CHI 2009 – Day 1

It was an interesting, tiring, and rainy day here in Boston.  CHI09 (the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction) is being held in the Hynes convention center, which is far bigger than I had anticipated.  There certainly seem to be less people at this year’s conference, though I haven’t heard an official attendance number yet.  Anyway, I saw many interesting presentations today, so let’s dig on in.

Opening Plenary

Even Small Distance Matters: Social Ergonomics in Collocated and Remote Teams – Judith S. Olson, UC Irvine

Social ergonomics is something that all of us deal with daily, but rarely think about.  The most common example of this is ‘personal space.’  When having a conversation, a person will feel different levels of comfort depending on his relationship with the other person and the distance between them (among other factors).  For example, a stranger who is conversing very close to you will make you feel uncomfortable, but not if he is further away.

Research shows that when two people are sitting and chatting in the same room, a 90 degree angle is the most comfortable position for the participants.  Additionally, in conversations, the taller person typically has dominance.  Both of these also hold true for telepresence.  By placing the camera at eye-level and arranging the room so that there is a 90 degree angle between the participants, users will have a much more relaxed experience.

Another example which intrigued me was a study that put 6 coworkers in the same room, no cube walls, just space to get work done.  Evidently, these coworkers were extremely productive because productive ad hoc meetings popped up and everyone knew what everyone else was working on, in real time.

Presentations

Correlating Low Level Image Statistics with Users’ Rapid Aesthetic and Affective Judgement of Web Pages – Siemens

One day, computers will churn out designs and music that humans will find aesthetically pleasing.  This work from Siemens takes us one step closer.  They are developing an algorithm that can examine the screen pixels and determine if the page is aesthetically pleasing.  A study was presented which showed that they are getting quite close to perfecting this technology.  I, for one, welcome our new algorithmic designers (I kid, I kid).

What Do You See When You’re Surfing?  Using Eye Tracking to Predict Salient Regions of Web Pages - DFKI (Germany) & Microsoft

This study presented an interesting eye tracking method to predict salient areas of a Web site.  Three eye tracking measures were used to determine these areas: view frequency, time to first fixation, and fixation impact.   Fixation impact is different from fixation duration, which is typically used in eye tracking studies.  Eye trackers typically track a single point of fixation and don’t account for the fact that we process items in the periphery.  The authors increased the size of the fixation area by 2 degrees to account for the rest of the fovea (the part of the retina with the clearest vision).  The fixation impact is the area of a page element that is covered by this increased fixation area.  They then examined the Document Object Model (DOM) of the page and assigned different areas of interest (AOIs) scores based on the calculated fixation impact.   In turn, they can use this information to essentially predict if code will produce salient areas of a Web page.

Some additional learnings from this presentation:

• Size, position, and level in the DOM tree are the most expressive features
• Users had low expectations for the right side of the page (across different types of Web pages)
• The results align with the notion of a ‘Golden Triangle’ for both information foraging and page recognition tasks
• Women look at each each region of a Web page longer
• Younger participants look at each region of a Web page shorter

Predicting Tie Strength with Social Media – U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The authors constructed an algorithm that can determine how close-knit two people are on Facebook.  The algorithm is based on the number of connections the individuals have, the number of wall posts (reciprocated and non), messages, and so forth.  Why is this important?  Individuals are not the only entities on Facebook anymore and a company would love to have close tie with its customers.  For instance, have you seen the Skittles homepage lately?

What Can User Experience Learn From Food Design – Panel Session

While not the most utilitarian session, this was certainly an interesting one.  On the panel were the head Chefs of Rialto in Cambridge and Gargoyles in Somerville, an HCI practitioner, and an HCI academic.  Though I didn’t get to see the whole session (ducked out to see the Tie Strength session) the major takeaway was: design holistically – it’s more than the interface, it’s the entire (dining) experience.

Invited Talk: Jan Chipchase, Nokia

Jan spoke at length about his various experiences traveling around the world and watching users in their element.  I don’t have much to say here other than world wide ethnography seems like quite the adventure.

That’s it for now.  Time to rest up for the next four eventful days.