Andrew Faulring

Using thumbnails to search the Web

We introduce a technique for creating novel, textually-enhanced thumbnails of Web pages. These thumbnails combine the advantages of image thumbnails and text summaries to provide consistent performance on a variety of tasks. We conducted a study in which participants used three different types of summaries (enhanced thumbnails, plain thumbnails, and text summaries) to search Web pages to find several different types of information. Participants took an average of 67, 86, and 95 seconds to find the answer with enhanced thumbnails, plain thumbnails, and text summaries, respectively. We found a strong effect of question category. For some questions, text outperformed plain thumbnails, while for other questions, plain thumbnails outperformed text. Enhanced thumbnails (which combine the features of text summaries and plain thumbnails) were more consistent than either text summaries or plain thumbnails, having for all categories the best performance or performance that was statistically indistinguishable from the best.

Citrine: providing intelligent copy-and-paste

We present Citrine, a system that extends the widespread copy-and-paste interaction technique with intelligent transformations, making it useful in more situations. Citrine uses text parsing to find the structure in copied text and allows users to paste the structured information, which might have many pieces, in a single paste operation. For example, using Citrine, a user can copy the text of a meeting request and add it to the Outlook calendar with a single paste. In applications such as Excel, users can teach Citrine by example how to copy and paste data by showing it which fields go into which columns, and can use this to copy or paste many items at a time in a user-defined manner. Citrine can be used with a wide variety of applications and types of data and can be easily extended to work with more. It currently includes parsers that recognize contact information, calendar appointments and bibliographic citations. It works with Internet Explorer, Outlook, Excel, Palm Desktop, EndNote and other applications. Citrine is available to download on the internet.

A comparison of the use of text summaries, plain thumbnails, and enhanced thumbnails for Web search tasks

We introduce a technique for creating novel, enhanced thumbnails of Web pages. These thumbnails combine the advantages of plain thumbnails and text summaries to provide consistent performance on a variety of tasks. We conducted a study in which participants used three different types of summaries (enhanced thumbnails, plain thumbnails, and text summaries) to search Web pages to find several different types of information. Participants took an average of 67, 86, and 95 seconds to find the answer with enhanced thumbnails, plain thumbnails, and text summaries, respectively. As expected, there was a strong effect of question category. For some questions, text summaries outperformed plain thumbnails, while for other questions, plain thumbnails outperformed text summaries. Enhanced thumbnails (which combine the features of text summaries and plain thumbnails) had more consistent performance than either text summaries or plain thumbnails, having for all categories the best performance or performance that was statistically indistinguishable from the best.

Eyes on the road, hands on the wheel: thumb-based interaction techniques for input on steering wheels

The increasing quantity and complexity of in-vehicle systems creates a demand for user interfaces which are suited to driving. The steering wheel is a common location for the placement of buttons to control navigation, entertainment, and environmental systems, but what about a small touchpad? To investigate this question, we embedded a Synaptics StampPad in a computer game steering wheel and evaluated seven methods for selecting from a list of over 3000 street names. Selection speed was measured while stationary and while driving a simulator. Results show that the EdgeWrite gestural text entry method is about 20% to 50% faster than selection-based text entry or direct list-selection methods. They also show that methods with slower selection speeds generally resulted in faster driving speeds. However, with EdgeWrite, participants were able to maintain their speed and avoid incidents while selecting and driving at the same time. Although an obvious choice for constrained input, on-screen keyboards generally performed quite poorly.

Calcite: Completing Code Completion for Constructors Using Crowds

Calcite is a new Eclipse plugin that helps address the difficulty of understanding and correctly using an API. Calcite finds the most popular ways to instantiate a given class or interface by using code examples. To allow the users to easily add these object instantiations to their code, Calcite adds items to the popup completion menu that will insert the appropriate code into the user’s program. Calcite also uses crowd sourcing to add to the menu instructions in the form of comments that help the user perform functions that people have identified as missing from the API. In a user study, Calcite improved users’ success rate by 40%.

Enabling rich human-agent interaction for a calendar scheduling agent

The RhaiCAL system provides novel visualizations and interaction techniques for interacting with an intelligent agent, with an emphasis on calendar scheduling. After an agent interprets natural language containing meeting information, a user can easily correct mistakes using RhaiCALs clarification dialogs, which provide the agent with feedback to improve its performance. When an agent proposes actions to take on the users behalf, it can ask the user to confirm them. RhaiCAL uses novel visualizations to present the proposal to the user and allow them to modify the proposal, and informs the agent of the users actions in a manner that supports long-term learning of the users preferences. We have designed a high-level XML-based language that allows an agent to express its questions and proposed actions without mentioning user interface details, and that enables RhaiCAL to generate high-quality user interfaces.

Using Association Metrics to Help Users Navigate API Documentation

In the past decade there has been spectacular growth in the number and size of third-party libraries, frameworks, toolkits and other Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) available to modern software developers. However, the time-saving advantages of code re-use are commonly hampered by the difficulty in finding the correct methods for a given task among the thousands of irrelevant ones. We have developed a tool called Apatite that helps address this issue by letting programmers browse APIs by viewing associations between their components. Apatite indicates which items of an API are popular in different contexts and allows browsing by initially selecting verbs (methods and actions) in addition to classes and packages. The associations are calculated by leveraging existing search engine data and source code, and verbs are identified by parsing the documentation descriptions. Apatite is available on the web and is being used by developers worldwide on a regular basis.

Selective Undo Support for Painting Applications

Todays widely deployed painting applications use a linear undo model that allows users to backtrack previous operations in reverse chronological order. This undo model is not useful if the user has performed desired operations after undesired ones. Selective undo, in contrast, allows users to select specific operations in the past and only undo those, while keeping the remaining operations intact. Although selective undo has been widely explored in the context of text editing and object-oriented drawing, we explore selective undo for painting (bitmap) editing, which has received less attention and introduces many interesting user interface design challenges. Our system, called Aquamarine, explores the script model for selective undo, where selectively undone operations are skipped in the history, rather than the more explored inverse model, which puts an inverse of the selected operations at the end of the history. We discuss the design implications and show through two informal user studies that selective undo is usable and desirable

A case study of using HCI methods to improve tools for programmers

For more than five years, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have been collaborating with several SAP teams to improve the usability of SAPs developer tools and programming APIs. Much research has shown that HCI techniques can improve the tools that developers use to write software. In a recent project, we applied HCI techniques to a SAP developer tool for the SAP NetWeaver Gateway product. The SAP team building this tool uses agile software development processes, which allowed them to quickly improve the tools usability based upon the evaluations.

The Design and Evaluation of User Interfaces for the RADAR Learning Personal Assistant

The RADAR project developed a large multi-agent system with a mixed-initiative user interface designed to help office workers cope with email overload. Most RADAR agents observe experts performing tasks and then assist other users who are performing similar tasks. The interaction design for RADAR focused on developing user interfaces that allowed the intelligent functionality to improve the user’s workflow without frustrating the user when the system’s suggestions were either unhelpful or simply incorrect. For example with regards to autonomy, the RADAR agents were allowed much flexibility in selecting ways to assist the user, but were restricted from taking actions that would be visible to other people. This policy ensured that the user remained in control and mitigated the negative effects of mistakes. A large evaluation of RADAR demonstrated that novice users confronted with an email overload test performed significantly better, achieving a 37% better overall score when assisted by RADAR. The evaluation showed that AI technologies can help users accomplish their goals.