Team Ether

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Team Ether

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Thesis Statement

Thesis

Consumer products that embrace the principles of ubiquitous computing are more appealing to users.

Revised Thesis

Users are forcing a paradigm shift that demands consumer products to embrace the principles of ubiquitous computing.

Keywords

  • Human-Computer Interacton (HCI)
  • Human-Centred Computing
  • Pervasive Computing
  • Ambient Intelligence
  • Physical Computing
  • Internet of Things
  • Haptic Computing
  • Things that Think
  • Context-Awareness
  • Task Based Design
  • Activity Based Design
  • Background Computing
  • Technology Integration
  • Object Hyperlinking

Bibliography

Research Notes

Potential Topics

Ubiquitous computing

  • Computers are getting faster, smaller, more effecient, and cheaper which will result in computers in everything (ubiquitous). This is already happening, and as it grows computers will become invisible, embedded in everything, and connected together. They will also become intellegent to changes in their surroundings (ambient intellegence).
  • The key to the success in ubiquitous computing will be the human factors. The will not be invisble unless human-computer interactions become more natural so that people are not aware that they are using a computer at all.
  • Example: Amongst mobile phones, digital music players, and many other computers that we don't think of as computers, tablets have become popular. Tablets have been around a long time, the idea has been around for decades, and there have been many effective tablets in this decade. However it didn't gain popularity until people started looking at them in a new way (a new class of device) different from newbooks or laptops. That is what the iPad and the Apple iOS accomplished. It was a shift in perception accomplished through a new user interface that was much more natural to users that had previously existed.
  • Some Computer Science Issues In Ubiquitous Computing
  • Ubiquitous Computing: Are We There Yet?
  • Connecting the Physical World with Pervasive Networks
  • The Human Experience
    • http://lcweb.senecac.on.ca:2289/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=993144
    • "Machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs will make using a computer as refreshing as a walk in the woods.”
    • "Invisibility of computing, from the human perspective, can start when we can determine an individual’s identity, location, effect, or activity through his or her mere presence and natural interactions in an environment."
    • "It is not the value of any single service that will make computing a disappearing technology. Rather, it is the combination of a large range of services, all of which are available when and as needed, and all of which work as desired without extraordinary human intervention. A major challenge for applications research is discovering an evolutionary path toward this idyllic interactive experience."
    • "The brief history of ubicomp demonstrates three emergent features that appear across many applications. First, we must be able to use implicitly sensed context from the physical and electronic environment to determine a given service’s correct behavior. Context-aware computing demonstrates promise for making our interactions with services more seamless and less distracting from our everyday activities. Applications can work well when properly informed about the context of their use. Second, we must provision automated services to easily capture and store memories of live experiences and serve them up for later use. Finally, we need continuously available services. As we move toward the infusion of ubicomp into our everyday lives, the services provided will need to become constantly available partners with the human users, always interrupted and easily resumed."
    • "The focus on activities as opposed to tasks is a crucial departure from traditional HCI design."
      • "They rarely have a clear beginning or end, so the design cannot assume a common starting point or closure and thus requires greater flexibility and simplicity."
      • "Interruption is expected as users switch attention between competing concerns."
      • "Multiple activities operate concurrently and might need to be loosely coordinated."
      • "Time is an important discriminator in characterizing the ongoing relationship between people and computers."
      • "Associative models of information are needed, because information is reused from multiple perspectives."

Thesis (roughly):

  • Ubiquitous computing is changing the way human-computer interfaces are designed. In order to be invisible to users, computers must interact with users naturally.

Outline:

  • Intro - What is ubiquitous computing, and thesis.
  • Background - Why is it important, where did it come from, where is it going.
  • Body - Key aspect of ubiquitous computing interaction/interface design. traditional design principles vs ubicomp design principles
  • Examples - tablets, smartphones, boards - success stories of computer interacting with user naturally,and blending into the background.
  • Conclusion

Notes:

  • Paradigm Shift - see course notes, and watch a video

Banner blindness is a phenomenon in web usability where visitors to a website consciously or subconsciously ignore banner-like information, which can also be called ad blindness.

  • An eye-tracking study conducted by the Nielsen/Norman Group finds Internet users avoid viewing banner ads. Text advertising is read more often than display ads, according to the research.
  • There's still hope for online ads. Pernice Coyne said graphical ads with text and contrasting colors, like white text on red, is less likely to be disregarded. "They're looking at them if they're text," she said. "I hate to sound boring, but [it is best] if you can make sure your ad is something simple, text or a recognized logo, and it needs to be relevant to the page."
  • The researchers also found that people read Web pages in an F-pattern, narrowing their focus as they scroll down a page of content. Pernice Coyne said readers fixate or focus on the content at the top of a page, read a little bit further down, then give up and go back to the beginning of the same or subsequent page.
  • Images that appear in the middle of the page, a spot for advertisements, are considered "obstacles" and annoying.

[1]

  • The industry is taking different approaches to the problem. Many are starting to have Rich Internet Application advertisements (RIA) – with ads that sometimes takeover the entire screen without the users consent – classic interruption marketing. I haven’t really looked at the stats as to the efficacy of these campaigns but it’s a clear response to banner blindness.

[2]


Solutions

  • placed it right at the beginning of a bulleted list, a natural breaking point.
  • put the banner ad by natural exit points – the end, after the first paragraph, at the beginning of a break in format, or by the most boring parts of the article.
  • Size color shape all play a part in people noticing your ads

webpage marketing strategy


Research Essay Outline

Thesis: Webpages and web ads suffer from a phenomenon known as banner blindness

Outline:

  • Intro - on the thesis, and on what blinder blindness is
  • Background info - how humans read web pages, the studies that are done on users reading webpages
  • Banner Blindness Problem Identified - tests and studies that have been done, and how this issue was discovered
  • Solutions - the solutions for web ads, and possible ad placement to over come this problem
  • Conclusion


Reference

Banner Blindness research with some tests

Thesis Presentation Slide Layout

Slide 1: Intro - Team members, and team name.

Slide 2: Banner Blindness

  • what it is
  • F shape reading habits of users

Slide 3: ubicomp 1

  • Moore's Law
  • Computers are everywhere
  • Ubiquitous computing is a human-computer interaction model
  • "Invisibility of computing, from the human perspective"

Slide 4: ubicomp 2

  • Embeded
  • Context aware
  • Personalized
  • Adaptive
  • Anticipatory

Slide 5: Thesis

  • Ubiquitous computing is changing the way human-computer interfaces are designed. In order to be invisible to users, computers must interact with users naturally.
  • "Machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs"

Slide 6: Example

  • iPad
    • "Interface considered a milestone in the history of computers that defined the tablet as a new class of device"
  • Smart Refrigerator

Essay Outline

BTH – Ubiquitous Computing

IMPORTANT NOTES:

  • Double space
  • 2 Spaces after period

SKELETON

Preface

  • Title
  • Abstract
  • Keywords

Intro

  • Context
    • What is ubicomp
    • embedded
  • Purpose
    • Why is it important to designers
  • Interpretations of the idea of ubiquitous computing
    • ubicomp, ambient intelligence, pervasive computing
  • thesis
    • Users are forcing a paradigm shift that demands consumer products to embrace the principles of ubiquitous computing.

Body

  • One paragraph per point, 6 points, ~250 words
  • POINTS
    • People prefer computers that conform to then rather that conforming to computers (natural interacting) [Sharon]
    • People like computers that are implicitly context aware (identity, location, activity, etc…), adaptive, and predictive (example setting phone to French explicitly vs. speaking in French and automatically switching to French (text and all)) [Kyle]
    • Users want services to be personalized ( this is automatically done, doesn’t need to be manually set) [Ken]
    • People was products that do many things with little input from them (using the information from the other services; services interact; data shared) Multiple activities concurrently and coordinated. [Kyle]
    • Users want constantly available services that can be easily interrupted and resumed in any location. [Ken]
    • Tablets and ipad example (stress natural interaction of screen is what made it successful) [Sharon]

Conclusions

  • Thesis (reword)
    • Users are forcing a paradigm shift that demands consumer products to embrace the principles of ubiquitous computing.
  • summary of points
  • recommendations, ideas
  • general

Essay Draft

Context Awareness

Users do not like to feed their devices and application information. Ubiquitous devices should determine as much information about the user as possible in order to adapt to and predict what a user wants. To do this requires contextual awareness. Context includes such information as the user’s identity, location, and activities. By identity we mean who the user is and what are their preferences. By location we mean where the user is in the world or in a room, where have they been. And what is around them. And by activities we mean what is the user doing and what have they done. In true ubiquitous computing, this activity awareness extends not just to what the user is doing with the device or application, but what is the user doing in the world. All this information should be determined implicitly, without direct input from the user. It is that explicit input from users that should be avoided in order to making the computer processes invisible to the user, and thereby makes the user experience feel more natural. A good example of context awareness is a device that changes the device language to French automatically when a user speaks French instead of having the user manually change the language to French. While that may take more sophisticated speech recognition systems than we have available today, the amount of contextual awareness in devices is increasing. With the addition of GPS and online access in smartphones and tablets in the last few years, services now have access to a significantly greater amount of locational context information.

Personalization

All users like to feel special, and individualized. In congruence with this individuality users like to customize their computing experience. They like services that remember who they are, and their preferences. In addition to services having to remember user identities and their preferences, services also have to be adaptive. This adaptability means user preferences do not have to be set or pre-programmed by the user. Instead, the services will set the preference and personalize the user experience based upon previous user inputs and usage patterns. Example of this technology is the digital video recorder TIVo. TIVo records TV shows according to preset interests of the user, the more advanced version of TIVo records TV shows based on what the user have been watching in the past. So in essence if a user watches a lot science fiction shows, TIVo will prerecord shows of that nature without the user telling it to. And if the user preference changes, the service should be smart enough to change the settings without additional commands. This personalization and adaptation technologies are the basis of ubiquitous computing. They are also the core for realizing context awareness in pervasive service provisioning. Users want to discover the most appropriate service to support their tasks, and the most appropriate service depends on user preferences and context therefore, ubiquitous computing is pushed to provide the personalization needed for an individual user.

Data Sharing

In the ubiquitous computing model there are often many computers running many services. Users will expect that interactions with any given device will be shared with any other device. Services must be able to share information and use other services on the same device and across other devices. In addition it is likely than many services are going to be running at any given time, both on a single device and across many. These services need to be able to interact in real-time. For example, if you are watching television and a news story is mentioned, the user should be able to read it in more detail in a news service on any other device they are using. All this should happen without the user needing to search for it the news story. This sort of seamless interaction between multiple services and devices will allow users to easily and naturally carry on with whatever activity they are doing without needing to work at the device to make it do what they want it to do. This will make the computers invisible to users by making users think of the computers as an entirely different class of device. From the example the user perceives a television and perhaps a phone and not two computers with different interfaces.


Service interruption and resumption


Ubiquitous computing aims to integrate itself into everyday life, and everyday life is not a single threaded linear event. In the daily lives of an average user, there are many interruptions, stoppages, and unexpected occurrences. Users also need to take breaks during their activities, or even want to put an activity on hold. Sometimes an activity can be put on hold for long durations or permanently. Regardless of the durations or the frequency of interruptions to an activity, the ability to resume an activity after an interruption must exist. Users also expect the service to resume the activity with all previous progresses intact. What this means is that when a service pauses an activity or process it must save all progress done on the activity and any settings that might be created for the activity. When the activity resumes all the saved data must be readily available, and the activity should resume as if no interruption had occurred. Furthermore, when an activity had been paused for a long duration, the user might forget previous progress and the service should be aware of the passage of time, and reacquaint the user with the activity and its progress. In addition, users also require continuously available services, as today’s paradigm move toward the infusion of ubiquitous computing into our everyday lives, the services provided will need to become constantly available, always interrupted and easily resumed. The manner of the service resumption is also paramount in the successful integration of ubiquitous computing. The service must be able to start in one location, paused, resumed at a completely different location with a different interface and a different computer. Only when all of those capabilities are meet, then true integration into ubiquitous computing will be possible, and accepted by the users.

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