Ad blockers make you feel safe, but aren't really working. 

Why Johnny can't opt out: a usability evaluation of tools to limit online behavioral advertising

Pedro Leon, Blase Ur, Richard Shay, Yang Wang, Rebecca Balebako, Lorrie Cranor

We present results of a 45-participant laboratory study investigating the usability of nine tools to limit online behavioral advertising (OBA). We interviewed participants about OBA and recorded their behavior and attitudes as they configured and used a privacy tool, such as a browser plugin that blocks requests to specific URLs, a tool that sets browser cookies indicating a user's preference to opt out of OBA, or the privacy settings built into a web browser. We found serious usability flaws in all tools we tested. Participants found many tools difficult to configure, and tools' default settings were often minimally protective. Ineffective communication, confusing interfaces, and a lack of feedback led many participants to conclude that a tool was blocking OBA when they had not properly configured it to do so.

On saliency, affect and focused attention

Lori McCay-Peet, Mounia Lalmas, Vidhya Navalpakkam

We study how the visual catchiness (saliency) of relevant information impacts user engagement metrics such as focused attention and emotion (affect). Participants completed tasks in one of two conditions, where the task-relevant information either appeared salient or non-salient. Our analysis provides insights into relationships between saliency, focused attention, and affect. Participants reported more distraction in the non-salient condition, and non-salient information was slower to find than salient. Lack-of-saliency led to a negative impact on affect, while saliency maintained positive affect, suggesting its helpfulness. Participants reported that it was easier to focus in the salient condition, although there was no significant improvement in the focused attention scale rating.

Too close for comfort: a study of the effectiveness and acceptability of rich-media personalized advertising

Miguel Malheiros, Charlene Jennett, Snehalee Patel, Sacha Brostoff, Martina Angela Sasse

Online display advertising is predicted to make $29.53 billion this year. Advertisers believe targeted and personalized ads to be more effective, but many users are concerned about their privacy. We conducted a study where 30 participants completed a simulated holiday booking task; each page showing ads with different degrees of personalization. Participants fixated twice as long when ads contained their photo. Participants reported being more likely to notice ads with their photo, holiday destination, and name, but also increasing levels of discomfort with increasing personalization. We conclude that greater personalization in ad content may achieve higher levels of attention, but that the most personalized ads are also the least acceptable.

Cornell University's new campus has a mandate to kickstart innovative technology projects and companies in New York City. It has a substantial endowment and a long-term home on city-owned land on Roosevelt Island, won after a long courtship and fierce competition with other top schools. It has a short-term home in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, donated by Google just this week, for when its first students arrive this fall. Its founding dean, Dan Huttenlocher, is assembling the faculty who will teach those students. All it needs is someone who can help convert those rich resources into practical results.

On Wednesday, CornellNYC Tech named its Founding Entreprenurial Officer, ex-Twitter CTO Greg Pass. Pass knows a few things about...

This need for generality is a big part of why we have created our mobiles courses, and the mission of our lab and UX effort. 

Video: Don Norman speaks out about engineering design education

This is a short, 3 minute video, that captures the dilemma of modern education. Engineering education has become narrower and deeper. We teach and train specialties and specialists. Practical applications require tying together the knowledge of the many specialties. They require generalists, people who have broad, integrated understanding of the world. We need an educational system that rewards those who are broad and knowledgable as well as those who are deep and narrow, even if the broad knowledge comes at the expense of shallow depth. Being narrow is just as big a liability as being shallow. We need both kinds of people. Alas, the university hires, teaches, and trains only the deep and narrow.

Finally a viz paper with interaction front and center. 

Semantic interaction for visual text analytics

Alex Endert, Patrick Fiaux, Chris North

Visual analytics emphasizes sensemaking of large, complex datasets through interactively exploring visualizations generated by statistical models. For example, dimensionality reduction methods use various similarity metrics to visualize textual document collections in a spatial metaphor, where similarities between documents are approximately represented through their relative spatial distances to each other in a 2D layout. This metaphor is designed to mimic analysts' mental models of the document collection and support their analytic processes, such as clustering similar documents together. However, in current methods, users must interact with such visualizations using controls external to the visual metaphor, such as sliders, menus, or text fields, to directly control underlying model parameters that they do not understand and that do not relate to their analytic process occurring within the visual metaphor.

Interpretation and trust: designing model-driven visualizations for text analysis

Jason Chuang, Daniel Ramage, Christopher Manning, Jeffrey Heer

Statistical topic models can help analysts discover patterns in large text corpora by identifying recurring sets of words and enabling exploration by topical concepts. However, understanding and validating the output of these models can itself be a challenging analysis task. In this paper, we offer two design considerations - interpretation and trust - for designing visualizations based on data-driven models. Interpretation refers to the facility with which an analyst makes inferences about the data through the lens of a model abstraction. Trust refers to the actual and perceived accuracy of an analyst's inferences. These considerations derive from our experiences developing the Stanford Dissertation Browser, a tool for exploring over 9,000 Ph.D.

A part of experience we tend to ignore. 

Technology heirlooms?: considerations for passing down and inheriting digital materials

William Odom, Richard Banks, David Kirk, Richard Harper, Siân Lindley, Abigail Sellen

Material artifacts are passed down as a way of sustaining relationships and family history. However, new issues are emerging as families are increasingly left with the digital remains of their loved ones. We designed three devices to investigate how digital materials might be passed down, lived with and inherited in the future. We conducted in-home interviews with 8 families using the devices to provoke discussion about how technology might support (or complicate) their existing practices. Sessions revealed families desired to treat their archives in ways not fully supported by technology as well as potential tensions that could emerge.

This paper describes a preliminary performance and power consumption characterization study on 3D mobile games. We choose Quake3 and XRace as the game benchmarks and study them on TI OMAP3430, Qualcomm Snapdragon S2, and NVIDIA Tegra 2 (three mainstream mobile System-on-Chip architectures) by selectively disabling different graphics pipeline stages in source code level. Our characterization results show that the geometry stage is the leading bottleneck and the game logic (application) takes a significant portion of power consumption.

Abstract

I wonder if these folks apply these ideas to mobiles?

Polyzoom: multiscale and multifocus exploration in 2d visual spaces

Waqas Javed, Sohaib Ghani, Niklas Elmqvist

The most common techniques for navigating in multiscale visual spaces are pan, zoom, and bird's eye views. However, these techniques are often tedious and cumbersome to use, especially when objects of interest are located far apart. We present the PolyZoom technique where users progressively build hierarchies of focus regions, stacked on each other such that each subsequent level shows a higher magnification. Correlation graphics show the relation between parent and child viewports in the hierarchy. To validate the new technique, we compare it to standard navigation techniques in two user studies, one on multiscale visual search and the other on multifocus interaction.

These sound kinda like icon arrays on mobiles, exploiting spatial memory. 

Improving command selection with CommandMaps

Joey Scarr, Andy Cockburn, Carl Gutwin, Andrea Bunt

Designers of GUI applications typically arrange commands in hierarchical structures, such as menus, due to screen space limitations. However, hierarchical organisations are known to slow down expert users. This paper proposes the use of spatial memory in combination with hierarchy flattening as a means of improving GUI performance. We demonstrate these concepts through the design of a command selection interface, called CommandMaps, and analyse its theoretical performance characteristics. We then describe two studies evaluating CommandMaps against menus and Microsoft's Ribbon interface for both novice and experienced users.

Distributed sensemaking: improving sensemaking by leveraging the efforts of previous users

Kristie Fisher, Scott Counts, Aniket Kittur

We examine the possibility of distributed sensemaking: improving a user's sensemaking by leveraging previous users' work without those users directly collaborating or even knowing one another. We asked users to engage in sensemaking by organizing and annotating web search results into "knowledge maps," either with or without previous users' maps to work from. We also recorded gaze patterns as users examined others' knowledge maps. Our findings show the conditions under which distributed sensemaking can improve sensemaking quality; that a user's sensemaking process is readily apparent to a subsequent user via a knowledge map; and that the organization of content was more useful to subsequent users than the content itself, especially when those users had differing goals.

Wesley Willett, Jeffrey Heer, Maneesh Agrawala

Web-based social data analysis tools that rely on public discussion to produce hypotheses or explanations of the patterns and trends in data, rarely yield high-quality results in practice. Crowdsourcing offers an alternative approach in which an analyst pays workers to generate such explanations. Yet, asking workers with varying skills, backgrounds and motivations to simply "Explain why a chart is interesting" can result in irrelevant, unclear or speculative explanations of variable quality. To address these problems, we contribute seven strategies for improving the quality and diversity of worker-generated explanations. Our experiments show that using (S1) feature-oriented prompts, providing (S2) good examples, and including (S3) reference gathering, (S4) chart reading, and (S5) annotation subtasks increases the quality of responses by 28% for US workers and 196% for non-US workers.

This is my latest project, which I will present tomorrow (May 9th) at the CHI 2012 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

I’ll have a longer post up about this project after I return from the conference, but for now enjoy the video. I also link to the PDF of our short paper below which has a nice discussion of the motivation and design rationale for this work.

Above all else, I hope this work makes clear that there is still tons of room for innovation in how we interact with the e-readers and tablet computers of the future– as well as in terms of how we consume and manipulate content to produce new creative works.

Hinckley, K., Bi, X., Pahud, M., Buxton, B., Informal Information Gathering Techniques for Active Reading. 4pp Note. In Proc. CHI 2012  Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Austin, TX, May 5-10, 2012. [PDF] [video .WMV - not yet available]

[Watch Informal Information Gathering Techniques for Active Reading on YouTube]

Online supermarket Peapod is bringing its foodstuffs to Chicago's "L" transit system, with a new ad campaign that allows commuters to do their grocery shopping from directly within the city's train stations. Last week, the company plastered Chicago's State and Lake Station Tunnel with a "virtual grocery store" ad — posters of grocery shelves stocked with popular household items and food products. People travelling through the station can scan an accompanying QR code to download the free PeapodMobile app, which will allow them to scan barcodes listed on the products displayed in the ad. With the app, iPhone and Android users can place orders, manage their shopping lists, and schedule deliveries as they wait for the next train.

This...

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson was a recent MIT graduate hired to help build the earliest components of Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the precursor to the internet. Tinkering on his own, he decided to build a networked messaging program. Most computers at the time allowed users to message one another, but as so few computers were networked, there was little reason to send messages across computers. Tomlinson hacked together a solution, using the now-ubiquitous @ symbol to indicate networked email. Four decades later, email seems less an invention than an innate aspect of our digital environment. On the occasion of his induction into the Internet Hall of Fame, Tomlinson talked to us about the birth of email, the future of...

Jonas Schild, Joseph LaViola, Maic Masuch

Recent advances in digital game technology are making stereoscopic games more popular. Stereoscopic 3D graphics promise a better gaming experience but this potential has not yet been proven empirically. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study that evaluates player experience of three stereoscopic games in comparison with their monoscopic counterparts. We examined 60 participants, each playing one of the three games, using three self-reporting questionnaires and one psychophysiological instrument.

http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/index/~3/KPeWvf_Sl2Q/next-generat...

Projectors are pervasive as infrastructure devices for large displays but are now also becoming available in small form factors that afford mobile personal use. This article surveys the interaction space of "projectors on the move" and reviews input and output concepts, underlying sensing challenges, and emerging applications.      

The term Projection-Based Augmented Reality denotes the use of projection technology to augment and enhance three-dimensional objects and spaces in the real world by projecting images onto their visible surfaces. Disney theme park designers use projection-based AR to create beautiful, dynamic, and interactive spaces that immerse guests in magical worlds. We present several examples of projection-based AR techniques used in Disney parks. We also describe the architecture and components of a Projector-Camera toolbox being developed by Walt Disney Imagineering and Disney Research Zürich to support this work. We outline some of the challenges and research opportunities presented by integrating projection-based AR techniques into a theme park environment.

Computers and digital displays replace posters and billboards. Such display systems are essentially distributed computing systems that enable a new form of communication in public space. Advertising is the driving factor for this transition and at the same time advertising is transformed through this development. Engaging and motivating the users as well as measuring their interaction is a major challenge for the advertisers. For society it is a unique chance to establish a new communication media in which advertising is present, but does not dominate it.

David J. Kasik takes a look at the latest advances in graphics technology.      

Demand is growing in engineering, business, science, research, and industry for students with visual analytics expertise. However, teaching VA is challenging owing to the multidisciplinary nature of the topic, students' diverse backgrounds, and the corresponding requirements for instructors. This article reports best practices from a VA graduate course at Purdue University, where instructors leveraged these challenges to their advantage instead of trying to mitigate them.