The nuReality

Encoding Emotion

This post is in response to Brave and Nass's question "How does emotion play out in computer-mediated communication (CMC)?" in Chapter 4 of The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook...

Emotion certainly plays a significant role in how we communicate with one another by providing a "social context" that seems to define the ways we communicate with one another. A smile on your face indicates to me you are feeling positive and are therefore likely more approachable and receptive to conversation than an individual with a grimace. It seems strange that computers have remained rather removed from needing to understand and convey their user's emotional experience. In many ways, computers have mostly been viewed as a cognitive tool but since computers are now being more and more used as mediums for creativity, connectivity, and interaction among people, we need to consider ways emotion can be encoded into the experience.

Emoticons became necessary because the types of interaction made possible via the Internet could not alone provide the context necessary for the communication. There are still, however, many emotions that cannot or effectively be conveyed through emoticons alone (e.g. sarcasm). Avatars in 3D games have employed emoticon type gestures that allow their character to exhibit behaviors that demonstrate one's mood (e.g. World of Warcraft characters can cheer or dance to celebrate a significant event) but these too often fall short. Emoticons of this type are low-bandwidth emotion conveyers. What's missing is the continuous and high-bandwidth emotional expression one can perceive from direct interaction with one another. Video communication (e.g. Skype) is highly effective, but video communication cannot as easily be shared, transmitted, or processed as text.

An important realization I've had is that emotions are experienced; they are not static. Emoticons are attempting to use another mode or dimension of textual interaction to efficiently "package" emotion into the textual experience--that is difficult to do and which is why they still fall short. Perhaps another mode that could be adopted for conveying emotion textually could be to standardize colors to sentences that indicate tonality, pitch, or cadence (i.e. much like music notes written on a sheet of music). While not ideal aesthetically, this capture would allow emotion to be captured in the communication.

I will soon start a new job at a small company. One important requirement levied by the hiring company was for attaining highly effective communication skills across many mediums and modes given the fact the team is spread around the world. Ideally I should be sure to spend time with these individuals in person to help define a "social context" that will help me "understand them". This provides me the means to know how to communicate with them effectively. We will also set up a "portal" that is a 24 hours a day, seven days a week television screen with a webcam linked directly to other portals around the world. The idea is that the portal will provide for higher-bandwidth communication than email can currently provide. The portal will allow the us as users to feel connected to the other working spaces rather than disconnected and reunited for minutes at a time with video chat like Skype.

Fun Implementing jParallax: Let's Fly

See Tinkerbin demo here (click run on the bottom left): http://tinkerbin.com/PGziRXiq

Honestly have no idea what inspired me this evening but thought this would be a fun way to learn jParallax and may serve as a good starting point for others. It could use a bit more polishing and interactivity, but you get the idea. I think there is potential for a new type of interaction here.

I recently discovered jParallax on a few other sites and have been trying to think of ways of using it for interactivity. Quickly mocked this up from graphics on the web and using jQuery ScrollTo.

For an amazing example of a parallax effect, check out thismanslife.co.uk/newstart/.

Have fun!

http://forr.st/~P2r

Made by Hand Film Series

The inagural film from a pending series entitled Made by Hand really inspired me. Brad Estabrooke wasn't sure if his ambition to open his own distillery would ever see the light of day but after continued hardwork and belief in himself, it did. What a great reminder to never give up and truly believe in your ambitions. No more excuses. "Yeserday you said tomorrow."  

Made by Hand / No 1 The Distiller from Made by Hand on Vimeo.

Mashable.com 9 Essential Resources for UI Designers

Mashable put out an article today that I think provide a few good resource for UI inspiration, best practices, and guidance:

http://mashable.com/2011/09/16/ui-design-resources/

Thought I would share. Always nice to see what others are up to.

InVision: Creating Fully Interactive Wireframes & Prototypes Easily and Beautifully

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words...er...Page Hits

The saying is true and Stew Langille, former VP of marketing at Mint, is out to prove it with his new startup visual.ly. Visual.ly will attempt to build a community, market and tools for infographics. Later this year, visual.ly plans to release Web-based “prosumer” tools for editorial, marketing, student and other users to create their own shiny infographics.

According to Langille, some of the most successful posts on Mint.com's site, that garnered the site its user base, were the posts including infographics. These posts would receive 30 to 40 times the page views of non-infographic posts.

Visual.ly hopes to make creating attractive infographics from user data easy--particularly easier than creating them with non-data driven programs like Adobe Photoshop. These designs can then be tweeked and shared as desired.

It is an interesting idea and I'm looking forward to trying it out. Making attractively designed infographics in Illustrator or Photoshop is not always ideal. I'm curious to see how they'll create different themes or styles so all the infographics do not begin to seem the same. A few of my favorites shown so far are True Colors: Color Preferences By Gender, Mars Missions and The Evolution of the Geek.

Never Used a Computer Before in His Life

We're quick to forget, but there are people in this world who have never used a computer.

Jennifer Boriss, a Fire Fox developer, recently encountered 60 year old Joe, a cafeteria worker, stumbling around the mall food court "bored out of his mind". Boriss had originally traveled to the mall to conduct user tests on how people surf the web (interesting note: she mentions she finds malls an excellent place to find user test participants due to the variation in technical expertise). She ended up spending three hours with Joe, finding his unbiased, inexperienced and untouched impression of the Internet a source of valuable insight.

While she did focus primarily on browser usability, I loved how she found that Joe instantly attempted to use the "Help" menu as a guide for him to navigate the world wide web. There really is no guide book for using the web. Its hard to believe that perhaps we take for granted all the drop down menus, text boxes, and scroll bars we seemingly find so intuitive. While these inexperienced users are becoming more and more rare, Joe's experience serves as a good reminder of remembering to think about your users' context, skill level and basis of interaction.

A few of Boriss's discoveries:

• No matter the user skill level, users stick with what they know. In the case of new users: text. Simple and informative text is effective.
• Don't assume users will naturally investigate how software will work. Provide visual feedback and encouragement.
• Don't make too many assumptions on how user's will use your technology

We truly take for granted what we know as we become experienced technology users. We've become so accustomed to scroll bars and drop down menus. Now we have touch interfaces where we can scroll around with a finger touch and zoom in with a pinch. We are even becoming more familiar with motion sensing devices that allow us to swipe through the air and move around to interact with the virtual world. It would be very interesting to see Joe try out a smartphone, tablet, or the Microsoft Kinect.

With the growth of ubiquitous computing, its interesting to think of how we will interact with technology in the future and decide what is natural and ideal. I personally strive and hope to create and support technologies that will us to interact in such natural ways that provide us deeper interaction with the world around us. I think we will need to learn more about ways to mesh our expertise of perceiving physical affordances in the world with our expertise of navigating virtual world of software and the web.

DML: I am who I am

Over the last few years I've been becoming more and more annoyed with how targeted web advertising is choosing to become. Between Facebook data mining and Google ad targeting, it seems like every ad on their websites I visit believes I want to get an IT degree from the University of Phoenix and participate in every Tough Mudder event happening on the West Coast simply because I've indicated I'm back in school and enjoy running events.

I laughed and was intrigued when Amber Case recently tweeted her blog post about creating a demographic markup language (DML). Essentially, such a markup language would allow one to define one's demographic information for all web services. For websites, the more data you have on your user, the better you can targets ads, and these ads bring more advertisers and, most importantly, money. So now it seems everyone collects some small bit of information so ads can be targeted. Amber notes, however, how sad it is how significantly one's user experience can change simply by changing basic information since most websites currently have only very small data points, like age or sex, with which to target their advertising. She herself set her gender to male and birthdate to 1973 so she could actually get advertising she likes. By defining a DML, the user would have a better say in the types of advertising they want to see. This is a win win for user and advertiser.

This would seem to pull the carpet out from under social media giants like Facebook. I've always felt that Facebook benefited more than its users simply because of all the data they have on their users. By giving the user more choice in the type of advertising they will see (since they have to), all websites will have equal access to user data and create a richer and more customized web user experience. This could be powerful for many different reasons and start to give identity to the faceless users of web services.

Leo Leopart with Creators of Google+

Leo Laporte had two of the individuals behind Google+ on his recent Twit netcast. The whole cast is a little long but initial overview is brief and provides a great overview of their inspiration and direction. Very cool stuff!

I've slowly been growing more and more frustrated with Facebook. I hate that everything is public, that I have to hear about everyone's statuses and don't actually feel connected to any specific friends other than knowing what they are up to. While it has been a successful successor of myspace, it has not done much to change the dynamic of what I see is simply a popularity contest--this is primarily why it is so popular with young adults, celebrities, and businesses. As is human nature to seek approval and acceptance, it is these groups that seem to try to vie for attention the most (and this is also why I feel that the only true beneficiaries of mass social media are businesses, Facebook, and advertisers and not exactly the users). Google+ seems to have it right. It does certainly have a more socially humanistic approach to the virtual world--especially circles and huddles. Can't wait to see how it goes! I may have a hard time getting some of my friends switching over, I'm the more technologically savvy of my friends spread all over the state of California--this may prove a better way to keep us all connected.

Axure RP Review

If you're not already familiar or aware, Axure RP is a wire framing, prototyping, and specification software tool for design of user interfaces in applications and websites. It can used to quickly create wire frames that evolve into fairly high fidelity interactive prototypes all before any code needs to be written. This allow for quick evaluation of company or client designs. Axure RP also boasts an automatic specification generator that utilizes annotations from the wire frames to generate a Microsoft Word specification document.