Echoing the words of science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke,former YouTube user experience director Margaret Gould Stewartadvised an audience of design researchers to think about creatingmagical experiences for their users. "Magic disrupts the notion of reality. It elevates good design intogreat design," Stewart said Monday, at the opening keynote of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Austin, Texas. She praised Internet services such as Pinterest,Instagram and YouTube for creating new ways for people to interactand tell their own stories, through successful user design.
More than 2,500 researchers have gathered at the conference to showoff their work in novel user interfaces, as well as to learn aboutwhat their peers are doing. Innovative ways of interacting withtechnology will be one of the major themes at the event, saidorganizers of the conference, which goes by the abbreviation CHI, aholdover from its days as the Computer Human Interface conference. "Not surprisingly this has been driven by the near ubiquity oftouch devices," said conference chairman Joe Konstan. "There's alot of research from the fundamental theory to practical uses ofthese devices." A project from Microsoft Research called Humantenna promises to show how body gestures can be interpreted without anyenvironment instrumentation.
A user wears a small backpack with asensor and when he, for example, raises both his arms, a computercan tell. Humantenna uses electromagnetic noise coming from powerlines and appliances. The body acts as an antenna to receive thenoise. Technical program chair and Google research scientist Ed Chi saidthat a decade ago it was hard for people to imagine that we'd beusing touchscreen smartphones and tablets. Now those devices arecommonplace.
Konstan said that the many facets of social computing will also beexplored at the conference. The papers and presentations will "runthe gamut from ethnographic studies of how people use socialcomputing to social computing applications and technologies," hesaid. While some think social media weakens human-to-human interactions,CHI plans to explore ways to combat that. "The CHI conference is the place where we surface these issues,"Chi said. "We don't just build technologies and say we're done.
Infact, that's where we say this is only the beginning." Multiple projects plan to address the future of social media.Papers titled "Intimacy in Long-Distance Relationships over VideoChat" and "It's Complicated: How Romantic Partners Use Facebook"will address different aspects of social media. Hundreds of unique projects have been presented over the years atCHI. In 2009 a project called Nanotouch showed that backside touch could produce smaller devices becausedesigners wouldn't have to worry about fingers occluding thescreen. The concept of backside touch has made its way intomainstream devices like Sony's PlayStation Vita, though it isn'trelated to Nanotouch.
In 2010, Carnegie Mellon researcher Chris Harrison turned theentire body into a touch interface with Skinput , a project that used an array of microphones to listen to taps ondifferent parts of the body. Certain taps could be differentiatedfrom others and control certain actions. Harrison demonstrated theproject by playing a game of Tetris by just tapping on his arm andhand. Stewart was until last month the director of user experience atGoogle's YouTube and will soon be starting a new job as ( director of product design at Facebook ), but she offered a few tips from her time at the massivelysuccessful video-sharing service. Researchers in user design shouldthink like magicians she advised, quoting Clarke's maxim aboutadvanced technology being indistinguishable from magic.
She warned researchers not to get their users entangled in thetechnology. Instead, designers should practice a magician's"sleight of hand," she said. "The moment you get too fancy, or tooslick, you start to alienate someone in the creator community whofeels this isn't the right place for them and their story." Stewart praised Instagram for being "so much more compelling than aphone's built-in camera app," she said. "The technology isbasically the same, but the experience is the difference." Facebookrecently purchased Instagram for US$1 billion. Part of Instagram'ssuccess is due to the set a set of filters it offers that "empowerscreativity and make photos that are more interesting," she said.The service also provides a platform for a user community to sharetheir work, "so photos don't languish on your phone," she said.
User participation is another ingredient to success. She praisedPinterest for how it allows users to curate content, which is anincreasingly essential way of sharing information. "We're producingcontent at an alarming rate, she said, adding that searchalgorithms can't capture all the aspects of what users may findinteresting. "Algorithms don't have a good sense of humor.
Theydon't know what good taste is. Humor and good taste are individual.What I find you funny is not necessarily what you find funny," shesaid. Ease of use is another vital quality. YouTube removed the barriersto sharing videos online, she said, namely by making it easy foranyone to upload, search for and watch videos. YouTube shows 4billion video a day.
Users upload 60 hours of video every minute,she said. Such ease of use can actually disrupt existingbusinesses, such as the television industry, in YouTube's case."Disruption is a critical ingredient in a massively successfulplatform," Stewart said. Nick Barber covers general technology news in both text and videofor IDG News Service. E-mail him at Nick_Barber@idg.com and follow him on Twitter at @nickjb . I am an expert from Resin, usually analyzes all kind of industries situation, such as school supply kits , tn250 toner cartridge.
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