customizable as more developers create tools that are easier to understand. Developers might choose the system because of its capacity for development and customization.

Still, Joomla is not as flexible as Drupal with its coding capabilities. While there are many ways to override default coding functionality, there are parts of the system that cannot be pushed and stressed as hard as Drupal. Also, while Drupal can be used to run multiple websites with one backend and database, Joomla lacks the ability to create multi-sites.

Compared to WordPress, Joomla has a ways to go in being as user-friendly. In cases where people use both systems to manage a website, those that lacked coding experience and a detailed understanding of the back-end of their website chose WordPress over Joomla. Joomla is simple enough that most can learn to use it, but not simple enough that everyone would pick it up easily.

Joomla Pros

• Friendly for most types of users, including designers, developers and administrators
• Huge community is awesome for assisting with website development
• Has been rapidly growing and improving itself for the past several years

Joomla Cons

• Still not quite user-friendly enough for everyone to understand
• Not quite as powerful as Drupal, and can be a bit confusing for some to learn
• Recently rebuilt the entire system from ground-up, and so many still using old versions (1.0.x); new version has some bugs

WordPress

WordPress is an excellent open-source system to use when creating a website that lets you quickly get your thoughts published on the web. While WordPress is often used as a blog platform, it can serve as a website CMS that can incorporate huge libraries of ‘plugins’ (such as social media integration or search engine optimization) to add powerful functionality to a website.

WordPress is extremely easy to use and setup. We have used it with clients that are new to the Internet, and they can pick this system up and use it quicker than any other system out there. Since WordPress is already developed to work as a blog, it can be setup to be a website very easily. WordPress also has an excellent WYSIWYG editor (with basic document editing controls), so content authoring is very easily done within WordPress. A commenting system is built in, as well as pinging services, multiple author profiles (for assigning content editing rights), as well as trackbacks and more. In most cases little needs to be done to set up the system, because it is initially set up to work the way most users want right out of the box.

WordPress allows for graphic designers to develop custom graphics for the website and to easily integrate them as a custom theme for WordPress. In other words, your website on WordPress can have any look and feel that you want. For example, Helen Sharritt Interiors (www.helensharrittinteriors.com) is a WordPress website with custom graphics developed by Situated Research, and you will not find this theme anywhere else on WordPress. Our graphic designers created the custom design, graphics and layout.

WordPress Pros

• Simple to use, no need for modifications
• Excellent for blogging or sharing thoughts sequentially
• Non-technical users can get the hang of it quickly
• Many free plugins for event calendars, social media, and other marketing tools
• Affordable solution to maintain your own website

WordPress Cons

• Not as developer friendly as other CMS like Drupal

Which Will You Choose?

Now it is time to make a decision. Joomla and WordPress are both known for their user-friendly interface, while Drupal may take some time to master but provide advanced functionality for advanced programmers. We recommend that you weigh the pros and cons of each popular CMS system listed above, and discuss these options with those that will be maintaining your website in the years to come.

If you have questions about content management, or any systems you are considering for your website, please do not hesitate to contact Situated Research. You can call us at (630) 522-0855 or email info@situatedresearch.com for more information. We would love to help you make this important decision, and help ensure your business achieves success with its Internet marketing objectives.

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt
Posted by: Situated Research

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According to research firm Score, Inc., the 2011 holiday season saw a 15% increase in web sales over 2010, for a total of $35.5 billion in online sales (while overall holiday spending was up just 3.8% from 2010).

The holiday season is not just about selling products to your customers. It also involves keeping those that come for the first time, and keeping them there. As said by Jakob Nielsen, “It’s an old lesson: It’s much easier to close additional sales with existing customers than to acquire new customers. People who’ve proven willing to give you money will often give you more. This is true for all sales channels, but it’s particularly crucial for e-commerce because the first order proves your credibility if you effectively handle follow-up and delivery.”

The following statistics about shopping carts highlight how website usability problems can impact sales:

21% of buyers said they “decided not to shop at any given site because of security concerns.” (Jan Riley)

1 second delay in page response = 7% reduction in conversion (Sean Work)

54% of U.S. consumers believe companies are more interested in selling products and services (Michael Fisher)

According to Aaron Marcus, Staples.com® in applying usability in their website found:

• 67% more repeat customers
• 31-45% reduced drop-off rates
• 10% better shopping experience
• 80% increased traffic

½ of your potential sales are GONE if customers can’t find merchandise on your e-commerce site

“At HomePortfolio.com we monitored site traffic, observed consumers in usability studies and worked with internal business groups. This helped us make changes that made the site’s purpose clearer and increased transaction rates measurably. The change increased the traffic up 129% the week we put it up.” (Interaction Design, Inc., 2001)

Some issues to consider that cause shopping cart abandonment:
(Charles Nicholls) & (Roger McGershen)

• Customers abandon their shopping carts when the ratio of the shipping cost to the value of the cart approaches 100 percent. Would you buy a $19.99 item if it costs an additional $14.95 to ship?
• Customers are sensitive to perceived price points. $9.99 seems cheaper than a $10.00 item. The same idea goes for shipping costs and how many items are in a cart. One study found that a $99 minimum order to get free shipping encouraged people to add more items to their carts.
• Not able to find contact information (22% abandonment rate): trust is lost if a person has no way, or difficulty in finding, how to contact you.

Nine ways to improve shopping cart retention and visitor experience:

1. Disclose shipping costs in advance.
2. Show security icons.
3. Create trust: Communicate your online store’s trustworthiness by having clear guarantees and contact information. Display company phone numbers on every page, along with hours of business, and place your guarantee and return policies prominently.
4. Easy shopping cart return: make it easy for customers to return to the shopping cart without having to go back through the purchase process.
5. Offer comparison shopping directly from your site.
6. Offer coupons and discounts.
7. Encourage user reviews and reward those customers who give them.
8. Do not have a graphic heavy page.
9. Make contact information prominent throughout your site.

When going over the final numbers of your holiday sales, consider the facts presented in this article. Consider how your potential customers view and interact with your e-commerce website. Review your weblogs and customer comments. Work with your hosting company and see how many shopping carts were abandoned. Most importantly, review the usability of your website.

As Jakob Nielsen said, “Usability rules the Web. Simply stated, if the customer can’t find a product, then he or she will not buy it.”

If you would like some assistance with reviewing your website’s usability, please contact Situated Research.

Written by: Situated Research staff
Posted by: Situated Research

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One way to manage interaction design complexity is to have commands serve double duty. There are two ways of doing this, with different usability implications:

• Generic commands use the same command in different contexts to achieve conceptually the same outcome, even though details of the specific effects might differ.
• Overloaded commands use variants of the same command to achieve different outcomes — sometimes depending on the context and other times depending on where the command appears on the screen.

I discussed generic commands in depth in an earlier article. The most famous generic command these days is the pinch-zoom gesture, which works in most touchscreen user interfaces. In fact, the command is so pervasive that users expect it to work universally — and are sorely disappointed when they encounter an application that doesn’t support it. Pinching outward sometimes enlarges text and other times enlarges pictures. Users don’t know or care about the differences; they simply rely on the gesture as a generic command when they encounter stuff that’s too small and want to make it bigger.

Generic commands increase usability, because they allow users to learn one thing and use it many times. As further discussed in our training course on The Human Mind and Usability: How Your Customers Think, memories are strengthened by repeated activation, so the more places the command works, the better users will learn it.

Overloaded Commands: Often Confusing

You might think that overloaded commands are good as well. Having the same command achieve different (but similar) results sounds like an equally sound idea.

In practice, however, command overloading often confuses users:

• If a single command has different results depending on context, users often overlook the context and don’t understand why they get different outcomes when doing the “same” thing.
• When a single screen has multiple instances of what seems to be the same command, users often assume that the design is redundant and that all instances of the command will have the same effect. Or, when users simply grab onto the first instance they see, they often fail to notice that the command actually appears multiple times.

A classic example of overloaded commands is websites with multiple search fields. I can’t count how many times we’ve seen users issue a query in the wrong search on such sites. (However, there is an exception to the guideline to avoid multiple search fields: people finders on intranets.)

We saw several examples of confusing command overloading in our recent Kindle Fire user testing. For example, the Condé Nast magazine app has one “home” button at the top of the screen that takes users to the list of magazines and another “home” button that takes users to the Kindle home screen:

Two home buttons in Condé Nast’s Kindle Fire app.

These two buttons have different icons and appear in different locations, but they’re still confusing.

Even worse, the “back” button has many different interpretations across different Kindle Fire apps:

• In many apps, “back” means “back to the previous screen” (which is the recommended use).
• In ESPN, “back” means “back to home screen” (and should thus be a “home” button).
• In The New York Times, “back” sometimes means “one step back” and sometimes means “two steps back.” (When our users did a search and clicked through to an article, tapping “back” didn’t return them to the search listing, but rather bounced them back one step further.)

For a decade, one of the primary homepage usability guidelines has been to designate a single page as the one and only official homepage for any given website. Users are confused when several pages are referred to as “home.” In other words, don’t use “home” as an overloaded command within a website. The main page for a subsite should be called something else, such as “foobar main page,” “foobar overview,” or — if you must — “foobar home” (within the site’s foobar section).

For mobile apps, it’s usually a good idea to have an “application home” that users can return to as a safe base after exploring the app’s various areas. This is particularly important for content-rich apps, such as magazines or newspapers. Used this way, the “home” button serves as a generic command: conceptually, it always does the same thing, even though the specific place users return to differs in different apps.

In contrast, offering many different “homes” within the same site or app makes “home” an overloaded command, which is confusing.

A final example of the risks from overloaded command is the swipe ambiguity we found in our iPad user testing. When the same command (a swipe gesture) has different outcomes, depending on exactly where and how the user swipes, confusion results, unless the distinctions are clearer than they were in the apps we tested.

Effective Command Reuse

As these examples show, it can be a bit tricky to determine whether command reuse should count as a generic command (usually good) or an overloaded command (usually bad). There are two key deciding factors:

• Do people recognize that two contexts are different? For example, two different websites are usually so different that users wouldn’t expect the two sites’ “home” buttons to lead to identical destinations. In contrast, the context for two search boxes on the same screen is similar, even if the labels (which users rarely read) are different.
• Do people view the outcomes as similar or different? For example, returning to the previous screen is a strong enough concept that users will view “back” commands as conceptually similar, even though the previously screens will usually differ.

Both criteria depend on how users interpret the user interface. How can you know what they’ll think? Well, you could analyze it yourself and try to judge the strength of the similarities and differences. But empirical testing is safer.

Written by: Jakob Nielsen, Alertbox
Posted by: Situated Research

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When Australian Philip Gith realised his pet lizard was a better smartphone gamer than him, he didn’t euthanise it for embarrassing him – he whipped out his camera.

And now the female bearded dragon he calls Crunch has become an internet celebrity due to its fondness for the smartphone game Ant Smasher.

In the video Crunch is shown snapping up the on-screen ants and insects with her tongue to the tune of the Super Mario theme, and when the game stops the lizard looks up expectantly at its owner, angling for another round.

Gith, 21, who works as an apprentice mechanic in Brisbane, uploaded the video to YouTube about a month ago to show his mates and three weeks later it had only done about 300 views. Then he woke up one morning and had 1000 emails in his inbox.

“It’s pretty insane … I had 225,000 views yesterday morning when I checked and now it’s got 1.7 million on it,” he said in a phone interview.

“I’ve had lots of TV shows like Good Morning America contact me and they wanted to play it on their show and I’ve had agencies and advertising partnerships contact me but i’ve got to sort all that out today.”

Gith said he’s had the lizard for about a year and also owns another bearded dragon but only Crunch has taken to the smartphone game.

“I’ve had video responses of people trying to do the same thing and their dragons just don’t react the same way,” he said.

So what is it about Crunch that makes her such a keen gamer? “It was kind of really random because whenever I feed her crickets she just chases them through the tank and just smashes them … every time you dangle something in her face she’s keen to eat it so I was like I wonder how she goes with this game which has got bugs crawling on the screen,” said Gith.

Peter Harlow, manager of reptiles at Taronga Zoo, said dragon lizards were the only type of lizard that could respond to what they see on a video screen.

“They have excellent visual acuity – that’s what they do, they look for little insects and then they go out and grab them,” he said, adding that Crunch would have thought that the on-screen bugs were food.

“He thinks it’s a real edible insect and he’s trying to eat it and he’s looking confused when his tongue flicks but he doesn’t taste it … it’s the first time in his life he’s grabbed an insect and doesn’t actually get to taste it.”

Harlow said he was surprised other lizards of the same type weren’t also taking to smartphone games as they are “very visual lizards”. He said it may just be that the other lizards weren’t as hungry as Crunch at the time.

He said a group at Macquarie University was actually conducting behavioural experiments with dragon lizards using video screens. “They play back a big male and the small male will retreat but if they play back a smaller male the big male will respond aggressively and try to attack the screen in some cases,” Harlow said.

But Harlow doesn’t see a future career for Crunch as a video game stunt lizard. “He seems to be losing interest by the end of it anyway because he’s realising that it’s not a good food source.”

Written by: Asher Moses, The Sydney Morning Herald (via Presence)
Posted by: Situated Research

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When conducting a website audit, keep these six points in mind:

1. Analyze your content
2. Update your sitemap
3. Review your URLs
4. Analyze your internal link structure
5. Ensure consistent design features
6. Check for usability problems

1. Analyze Your Content

Your site has been growing since it first went live. Do you really know what is on your site as of today?Did you create a content inventory system when first developing the site? If you did not it is time to do an inventory of your content.

When developing a content inventory, utilize either a spreadsheet or database to categorize and describe the information on every page of your website. Some things to include in the inventory are:

• Central topic or area on website; i.e. ‘Staff’ page is under ‘About’ area
• Page title and URL
• Short description of the page
• When the page was created, and revision dates if any
• Who wrote the page and who is responsible for maintaining the page and their contact information
• If there is a page expiration date
• Other pages linked to this pageImages on the page
• Page status – keep, delete, revise, in revision process, etc.

Once you have this inventory, you will not only have a great tool for maintaing your website, but one that can assist with the future development of your website.

Finally, remember to assign someone (or team) to keep this inventory up-to-date.

2. Update Your Sitemap

Does your website have a functional sitemap? Is it easily accessible to your website users?

Having a functional sitemap will benefit your organization in several ways. Visitors go to sitemaps if they are having any issues finding the information on your website. Helping users find what they came for will enhance their opinion of their visit. If they cannot find information or are challenged in finding information, what will they tell others about the website or your organization?

Sitemaps do not need to be overly stylized; a basic HTML sitemap will work. Search engines also utilize sitemaps as a part of how they rank you.

Have Sitemap → Have improved usability & visitor experience
Have Sitemap → Have SEO improvement / higher search rankings

3. Review Your URLs

Do you have a http:// and a http://www. version of your site? Or, did you move a page ( i.e. www.website.com/about/ to www.wesite.com/aboutus/)? If this is the case, then you need a 301 redirect. This will ensure your web pages retain their optimized rankings after the move among search engines like Google.

When creating your URL’s are you paying attention to how they read? Are they SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly? Making URLs with keywords in the URL will help raise your rank in search engines.

Both your visitor and search engines prefer a URL that is clean and concise. A friendly URL is like: www.website.com/about.html, while an unfriendly URL might read like: www.website.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=4view=about.

4. Analyze Your Internal Link Structure

Your website internal link structure is important for a number of reasons. SEO is a theme throughout this post, and internal links are another part to your SEO. For example, if you click on a link titled “Doing a Year-End Business Review”, the page that you are directed to should be optimized for the keyword phrase “Year-End Business Review”.

5. Ensure Consistent Design Features

Are there areas of your site that are still displaying old template designs? Are your graphics up to date and consistent across your website?. While doing your audit keep in mind your overall design, including your page layouts and company graphics. Making some quick changes not only will improve the appearance of your website, but enhance your brand image and level of trust among customers.

6. Check For Usability Problems

How difficult is it to read and understand content and navigate your site? Do users get lost, or can they find what they are looking for easily?

Usability is essential for good websites. When people visit a website, they typically  are on a mission. Once on your website, users want to fulfill their goals: whether it is for entertainment value, searching for information, or for socializing with others. If your website’s visitors experience difficulty, it does not take much for them to become discouraged and go elsewhere.

Usability is a whole article of its own. However, if you do a full website review you will be well on your way to improving your website’s usability. If usability for your website is of interest, you can request a Free Usability Report from Situated Research. This report grades your website on 20 different areas of usability, and is free with no obligation.

If you so choose, you can take your audit a step further by conducting online surveys, doing reviews of materials like your PDFs, white papers, and other material your visitors might download.  You may also review comments that were posted on your blog, or on social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook.  Also, don’t forget to review  customer emails and phone calls that were handled by your customer service department.

A website review should be done on a regular basis, but if you perform it at least once a year you will be well ahead of your competition. More importantly, you will be enhancing your visitors’ time spent on your website.  This will increase the website’s marketing effectiveness, which is why you created it in the first place.

If you would like some assistance in doing your website audit feel free to contact Situated Research.

Written by: Situated Research staff
Posted by: Situated Research

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North Idaho College’s athletic department has been geared for many years now to pursue a path of excellence. But with technology changing rapidly everyday, would that ideal hold up if the sports world expanded into a virtual reality setting?

Recently, I had an opportunity to watch both TRON movies, and the game concept from the new and old videos had me thinking about possibilities for the future. In recent generations, we have seen televisions transform from the clunky old cathode ray tube to LCDs and now into 3-D.

Digital convergence is happening all around us, and it won’t be long before we see the sports world begin to collide with the virtual realm. I think that one day our athletes might be able to download their personas into a virtual setting and compete against other players, schools or national and global teams.

Now this is all just speculation, but imagine if we could put a lifelike avatar into virtual reality and control them with our minds. It would be like having the world of “The Matrix” but using the gadget in “Avatar” to control the virtual body.

The ability to modify the physics of the environment could open up a whole new set of sports not able to be achieved in our gravity-forsaken world. Colleges and athletes around the globe would have a whole new arena to earn bragging rights in.

One game I know they would have to include would be very similar to the “Disc Battle” from the movie “TRON:Legacy.” For those not familiar with this game, it is simply a rectangle with a floor comprised of hexagon panels that break when hit with the disc object.

The disc can be bounced off the walls to strike the floor or opponent, but would not maim or decapitate any of the athletes playing like in the movies. When the floor breaks completely and the athlete falls through, he or she loses.

I could see NIC excelling at the “Disc Battle,” even if it was to become an official sport tomorrow. The game of dodgeball is closely related to the virtual game, and Cardinal athletes have already shown a prowess in the field.

On Dec. 1, Rec. Sports held a dodgeball night in Christianson gymnasium and some softball and soccer players could be found competing in that night’s events. If virtual reality came to fruition tomorrow, our athletes could probably top the field.

Games to play would be endless, like virtual paintball, racing, blitz ball (for all the Final Fantasy fans), quidditch, and simulated real world sports, but it definitely wouldn’t be a substitute for competing in the real deal.

Skill and hand-eye coordination would still be necessary and knowledge of how to play conventional sports can never be created virtually.

These games would just offer a new way to think outside the box of conventional sports rules and physics and allow an individual to take it to the next level.

Imagine playing baseball on a larger field with lower gravity or playing paintball in a zero gravity environment.

North Idaho College continues to dream big in the real world and there is no doubt in my mind that the dream would extend into cyberspace. I will continue to dream big for my own chance at virtual reality as I keep my eyes locked on the Silicon Valley.

One day in the not so distant future, may we meet on the virtual frontier and let the best virtual athlete win.

Written by: Eric Rivera, North Idaho College’s Sentinel Online (via Presence)
Posted by: Situated Research

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“For example, if you make a gesture, the computer should be able to recognize this as “I want to use the telephone”. So with an iPhone for example, you have everything in a small device and you have to learn how to use it, here we want to do the opposite, the computer will have to learn what you want to do.”

“If you want to use a laptop, you just make a gesture it will recognize this, project the screen, the keyboard and everything, you won’t have to carry a device, no battery or everything, everything is ubiquitous, ubiquitous augmented reality.”

The system won the grand prize at Laval Virtual 2011 in France and was on display at the Digital Content Expo in Tokyo with two proof of concept prototypes. The first demonstration turns a regular banana into a phone. By using a high speed camera to track the banana and a parametric speaker array to direct the sound in a very narrow beam, this creates the impression that the sound is coming directly out of the banana. The second demonstration is a laptop in a pizza box. The video and sound is projected onto the lid of the pizza box and the user can interact with it by moving the playhead and changing the volume.

“For this prototype here we have tracking to get the position of the augmented object and then we project sound on the object as well as video. So usually for augmented reality, we can use goggles, we can use even iPhone or iPad with a camera, and you see augmented reality through this device. Here, it’s special augmented reality so we use a projector to directly augment objects, so it’s multi-user and the particular thing here is that we also have sound as well as the video.”

In the future they want to broaden the range of gestures and objects that the system can recognize and interact with, with the goal being the creation of a ubiquitous AR system which can learn and anticipate the intentions of the user in various situations.

[From DigInfo TV, where the story includes a 2:51 minute video; more information is available at the researchers’ web site]

Written by: DigInfo TV (via Presence)
Posted by: Situated Research

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This review is like a medical physical, and is helpful for both non-profit and for-profit organizations. During a physical your doctor asks probing questions not only about your physical health, but how things are going for you overall. Like a physical, the business review will help point out your good habits and diagnose any potential problems so they can be fixed.

To help you get started here are some of the things you should do as part of your review.

1. Check your balance sheets
   Did you make a profit? How much did you make? This is a great time to look at your return on your investments. You know to look at what you purchased and spent over the year. For example, one area of expense that can get missed is what was spent on education and training for you and the rest of the organization. Was it effective, or could it be done differently or more efficiently?
2. Review paperwork: business plans, contracts, and legal agreements
   When was the last time you took a look at your business plan? Business plans are not just materials to be shown to outside parties. Your business plan is a tool to help guide your internal operations, and should be a living document that reflects the ongoing changes within your business.
   Do you know the status of various agreements, policies and contracts? Many businesses sign long-term agreements, for things like yellow page advertising, lease agreements, and insurance policies which were all fine when they first started out. Some of these items might be out-of-date and costing the business money or an old insurance policy might not be covering your business as well as you might think. Oh, and don’t forget to look at the legal aspects of your business since that too might be out-of-date.
3. Review costs of goods and services
   Have you reviewed your vendors and service providers recently? It is important to actively manage your costs of goods and services. While price increases are a part of doing business, businesses need to keep track so their profit margin is not severely affected. This even applies to those vendors you might be using to supply items like coffee, snacks, and paper for your organization.
4. Evaluate your marketing and public relation (PR) efforts and needs
   This is the point where you take a closer look at what worked, did not work, and what needs tweaking for your marketing and PR campaigns. Take a look at each item separately. Some examples are:
   • Advertising
   • Trade Shows
   • Website marketing materials
   • Social Media marketing
   • Press Releases
   • Annual Report
   • Communications Policies

An important area to analyze is your various communication mediums and what they are doing, especially in this digital age. Website marketing and social media marketing plans are an important part of your communication as a business, and contribute to the quantity and quality of inbound leads for your business. Websites and social media presence not only bring business, but impact your company’s perceived reputation and level of trust among customers. Also remember, review those materials (i.e. PDF’s and PowerPoint) that visitors can download and pass around.

By making a conscientious effort to review your business, you will know exactly how your money was spent and the effectiveness of your efforts for the year. This knowledge can help formulate new strategies and an effective game plan for the coming year, helping your business thrive in spite of the current economy.

If you would like to discuss your year-end review with Situated Research please contact us.

Written by: Situated Research staff
Posted by: Situated Research

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Summary: Better to accept a wider margin of error in usability metrics than to spend the entire budget learning too few things with extreme precision.

Last week, I made a slide for the new User Experience (UX) Basic Training course with the recommended number of test users for different types of studies. I like teaching foundational courses because they afford me just this kind of opportunity — to distill 25 years of usability process research into a single table. Patterns crystallize when complex topics are condensed to the essence.

For example, why do we recommend testing more users for card sorting than for usability studies? Because the usual rule, “we’re testing the system, not you,” doesn’t apply to card sorting. When eliciting mental models, we’re actually testing the individual users instead of a predefined artifact, and the variability is thus larger.

The thing that surprised me most about my own table: I recommend doing most quantitative user testing with a sample size that typically entails a 19% margin of error.

19% sounds sloppy. How come a fairly low level of accuracy usually suffices in estimating usability metrics?

Two reasons:

• A 19% confidence interval pretty much represents the worst-case outcome. Usually, the error is much smaller.
• The average usability difference between websites is 64%, so even in those few cases where we get a 19% measurement error, we’d usually pick the correct winner anyway.

These mathematical points suffice to defend the idea of saving budget and limiting quantitative studies to mid-sized samples.

But there are two deeper arguments that are even more important.

Focus on Big Problems

You shouldn’t care about small issues in usability. At this stage, we still have bigger fish to fry. When redesigning a website for usability, the average improvement in key performance indicators (KPI) is 83%. Clearly, most websites still contain horrible usability problems. Intranets and mobile sites/apps are often even worse.

Your focus should thus be on the really big design problems, where your user experience is failing to meet customer needs. Typically, there are only a few issues with immense bottom-line impact. Better to invest heavily in those crucial improvements than mess around with changes that’ll gain you only a percent or two.

Wasting your budget on overly precise measurements can easily sidetrack you from the important issues; for sure, you’d have less budget left over to work on them.

Maybe in 20 years, user interfaces will be good enough that our only remaining goal will be to fine-tune them for the last few percents’ quality gain. That’s definitely not the case today.

Ask More Questions: Learn More

If you ask only one question, you’ll get only one answer. That’s why it’s better to allocate any given budget across a wider range of user research, as opposed to spending it all on getting an ever-tighter confidence interval for a single metric.

Worse yet, if you have only that one answer, you might not know what the real question is. In that sense, quantitative usability studies are like a game of Jeopardy. Your study might tell you that the answer is 42 — but why? How should you change the design to score 50 next time?

That’s why I recommend investing instead in parallel and iterative design, which exposes diverse user interface solutions to the harsh light of user testing. Of course, with more studies, each one must be smaller, but that’s okay because your insights will sum across the studies. More research = more questions = more answers = better design.

All that said, there are still cases in which it pays to spend on “deluxe usability” — mainly in those rare organizations that have reached a high maturity level with respect to user experience methodologies.

From Small Studies, Big Oaks Will Grow

One final argument in favor of keeping each study at an affordable size is the value of cumulative insights across studies. Year after year, as you keep doing research on your site and your customers, you’ll accumulate learnings.

For example, Nielsen Norman Group has tested 1,600 websites with 4,090 users across our various research studies and client projects. Although we haven’t tested each individual site with hundreds of users, we’ve observed many key user behaviors thousands of times. So, when we say, for example, that users tend to scan content on websites and read even less on mobile sites, that finding doesn’t arise from just one study which might conceivably include 20 participants who were all particularly reluctant to read.

When you see the same behavior on many different sites, with many different user profiles, the evidence mounts and becomes much stronger than the confidence interval for each of the contributing studies.

Written by: Jakob Nielsen, Alertbox
Posted by: Situated Research

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It is an honest question: how smart are your users? The answer may surprise you: it doesn’t matter. They can be geniuses or morons, but if you don’t engage their intelligence, you can’t depend on their brain power.

Far more important than their IQ (which is a questionable measure in any case) is their Effective Intelligence: the fraction of their intelligence they can (or are motivated to) apply to a task.

Take, for example, a good driver. They are a worse driver when texting or when drunk. (We don’t want to think about the drunk driver who is texting.) An extreme example you say? Perhaps, but only by degree. A person who wins a game of Scrabble one evening may be late for work because they forgot to set their alarm clock. How could the same person make such a dumb mistake? Call it concentration, or focus, we use more of our brain when engaged and need support when we are distracted.

So, what does a S.T.U.P.I.D. user look like?

Stressed

“Fear is the mind killer”, Frank Herbert wrote. Our minds are malleable and easily affected by their context. The effect of stress on the brain is well known, if not well understood. People under stress take less time to consider a decision thoroughly, and they choose from the options presented to them rather than consider alternatives. Stress is often due to social pressures. Car salespeople know to not let a customer consider an offer overnight, but pressure them to buy right away.

Tired

Tiredness is one of the largest causes of industrial and motor vehicle accidents. Interfaces used by tired people should take into account their lowered sense of self-awareness and number of details that the user is likely to miss. A classic example of an interface used by sleepy people, the iPhone alarm clock is typically set right before bed. Unfortunately, it doesn’t ring if the phone is set to vibrate, the default state for many people. When a user sets the alarm, it would be useful to override the vibrate feature, or at least remind them that it won’t ring.

Untrained

Training for enterprise applications is more often discussed then enacted. Users are thrown at an application with a manual and a Quick Reference Card. Applications that are not designed around the user’s workflow have to explain their conceptual model while they are being used: “where” things are stored, how to make changes, who to send things to.

Complex systems that are used infrequently are a particular problem. In the design of the automated external defibrillator, it is assumed the user may have no knowledge of the science or training on the device, and will be using it in a chaotic, stressful environment. The frequency of use should drive design. Yearly processes, like doing your taxes, should assume that the users have never done it before. In rarely used interfaces, customization is likely to be less useful, but a comparison to previous year’s entries is very useful as they remind the user what they did before.

Passive

More important than the user’s mental model of an application is their mental attitude toward the task. Someone sitting in the front passenger seat of a car may have the same field of view as the driver, but unless they are focused on it, they will not remember the path driven. Nothing reduces effective intelligence faster than doing a boring task against one’s will. When a user is passive, complexity becomes insurmountable. Games aimed at casual gamers know to keep the interaction model simple, using a flat navigation and avoiding “modes” (e.g. edit vs view).

Independent

User centered design is a powerful approach because it recognizes that there are many reasons people use a system. Airline booking sites are used to buy tickets, but also to see if the family can afford to go on vacation. The designer should recognize that they cannot solve every problem, but should give users the tools to help themselves, to work independently of the application’s intended method. In internal enterprise systems, the top user request is often “export to Excel”. This often reflects that the system does not meet the user’s needs. Excel empowers the user to do ‘out of the box’ actions. It is the API to the real world.

Distracted

People are multi-tasking more than ever, whether it is simply listening to music while driving or playing Farmville while watching TV. Effective multi-tasking has been shown to be a myth, but it is a popular one. Paying “partial attention” to multiple activities has significant impact to your perception of an interface. Users are often said to be on “autopilot”, clicking on things by shape, rather than reading the text. An interface cannot rely on the user having a clear and consistent working memory across multiple screens. The task and details must be re-stated at each step to remind the user the step they are on and what they need to do. Frequent, automatic saving of user entered data is essential, especially as connections can time out.

Help S.T.U.P.I.D. users by designing S.M.A.R.T.

Start-ups often experience a shock when they emerge from the hothouse of heads-down development. Their intended customers barely have time to listen to their idea, let alone devote time to explore its features. The contrast between a small group of friends working intensely together on a single project with the varied needs and limited free time of their customers can be a disheartening experience.

Projects often fail not because the idea is bad, but because the value their service will provide is not easily understood. The question I ask my team is “What problem, from the user’s point of view, are you solving?” It has to be a problem the user knows they have. If the problem is not obvious to the user, in terms they understand, the solution doesn’t matter. Focusing on the problem keeps a project from drifting into fantasy requirements: solutions looking for a problem.

Design teams often use themselves as model users, but they are almost the perfect storm of differences between themselves and the users.

• They know the product exists and what it is supposed to do.
• They understand the internal concept, including its past and future ideas.
• They care, personally, about the product. Their success depends on it.

The user has none of these things. The user knows nothing about the product, doesn’t understand the concept, and doesn’t care.

What can be done to make S.T.U.P.I.D. users S.M.A.R.T?

Simplify

Why are simple apps popular these days? It is not that people don’t like features, it’s because instant comprehensibility trumps powerful features. In the old search engine wars, Google may have had a better search algorithm, but they became known for having a simpler design. Yahoo and others tried to become portals, losing sight of the users primary goal. I advise people to “Design the mobile version first” to help them focus on the key user benefits.

The down side is that any successful project expands and adds features to address additional user needs. What starts out as “Writer for iPad” can end up as Microsoft Word. Simple is not always better, but keeping the new user in mind helps find the right balance.

Memorable

An app is only as good as the user understands it. That starts with the name – is it cute or does it explain what it does? Is it “pidg.in” or “Automatic Mailbox”? The iPhone / iPad apps’s television ads were effective sales tools, but also trained a generation by simply showing them in use. Each step of a workflow is subject to delays and distractions. Ecommerce sites know to reduce links during the final checkout process. With complex transactions, the risk is greater that the user will have lost their focus. Remind the user what they are doing in big title text. Focus on delivering Clear and Consistent messaging and instructions, for example, adding side notes like Ally.com’s password guidance.

Accept Autopilot

Standard design patterns are good, but they also throw the user into autopilot. It makes sense to break them for critical decisions. The hard part is determining what a critical decision point is. Observing user behavior, customer service records, and identifying risks to the user’s data are good clues. If something is simple enough that the users are mostly on autopilot, for example installing software, make the default action a single click.

Recovery

The dark side of users on “autopilot” is that they will regularly make mistakes by not paying attention. Mistakes are generally not obvious to a system, but it is good practice to highlight destructive actions and enable recovery. Capture data in little steps. Saving form fields instead of form pages, prevents large data loss. It’s a good idea to highlight and ask for confirmation on big, destructive changes, like deleting a database. “Undo”, common on computers, but slow to come to the web, enables the user to recover from errors.

Gmail lets users undo moving a message to the trash.

Gmail also let you restore your contacts if you accidentally make a large, destructive change.

Test in realistic situations

There is an essential flaw in the two-way mirror usability test method. In the interest of copying the form of the lab-coated scientist, these rooms create an artificial aura of “science”. But as ethnographic research can tell you, real world usage is so different as to make the test questionable. It selects for a test population that is free in the middle of the day, motivated by $50, and M&Ms, puts them in an unfamiliar environment with a personal guide to focus on a specific task with no distractions. This is about as unrealistic as it gets.

In reality, the same person may have a child on their lap and only 10 minutes to look up a flight. The fact that an ecommerce session may expire after a few hours is trivial for some, but significant for people who only have a few hours a day to use the computer. “Universal Design” is a great approach, because methods to help specific disabilities tend to be useful to the general public.

Testing should go beyond the user interface and cover the basic business model. The Apple iTunes video download “rental” is for 24 hours. Unfortunately, people tend to watch movies at the same time each day, for example, after the kids go to bed. If your kids wake up, you have to finish it earlier the next day. Would it have killed them to make the rental 27 hours, so parents could actually use it?

Design for the right level of Effective Intelligence

Effective intelligence obviously varies across situations. People are ingenious at figuring out things they really want, but the simplest task is insurmountable to the unmotivated. Both scenarios are solvable, but an application that makes the wrong assumptions about its users will fail. (Interestingly, this study suggests that easier-to-use design can affect the user’s perception of difficulty, and encourage them to complete the task.)

One should adapt their strategy to the user’s desire and the problem’s complexity. Here’s an unscientific matrix for effective intelligence with software interfaces.

This matrix compares the amount a user desires to complete the task versus the complexity of the task to that user type. Different user types will have different measures of complexity, so one might create several matrices.

Low Desire, Low Complexity – The goal here is to finish these tasks as fast as possible. Follow standard design conventions, seek to eliminate steps.

Low Desire, High Complexity Complex – Tasks that the user doesn’t want to do are a danger zone. Can the problem be reconsidered or eliminated?

High Desire, Low Complexity – The easiest quadrant.

High Desire, High Complexity – This is the most interesting quadrant. A self-training interface, (integrated help, training modules) can get the user started; they will often take it the rest of the way. Video games often have a “training” level to train the user on basic skills like moving around.

Get Smart

Effective Intelligence is a helpful concept in the design toolbox. User research and testing are the best ways to know your users, but knowing what may limit a user in reality helps design ways to make them smarter.

Like this article? Want to keep Stephen’s wisdom close at hand? Download the handy, cubicle-friendly, 61kb PDF to hang on a nearby wall and you’ll always remember to design SMART.

Written by: Stephen Turbek (via boxesandarrows blog)
Posted by: Situated Research

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From Microsoft’s Office YouTube Channel:

Watch how future technology will help people make better use of their time, focus their attention, and strengthen relationships while getting things done at work, home, and on the go. (Release: 2011)

There are some interesting concepts in the video involving augmented reality (adding visualizations to one’s environment), new user interfaces and user collaboration, and “Web 3.0″ style communication: where relevant information finds the user at the appropriate time (an intelligent filtering of the overwhelming information now being generated by “Web 2.0″ technologies such as social media).

Any thoughts on the practicality of these concepts? How do you envision collaboration with coworkers in the future? Do you see these technologies as appropriate, or too intrusive? We would love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment below.

Video by: officevideos on YouTube (Microsoft)
Posted by: Situated Research

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Summary:
Many guidelines are similar for mobile and desktop design, but their mobile interpretation is much more unforgiving.

My recent column Mobile Content: If in Doubt, Leave It Out advised site owners to eliminate secondary material when writing for mobile users. Many tweets, blog postings, and other comments on the article all expanded on this theme: Yes, do cut the fluff from mobile content, but also cut secondary content when writing for desktop websites.

In one way, I can only agree. Since 1997, conciseness has been a key guideline when writing for the web. People don’t read a lot on the web and leave in a few seconds if a site doesn’t communicate its value clearly. These findings lead to more detailed guidelines, such as emphasizing the first 2 words of nanocontent (e.g., headlines and search engine links).

So yes, cut the blah-blah from your desktop site.

Mobile Is Less Forgiving than Desktop

However, there’s still a difference between writing for the web and writing for mobile:

• Desktop copywriting must be concise.
• Mobile copywriting must be even more concise.

The high-level guideline is the same: reduce secondary info. The difference is one of degree — certain information that might be acceptable on a desktop site should be removed from a mobile site or app.

Our original research on how people read on mobile devices used the example of sending users a coupon with a special offer. In the study, the best design presented fairly limited information on the first screen. To read “more about this deal” users had to tap a link.

In a desktop design, it would have been better to show all the information on the first screen and save users a click. Why this difference?

• Mobile screens are much smaller: reading through a peephole increases cognitive load and makes it about twice as hard to understand text on a mobile device as on a desktop. Short-term memory is weak, so the more users have to remember after it scrolls off the screen the worse they’ll do.
• Mobile users are even more rushed than desktop users because of the mobile setting.

Both differences support the same recommendation: be more severe when cutting text for mobile than for desktop.

A similar finding applies to the choice of functionality: the feature set should be much smaller for a mobile site than for a desktop site. For sure, desktop sites should offer as few features as possible. For every feature that’s removed, the UI has one less thing to confuse users and thus makes the remaining features easier to use.

But a mobile site should have even fewer features than the desktop site. (Thus the guideline to offer a link from the mobile site to the full site for users who need features that only the desktop site supplies.) The mobile site should have only those features that make sense for the mobile use case. For example, a company’s full site typically includes PR information and investor relations sections, but this info should be eliminated from the mobile site.

Your desktop information architecture (IA) should always feature a simple navigation space that avoids an overly deep hierarchy. But for mobile, the limited space makes it even more important to prevent user disorientation; you should thus limit the navigation options, because you can’t show full contextual information on every screen. (The total screen space allocated to navigation on a typical desktop site is more than the entire screen of a typical smartphone, leaving no room for the content.) That is, your navigation structure should be even shallower in a mobile IA.

Usability Guidelines Are Rarely Dichotomies

People want me to give hard and fast rules: don’t show more than X menu items; don’t write more than Y words per page; nothing should be more than Z clicks from the homepage. Sadly, UI design doesn’t work that way. Usability questions seldom have a single answer. Rather, they are qualitative issues that specify the direction and nature of inevitable design tradeoffs.

Every time your web page’s response time increases by 0.1 seconds, you’ll lose a few percent of your visitors. But it’s not true that everybody will wait 10 seconds while nobody will wait 11 seconds.

As another example, take the guideline about concise writing. The most concise copy would be a word or two, but that would typically make for an unsatisfactory web page. In fact, sometimes longer articles can be better (though even in-depth articles should cut the fluff and be written at an appropriate comprehension level for their target audience).

The simple point remains: it’s best to squeeze the text when writing for the web (as well as follow the many other web content guidelines). If writing for mobile, simply squeeze that orange even more. When considering which secondary content to defer to secondary pages, you need to move the cut-off point between primary and secondary when targeting mobile users. The principle remains the same, but your judgment should be harsher for mobile.

In all areas of user experience — feature set, IA, writing, images, and more — mobile usability requires stricter and more scaled-back design than desktop usability. That’s why you need a separate mobile site. Simply using responsive web design to make the full site accessible on mobile devices results in a substandard mobile UX. (This is actually an old lesson repeated for a new medium: accessibility ≠ usability.)

Written by: Jakob Nielsen, Alertbox
Posted by: Situated Research

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Multitouch screens are so versatile and easy to use, why limit them to smartphones and tablets? Researchers have been working for several years to extend multitouch to arbitrary surfaces, but a project called OmniTouch from Microsoft Research and a PhD student at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University may bring it closer to reality.

OmniTouch turns body parts and nearby surfaces into touch interfaces. Users can read and reply to an e-mail by touching their hands or a nearby wall, or even use multiple applications at once on multiple surfaces. The results from a user study “suggest our prototype system approaches the accuracy of conventional, physical touch screens, but on arbitrary, ad hoc surfaces,” the researchers say in a [3:24 minute] video.

The project is led by Carnegie Mellon student and former Microsoft Research intern Chris Harrison and Microsoft researchers Hrvoje Benko and Andrew Wilson. “We wanted to capitalize on the tremendous surface area the real world provides,” Benko says in a Microsoft research article. “The surface area of one hand alone exceeds that of typical smart phones. Tables are an order of magnitude larger than a tablet computer.”

OmniTouch is reminiscent of the SixthSense system developed at the MIT Media Lab, which had students projecting a gestural interface onto the world around them with the help of a device containing a projector, mirror and camera worn around their necks, as well as sensors placed upon their fingers. OmniTouch, however, requires only a device to be worn on one’s shoulder, with nothing special on the hands or arms. A research paper on OmniTouch notes the influence of SixthSense and other similar projects, but says these systems did not create true touch interactions because they “could not differentiate between clicked and hovering fingers.” The limitation was due partly to an “inability to track surfaces in the environment, which also made it impossible to have the projected interface change and follow the surface as it moved.”

The proof-of-concept OmniTouch system consists of a depth-sensing camera and laser-based pico-projector. It is tethered to a desktop computer in its prototype stage, so is not yet truly portable.

Using technology principles similar to Microsoft’s Kinect, OmniTouch starts by generating a depth map of a scene, while isolating fingers from appropriate touch surfaces, including a hand, forearm, notepad, table, or wall. While researchers say the system generates few false positives, it is sensitive to the angle at which fingers appear in front of the camera. Some sophisticated computation is performed to differentiate fingers touching a surface from fingers merely hovering above a surface.

“In this case, we’re detecting proximity at a very fine level,” Benko says. “The system decides the finger is touching the surface if it’s close enough to constitute making contact. This was fairly tricky, and we used a depth map to determine proximity. In practice, a finger is seen as ‘clicked’ when its hover distance drops to one centimeter or less above a surface, and we even manage to maintain the clicked state for dragging operations.” In user trials involving 12 participants, 96.5 percent out of 6,048 clicks were correctly perceived by the system. In the remaining 3.5 percent, the system either did not perceive a click or incorrectly detected more than one.

Potential applications include projecting a full keyboard onto a table, zooming in and out of a map projected onto a notepad, or turning a paper document into an interactive surface for the purpose of adding annotations.

“It is now conceivable that anything one can do on today’s mobile devices, they could do in the palm of their hand,” Microsoft says on the project website. Although the shoulder contraption is bulky, Microsoft says there are no significant barriers to miniaturization and the entire system could eventually be the size of a matchbox and worn as a pendant or watch. But there’s no indication of concrete plans to turn this into a commercial product.

Beyond tracking a person’s fingers and environment, the system must also project interfaces similar to what we might expect in a smartphone. OmniTouch uses several methods, including creating a “lock point” to provide an interface that will stay on the surface—such as your hand—as it moves. OmniTouch can automatically generate interfaces on easily distinguishable objects, like a notepad, table and wall, but researchers say more sophisticated depth-driven object recognition will be needed to make the system capable of recognizing literally any surface. They have introduced one way to sidestep the complications, by letting the user define the surface by “clicking” to create a generically sized area or by clicking and dragging to create one of a custom size.

Once the surface is defined, projecting the interface is relatively straightforward “since our projector is precisely calibrated to the depth camera coordinate system.” The prototype projects a 2D interface, but the team says “our approach easily lends itself to experimenting with 3D interfaces that take into account the true geometry of the projected surface.”

OmniTouch is one of two similar Microsoft projects being unveiled this week at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Santa Barbara, Calif. The second project is called PocketTouch, and lets users interact with their smartphones without removing them from their pockets.

Instead of taking your phone out of your pocket to dismiss a call or quickly respond to a text, PocketTouch lets you manipulate the phone simply by touching the outside of your pocket. For example, a user could trace letters on the outside of a pants pocket in order to write a text message. Researchers tested the prototype on 25 types of fabrics to ensure responsiveness. While the prototype is unwieldy, with extra hardware and a cable attached to the phone, it could theoretically be modified to work with a smartphone’s capacitive touchscreen.

Written by: Jon Brodkin , Ars Technica (via Presence)
Posted by: Situated Research

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I joined YouTube in 2005, back when it was cool and you could actually find interesting content. At the time, I was most interested in indie-acoustic guitar covers and performances of aspiring artists.

Now YouTube is clearly aimed at and for professionals and it’s dominated by major brands and labels. This is problematic for the average person or professional starting to build a fresh audience and competing with people who manage their channels full-time and have a staffs seems imposing to say the least.

Additionally, most of the search results are limited by this and thus good content becomes very difficult to find. The corollary is that organic leaders are hard to find and organic audiences are hard to attract. People just don’t have the willingness to sort through the corporate “sponsored” content, or lackluster search results.

However, that can change drastically for those of us who are in the know. The principle reason that YouTube is can be un-useful to the disadvantaged is because of the relevance searching mechanisms, search-engine-pruning that Google conducts and the volume of paid content showing up first in the search results.

However, this can all be circumvented via some elbow grease and a neat little tool called TubeToolBox. Before we can really discuss the tool, you need to be aware of how YouTube thinks about you. Youtube, via Google is attempting to draw conclusions based on your usage, subscriptions and subscribers and thereby filter appropriate content on your behalf. This is evident based on their subscription suggestions on the home page when you first login.

For the professional this becomes tricky because now personal activity and professional activity affect each other and thus your results. Since YouTube is all about social interaction, finding other ‘tubers, has more to do with finding their content than it does finding them personally.

Accordingly, unless your search string is perfect you’re more likely to find the content YouTube “thinks” you want to see, rather than the content you might actually be looking for. There is however, no need to be deterred if your aim is to make the most of YouTube for audience development. Let’s look at the tool. Consider a marketing message directly from their website.

“TubeToolBox – Get Subscribers, Get Friends, Get Video Views all with the Best YouTube Marketing Software available!”

TubeToolBox does what is advertises. Not by magic, or trickery, but rather vigorous channel management and maintenance. The developers understand that in order to maintain a channel and grow an audience you must actively promote it.

This tedious task is accomplished through the automation of all the channel maintenance operations, such as accepting friend invites, subscribing to channels of interest and sending out mass messages as well, including videos! This is no small feat, since the effort by itself is so tedious and time consuming that without the tool, managing a sizeable Youtube Channel would be a full-time job; literally!

The most interesting thing about how the tool will help you build an audience is the fact that it uses keywords and common interests, as well as demographics to target people to be friends with. This is important because becoming friends with someone, in the YouTube sense, is the first step to getting them to look at your content and possibly subscribe. The tool is easy and intuitive to use and you can download a trial here.

Lest you think that this contraption and novelty of post-modernity is a cheat, you must know that the process that TubeTool Box uses is well within the parameters of Youtube’s Terms of Use policies.

The best way to think about the tool box is to consider it an automaton. It simply does what you would normally have to do to successfully promote your channel. The tool provides workflows for users to schedule the work they would normally being doing in the wee hours of the evening, after the kids have gone to bed.

The tool is easy to use and simple to setup. It’s the easiest way to build an audience and attract the kind of content that you’re interested in. The tool comes in a free version and also has a paid version. The license is based on a subscription, so the cost is pretty low. If you’re trying to leverage YouTube to build an audience and spread your message, there is no more efficient way than to use TubeToolBox. I am a subscriber and love the tool. My only regret is that I didn’t know about it sooner.

Written by: Joshua Barnes, The Big G & Business magazine
Posted by: Situated Research

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