This paper, published in the CHI'12 proceedings, describes those interactions in which induced discomfort has long-term benefits for users. After identifying types of discomfort, the authors describe how discomfort can be inserted into interactive experiences; finally, an ethical framework is provided.
While reading the paper it came to my mind how we (consciously or unconsciously) often test flawed interfaces with users and may unintentionally create situations of discomfort. Even if the research is difficult to generalise directly to traditional user testing -- the paper is mainly focused on interactive art exhibitions -- it is still good food for thought.
Uncomfortable InteractionsWe argue for deliberately and systematically creating uncomfortable interactions as part of powerful cultural experiences. We identify the potential benefits of uncomfortable interactions under the general headings of entertainment, enlightenment and sociality. We then review artworks and performances that have employed discomfort, including two complementary examples from the worlds of entertainment and performance. From this, we articulate a suite of tactics for designing four primary forms of discomfort referred to as visceral, cultural, control and intimate. We discuss how moments of discomfort need to be embedded into an overall experience which requires a further consideration of the dramatic acts of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement. Finally, we discuss an ethical framework for uncomfortable interactions which leads us to revisit key issues of consent, withdrawal, privacy and risk.
Full paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208347
Full proceedings: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Labels: ethics, user tests, comfort
Implied Dynamics in Information Visualization
Information visualisation may be a left field topic to most accessibility researchers, however this month I found the proceedings of a conference called the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces which was held in Roma, Italy. The proceedings is full of interesting papers but one particularly has grabbed my attention called Implied dynamics in information visualization. This paper shows that even minor properties of visualisation such as borders, background areas, and the connectedness of parts, may affect how people perceive semantic aspects of data by suggesting different potential dynamics between data points.
Implied dynamics in information visualization
Information visualization is a powerful method for understanding and working with data. However, we still have an incomplete understanding of how people use visualization to think about information. We propose that people use visualization to support comprehension and reasoning by viewing abstract visual representations as physical scenes with a set of implied dynamics between objects. Inferences based on these implied dynamics are metaphorically extended to form inferences about the represented information. This view predicts that even seemingly meaningless properties of a visualization, including such minor design elements as borders, background areas, and the connectedness of parts, may affect how people perceive semantic aspects of data by suggesting different potential dynamics between data points. We present a study that supports this claim and discuss the design implications of this theory of information visualization.
Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1842993.1843031
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, Roma, Italy, 2010.
What Are the Most Eye-Catching and Ear-Catching Features in the Video?: Implications for Video Summarization
Video summarisation is not a left field topic for accessibility research, but I thought the following paper could still be an interest to people working on video accessibility research - What are the most eye-catching and ear-catching features in the video?: implications for video summarization which was published at the 19th international conference on World wide web.
Video summarization is a mechanism for generating short summaries of the video to help people quickly make sense of the content of the video before downloading or seeking more detailed information. To produce reliable automatic video summarization algorithms, it is essential to first understand how human beings create video summaries with manual efforts. This paper focuses on a corpus of instructional documentary video, and seeks to improve automatic video summaries by understanding what features in the video catch the eyes and ears of human assessors, and using these findings to inform automatic summarization algorithms. The paper contributes a thorough and valuable methodology for performing automatic video summarization, and the methodology can be extended to inform summarization of other video corpuses.
Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1772690.1772783
Full Proceedings: 19th international conference on World wide web, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, 2010.
Monitoring Smartphones for Anomaly Detection
I am a member of the ACM Member Technical Interest Service and I receive a monthly email from this service. In the June edition, they were suggesting a paper which was among the top three downloaded articles - "Monitoring smartphones for anomaly detection". It is an interesting paper that shows how to monitor a smartphone running Symbian OS in order to extract features that describe the state of the device and can be used for anomaly detection. I think this paper is a left-field paper for most of the SIGACCESS members but I wonder if such applications can be reused/repurposed for better customisation for supporting better accessibility.
Monitoring smartphones for anomaly detectionIn this paper we demonstrate how to monitor a smartphone running Symbian OS in order to extract features that describe the state of the device and can be used for anomaly detection. These features are sent to a remote server, because running a complex intrusion detection system (IDS) on this kind of mobile device still is not feasible, due to capability and hardware limitations. We give examples on how to compute some of the features and introduce the top ten applications used by mobile phone users basing on a study in 2005. The usage of these applications is recorded and visualized and for a first comparison, data results of the monitoring of a simple malware are given.
Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1165387.30864
Full Proceedings: MOBILWARE '08: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on MOBILe Wireless MiddleWARE, Operating Systems, and Applications, Austria, 2008.