Month: December 2012

Gaze Interaction

While the current focus in HCI is sensor-based interaction (à la Kinect), recent developments could foster interaction with the eyes. The Danish company EyeTribe (formerly Senseye) is building a very nice tracking system with $2.3 million support from the Danish government. Partnering companies include the IT University of Copenhagen, DTU Informatics, LEGO and Serious Games Interactive.

EyeTribe plans to release an SDK for app development next year.

Microsoft’s Vision of HCI

Although Microsoft has a reputation for building suboptimal user interfaces, its research department actually has several world-class interaction design researchers (like Buxton, Hinckley, Wilson, Benko). There is no big human-computer interaction conference, be it CHI, SIGGRAPH, UIST or ITS, without several papers and keynote speakers from Microsoft Research. Recently, Microsoft has released several videos about the future in human-computer interaction, and these video actually assemble many quite recent research findings which are adopted almost one-to-one.

Here’s another one:

Some of the research concepts you see in the videos are:

  • Proxemic interaction (cf. Saul Greenberg, Till Ballendat et al.)
  • See-through displays
  • Multitouch and animation (cf. Takeo Igarashi)
  • Telepresence
  • Back-of-the-device interaction (e.g. Baudisch)
  • In-air gesture control
  • Interaction with and between multiple devices
  • Tangible Interaction (cf. Hiroshi Ishii et al.)

Windows 8 Critique by UI Expert Nielson

Jakob Nielson is a well known and highly regarded expert in the world of interface/interaction design and human-computer interaction in general. He wrote a critique on Windows 8 shortly after its release which caused a lot of controversy in the net (try Google with “Nielson Windows 8”). Nielson heavily criticizes the way that Windows 8 tries to fuse desktop and mobile UI.

What’s interesting is that Nielson did empirical user studies with 12 experienced PC users. The findings that I find most relevant are these three:

  • The double desktop (one traditional, one with big touchable tiles) is confusing since one has to switch between two worlds that work very differently (inconsistency).
  • The flat Metro style, while visually pleasing, makes it hard to distinguish regular text from clickable links.
  • Some of the new gestures that e.g. require the user to swipe from the outside of the touchpad into it are highly error-prone.

I recently got my own Windows 8 laptop and could experience “live” some of these concerns. Even now, I find it difficult to know whether I’m in the Metro world or in the traditional desktop world because with ALT+TAB you switch between all applications (of both worlds). Gesture interaction is a pain. Of course, Microsoft has the problem that it tries to introduce new interaction techniques for a huge range of actual hardware devices. That may be one reason why the resulting experience does not feel as optimized as in Apple products.

Nielson’s own summary is this:

Hidden features, reduced discoverability, cognitive overhead from dual environments, and reduced power from a single-window UI and low information density. Too bad.

If you want a balanced picture, read some of the counter arguments on the net. I do not link up any because I haven’t found anything substantial yet.

Codecademy vs. Khan Academy: Interaktiv Programmieren lernen

Eine weitere Online-Plattform, um Programmieren zu lernen, teilweise sogar auf Deutsch, ist Codecademy. Bislang sind folgende Sprachen im Angebot: JavaScript, Python, HTML/CSS und Ruby.

Es gibt Lektionen und man programmiert online in einem Editor-Teilfenster und kann anschließend mit eine RUN-Button das Programm ausführen und bekommt Feedback. Im Screenshot sieht man in der linken Spalte die Texterklärung und jeweils nächste Übungsanweisung. Rechts ist der Editor und darunter die Konsolenausgabe.

Etwas ähnliches bietet Khan-Academy (Bereich Computer Science), allerdings nur für JavaScript und nur auf Englisch. Hauptunterschied zu Codecademy ist, dass die Übungen per Audio vermittelt werden (Sprecherin: Vi Hart). Im Screenshot sieht man links den Code-Editor, rechts ist die (meist grafische) Ausgabe. Unter dem Code ist der PLAY-Button für den Audio-Kommentar.

Ohne mich viel mit den beiden Plattformen beschäftigt zu haben, wirkt die Khan-Academy didaktisch etwas stringenter, bietet dafür aber eine spezielle Programmiersprache, ist also vielleicht für Programmier-Einsteiger am besten geeignet.

Codecademy richtet sich eher an Leute, die sich schnell in eine spezielle Sprache einarbeiten wollen.

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