The Messy Office

Reflection

2006-03-24T22:37:00.000Z

I think after completing this module, I can say probably for my whole group, that i've never realised how much HCI is really a philosophy and how it teaches you not to think in a conventional way. We all knew the complexities of the area and quite a bit about the theoretical aspects of HCI picked up from the module we completed last year. Yet I believe that quite a lot of the blank areas that were left void from last year have been filled in. We've learnt how to apply the theory to something in a choosen doman i.e our intelligent car and how to carry this through from initial idea to a final solution. Anyway, I've really enjoyed this module and hopefully I'll be seeing nicely designed software from my fellow students in the future.

(P) Summarising the Project

2006-03-24T13:04:00.000Z

Here is a brief summary of the life cycle of our design process:

Brainstormed initial ideas
Refined idea of intelligent car - brainstormed
Worked out specific areas we wanted to concentrate on designing
Scenario of GPS usage
Task analysis on navigation and music playback
Researched components of our design - GPS and music streaming
Researched use of GPS to give driver road information
Looked into problems drivers face with visibility and how it could be improved with a HUD
Very early prototype demonstrating initial ideas
Looked at practical design decisions needed to be considered in order to stream music to a car
Looked at detecting eye movement to improve interface but later decided to abandon due to technical limitations
Released a questionnaire in order to qualify the assumptions we had made
We made prototypes on a white board, using images and animations in order to improve our idea by gaining user feedback
We asked a domain expert to criticise our idea to further improve our design
Refined our idea for hazard avoidance by researching into colour and motion
Looked into incorporating emotion as a variable in music playback selection in the car, but abandoned the idea because it was deemed to be too complicated for the end-user
Identified the problem of unreliable technology and hence the legal issues surrounding technical failures
Prototyped voice recognition by setting scenarios and getting people to talk out loud the commands they would say to achieve given tasks
Carried out a prototype to find out whether people react quicker to different stimuli - in our case, we used a drinking game where we found that red tape around a thumb is a better stimuli than a naked one

(P) Reaction game (experiment)

2006-03-24T12:38:00.000Z

To test the reactions of people (for our hazard avoidance system), what better way to do it than a good old pub drinking game? We have taken a well-known game and adapted it to test people’s reactions using colour for our hazard avoidance system.

The game is simple. There are players (4 in our experiment) who are given 4 cards each that are shuffled up. There’s a total of 16 cards in our game (4 per person) and they are 4 sets of numbers (4 Aces, 4 Kings, 4 Queens and 4 Jacks). The idea of the game is to get a complete set by passing on a card that you don’t want to the player next to you when it is your turn. Once a player has a complete set, they must place their thumb on the edge of the table but continue to pass the cards. It is then the last person to realise that someone has a complete set (by noticing the thumb on the table) who looses.

The way we adapted this was to time how long it took the loosing players to realise there was a player with a complete set. We did the experiment on a “pine” coloured table (so not far off thumb colour). The first 6 runs was a standard game and we didn’t tell them what we were doing. We just told them that it was an experiment and we wanted completely fair results, which they all agreed to.

The results are as follows:

We then took the players away and attached red tape to their thumbs (in a nice safe and easy to remove way) and again, did not tell them what we were doing. We then repeated the experiment and did another 6 runs.

The results are as follows:

Clearly, the red tape helped the players to notice the game was over a lot quicker than without the red tape. When the thumb had no tape on, it blended in very well with the “pine” coloured table, but with the red tape, the thumbs stood out a lot more.

From this experiment, we have concluded that using colour to identify possible hazards will decrease the time it takes the driver to realise that there is a potential hazard on the road and therefore give the driver more time to react safely.

(P) Intelligent Car Article

2006-03-24T12:31:00.000Z

I came across an article about an intelligent car. This article both envisions levels of intelligence in a car and explains commercial technologies that have been developed with improving the driving experience in mind. The article goes through a typical family journey and highlights key improvements that the intelligent car makes. It links to a great diagram explaining the technologies behind displaying HUDs on the car windscreen (see image).

Many of the features of the car mentioned in the article have been discussed in our design, but some have not. I'll leave you to check out the article yourself if you want the details. Interestingly, it doesn't mention any hazard notification system at all. It only goes so far as explaining a system to automatically adjust car position, e.g. when it is getting too close to a car, or when the car is swerving slightly out of the lane.

(P) Questionnaire Design

2006-03-24T12:03:00.000Z

In order to write an effective questionnaire a number of points needs to be considered: clarity, leading questions, phrasing, and prestige bias. When designing our questionnaire we were careful to make the process fun and remove repetitiveness in order to get a good response. Yet, there were a few mistakes that we inevitably made that on reflection we would have improved. I believe that overall the clarity of our questionnaire was good although in a few questions we used technical terms i.e. acronyms that could have been avoided. All questions that involved frequency were clear because we used qualified choices that were not open to interpretation. A few of our questions were leading in either the question itself or the answers not allowing a full range of responses. While in terms of phrasing, questions need to take account of the positive and negative connotations of words to prevent a biased response. In our questionnaire I found little use of emotive adjective or verbs and believe the majority of the questions were as neutral as possible.

Finally prestige bias is the tendency for people to answer in a way that makes them feel better. When asked about how long it takes a person to learn an task they are more likely to embellish their answer to make them seem smarter than reality. There is no real way of removing this problem but my placing our questionnaire on the Internet I believe its perceive anonymity helped to reduce this problem.

(P) The Final Prototype...

2006-03-24T11:16:00.000Z

An interactive flash animation of the final prototype can be viewed here. It's the final result of many weeks of constant tweaking as part of the user centered design.

Please note its 3.5mb in size so give it time to download before you click the buttons. I hope this gives you all a good indication of our project and have fun!

In a few posts time we will give a summary of the design decisions we made during the development of the prototype.

I want one for Christmas!

2006-03-16T03:06:00.000Z

I can’t seem to believe what I was reading when I was doing my usual BBC News website crawl. Remote controlled insects! At first, I thought they meant robotic insects… but no!

They are on about inserting a chip into the larva of the insects (butterflies, moths etc) and then “re-wiring” the insect so that the chip can essentially remote control the insect and report back vital information. The idea is in the metamorphosis stage (when the caterpillar is in a pupa) will accept the foreign body and rework the internal organs around it.

The pentagon want an army of these insects so they can be used to sniff out explosives and report back sound and video footage of what they see and find.

Is it me, or is this just the most ridiculous idea you have ever heard???? I’m honestly lost for words on what they are suggesting… but if it works, I WANT ONE! Completely unrelated to HCI but what a post its made….

Full story can be found on the BBC website.

(P) The prototyping...

2006-03-14T23:05:00.000Z

As Mike discussed below, we set up a small prototype, found here (Music Player), where we asked people to say what voice commands they would use to do certain tasks.

The Music Player

The first voice command which we asked our volunteers to use was to change the songs in the play list. The most common answer was ‘next track’ and ‘previous track’. This does seem the most obvious response to use as you are specifying ‘next’, which is the direction you want to go, and ‘track’ which is a typical word for a song.

We then asked our volunteers to change the music playing to a radio station called “Rock FM”. The most common response was ‘Rock FM’ with no prefix of what system would need it. When we asked why they said this, we had a few people explain they would expect favourites that you can programme into the system. Without any suggestion of such features, people are already starting to explore the possibilities of the system. This gave us great feedback for our prototype.

The Satellite Navigation

For the Sat-Nav questions, we had some very mixed replies.

We first asked them to tell us how they would ask the system to go to “Bristol Road, Birmingham”. One person used the phrase ‘Navigate to…’ where another used ‘Directions to…’ and others who simply said ‘Bristol Road, Birmingham’. This could prove difficult to implement a system that could be able to understand all of these responses. From this we concluded that it would be better if the system questioned the driver on where they would like to go. For example, it would say ‘What is your destination?’ This way, the system would know that a place name was going to be said back to it and it can plan the route.

For appending a destination to the end of the current route, almost every body used the word ‘add’ followed by a place name. No one used the word append and no one was unclear if it was replacing the route or adding the route.

From this experience, we were able to see how a system could be implemented using natural language. While understanding every possible command would be incredibly hard, giving the user prompts like ‘What is your destination?’ will narrow down the possible responses that the system would have to deal with, and therefore be able to respond to them better.

(P) Music Control

2006-03-14T22:18:00.001Z

There was some discussion today concerning how we would change the volume in our car by using our voice. We came to the conclusions that if the volume is really high, our car wouldn't be able to hear our voice and the system could interupt words in the music as commands. For a voice recognition system the later point is not really too much of a problem, assuming our system recognises the drivers voice and they don't listen to recordings of themselves all too often.

While thinking about the problem I remembered quite a nice feature of the mac that might be a good idea for our interface. On the Mac, if you change volume not only do you get a visual display to illustrate the change.

You also get a sound that accompanies the increase in volume, akin to a beep getting louder as you increase the volume. Personally, I think this is quite a good idea because for a first time user it gives a good idea of the correct level they want to achieve instead of saying perhaps volume level 8. If combined with a visual display it allows the user to keep their attention on the road.

(P) Voice Recognition Testing on Prototype

2006-03-14T12:56:00.000Z

As part of the user centered design process we have created a user evaluation plan which will evaluate a particular sub set of our prototype. The problem with testing our system is that although we have a prototype which explains the effect of invoking a particular feature, it does not allow us to test the voice recognition features, i.e. where drivers can verbally issue commands to the car. The aim of this evaluation was to find out:

Whether there are patterns in the structure in verbal commands given by users to solve given tasks
Whether there are certain tasks that users wish to perform more often than others
Whether interaction by voice recognition is preferred by users over tactile methods
Whether there are flaws in our testing methods that may make it unfair

The plan for the test is as follows:

Plan a set of scenarios and tasks that users may want to perform in the car
Show the prototype to the tester and give a general overview of our envisaged car
Have testers answer verbally what they would say in order to perform each task given the scenarios and record their responses

The results will give us an idea of the way humans want to interact with the system without having to know anything about what the system can understand. We want to understand the bigger picture rather than attempt to create the underlying system and understand the technical hurdles that must be overcome. Because of this assumption we do not need to present the results in front of the user; we can just assume that the right results come up. The important thing is that the results of this test should hopefully give us an idea of how people would naturally interact with a system in a way that is new to them; which is exactly what we're interested in.

These results will be discussed in subsequent posts.

Origami

2006-03-13T16:03:00.000Z

Here's a picture of the thumb interface that ben is talking about.

(P) Task Analysis

2006-03-13T15:50:00.000Z

Music Player

Turn on player.
Change volume.
Track change
Turn Off

Navigation System

Setting of destination
Change of destination
Turn Off

Hazard Avoidance System

Enable system
Disable system
Change notification level

Microsoft's Origami: New, unique and pointless?

2006-03-10T03:17:00.000Z

Microsoft has released their new ‘Mini PC Project’ called Origami. It is a cross between a laptop and a pocket PC in an attempt to fill a gap in the market. They believe that people want the power of a PC which can be easily carried around, and to a certain point this is true. Looking at the product it doesn’t get my vote.

It is the size of a ‘hard-back’ book or 2 DVD cases and weighs 779g which is just over ¾kg. That is pretty heavy when you want to carry it about on a daily basis. It has a 900 MHz Celeron processor and a 40GB hard drive which is not bad considering its size. The price is a bit steep though, at £699 when it is released. It would be cheaper to buy a laptop which has more processing power, a bigger hard drive and a bigger screen.

In my personal opinion, it seems a bit of a gadget more than a useful every day item. If you want to do word processing on the move, then a laptop would be a better choice rather than a tiny 7” touch type screen PC. If portable gaming is your thing, then the PSP is a far better choice for games and price (only £170). The PSP also supports full feature films which can be purchased or downloaded onto the memory stick as well as playing music and viewing images. It also has wireless for gaming and full web browser capabilities. So.. it basically does everything the new Origami does except the word processing, and the PSP has been out for a couple of years now. If you want to do it all, then I would suggest a cheap laptop for £400 and a PSP off eBay for about £130.

Ok now the HCI stuff. The word processing is done using 2 ¼ circle type keypads at either side of the screen which are pressed using the thumbs. While it sounds like a great idea and does look good, it really is not very comfortable to use. How do I know you ask? I got a book about the size of the Origami and pressed using my thumbs for about 1 minute. After this time, it started to ache so how can you possibly type on it for long periods of time?

Ok what next… carrying it. How is this device going to be portable? If you have a bag for it, like that of a laptop bag, then it’s going to be too small to carry comfortably and look very odd(Imagine carrying a handbag). However, it’s too big to put in your pocket and if your pockets were huge, it’s too heavy.

Finally, the battery life. Bill gates claimed that the device would run an entire days work on one single charge. However, the released version will give about 3 hours battery life which is pitiful. What is the point in having a device that’s mobile and versatile if it can only be used for a few hours before you need a power point? I get more life out of my laptop battery and the PSP has a game time of about 6 hours.

I’m sure my comments are harsh and very critical but when releasing something so unique in the market, it needs to be right. If you release a new unique product that actually doesn’t do much more than current products, then it will not be as popular as first thought.

More information can be found on the BBC website and the Microsoft's UMPC Homepage.

Tactile File Browsing: Crap

2006-03-07T19:49:00.000Z

I've just been reading articles around the web to do with future envisioning of user interfaces in operating systems as it's an area that I've caught an interest in recently. This is just a report on my findings and a few opinions that I have on a system that tries too hard without looking into real human factors.

People think that the desktop on an OS is 2D. To an extent, they are right, but overlapping windows is an inherent 3D feature. People sometimes call this 2.5D as the windows are essentially totally flat. An article I read explained why 3D should be used for organising things and argued that we are used to organising things in 3D, so that's how it should be done in the computer. The author suggested that because research showed that humans can remember where we put things, we should harness that power into the operating system to organise our files. At this point I started to think to myself - this guy is bonkers! The reason why tree-based navigation and organisation systems work so well is that we can easily conceptualise what's going on. There is just one idea to grasp - that each file and folder has at maximum one parent (aliases and symbolic links are sometimes used, but is not quite considered to be useful to the average user). Once we start trying to remember where we put files in a 3D space, we are essentially reinventing the problems of organisation we have in real life. How many times have you forgotten where you left your keys? Exactly...

I searched further and found that the author plays a part in the development of Tactile 3D (see screenshot), a standalone application for Windows that gives the user a 3D world which has objects representing their files and folders in. I'll let you find out a bit more yourself if you're interested in being appauled, but seriously, I felt like I was concentrating so hard to navigate the world. Immersive interfaces to do everyday tasks are bad. They need too much brain power to operate and therefore should be an interface technique kept to gaming and simulations only. How do the developers hope to increase productivity with this program?

Linked with my post about Spotlight and search technologies, I am starting to realise the usefulness of not having to worry about where the files are physically stored. On the other hand, I still think that the user should still be encouraged to organise their files somehow. I think the hierarchical system of organisation is nearing its death though. We need new ways of organising our files. But how else do we do it?

Office 12 and "Ribbon UI"

2006-03-07T00:13:00.000Z

In an extention to the previous post, I'm going to talk a little bit about the usability issues that Microsoft found with Office 2003 and below, and how they are trying to fix it for the next version, Office 12. If you weren't at the previous HCI 2 lecture, basically, Russell opened up every single toolbar available in Microsoft Office 2003 (rather tediously using the menus I must say). He then said "how the hell am I supposed to recognise the icons I need when there are so many?". "usability guidelines say we should use recognition rather than recall, so maybe the designers thought icons are good. But there are so many". Basically, he identified the problem with Word having so many features and the user interface designers didn't think enough about how to make the features easier to find.

Has anyone seen the massive floor of Birmingham New Street train station which has a big yellow and white Office 12 teaser saying "We've changed, have you?" (that's probably wrong as it came from my memory). Well, they really are pushing something new with Office 12. They too have recognised the problems mentioned above, and are introducing a new user interface paradigm called "Ribbon UI" (pictured). They have gotten rid of all the traditional menus apart from File completely, and have given users access to features via panels headed by simpler, task-oriented words. The important thing about these panels is that because they are context aware, they make it easy for users to find features they want to use. For example, if I want to edit the look of a chart in Excel 12, I would click on the chart, and a design panel would be selectable. This panel is customised to displaying only design features that can be applied to the selected item (the chart).

Does this solve the problem? I've played with the Office 12 Beta 1 only briefly. Has anyone used it more and would like to share their comments?

More screenshots of Office 12.

Consumers Are Stupid

2006-03-07T00:00:00.000Z

According to Reuters, 50% of product returns are due to customers not being able to operate it. This surely is one of the many studies that point towards the idea that "consumers are stupid". The article doesn't directly target user interfaces or even HCI to that matter, but we can somewhat generalise. For example, in today's lecture when Russell asked the class how to replace text that had a green squiggly line underneath and proceeded to follow instructions by a fellow student, ending up in a spell checking dialog, another student put his hand up and said "well it's obvious! Stop being stupid" (probably not his exact words but he said something like that). Well, can we assume that people find the same things obvious as you? No! We have to assume people are stupid. If everyone using Microsoft Office were clever, there would be much less need for usability people like our lecturer himself.

Article found via digg.com.

(P) Questionaire - Demographic

2006-03-06T14:31:00.000Z

The resutls of our questionnaire seem to show that a large percentage of car drivers are male and between the ages of 16 and 25. I'm not sure how representative of the population these results are, but it could be hightlighting the subset that is interesting in our solution.

Attracting Attention

2006-03-04T18:21:00.000Z

Mac OS X has a nice way of alerting a user to events by having items on the dock to bounce up and down to alert the user. This method is a good way of getting the users attention but it has to be used carefully. I thought I'd post an extract of an article I read on informit.com as it explains the problem better than I can, enjoy.

Items bounce up and down in the Dock to alert you to situations that supposedly require your attention. My gripe is that the "problem" is usually not urgent. The icon bounces indefinitely, like a needy child demanding your attention, endlessly screaming, "Look at me, Mom, look at me!" This is so annoying and unnecessary it makes me want to scream back, "Listen up ya little punk. I hear ya, but I just don’t care, so shut yer trap!"

Here’s the deal. First of all, there’s nothing that can go wrong in software that requires the immediate intervention of a human, so programs are never justified in distracting you from the task at hand. If a program has a problem and needs your attention, it’s OK for its icon to bounce a few times to visually draw your attention to it. Furthermore, it’s fine for it to beep or use some other innocuous sound effect to audibly alert you to something out of the ordinary. But if you haven’t responded after that, you either chose to ignore the situation or are not around. It would suffice to have some other static visual change (interpretation: subtle and nonannoying) to the application’s icon in the Dock, indicating that it wants your attention when you get around to it.

(P) Legal Issues

2006-03-04T01:31:00.000Z

Another issue that came to light from our meeting was the question of legal reponsibility. Ben has given a scenario where a car suffers the inevitable blue screen of death, familiar to all windows users. This raises the question, if the blue screen of death causes a crash and posiblity takes a life, who is reponsible?

Most people would put the finger of blame on the company. Yet nothing can be produced that functions perfectly all of the time. Should the company be held responsible or the individual creators of the product? Most business ethicist would claim that a person should take the ultimate responsibility for their actions. Although, HCI often relies upon the opinions of experts and end-users to draw a qualitive opinion. In fields such as Civil Engineering where there are well estabilished quantitive measures of performance and strict legal guidelines, this is more easy. HCI hasn't reached the point where a product can be evaluated to show its true effects on end-users and this has not really been much of an issue for consumer electronic devices. But if interfaces such as our design which are in a safety critical area become more dominate it's an area that needs further investigation.

My standpoint on the issue would be that we can only reduce the most common dangers and controversally in some framework of cost. What I mean by this statement is that we can't place multiple backup systems into a car on the chance that the one in a million situation occurs. So long as our interface is not causing a significant problem we all need cars under a million pounds.

(P) The Blue Screen of Death...

2006-03-02T18:34:00.000Z

During a meeting, we discussed how computer systems can crash and how this affect would our system, which is mostly a computer based system. What if the user was driving along in our intelligent car and they suddenly got the "blue screen of death" appear in front of them? Sounds funny, but making the software and hardware robust and secure is a critical part of the implementation process. This applies to other systems like planes which are now mostly fly-by-wire systems and even the common car has an onboard computer for engine management.

So what causes a computer system to crash?

The common one is errors in software code which tries to do something to the system which it either shouldn’t or couldn’t. An example of this would be an infinite loop. If the loop never ends, then the system will never be able to free that resource and slowly crashes the system. Also memory overflow where not enough memory is available for the application.

Another type of common crash is over heating. When the processor or other hardware devices gets to hot, then they usually automatically shut down to protect themselves. If they don’t, then they stop working and cause the system to stop operating.

In our system we need to consider the possibility of a crash and find ways to overcome this problem. If not to stop the system crashing altogether then to at least add fail safes so the driver of the vehicle is not put at risk if the system crashes.

This then asks the question “would you trust the intelligent car system?”

Organising Our Files

2006-03-01T14:06:00.000Z

For the past few days I've been thinking a lot about the problem of file management on a computer. "The notion of files and folders has been with us for so long that it almost seems axiomatic" - Marsden et. al, 2003. This is true. Every single operating system in existence that has been used by the general public has made use of a hierarchical folder tree to store files. The reason that folder trees probably have been so successful is that there is the need to accurately organise operating system files. But users do not want to manage a hierarchy of folders. Studies have led to desktop search systems such as the Microsoft ToolBar, Google Desktop and of course Apple's SpotLight. All of these systems recognise the laziness of users and allow us to search our documents in much the same way as online search engines that so many of us have grown reliant on.

Having hands on experience with all of the three systems mentioned above I still felt there was something missing. It's possible I haven't spent enough time on them to really blend it into my work patterns, but I found the following disappointments with them:

I expected desktop search to stop me having to organise my files. But as a guy that likes to know where things are stored, I felt like I wasn't in control enough. For example, if I'm working on a set of files that come together to form a report, I like to see the directory of files. Similarly in a real life filing system, I'd like all my related things to stay together. I wouldn't call myself an organisational freak, but I find comfort in knowing there's some kind of organisation behind my documents.
Because of the above, I ended up using the search only when I couldn't be bothered to navigate to my files. This means that traditional search mechanisms would work just as well.
I didn't like the idea of Google Desktop searching my emails. By default, emails and documents are searched simultaneously. Maybe it's better to separate search into task contexts, i.e. use different services like Google?
"Users tend to like navigating to files themselves rather than trying to remember attributes of the files" - Marsden et. al, 2003 (file names, date last edited, etc.). I agree.

"Smart folders" have been Apple's attempt to do a kind of "union" on different search queries, presenting the result as if it were a real folder. This builds on the search idea a bit, meaning that you can be even more lazy about where you store your files. Does this work? I haven't used them myself so I'm unsure about useful they are. Please post a comment.

Has anyone realised that they have been storing more and more of their data online? I use a lot of online services such as GMail, Flickr and Friendster. They all contain 'files' that I've created, whether it's an email or a photo that I own. Is there any way of linking all these together into an interface that navigates all of your files. Can we create links between all of these services so that we stop having to jump back and forth between them? I want to unify and simplify everything without losing the control if I need it. Is Google's getting closer to its mission of "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful" when search may be just one way of ignoring the original problem?

Well, I've had a few ideas but that'll be in the next blog post.

Links:
Good summary about SpotLight's features.

Emotion in Music Selection

2006-02-24T20:15:00.000Z

This blog post is going to take a look at a music player application for the computer which uses a novel approach to playback. Most of us have gotten used to traditional methods of interaction, such as genre classification, playlist generation, shuffle playback, etc., but the method presented by MoodAmp is quite unique.

MoodAmp is a music player which has a simpler user interface than iTunes. Rather than present a complete user interface with many alternative methods for navigating and selecting songs from a music library, MoodAmp's philosophy is to simplify the user experience. The program is targetted at people that don't want to often select tracks that they want to play manually. It uses an adaptive learning algorithm to play tracks that suit your mood. The user input required for the learning to work is as follows:

The program is told what mood the user is in (e.g. Romantic, Working, Happy, Angry)
As tracks are being played, tracks are rated by the following ratings: awesome, good, normal bad and exclude.

The player will then use an algorithm to determine the probability of playing a specific track as proportional to the rating for the given mood. The algorithm is quite simple, but provides quite a nice way to incorporate the notion of mood into playlist generation which, during informal testing, works remarkably well.

The main drawback of the system is that a long time must be spent training the system. Textual descriptions for moods and ratings make it harder for the user to rate tracks quickly. Do users really want to spend this long on the interface? Another problem is they may find it difficult to reflect on themselves accurately when asked what mood they are in. What mood are you in now? I don't think the program's authors researched enough into the human factors involved with thinking of mood.

I've done a study in my final year project that goes into a bit more detail into this subject, but it isn't really worth dirtying this blog up with the fine details. It's a fine place to plug my project though. It's called Colour Player, and overcomes the limitation of the difficulty of self-reflecting your emotion by abstracting mood into colour. Check it out! (Haha, Ben's gonna slap me for this post).

The iButton!

2006-02-23T00:26:00.000Z

As I was searching around for wearable devices, I came across this fantastic piece of hardware. The iButton! While it is not directly a wearable device, it is a great piece of technology and can be carried on a user easily.

What is an iButton?

An iButton is a small chip encased in a stainless steel “can”. It is 16x16mm in size and is incredibly durable. It can be dropped, stood on or scratched and it will still function 100% of the time.

How does it works?

The iButton contains a small chip which is used to store information on. The ‘lid’ and the ‘base’ of the can are used to communicate with the chip inside and it can pass all of its information in a momentary contact of a reader. The readers are attached to PC’s or PDA’s which can then process the information.

What use do they have?

The iButton is used in applications where a user needs to make a quick communication with a system. A good example of this would be secure access to a building. As all the iButtons come with a flange, they can be easily attached to a key fob. Another example of them being used, which a lot of you may of seen, is in a bar where the bar staff press this button ‘thing’ up to the machine before they type in the order. That is an iButton!

Overall, this is a great alternative to swipe cards and barcode readers. They offer far better durability and far better security. They can be carried around on a set of keys discreetly and safely without the worry of damaging the unit. More can be read at Maxim-ic.com

Reflection on wearable technology

2006-02-23T00:05:00.000Z

After the lecture on Monday, I decided to do a bit of reading on wearable technologies. The reason for this is mainly because I found the lecture not very HCI related and more related to cost, processor speeds and information processing. It didn’t really discuses HCI issue such as comfort, practicality, ease of use etc.

An example of the lecture was having a laptop type machine in a back-pack and walking around with this big helmet thing attached to your head. While this is “wearable” to a certain degree, it is by no means practical or even very user friendly which is what we are concerned about in this module. In my personal opinion, wearable devices are that of small size and can be discreetly used such as mobile phones, PDA’s, Bluetooth headsets and so on.

On researching the internet, I found a paper on wearable technologies which covers the characteristics of a wearable device. These include small screen, limited performance and processing and slow connectivity. This paper also includes some current technologies in development.

I'm now going to make a new post on the i-Button as it deserves its own post.

Robotic Cellular Secretary

2006-02-21T23:15:00.000Z

Over at gizmodo.com I found an interesting article where a guy at MIT is doing research into using a robot to interface between you and your cell phone. At the moment, its a squirrel that when someone calls checks their number against a list and asks them questions in order to prioritise their call. The squirrel then tries to get the users attention with gestures and eye contact. I think that research such as this is very interesting because it's using non-verbal cues to attract a users attention just like a human would. If you think about it, how many times have you got annoyed with peoples ringtones and vibrate.

Now if you manage to think past the silly squirrel for a second, I'm sure there are a number of possible area this research could be applied to in alerting users to events.

When to Stop Saying Change is Bad?

2006-02-21T13:34:00.000Z

I was just reading a fellow student's blog about the unconventional placement of the sim slot in the Nokia 6111 phone. Here the blogger complains that people expect the sim slot to be underneath the battery and not behind the phone which is only revealed when the phone is in its "slided open" position (see image).

Nokia and other companies such as Google, Yahoo and Apple are constant innovators, and they must be in order to keep up with or get ahead of the competition. In some cases such as the button labelling example I blogged about a few days ago, I think that consistency is very important. To an extent, the sim placement in phones has its advantages being in a consistent place. Nokia obviously found a more logical place to put the sim slot. What is this logical reason you may ask? Well, who wants to take the battery out in order to change their sim card? Some people keep multiple sim cards and swap them in and out all the time. Placing the sim card in the new position not only makes this process easier, but it ensures less dust can enter the phone through the cracks exposed by lifting the battery out. The only bad thing I can think of is that people will take a minute or so to get used to it. But hey, we can't innovate without change can we?

Thanks Navneet Loyall for the original blog post about this.

Smart Defaults

2006-02-20T17:28:00.000Z

For first time yesturday, I noticed that safari (mac browser) does something quite clever in the way it saves bookmarks. Now I'm not sure if other browsers do this, but safari automatically predicts the folder that you want to save a bookmark into by analysing a site's title and description. Generally, I feel that using defaults in this way is a good way of making poducts more usable. For example, if you are listening to music and your at the begining of a track. Do you really need to display the rewind button?

(P) Fingerprints...

2006-02-19T21:28:00.000Z

As biometrics has been a strong topic during our lectures, I thought I would look into one area of interest in a bit more detail.

The most common way to take biometric information of a person is to scan their fingerprint. The original use of fingerprints was to provide grip when holding objects in the hand, like that of bicycle tyres. However, due to fingerprints being unique to every person in the world, they can be used to identify people and confirm that they are who they say they are. Fingerprints are built up from our DNA and will grow back if they are removed in any way (burnt off, scrap or cuts).

Fingerprints are made up of ridges of skin which can be defined as minutiae. These minutiae are characteristics of the fingerprint which can be further defined as ridge endings or splits. Other characteristics of fingerprints include dots, spurs, lakes and crossovers. These individual characteristics are used to map fingerprints onto systems where they can be compared by looking for the same patterns and placements of the characteristics.

Devices used to read fingerprints are now available for commercial use. For as little as £15, you can buy an optical mouse with an inbuilt fingerprint reader. This will include software to secure your PC with.

This started as a post about biometrics with no relevance to our project, but after researching the internet, it can be very useful to our project. Using the simple biometrics of fingerprints, they can replace the use of car keys completely! Car keys are easily lost or stolen, where your fingers tend not to be as easily misplaced or stolen… (it does make sense, honest!) A single finger could give the driver access to their car or even a combination of different fingers in a particular order could be used to add more difficulty in the scanner being tricked.

However, there are many advantages and disadvantages to using fingerprint scanning.

The main advantage is that there is no need to train the user how to use it. You simply place your finger on the sensor! Also, fingerprint sensors are very small and don’t consume much power so can be left on running all the time. They are also the oldest and best developed area of the biometric range so they are well established and are becoming very accurate.

There are disadvantages to the above points. Constant use of a fingerprint scanner will result in it becoming dirty and giving inaccurate results. Fingerprint scanners usually run along side another device such as PIN number or swipe card and therefore just act as convenience rather than security. Finally, people tend to dislike the idea of having their fingerprints on a system, especially as they can be scanned against outstanding crimes etc.

Button Labelling Guidelines

2006-02-17T20:24:00.000Z

I found an article on usabilitynews.com written by a usability consultant that looks further into what the 'correct' design decision would be for a specific scenario. The scenario mentioned is what the cancel button on a tabbed form should do. Should it cancel changes in the current tab only or the entire tab set? User interface designers often dispute about what is the correct way of doing things. Of course, the only way to find out really is to test it on lots and lots of people.

The author of the article, Caroline Jarrett talks about a button labelling rule which is simply to:

"Label the button what it does."
"If the user doesn't want to do it, don't have a button for it."

It all seems a bit obvious but some of these labelling decisions aren't easy to make at all. For example, take advice number 1. What if the function that the button executes is one that cannot be explained properly in just a few words? Suddenly we break many rules set by well-researched user interface guidelines which say that button labels should only be several words long or less, and should be simply a verb describing the action if possible.

This is from the Apple User Interface Guidelines:

Button names should be verbs that describe the action performed—Save, Close, Print, Delete, and so on. If a button acts on a single setting, label the button as specifically as possible; “Choose Picture…,” for example, is more helpful than “Choose…”

Users expect consistency across user interfaces. Part of this consistency involves the user expecting buttons to be context sensitive. Most of the time in this situation, interface designers would put the cancel button inside the actual tab's content area if it means that only the current tab's changes would be cancelled, and placed outside the tab set's content area (see screenshot) if the whole tab set's changes would be cancelled. It makes sense to me and it makes sense to Microsoft too.

Caroline says that we should label the button "Cancel and remove all changes". I don't like it. It's not consistent at all to what users expect (and I notice these things - it would look weird).

As for the second rule, well it's obvious! It's a bit of a silly piece of advice really. It's not even related to button labelling so I don't know why she included it in an article titled "rules for button labelling". Maybe a single bullet point looks stupid.

I think advice like the ones in the eight golden rules of interface design are better. But that's for another post...

(P) Recommendation

2006-02-17T19:33:00.000Z

The solution needs to combine the user of colour and motion. For hazards that are close to the users point of fixation I would suggest the use of colour. We discussed highlighting the hazard by overlaying its edge in red, when the hazard gets closer the colour change from light to dark. This idea is appropriate because colour in this context is processed efficiently without being too distracting. But we also need to be aware that between 2-12% of European males are colour blind. Ben suggested that this coudl be solved by giving the usr the option of different colours. When hazards are at the periphery of our vision it would be a good idea to highlight the danger using motion especially if its stationary. Finally, if the danger is almost on top of the car and its a significant risk of causing an accident then zooming should be used. This is the best way of gaining the users attention, although if used for trivial hazards its use would dominate the users attention which could be problematic.

(P) Good Usability Testing

2006-02-17T18:20:00.000Z

I looked around the internet to find a good guide to successful usability testing so that we can apply these when it comes to testing out our prototype. Even though test subjects will not have access to the real thing, a lot of the advice will apply anyway. The article I found contained a lot of advice on how to put the users in the right frame of mind required for good usability testing, a bunch of things not to do, and good advice about setting scenarios with instructions rather than just plain instructions. The advice tells us to not look out for ego-massage and to make sure you find out whether the users can do what they set out to.

Our prototype in development at the moment will be an animated and interactive flash animation which will try to replicate the features of the car as much as possible. It will try to replicate as much of the feel of the design as possible. Obviously it would be ideal to create a physical prototype and get a user to drive around in the car, but an interactive prototype on the computer is quite possibly the best we could do. Following advice on the article we will make sure we keep talking to a minimal amount so that the user is actually on their own.

One important thing we need to do is make them sign a letter of consent, which could easily have been missed.

(P) Motion and Colour

2006-02-17T04:51:00.000Z

This week I've been researching the effect of motion and colour on human vision, to help us decide a strategy for our hazard avoidance system. After reading quite a few papers, I thought I'd give a brief summary of what I have uncovered so far.

The majority of current interfaces rely on shape, colour, size, texture, orientation and position. These elements can be efficiently processed by our visual system without requiring too much attention and have been actively researched in the past. Monitoring of visual information be can mentally strenuous, a user needs to examine the currently displayed information and decide whether it has changed without being overloaded. One example I remember reading of was a stock market brokering system that used different colours to represent changes in price. As you could imagine the interface resulted in a mass of colour changes that was difficult to interpret and probably resulted in a few mental breakdowns. Now although these approaches when implemented correctly have worked well on computer monitors, we have the problem that our system needs to inhabit a 3D world.

Human vision is very non-uniform with respect to our ability to resolve detailed information, we can only resolve about one tenth of the detail at about ten degrees to the side of the point of fixation. For colour, a similar pattern is followed where our ability to discriminate colour information is also non-uniform and this results in us being almost colour blind at the periphery of our vision. in contrast, our ability to perceive motion falls off much less towards the periphery of our visual field. This was demonstrated in 1972 by researchers Peterson & Dugas, they showed that static targets where virtually invisible in the far field whereas moving targets were easily detected. This seems to suggest that motion is significantly better than colour when used to attract a user's attention, especially in the periphery. Further studies have also shown that the percentage of undetected targets increased from 6% to 25% with peripheral colour targets, whereas failure-to-detect with motion was less than 2% in both near and far sighted targets. Motion therefore seems to be equally remembered in both near and far conditions, while colour and is less well noticed and less accurately tracked. Perhaps the greatest advantage of using such motion-based signals, however, is that they do not seem to interfere with existing colour and form coding. While it would seem that all motions are effective signaling mechanisms some are clearly more distracting that others. Traveling motions involving both detection and tracking are substantially more distracting than anchoring motions. Zooming motions are also very distracting because they elicit a sudden perceptual response from our visual system. Overall the slow linear motion would appear to be a good comprise where in studies it was rated among the least irritating and distracting but it elicited good response times and detection rates.

This is getting a little long so my next post will give my recommendation for our hazard avoidance system.

(P) Prototype - Hazard Warning Example

2006-02-17T01:34:00.000Z

Hmmm... mike mentioned Flash which I plan to start working on for the presentation in the next few weeks. But this got me thinking I could quickly demonstrate the hazard warning idea using animated GIF's to clear up any misunderstandings. Hope it works ok...

(P) Prototype

2006-02-16T22:14:00.000Z

We have started to develop our prototype and it is coming along nicely! We first made ideas on paper (shown on the right) and then did a graphical version to give a better layout and idea of our product (shown on the left).

First thing… before anyone claims it’s too cluttered… it isn’t! Obviously not everything will be happening at the same time. But to demonstrate our prototype without having 20 different images is to combine it all into one. For example; when the warning system shows a possible hazard, then the navigation will disappear to give the user better vision.

The warning system uses a zoom effect which is featured in many shoot-em-up games. The idea is a subtle change in colour which goes from the outside of the screen to the point it wants focus, will attract the user to that exact area. For an example of this, go play any of the Virtua-Cop games. When an enemy comes into view, this zoom is used to attract the player’s attention to him/her. This same idea would be extremely useful in a hazard warning system, like on our car. An example of the game is shown on this video where you can see the idea behind the zoom in to attract attention.

The music player is currently being prototyped by Mike (as it’s his area of interest) which will feature on the blog soon along with additional controls for the driver.

(P) Music Player Early Prototype

2006-02-16T16:59:00.000Z

Basic controls - playing and pausing

Presented are the two different states of the play and pause interaction method. When the track is stopped or paused, the user simply touches the middle of the CD case. Similarly, the pause button can be pressed when a track is playing.

Other controls - volume and track skipping

Tapping the touch spots could change the volume and track.

Alternative interaction method

Mouse gestures are a way of combining the movement of the mouse and clicks to execute a specific behavior. Similarly in our car's dashboard display, we could make use of gestures. Basic horizontal and vertical movement would change the track and volume respectively. More complex gestures such as a circular movement to change the track are possible, but we would have to test it in a more complete prototype to see whether people find it easy enought to use.

This could be used as an alternative interaction method. One of the disadvantages of using gestures is that friction is increased while the screen is pressed. This could be argued as being a good thing though, as the resulting muscular tension can be exploited as it gives constant feedback that the user is in a temporary state, or mode.

Browsing online radio stations

I looked at the iTunes interface (pictured left) to browse online radio streams on the PC and started thinking about how to represent this kind of functionality in a limited screen space scenario [pdf]. Our problem here isn't so much the resolution available to us. It's that the more complex we make our interface the harder it is for the driver to use, especially while driving. We treat the dashboard more like an embedded system rather than a multi-purpose system like the PC, which is designed to be flexible. We only need to include the bare minimum set of features.

We present the following mock-ups of this part of the interface. The first picture shows the menus used to pick a category of radio stream. The second, shows a more specific menu. The first option in purple - "personalised" can be selected to play a radio station that dynamically generates tracks on-the-fly depending on the user's tastes from collaborative data and preference matching. Other items start playing pre-defined playlists which can be free or subscription only radio stations.

Look forward to the integration of this little prototype with other portions of our car in a dynamic prototype which hopefully we can get people to start playing with so that we can improve our design.

(P) Music Related Survey Results

2006-02-15T22:53:00.000Z

One of the aims of our survey was to find out exactly where the problems lie in cars in the realm of music playback and other in-car entertainment. We needed to find out what equipment people use in their cars and whether they find operating this equipment difficult. The primary aim of our project is to identify the human factors in cars and to attempt to bring forward ideas to improve them. The results of the part of the questionnaire related to music equipment interaction are as follows:

Out of the 81 people that answered this question the majority had a radio and a CD player in their car. This is surprising to me as just a few years ago I would have expected most cars would only have a cassette player. Over a quarter had an MP3 player of some sort in their car. This shows that many people are already using the benefits of compressed music from their computers.

Only 3 people had cruise control in their car. This would probably be explained by the poor variance in the age groups of our respondents - mainly under 25 years old. A survey spread across a larger age range would be more definitive.

There's not much to say about these results. It clearly shows that most people find operating in-car controls easy. 81% of respondants said they find operating in-car controls from very easy (5) to easy (3). From this we can conclude that people generally don't find it hard to interact with the system, so we should concentrate on providing better features rather than making the system easier to use. Of course, we need to keep the system easy to use so a further survey after our finalised prototype will be required.

These results show that our respondents change tracks quite often. 78% found themselves changing tracks from sometimes (3) to very often (5). This question may seem trivial but is important to identify that users actually make use of the interface which makes the question on the difficulty of operating in-car controls valid (as people changing tracks more often will probably find operating the controls more difficult.

(P) Questionnaire - GPS results!

2006-02-15T20:08:00.000Z

I would of done this before but I have been feeling ill the last few days with infected eyes.. :( boo!

44 people out of the 90 that answered our questionnaire have had experience with a GPS system. This is a good result considering GPS is not a common piece of equipment. However, it is starting to become extremely popular in new cars with new build in systems being introduced.

Only 12 out of 44 people gave the GPS route planning a rating of 3/5 or lower. The remaining 32 people gave the GPS a rating of 4 and 5 out of 5 with the majority (17) giving it 4/5.

A key area which we will focus on with the GPS is how to input the destination. 18/40 people who answered this question found that the input of the destination was the most complex part and I completely agree! When I used my friends, it was a terrible input interface. You had to turn and press this one knob to input letters etc. This is a key area to improve in our system to allow the users to input the destination’s nice and easy. As we will have the entire windscreen as a HUD, using touch screen technology the user could point to the destination or type it in on a full keyboard.

Overall, the ease of use according to the participants was extremely good. 29/43 gave the ease of use 4/5 or higher. 9 people gave it 3/5 and the remaining 5 people gave GPS 2/5 or lower. This still means we have plenty of people to please, with the current happy people being even happier about the new system!

(P) Users - Speedometer Further Ideas

2006-02-14T20:35:00.000Z

In 2002, excessive speed was a contributory factor to 12 per cent of slight, 19 per cent of serious and 30 per cent of fatal accidents. For accidents precipitated by cars, excessive speed is most often cited as a contributory factory where the driver was aged 17 to 19, although for fatal accidents it is slightly more often cited for 20-24 year old drivers. As driver age increases, the proportion of excessive speed accidents falls.

From our questionnaire it would seem that the majority of our drivers are male and aged between 16 and 25. How representative of the general motoring public these results are is debatable, but it got me thinking about how our car could be designed to represent different age groups. Previously we had been prototyping speedometers and the idea of a change in colour representing when you break the speed limit. There was also the suggestion from our expert that the driver wouldn't be affected by the change in colour and a vibrating seat would a better solution. Now, if you are a young driver then because you are more likely statistically to be involved in a car accident due to excessive speed then perhaps the more extreme measure of vibrating the seat should be employed. Yet if your an older driver then speed is not really as much of a danger in the sense of it being life threatening although it's still illegal. This could also be applied to where you are driving because accidents on rural roads for example are twice as likely due to excessive speed when compared to urban roads. The ability to customise a car to the specific driver would be a great feature because it gives people a sense of control over the device and personalisation.

(P) Expert Opinion and Human Factors

2006-02-11T21:29:00.000Z

Today I talked to a friend who does a course called automotive Design with Management. As he deals with cars all the time in his course I thought I'd seek him for an "expert" opinion on our product. Any projects that are either trying to reach out into a market that is foggy or is trying to realise an idea that hasn't been done before is doomed to fail without expert opinion. Of course, our idea has been thought of by many people. It's impossible to assume that an idea is completely innovative.

Anyway, the first thing he was worried about was the safety of the vehicle. If the windscreen was wider and taller, we'd need to use some kind of shatterproof, strong but flexible, cheap and of course, easy to mass produce. Of course, we could just choose to ignore all of these issues and assume that they are problems that clever people will be able to solve. Besides, we're interested in human factors so that's all irrelevant, right?

The other thing he said was "eh, what kind of price you thinking of? These kind of things are for aircrafts!". Again, not our problem. But, I looked on Google for existing methods of projecting images onto a windscreen. I found loads of things such as this simple speedometer installation using an electro-fluorescentt display. One interesting article I read was about Jaguar's concept stand at the NEC, 2000, demonstrating the use of a night vision camera projecting an image onto the windscreen from the inside (explained in diagram). Here, a blogger talks about his experience at the stand, where a demo vehicle played a pre-recorded video projected onto the windscreen. It turns out that the vision enhancement system only works on the central field of view. When the blogger saw a pedestrian on the side of the road, he swerved the car even though it would have missed the hazard. Did Jaguar think of the human factors of this product? Does the enhancement of the central field of view make an object appearing in peripheral vision much more sudden? I'll leave you all to comment, but meanwhile we're going to have to think about these issues in more depth...

I also found a nice explanation of the main idea of HUDs in vehicles. The commercial product "Night Driver" shows an actual product that does something similar to Jaguar's concept car. The aim is the same - increase the driver's visibility when driving in the dark, but with a different techological approach - it's projected from the outside. All these demonstrate that the product has commercial viability (even thought I've spent the last 5 minutes trying to find the price of the thing without success).

Another thing he mentioned about our prototype of the speedometer was that a driver "wouldn't be affected by the change in colour if he goes over the speed limit". He wasn't convinced, and thought that a vibrating seat would be better - the idea being that the driver would get annoyed and speed less. I said back "but then nobody would buy the car." Bad thing.

Guys, shouldn't we be analysing the questionnaire?

(P) Integrating Music Players in Cars

2006-02-09T21:26:00.000Z

The 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid attempts to give you a grand total of 5 different ways to listen to music. AM/FM radio, compact flash reader, 3.5mm stereo jack, iPod dock connector and some kind of satellite radio. Of course, it costs around $350.00 to have the iPod dock installed in your car by Honda. That's a ridiculous price for what's basically a cable. I think the idea is that Honda see the problem with music interaction in vehicles. Many people, including friends of mine, connect their iPod or music player to their car by a stereo-to-cassette adapter, FM transmitter or manually install a wire into their sound system. This makes it more dangerous to change tracks than with controls integrated in the car, which takes into account anthropometrics so are (most of the time) positioned in sensible areas.

What the review states as being rather bad though, is the way that an iTunes plugin attempts to attach a robotic voice to each track so that titles are read out while you're using the music system in the car. If you don't have time to watch the video clip, I can tell you, it sounds awful. It's literally the kind of voice synthesis I heard way back on my Amiga 500! Thumbs down.

Scouring the internet for alternatives, I came across loads of sites which show stories of how iPods have been integrated into cars. This CNET article describes the process of integrating an iPod into a car (pictured to the right). What impressed me was that there are actually products out there that enable you to display ID3 metadata on your music interface. The project cost around $150 to complete, which is a hell of a lot cheaper than the Honda one. And you don't have to buy a Honda either. Which is $25 000 cheaper.

But still, too expensive for my liking! Why approach music playback in a car in the way that we're envisioning?

(P) Speedometer...

2006-02-09T18:08:00.000Z

The speedometer which was discused today was decided to be kept simple but clear. The idea of it is that the car will know what the speed limit is of the road the driver is on. The speedometer will then only show the speedometer values up to that speed limit. If the driver wishes to go over the limit, they may do (we don't want to take control away from the driver) but it will warn you that you are over the speed limit using colours. Green shows you are OK and at a sensible speed where red is used to signify that you are over the limit. Bellow is an example of how the speedometer will look on the HUD.

(P) Prototyping...

2006-02-09T17:34:00.000Z

Today we all met up and discused our prototype. Using feedback from the questionnaire along with our own comments we came up with some great ideas. At first, we started making some notes on paper but soon thought this wasn't good enough!

We decided to go into the common room and take advantage of the white board where we could all scribble ideas down freely instead of cramping around a piece of A3 paper. Once we had finished our ideas we took pictures of the board to blog up.

The first one shows our stages of developement on the speedometer. We wanted to keep it simple but effective. Using green as OK and red as Speeding, we were able to make a comprimise between simple and efficiency.

The second one shows the developement from the conventional GPS system to our own. We went from the full road map system down to just showing the route the user is taking. From that we realised that there is no need for a map at all! Since our design is to have a HUD as the windscreen, we could just have a line that is projected on the road that the user can just follow. No need for following instructions or listening to a voice. Just simple line following.

The third photo shows the rear view mirror. We decided to combine the rear view mirror and side mirrors into one and just have a long top mirror that uses cameras to show the driver the complete view behind him/her.

We couldn't decide on exactly how we'd identify hazards in the HUD display. We therefore resorted to simply brainstorming as many ways of doing it as possible. Our plan is to identify the best one by presenting different options to people and seeing which one they like the best.

Eye Tracking Problems

2006-02-08T23:57:00.000Z

I'm not entirely convinced that eye tracking technology is of any practical use beyond a lab environment. I have serious doubts that a commercial product could implement this technology successfully owing to the technology not taking account of human factors. The major problem would be detecting what a person is looking at from the movement of our eyes. When we look at objects our eyes are not fixed, but are continuously moving around due to the ocular muscle not being particularly strong. This can be demonstrated via the uncomfortable feeling you will experience when you stare at a fixed point for too long. In addition, humans are sensitive to moving objects at the periphery of our vision which is likely to be an evolutionary kickback for detecting ambushing predators. So if we can detect an object without directly looking at it, how will the system cope? In fact, even if we stare directly at an object does this mean we recognise the danger and so the system thinks the driver can handle the problem - when in reality he may be dreaming. There are also problems of mirrors and reflections that a driver could use to identify a hazard that would be particularly difficult for software to interpret.

Colour Guidelines

2006-02-08T21:30:00.000Z

Different people perceive colours differently for a variety of reasons for a variety of physical and psychological reasons. So here are some simple rules about using colours:

Black text on a white background on a constrating dark background.
Never use patterns or textures as a background to important text.
Don't use grey it looks washed out
Red is a universily urgent colour and can be used to draw attention - use sparingly
Don't use more than five colours in any scheme. Any more cause loss of informational value.
Don't pair wavelength extremes (red and violet; yellow and blue) as standard practice.
If your text is to be viewed outside, use dark text on a pale background and avoid patterns.

Startle Reaction Game

2006-02-07T20:57:00.000Z

To illustrate the point that you reaction better to motion than colour, Ben found this "Startle Game" give it a go:

(P) Our questionnaire!

2006-02-07T19:54:00.000Z

We have made a questionnaire between us and have published it. Feel free to fill it in! The more results we get back, the better we can make our product.

http://www.my3q.com/home2/89/mvoong/driving.phtml

Many thanks all!

Eye tracking...

2006-02-07T19:39:00.000Z

I was watching a programme called 'Child of Our Time' the other night and they were using a piece of amazing technology, Eye Trackers. It was a pair of Perspex glasses that have 2 cameras attached to them. One camera is pointing at the eye of the user and the other is pointing in the direction that the user is looking. Combining these 2 images, the system can circle the exact position that the user is looking at on the video of the users FoV (Field of View).

On the programme, they were using it to see how children answered questions when made to look at a face and when made to look away from the face. From this, they found that a child can answer a question far quicker and more correct when they are allowed to let their eyes wander. The reason for this is that faces are incredibly difficult to read and trying to answer a question at the same time as looking at a human face is incredibly difficult.

This technology could be used to control our Intelligent Car. With so many controls and functions, our eyes can tell the system a lot of information. A classic example would be a hazard that the car has spotted. The car can use the eye information to determine if the user has seen it in time or not and make a decision to break for the user or to let the user control the situation themselves. Also it could be used to control the MP3 player or turn on the indicators.

For videos of the technology, I found http://www.smi.de/iv/ivhed.htm

(P) Music Playback in a Car

2006-02-06T23:42:00.000Z

Before we start creating a car with loads and loads of computational power to integrate a GPS system, voice recognition, hazard avoidance, image recognition, advert blocking and all that, we can't forget the basic inconveniences of driving in a car.

Many people I know (including my parents) drive in a car with the same music playing over and over again. They either don't often change their CD/cassette tape or cycle between under half a dozen selections. I, for one, require a good selection of music. I can't stand listening to the same tracks over and over again.

Do these people mind not listening to the same tracks over and over again? This is a question we we will attempt to answer with our questionnaire. But for now, I'll give my view.

I think for most of the people in the class mentioned above it's basically the case of inconvenience and/or lack of motivation to change the music. I can think of a couple of reasons for this:

The driver doesn't have time to select music
The driver cannot be bothered to change the CD
The driver doesn't own much music
Music is the least prority for the driver - they use the car to drive and drive only
The driver is obsessed with only a handful of albums/tracks

Music is an important part of the life of a driver, and I think if all drivers had decent music to listen to, they'd be much less stressed, and as a result the roads will be a safer place. There are loads of ways we could fix some of the things mentioned in the numbered points, but I'll discuss one that we consider to put into our prototype car design.

Music recommendation services are becoming widespread now. The best one that I've come across is Last.fm, which is based on Audioscrobbler technologies. Basically these services track what tracks you listen to, and based on collaborative data from other users in the community, relationships between your listening tastes and habits are built. Last.fm enables you to then listen to recommended tracks like a personalised radio service. This technology can be used in a car - imagine not having to select tracks. Imagine that your favourite tracks are streamed to your car as easily as conventional radio. Imagine effortless switching between tracks. Imagine the convenience this would bring. Imagine the amount of stressful drivers we'd get rid of. Imagine our car (ok, this is starting to make me laugh to myself).
"Join the social music revolution at Last.fm. It's fun, it's free, it's all about the music."
A streaming, personalised music system has a good chance of fixing points number 1-4. It's as likely that we'd find a way to fix number 5 as we'd get many people reading this boring blog post in its entirety.

Google & Volkswagon Join Forces

2006-02-06T23:19:00.000Z

It seems like Google and VW are joining forces to put the maps in Google Maps/Earth into cars. The uses of this that I can think of right now are:

The use of the 3D system to fly through routes before you drive them. Is this just pretty or actually useful? I'm skeptical.
Having some pretty 3D graphics powered by an Nvidia graphics chip which basically represents what you can see in your windscreen but with much greater clarity.
Google AdSense, but on the roads. Targeted advertising and information. Imagine going home and realising that all the adverts you see on web pages are related to the places you've been in your car.

Other than that, it seems like this technology is similar to a system we're planning for our HUD. If we have data on what's round the corner, we could better inform drivers of the dangers ahead and/or give them a view through obstacles in a similar, but better way to the V2V we wrote about a couple of posts back.

Sat-Nav - First hand experience...

2006-02-06T11:39:00.000Z

Yesterday I went to S.Wales where I work at an airsoft site. My friend who lives in Birmingham gives me lifts down there and has recently been leant a brand new Toyota Avensis which came equipped with Sat-Nav.

First of all the system look very basic as it was a black and white display, but when driving, I realised you don't tend to look at the display and more just listen to what the system tells you. Sometimes this proved annoying to the driver as he wasn't sure what the voice meant and had to try tell what it was from the tiny black and white image on this tiny centered display.

The first problem I noticed with it was that if you came off the motorway and went around the roundabout above the motorway, the Sat-Nav thinks you missed the turning and starts recalculating routes while your going around the island as it follows the motorway. Then you have to wait for a minute for it to realise you took the right route and recalculate it back, by which point your lost. Luckily, we do this route regularly so didn't get lost (the car is a hire car from an accident which the other drivers insurance is paying for ;) and he wanted to try out the Sat-Nav). Secondly, while it was amazing in knowing where you were, it did sometimes put in random roundabouts that didn't exist! We found it quite amusing but could see how misleading it would be to someone on an unknown journey.

Overall I think the system is extremely clever and very accurate. It tells you the directions a quarter of a mile before you need to do them and then again once you reach the point of direction which is very handy. It also tells you of nearest petrol stations and service stops when on the motorway. I personally was very impressed.

(P) Very Early Prototype

2006-02-06T10:15:00.000Z

To get some initial ideas down I've done a very quick mockup of some of our key ideas in PowerPoint. As a tool for rapid prototyping, I was impressed with PowerPoint and will use it more. It makes it so easy to link slides together using hyperlinks!

Don't laugh at the prototype. It's for informal testing which we will discuss and refine further down the line.

Available in PowerPoint (118KB) and PDF format (75KB - PDF format isn't interactive).

Thanks to Ben for drawing the beautiful background!

(P) Would V2V Work?

2006-02-05T22:08:00.000Z

I was just reading the posts below and the first thing that popped into my head with the V2V system was - would it work? Would the updates from the cars be fast enough be used in an appropriately up-to-date visualisation on the HUD?

I used to play a game called Half Life. This is a "first-person shooter" game, which had an internet play feature making use of a client-server architecture. You may or may not know that when playing online games network latency is important. A player with a greater network latency would therefore be disadvantaged as its view of the "real" game was older. The makers of this game, Valve, got around this problem by issuing a patch that would introduce a netcode. This netcode would interpolate between frames meaning that the player's view would be more up-to-date. The advantage of this was that people with a high network latency would play in a less jerkey game, but of course with only an estimated view of the world. They would be able to shoot instantly, but a hit wouldn't be confirmed until a packet comes back from the server.

My point is - does V2V need some kind of interpolation to determine better estimates of car positions? I think WiFi network latency is around 20ms, which by my calculations means that a car travelling at 30mph would travel around 30cm before the other car would actually receive the data on the position of it. That's not even including processing time. Does this make the system dangerous? There are also HCI issues related to this - does a user want to see data on a car which has been interpolated or even guessed? There are HCI issues related to latency in user interfaces all the time, and not only ones which are caused by network latency. This is especially true in real time systems.

Road Hazards - Fog

2006-02-04T22:13:00.000Z

My last blog post mentioned a technology developed by General Motors, V2V, and this got me thinking about how it could be applied to hazard identification. Today I was thinking about how weather is one of the most constant dangers that a driver faces and this brought back memories of driving in thick fog. When driving in such conditions you may be unable to see for more than a few metres ahead and this could be a problem if a car suddenly brakes. I then realised that this technology coupled with a heads-up-display is the perfect solution to the problem. If all cars are fitted with V2V then you can determine the relative position and speed of other cars compared to yourself. The HUD could then create a visualisation of where the car should be if it were not masked by fog or some other visibility problem. This means that the driver even with no visibility to the naked eye can driver perfectly normally by watching the computer generated car drawn by the HUD. Interestingly this could have applications for blind bends or hump back bridges and would allow you to see around corners almost like xray vision.

V2V - vehicle to vehicle Wireless

2006-02-03T03:18:00.001Z

General Motors recently revealed its vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) wireless comms setup which allows cars equipped with the system to communicate and issue proximity warnings to attention deficit drivers. A computer system calculates the relative positions and speed information between V2V equipped automobiles within a quarter mile radius. This offers the possibility of alerting drivers to incidents far ahead and preventing a pile up perhaps through automatically stopped the cars further behind.

(P) Hazard Identification - GPS

2006-02-03T01:18:00.000Z

The area that I have been researching over the last couple of days has been hazard identification. Car manufactures are investing heavily in technologies that help to prevent accidents which is more cost effective than designing crash resistant cars. Over the years there have been a number of innovations: air bags and side impact bars etc etc. Manufactures have found that they are reaching a limit in terms of cost and before their product resembles a Sherman tank.

The majority of the research I have uncovered not suprising is concerned with reducing a drivers speed and different solutions to the problem. One widely used solution is GPS to determine a cars geographic location and then provide the driver with a posted speed limit. This is very similar to a number of products such as a Road Angel that you can purchase from your local Halfords.

The device sits on the cars dashboard and determines the cars location via GPS, and provides information such when you approach an accident blackspot. Unfortuately, I've travelled in a car with such a device and I found it be quite annoying because of its constant beeping. Additionally the screen which s centred on the dashboard flashes displaying a graphic for each different alert. Not only does this distract your attention from the road but it also makes you feel like running it over many many times.

There is one final GPS related scheme that I found that was investigated fairly recently by Leeds University. The plan was to use a satellite-based system to stop motorists from speeding. The technology worked by applying the breaks or cutting out the accelerator in modified cars when they exceed the speed limit for a paricular stretch of road. The researcher found that if they system was to be implemented nationwide they could save up to 1,000 lives a year. Not very impressive given the fact that in 1998 alone there were an estimated 4,300 people killed in the home and garden accidents in the UK. About 168,300 people suffered serious injuries and were detained in hospital.

(P) Streaming Music

2006-02-01T18:36:00.000Z

As Mike stole my research of GPS (I'm only joking), I have done a bit of research on the streaming music front for our Intelligent Car. It was discussed that the car would have a built in MP3 player which would stream music from the internet, using the satellite connection. These tracks would be selected based on the users input of preferred genre and of what current songs the user has listened too.

Streaming audio is a relatively simple process for both broadcasting audio and listening to the audio. For broadcasting the audio, a lot of the work is done for the user with existing software.

- The music is fed into an encoder which converts the music into streaming format.
- The stream is then sampled and compresses the information so that it can be sent to the listener.
- The broadcaster then sends the stream to a server, which has dedicated bandwidth to send to multiple users.
- The listening user has software which will decode the streaming information into music which will be amplified on the user’s speakers.

The most popular form of streaming music on the internet is ShoutCast which is aimed at Winamp users. ShoutCast is very straight forward to use, even I have used it successfully over the internet with my friends.

A good feature of the streaming music is that it can be compressed to any level so low bandwidth users (56k modems, ISDN) can still listen to the music, even though it will not be as good quality as a user on a 4mb connection. This means it would be relatively simple to implement a streaming player into the Intelligent Car as a satellite has a high amount of bandwidth.

(P) Research - conventional GPS in Cars

2006-02-01T10:08:00.000Z

While we're still on the topic of GPS I'd like to give an overview of the research I've done on the subject. This process was spawned from my thoughts that existing GPS systems are cumbersome to use because most of them are external devices that users mount to the dashboard of their car. I picture that most car GPS users use either a PDA with satellite navigation software or a dedicated navigation device such as a tomtom (pictured left). I imagine that the problem is that users find it difficult to see the screen while driving. That's not even thinking about the safety implications. However, these devices always include voice features meaning that directions are read out, and so I imagine the visual representation of the roads is only needed for additional information (or when you're lost).

I discovered that users do actually use the screen while driving. I admit that I have not searched around for very long, but it seems reasonable to assume that there are a large proportion of people that use the visual representation on their GPS system whilst driving.

One more interesting issue I came across with conventional sat-nav is that there has been reports about thefts. Apparently, people have reported having their sat-nav device stolen while they were driving in the car. Thieves wait at traffic lights, smash windows and literally rip the device away from the dashboard. To counter-act this, it has been recommended that the devices are mounted in the center of the car.

So, all of this suggests that there is a real problem with the current line of GPS products for the car. The HUD in our intelligent car will solve the first problem of the difficulty of accessing the visual information by presenting a bare-bones version of the map in an overlay. The position of the map would be in a much easier to see location. This, however, raises some more questions. Would the map still be distracting as it would be in the driver's immediate (or possible peripheral) view? Is map reading of any sort whilst driving a bad thing? We'll discuss these things in later posts.

The second problem of theft would obviously be solved using a HUD. Try stealing a windscreen of a car while someone is driving it :)

(P) Task Analysis - Music Playback

2006-01-31T22:32:00.000Z

A task analysis for music playback and track switching in a car can be quite tedious to write, but is required to understand why a different system will be more usable. Here I'm going to outline the process of changing tracks in two different cases. One being the car has a CD player, and the other being the car has a CD player with changer. We assume that the CDs are numbered (say, from 1-10) and we can change the CD by simply pressing the appropriate buttons.

Without CD Changer
The car must be stationary (to

Pick your music (the CD must be in your car)
Eject current disc
Insert new disc
Press play

With CD Changer

Pick the number of the CD you want to play
Press the number

Obviously, the CD changer solves the simple problem of changing CDs. But there is still the problem of playing a variety of music. The CD changer still has to be loaded with the music in the first place. What other methods of improving the music playback experience in a car are there?

I recognise how stupid this blog post is as it outlines a really obvious process, but I guess this is what is required for a task analysis. As the music system would only be a small part of the HUD idea we don't really need to go into great detail here.

(P) Task Analysis - Navigation

2006-01-31T22:24:00.000Z

In this post I will try to list the reasonable steps that a driver would need to think about in order to travel from one place to another. To illustrate the point, I will explain how these steps can be applied to navigating with an Ordinance Survey map instead of getting lost in more advanced technology such as GPS and its derivatives. Hopefully this should allow me to think about the problem more clearly without getting caught up in the technology.

The first stage for any driver would be to choose the origin and destination of the journey, although the origin would be the starting position of the car. This raises the point - does the driver need the ability to set the origin in a car whose starting point will be fixed by its current location. The next step would be to find all the routes between the origin and destination and then choose the route most appropriate to your needs. This would need to take into account of traffic problems, hotels or petrol stations on the route. Finally, the last last two steps may need to be iterated over to cope with changing conditions i.e wrong turn - new routes would need to be calculated and the most appropriate solution choosen.

Choose Origin
Choose Destination
Calculate Routes
Choose Route
Travel Route

Iterative:

Calculate Route
Adapt Route

(P) Scenario of GPS

2006-01-30T19:38:00.000Z

Here is a few different Scenario's for the driver using the HUD GPS system. It covers the disadvantages of using standard road maps and also a few disadvantages of using standard GPS.

Without any GPS

The driver plans a route using a road atlas.
The route is printed out with instructions written in text format.
The driver starts their journey.
The driver tries to read the instructions as they drive but find that they miss turn offs and have to turn around.
The driver reads turn at next left, and finds that the next left is a dead end. The instructions actually meant the next non-dead end left but instructions were not clear.
The driver then realises that they are in the completely wrong area and the instructions cannot tell him where to go from here.
The driver has to stop at the next available service area/petrol station to ask where to go.
The driver finds his/her way back onto the main route and eventually arrives at their destination 3 hours late.

With standard GPS

The driver types their destination into the SatNav system and it plans a route for them.
The system tells the driver which turnings to make and the driver can understand where to go.
The system then tells the driver to take the next left and says ‘turn left now’ but the road splits into two left turns and the driver is confused.
From the mistake, the system generates a new route and tells the driver to turn around on a dual carriage way which the driver can not until they reach the roundabout in 12miles.
The driver gets annoyed with the system but continues the journey.
Eventually, the driver is back on route and is now 30 minutes behind plan.
The driver hits traffic which the system did not know about and holds the driver up by another 30 minutes.
The driver is successful with the rest of the instructions and arrives at their destination 1 hour late.

With Intelligent Car HUD GPS

The drivers tells the system where their destination is using their voice and it confirms it using images from that area so the driver knows the exact location they are driving too.
The driver sets off and system will confirm every turn off with an image of the exact road they should be turning down.
The system will keep track of any traffic issues ahead using other Intelligent Car’s and using images from the satellite to stop the driver getting held up.
The system regenerates the route to avoid an accident on the motorway to prevent the driver being held up.
The driver follows the exact route told by the system and does not make one incorrect turn.
The driver arrives at the destination on time.

(P) Different Perspectives

2006-01-23T15:07:00.000Z

Earlier this week we carried out a successful brainstorming session that produced a number of good ideas. The main leason I learnt was that humour played an integral part in the process and joking around allowed us to communicated more effectively.

Mike and Ben have talked about brainstorming storming at length so I will discuss how we used different product perspectives to generate ideas. If we take an intelligent car as our example another perspective could be to consider what design features would be needed for it to work underwater i.e like the lotus espirt in a James Bond film.

The design of such a car is likely to need some of the following features:

Air Tight: Always a good idea underwater and would stop Bond's tuxedo getting wet.
Echo Location: Avoidance of obstacles and enemies sent for Bond
Emergency Escape: Ejecting of villians - not really needed by Bond as he's invincible
Low Drag Profile: Allows the car to glide through the water
Hybrid Engine: Allowing propulsion on land or sea.
Rudders: Steering of the car under water

By considering each of these features it is likely that you can gain better insight into the product you are designing. An air tight cabin could be advantagous because in a normal car it could block pollution and give a more immersive feeling to passengers. Additionally rudders could be used like aeroplane wings in reverse to increase down force.

The central idea is to stimulate ideas for your solution that might not seem at first seem perhaps silly but when thought about allow you to come up with novel ideas.

(P) Combining Odd Things...

2006-01-22T00:54:00.000Z

As Mike said, in our meeting we had decided on the intellegent car after 3 or 4 brainstorms, gradually making them more specific as we went along.

First brainstorm was anything and everything. Even Squirrels made an appearance in this one! How and why I can't remeber but it did! We then concluded we liked the idea of cars which led to the discusion of a HUD (Heads Up Display) for the driver to display information about the road, speed limits etc. From this, ideas from everywhere and anywhere flooded in with navigation, hazard warnings, self-driving, music streamer, daily planner and many more.

One of us then suggested films but from films we decided how amazing would it be if the driver could pick the scenario that they were driving in? Ideas from this included driving in the days of the first car where the HUD would turn all real images of the car into old style cars to give the driver a sense of that year. Also different countries, towns and even planets! Providing the cars and the roads were all the same, a driver could then drive anywhere and everywhere they wanted.

A simple example would be if it was raining and the driver wanted to drive in the glorious sunshine, then the HUD would turn all wet cars into dry cars and the sky to blue with sun shining in. Basically an overlay of the real world displayed to the driver through the HUD windscreen.

And to think all this came from a 20 minute brainstorm! The ideas are endless but I will not bore you all with that yet!

(P) Hazard Avoidance Brainstorm

2006-01-21T23:36:00.000Z

Here's the result of a brainstorm that we conducted on hazard avoidance:

(P) Problem Definition: HUD For Cars

2006-01-21T19:28:00.000Z

The aim of our project is to develop a HUD that can be integrated into a car. A HUD is a electronically generated display that superimposes data directly onto a humans visual field. We believe that such a technology can offer a number of benefits when it comes to interacting with cars.

At the moment, here is a list of the areas we are investigating:

Music Players
Navigation Systems
Driving Information, i.e. Speed, Car Information
Hazard Warning Systems

(P) Brainstorming Ideas

2006-01-20T19:57:00.000Z

Our group met up to discuss possible ideas for our project which will eventually be developed into a full design. Brainstorming is an interesting method of getting ideas from a group as it pulls together inspiration from each and every member. During our brainstorm, we made an effort to ensure that no one of our group talked for too long, as advised by our module lecturer, Russell. It really worked! We found that by doing so, we would bounce ideas off each other. I think the reason why this works is because we tend to discard ideas in our mind if we think of them too hard. By saying them out reactively, another group member may find a way of changing it from a bad idea to something actually quite good.

Firstly we did a quick and broad brainstorming session. Our favourite idea turned out to be the intelligent car, so we repeated the process again but starting off with something more specific.

This is what we came up with:

The interesting thing is that we tried the technique mentioned in the previous lecture of trying to combine impossible things together.

A Note...

2006-01-20T19:37:00.000Z

Just to make things clearer, we will be using a standard prefix to our blog entry titles of (P) when the post is directly related to part of the design.