John Halloran

Designing novel interactional workspaces to support face to face consultations

This paper describes the design and deployment of a novel interactional workspace, intended to provide more effective support for face-to-face consultations between two parties. We focus on the initial consultations between customer and agent that take place during the development of complex products. Findings from an ethnographic study of the existing use of technological systems show the interaction during such consultations to be disjointed and not well supported. As an alternative approach, we developed a novel arrangement of multiple displays intended to promote shoulder-to-shoulder collaboration using a variety of interlinked representations and visualizations. The resulting interactional workspace was used by a travel company as part of a large international trade show attended by the general public. The many consultations that took place between agents and customers were quite different, proving to be more equitable, open, fluid and congenial.

The literacy fieldtrip: using UbiComp to support children's creative writing

Fieldtrips, traditionally associated with science, history and geography teaching, have long been used to support childrens learning by allowing them to engage with environments first-hand. Recently, ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) has been used to enhance fieldtrips in these educational areas by augmenting environments with a range of instruments, devices and sensors. However, the sorts of interaction design that UbiComp makes possible have the potential not just to enhance the value of educational techniques in known application areas, but also to expand the application of those techniques into new areas of curriculum. We report on a UbiComp-supported fieldtrip to support creative writing, associated with the learning of literacy skills. We discuss how the fieldtrip, designed and run in the grounds of a historic English country house with Year 5 UK schoolchildren, engendered interactions which changed both the processes and products of creative writing, with benefits for both teachers and children.

Requirements for in-situ authoring of location based experiences

In this paper we describe an investigation into the requirements for and the use of in-situ authoring in the creation of location based pervasive and UbiComp experiences. We will focus on the co-design process with users that resulted in a novel visitor experience to a historic country estate. This has informed the design of new, in-situ, authoring tools supplemented with tools for retrospective revisiting and reorganization of content. An initial trial of these new tools will be discussed and conclusions drawn as to the appropriateness of such tools. Further enhancements as part of future trials will also be described.

Does it matter if you don't know who's talking?: multiplayer gaming with voiceover IP

Voiceover IP (VoIP) now makes it possible for people in distributed online multiplayer games to talk to each other. This might not only influence game performance, but also social interaction. However, using VoIP in multiplayer games can often make it hard to know who is talking, an issue that other researchers have found to be problematic. In a 10-week study of a fixed group of adult gamers, we found that not knowing who is talking affects game performance differently according to the type of game. In team-based war games, it can have a negative effect both on learning and coordination, but in race games, where individual rather than teams compete, it appears generally not to matter. In contrast, the impact of not knowing who is talking on social interaction is the same regardless of game type: while the social experience can be highly enjoyable, it is difficult for gamers to get to know each other. We consider the design implications for enhancing both game performance and social interaction.

Unfolding understandings: co-designing UbiComp In Situ , over time

A key challenge in co-designing UbiComp is that users may have limited understanding or experience of these technologies. While the value of situated co-design activities for promoting understanding is known, the role of time is less well researched. Here we describe and reflect on a range of co-design activities carried out with the curators of an historic English manor house to create novel visitor tours. We show how an ensemble of situated co-design activities over time led to the unfolding of user understanding around issues of content, technology and user experience, in turn leading to a progressive re-imagining of practice. This points to the importance of time and variety of in-situ activities to help people engage as co-designers in creating novel UbiComp-enabled experiences.

In at the Deep End: An Activity-Led Introduction to First Year Creative Computing

Misconceptions about the nature of the computing disciplines pose a serious problem to university faculties that offer computing degrees, as students enrolling on their programmes may come to realise that their expectations are not met by reality. This frequently results in the students’ early disengagement from the subject of their degrees which in turn can lead to excessive ‘wastage’, that is, reduced retention. In this paper, we report on our academic group’s attempts within creative computing degrees at a UK university to counter these problems through the introduction of a 6 week long project that newly enrolled students embark on at the very beginning of their studies. This group project, involving the creation of a 3D etch‐a‐sketch‐like computer graphics application with a hardware interface, provides a breadth‐first, activity‐led introduction to the students’ chosen academic discipline, aiming to increase student engagement while providing a stimulating learning experience with the overall goal to increase retention. We present the methods and results of two iterations of these projects in the 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 academic years, and conclude that the approach worked well for these cohorts, with students expressing increased interest in their chosen discipline, in addition to noticeable improvements in retention following the first year of the students’ studies.

Design implications for task-specific search utilities for retrieval and re-engineering of code

ABSTRACT The importance of information retrieval systems is unquestionable in the modern society and both individuals as well as enterprises recognise the benefits of being able to find information effectively. Current code-focused information retrieval systems such as Google Code Search, Codeplex or Koders produce results based on specific keywords. However, these systems do not take into account developers’ context such as development language, technology framework, goal of the project, project complexity and developer’s domain expertise. They also impose additional cognitive burden on users in switching between different interfaces and clicking through to find the relevant code. Hence, they are not used by software developers. In this paper, we discuss how software engineers interact with information and general-purpose information retrieval systems (e.g. Google, Yahoo!) and investigate to what extent domain-specific search and recommendation utilities can be developed in order to support their work-related activities. In order to investigate this, we conducted a user study and found that software engineers followed many identifiable and repeatable work tasks and behaviours. These behaviours can be used to develop implicit relevance feedback-based systems based on the observed retention actions. Moreover, we discuss the implications for the development of task-specific search and collaborative recommendation utilities embedded with the Google standard search engine and Microsoft IntelliSense for retrieval and re-engineering of code. Based on implicit relevance feedback, we have implemented a prototype of the proposed collaborative recommendation system, which was evaluated in a controlled environment simulating the real-world situation of professional software engineers. The evaluation has achieved promising initial results on the precision and recall performance of the system.

A reusable, extensible infrastructure for augmented field trips

This paper describes a reusable pervasive information infrastructure developed as part of the Equator IRC, designed to allow the construction of literacy based eLearning activities on top of material created as part of a more traditional visitors system. The architecture of the system is described along with details of the creation of the curated material and the subsequent adaption of the system by local primary school teachers to create a literacy experiences. Results of the first trials of the system are presented with conclusions drawn and discussion of future directions

Putting it all together: information visualizations, display arrangements, and sales transactions

Computer networks offer powerful ways of integrating and coordinating information so that it can be more effectively accessed and used. Often, the focus is on the back end: the systems infrastructure, applications and standards which will enable this. However, with diversification in the range of activities networked information now supports, growth in numbers and types of user, and the appearance of new technologies, new challenges arise. As well as the issue of back end information design, creating networked information systems increasingly involves the issue of how to coordinate this, across a range of activities both single‐user and collaborative, with a host of front‐end design problems concerning information representation and visualization, display arrangements, interactivity, and human factors. We tackle these issues through a case study of the analysis and redesign of user interfaces used by the travel industry during sales transactions. This involved the development and evaluation of an interactive trip planner, featuring linked information visualizations and multiple displays, which represents networked information in innovative ways, and allows new kinds of access, configuration and discussion.

Game Changer? How VoIP Is Impacting the Way We Play

Recently, computer games producers have integrated Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) into distributed multiplayer games, allowing gamers playing at a distance to talk to each other ‘earto-ear’ in an audio-conference-like setting. How does being able to talk to one another in this manner affect the gaming experience? A longitudinal study of a group of adults playing a multiplayer team game is presented. Our analysis looks at how the players used VoIP talk to interact with each other in the virtual game world. We found that VoIP represents talk in ways that differ both to face-to-face talk and to text-mediated communications, and this leads to new forms of multiplayer gameplay: VoIP audio representations interact with, and mediate, the graphical materials of the game world in ways that can generate problems to be overcome for players, but also provide new opportunities. In particular, our findings show how players used VoIP to coach each other in the early stages of playing together, and then later on to successfully coordinate more complex game playing. For both, distinctive forms of collaboration made possible by VoIP were found. On the basis of our findings, we consider how VoIP can be further integrated with graphical representations to enhance the user experience in distributed multiplayer games.