The experience of enchantment in human–computer interaction

Improving user experience is becoming something of a rallying call in human–computer interaction but experience is not a unitary thing. There are varieties of experiences, good and bad, and we need to characterise these varieties if we are to improve user experience. In this paper we argue that enchantment is a useful concept to facilitate closer relationships between people and technology. But enchantment is a complex concept in need of some clarification. So we explore how enchantment has been used in the discussions of technology and examine experiences of film and cell phones to see how enchantment with technology is possible. Based on these cases, we identify the sensibilities that help designers design for enchantment, including the specific sensuousness of a thing, senses of play, paradox and openness, and the potential for transformation. We use these to analyse digital jewellery in order to suggest how it can be made more enchanting. We conclude by relating enchantment to varieties of experience.An earlier version of this paper was presented at Chi’2004 Fringe.     

Building an interaction design pattern language: A case study

Interaction design patterns are a proven way to communicate good design. However, current pattern collections are not sufficiently powerful and generative to be used as a guide for designing an entire application such as those used in complex business environments. This study shows how we built and validated interaction design patterns that serve as the specification for the redesign of an application. Additionally, they were integrated into a pattern language, as a ruleset for human–computer interaction (HCI) non-professionals to continue development of the application. We demonstrate how individual phases in the redesign of an application can be matched with the process of creating an interaction design pattern language. To facilitate the writing of individual interaction design patterns as well as the development of the pattern language as a whole, a combination of user interviews, controlled experiments and analytical methods has been applied successfully.     

Reconciling usability and interactive system architecture using patterns

Traditional interactive system architectures such as MVC [Goldberg, A., 1984. Smaltalk-80: The Interactive Programming Environment, Addison-Wesley Publ.] and PAC [Coutaz, J., 1987. PAC, an implementation model for dialog design. In: Interact’87, Sttutgart, September 1987, pp. 431-436; Coutaz, J., 1990. Architecture models for interactive software: faillures and trends. In: Cockton, G. (Ed.), Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction, Elsevier Science Publ., pp. 137-153.] decompose the system into subsystems that are relatively independent, thereby allowing the design work to be partitioned between the user interfaces and underlying functionalities. Such architectures extend the independence assumption to usability, approaching the design of the user interface as a subsystem that can designed and tested independently from the underlying functionality. This Cartesian dichotomy can be fallacious, as functionalities buried in the application’s logic can sometimes affect the usability of the system. Our investigations model the relationships between internal software attributes and externally visible usability factors. We propose a pattern-based approach for dealing with these relationships. We conclude by discussing how these patterns can lead to a methodological framework for improving interactive system architectures, and how these patterns can support the integration of usability in the software design process.     

The Growing Divide in the Patterns World

At Microsoft, the patterns & practices group has been employing software patterns to distill, reuse, and communicate guidance about software design and development. This effort made a number of contributions to the patterns world, including several books and a community site (patternshare.org) aimed at bringing pattern authors and users together. Since then, patterns have also became a common ingredient in some of our other products, such as reusable application blocks and software factories. Our sustained investment in patterns, large user community, customer-driven development approach, and usage and customer satisfaction metrics provide us with unique insights into how practitioners use patterns. They also give us opportunities to identify and address some of their key challenges. Bridging the gap between the patterns expert community and the typical pattern user is critical to achieving the full benefits of software patterns.     

Experiencing the Affective Diary

A diary is generally considered to be a book in which one keeps a regular record of events and experiences that have some personal significance. As such, it provides a useful means to privately express inner thoughts or to reflect on daily experiences, helping in either case to put them in perspective. Taking conventional diary keeping as our starting point, we have designed and built a digital diary, named Affective Diary, with which users can scribble their notes, but that also allows for bodily memorabilia to be recorded from body sensors and mobile media to be collected from users’ mobile phones. A premise that underlies the presented work is one that views our bodily experiences as integral to how we come to interpret and thus make sense of the world. We present our investigations into this design space in three related lines of inquiry: (1) a theoretical grounding for affect and bodily experiences; (2) a user-centred design process, arriving at the Affective Diary system; and (3) an exploratory end-user study of the Affective Diary with 4 users during several weeks of use. Through these three inquiries, our overall aim has been to explore the potential of a system that interleaves the physical and cultural features of our embodied experiences and to further examine what media-specific qualities such a design might incorporate. Concerning the media-specific qualities, the key appears to be to find a suitable balance where a system does not dictate what should be interpreted and, at the same time, lends itself to enabling the user to participate in the interpretive act. In the exploratory end-user study users, for the most part, were able to identify with the body memorabilia and together with the mobile data, it enabled them to remember and reflect on their past. Two of our subjects went even further and found patterns in their own bodily reactions that caused them to learn something about themselves and even attempt to alter their own behaviours.

Contextualized videos: combining videos with environment models to support situational understanding

Multiple spatially-related videos are increasingly used in security, communication, and other applications. Since it can be difficult to understand the spatial relationships between multiple videos in complex environments (e.g. to predict a person's path through a building), some visualization techniques, such as video texture projection, have been used to aid spatial understanding. In this paper, we identify and begin to characterize an overall class of visualization techniques that combine video with 3D spatial context. This set of techniques, which we call contextualized videos, forms a design palette which must be well understood so that designers can select and use appropriate techniques that address the requirements of particular spatial video tasks. In this paper, we first identify user tasks in video surveillance that are likely to benefit from contextualized videos and discuss the video, model, and navigation related dimensions of the contextualized video design space. We then describe our contextualized video testbed which allows us to explore this design space and compose various video visualizations for evaluation. Finally, we describe the results of our process to identify promising design patterns through user selection of visualization features from the design space, followed by user interviews.     

A designerly critique on enchantment

To develop the concept of user experience in HCI, McCarthy et al. introduce the notion of enchantment in interaction design. They describe five sensibilities that support exploration and evaluation in design for enchantment. In this paper, we discuss design for enchantment in light of our approach to design for interaction, called design for meaningful mediation. Based on our experiences from case studies, we argue that ‘considering the whole person with feelings, desires and anxieties’, one of the sensibilities McCarthy et al. formulate, influences the desirability and realisation of the other four sensibilities. By way of case studies, we show how we explored the link between ‘the whole person’ and desired interaction experience in a designerly way. We place enchantment in a context of other interaction experiences and demonstrate possible design techniques relevant to design for interaction experiences, including enchantment.     

Representing older people: towards meaningful images of the user in design scenarios

Designing for older people requires the consideration of a range of design problems, which may be related to difficult and sometimes highly personal matters. Issues such as fear, loneliness, dependency, and physical decline may be hard to observe or discuss in interviews. Pastiche scenarios and pastiche personae are techniques that employ characters to create a space for the discussion of new technological developments and user experience. This paper argues that the use of fictional characters can help to overcome restrictive notions of older people by disrupting designers’ prior assumptions. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences using pastiche techniques in two separate technology design projects that sought to address the needs of older people. In the first pastiche scenarios were developed by the designers of the system and used as discussion documents with users. In the second pastiche personae were used by groups of users themselves to generate scenarios which were scribed for later use by the design team. We explore how the use of fictional characters and settings can generate new ideas and undercut the potential in scenarios, for weak characterisation of “the user” to permit scenario writers to fit characters to technology rather than vice versa. To assist in future development of pastiche techniques in designing for older people, we provide an array of fictional older characters drawn from literary and popular culture.     

角色模型在软件建模中的应用

本文针对模式应用中出现的由于软件模式是解决问题的详细设计而无法实现从分析到设计的平滑转换的问题，提出在分析阶段便使用软件模式，引入了Role模式并把它作为从分析阶段至类图设计阶段的中介，阐述了如何从Use case中抽取Role模式，如何从Ro1e模式转换至Class类图，最终得到Class详细设计图，以帮助软件开发者有效利用软件模式，顺利实现从分析过程至设计过程的过渡。     

Demonstrating the Cognitive Plausibility of Interactive System Specifications

Much of the behaviour of an interactive system is determined by its user population. This paper describes how assumptions about the user can be brought into system models in order to reason about their behaviour. We describe a system model containing reasonable assumptions about the user as being ‘cognitively plausible’. Before asserting the plausibility of a model however we must first be able to make the assumptions made in that model inspectable. There is a tension between the inspectability of user assumptions and the tractability of models; inspectable models tend to not be very tractable and vice versa. We describe how we can get round this tension, by deriving tractable models from explicit user assumptions. The resulting models may not of themselves be very inspectable to human-factors workers, but the process by which they are derived is inspectable. Hence we claim that we can have both tractability and inspectability. We exemplify our claims using a simple cognitive model and ‘Meeting Maker’, an interactive electronic diary system. Received March 2000 / Accepted in revised form July 2000     

Efficient Discovery of Unusual Patterns in Time Series

The problem of finding a specified pattern in a time series database (i.e., query by content) has received much attention and is now a relatively mature field. In contrast, the important problem of enumerating all surprising or interesting patterns has received far less attention. This problem requires a meaningful definition of “surprise”, and an efficient search technique. All previous attempts at finding surprising patterns in time series use a very limited notion of surprise, and/or do not scale to massive datasets. To overcome these limitations we propose a novel technique that defines a pattern surprising if the frequency of its occurrence differs substantially from that expected by chance, given some previously seen data. This notion has the advantage of not requiring the user to explicitly define what is a surprising pattern, which may be hard, or perhaps impossible, to elicit from a domain expert. Instead, the user gives the algorithm a collection of previously observed “normal” data. Our algorithm uses a suffix tree to efficiently encode the frequency of all observed patterns and allows a Markov model to predict the expected frequency of previously unobserved patterns. Once the suffix tree has been constructed, a measure of surprise for all the patterns in a new database can be determined in time and space linear in the size of the database. We demonstrate the utility of our approach with an extensive experimental evaluation.     

Cooking personas: Goal-directed design requirements in the kitchen

Technology to assist people in the kitchen has become a major research topic as technology becomes more ubiquitous in the home. Research is being carried out in numerous areas to assist with cooking, from solving difficulties in the kitchen to more recently enhancing already good experiences related to cooking. To design solutions that are not only usable, but useful in all related aspects of cooking, we must get a good understanding of the needs of the user. It is important that real needs are identified, so that products or systems designed are adopted and are sustainable. There are various methods that researchers and designers use to gain user insights and there is much debate on different approaches and their effectiveness. Whilst there have been a number of ethnographic style studies in people's homes, there has been little in the way of understanding user goals in the kitchen which could lead to more effective design solutions. In this paper, we present goal-directed research of cooking needs in Singapore. We produce three primary design personas and three secondary personas, describing their goals and needs and where they can be helped through technology. An online survey was carried out to validate our personas, comparing our qualitative and quantitative findings. We provide a general holistic overview of kitchen requirements for these personas, whether in helping correct problems or enhancing positive experiences and how these needs can be connected. The user requirements provided can help guide researchers and help designers produce more meaningful, complete and acceptable technology solutions in the kitchen.     

Shifting knowledge from analysis to design: requirements for contextual user interface development

There is consensus among the members of the HCI community as well as among software developers that work tasks and user characteristics (i.e. context) should play a leading role in the course of system development. There seems to be less consensus on how the information about users and work tasks should be acquired and subsequently moved to the design process of a development project. Due to the use of unifying methods and concepts--such as object-orientation-- that might be used for analysis, design and implementation, this transition seems to be facilitated. However, few inputs have been provided to guide developers on how to shift knowledge from analysis to design when task- and user knowledge are considered to be inherent parts of the development knowledge. This paper details the interface between analysis and design, reviews existing concepts to bridge the gap between the two phases of development, and enriches these findings with some empirical results from a survey with respect to practical experiences. From these findings, requirements to successfully shift knowledge in the early phases of software development have been derived.     

Exploring the feasibility of web form adaptation to users’ cultural dimension scores

With many daily tasks now performed on the Internet, productivity and efficiency in working with web pages have become transversal necessities for all users. Many of these tasks involve the inputting of user information, obligating the user to interact with a webform. Research has demonstrated that productivity depends largely on users’ personal characteristics, implying that it will vary from user to user. The webform development process must therefore, include modeling of its intended users to ensure the interface design is appropriate. Taking all potential users into account is difficult, however, primarily because their identity is unknown, and some may be effectively excluded by the final design. Such discrimination can be avoided by incorporating rules that allow webforms to adapt automatically to the individual user’s characteristics, the principal one being the person’s culture. In this paper we report two studies that validate this option. We begin by determining the relationships between a user’s cultural dimension scores and their behavior when faced with a webform. We then validate the notion that rules based on these relationships can be established for the automatic adaptation of a webform in order to reduce the time taken to complete it. We conclude that the automatic webform adaptation to the cultural dimensions of users improves their performance.     

User-Sensitive Inclusive Design

Although “User-Centred”, “Participatory”, and other similar design approaches have proved to be very valuable for mainstream design, their principles are more difficult to apply successfully when the user group contains, or is composed of, older and/or disabled users. In the field of design for older and disabled people, the “Universal Design”, “Inclusive Design” and “Design for All” movements have encouraged designers to extend their design briefs to include older and disabled people. The downside of these approaches is that they can tend to encourage designers to follow a traditional design path to produce a prototype design, and only then investigate how to modify their interfaces and systems to cope with older and/or disabled users. This can lead to an inefficient design process and sometimes an inappropriate design, which may be “accessible” to people with disabilities, but in practice unusable. This paper reviews the concept that the authors have called “User-Sensitive Inclusive Design”, which suggests a different approach to designing for marginalised groups of people. Rather than suggesting that designers rely on standards and guidelines, it is suggested that designers need to develop a real empathy with their user groups. A number of ways to achieve this are recommended, including the use of ethnography and techniques derived from professional theatre both for requirements gathering and for improving designers’ empathy for marginalised groups of users, such as older and disabled people.     

Networks of Names: Visual Exploration and Semi‐Automatic Tagging of Social Networks from Newspaper Articles

Understanding relationships between people and organizations by reading newspaper articles is difficult to manage for humans due to the large amount of data. To address this problem, we present and evaluate a new visual analytics system, which offers interactive exploration and tagging of social networks extracted from newspapers. For the visual exploration of the network, we extract “interesting” neighbourhoods of nodes, using a new degree of interest (DOI) measure based on edges instead of nodes. It improves the seminal definition of DOI, which we find to produce the same “globally interesting” neighbourhoods in our use case, regardless of the query. Our approach allows answering different user queries appropriately, avoiding uniform search results. We propose a user‐driven pattern‐based classifier for discovery and tagging of non‐taxonomic semantic relations. Our approach does not require any a‐priori user knowledge, such as expertise in syntax or pattern creation. An evaluation shows that our classifier is capable of identifying known lexico‐syntactic patterns as well as various domain‐specific patters. Our classifier yields good results already with a small amount of training, and continuously improves through user feedback. We conduct a user study to evaluate whether our visual interactive system has an impact on how users tag relationships, as compared to traditional text‐based interfaces. Study results suggest that users of the visual system tend to tag more concisely, avoiding too abstract or overly specific relationship labels.     

一种基于原语的界面设计模式建模方法

为了提高用户界面开发的效率,通过对界面区域的构成分析,提出了基于原语的界面设计模式,并从数据、交互和展示三个角度定义了界面设计模式原语,对界面设计模式进行规范化描述。以此为基础,进一步提出了一种基于原语的界面设计模式建模方法。本方法通过对模式原语的定制对界面展示单元的静态信息、交互信息和展示信息进行采集,从而完成对界面设计模式的建模,并有效指导代码的自动生成。     

Materials with computational experience and style

This paper discusses the design of materials that utilize embedded computational techniques to demonstrate the capacity to learn, adapt and develop responsive behaviors that are shaped over time. The focus is on materials that develop time-based relationships based on a level of ‘experience’ they accumulate from long-term interaction with their users and environment. Materials with ‘computational experience’ are demonstrated with two designs: an interactive rocking chair that utilizes its material properties and computational abilities to manage its own energy production and consumption while providing physical and mental exercises to its user; and an LED-based, reconfigurable display that adjusts its content based on its interaction with its user while monitoring its internal conditions, environmental factors and usage. These examples are used to discuss the design of computational ‘styles’ for materials that would not only allow them to express signature characteristics embedded in their physical properties and computational behavior but also function as features that would evolve in response to interaction patterns and accumulated experiences. Throughout the paper, behavior-driven material practices are presented and their potential to influence the look, feel and functionalities of products and spaces are discussed.     

Design pattern evolutions in QVT

One of the main goals of design patterns is to design for change. Many design patterns leave some room for future changes and evolutions. The application of design patterns leads to adaptable software since the design pattern instances could be changed with minimal impact on other parts of the system. Such changes, called the evolution of a design pattern instance in this paper, typically involve the addition or removal of a group of model elements, such as classes, attributes, operations, and relationships. However, the possible evolutions of each design pattern are often not explicitly documented. Missing a part of the evolution process may result in inconsistent evolutions. In this paper, we present our approach to assist the evolution processes of design patterns by model transformation technology. We provide a formal foundation for our approach by defining the predicates that can be used to describe the properties of each design pattern, software system design, and design pattern evolutions. We also provide tool support to automate the evolution processes based on the Query, View, and Transformation standard. A case study of a large open-source software system is conducted to illustrate and evaluate our approach.