Mark Podlaseck

Measuring success

COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM August 2000/Vol. 43, No. 8 53 The structure of the Web is rapidly evolving from a loose collection of Web sites into organized marketplaces. The phenomena of aggregation, portals, large enterprise sites, and business-to-business applications are resulting in centralized, virtual places, through which millions of visitors pass. With this development, it becomes possible to gather unprecedented amounts of data about individuals. Data sources capturing purchase histories, casual browsing habits, financial activities, credit histories, and demographics can be combined to construct highly detailed personal profiles. Not only is it possible to collect vast amounts of data, it is vital for e-businesses to be able exploit the data effectively. In the Internet environment, products and services are constantly in danger of becoming commodities, shoppers can explore competing Web sites without leaving their chairs, and bots and agents MEASURING SUCCESS Edith Schonberg, Thomas Cofino, Robert Hoch, Mark Podlaseck, and Susan L. Spraragen

Steerable interfaces for pervasive computing spaces

This paper introduces a new class of interactive interfaces that can be moved around to appear on ordinary objects and surfaces anywhere in a space. By dynamically adapting the form, function, and location of an interface to suit the context of the user, such steerable interfaces have the potential to offer radically new and powerful styles of interaction in intelligent pervasive computing spaces. We propose defining characteristics of steerable interfaces and present the first steerable interface system that combines projection, gesture recognition, user tracking, environment modeling and geometric reasoning components within a system architecture. Our work suggests that there is great promise and rich potential for further research on steerable interfaces.

Analysis and Visualization of Metrics for Online Merchandising

While techniques and tools for Web marketing are being actively developed, there is much less available for Web merchandising. This paper contributes to the area of Web usage analysis for E-commerce merchandising. First, we categorize areas of analysis for Web merchandising such as product assortment, merchandising cues, shopping metaphors, and Web design features. Second, we define a new set of metrics for Web merchandising, which we call micro-conversion rates. These new metrics provide capabilities for examining data about sales and merchandising in online stores, and also provide detailed insight into the effectiveness of different Web merchandising efforts by answering related business questions. Third, we present a set of novel visualizations that explore patterns in micro-conversions in online stores reflecting in customer responses to various Web merchandising efforts. Through an empirical study using look-to-buy data from an online store, we demonstrate how the proposed visualizations can be used to understand the shopping behavior in an online store and the effectiveness of various merchandising tactics it employs. Finally, we discuss the types of data required for this kind of visual analysis of online merchandising, and briefly describe how the data can be collected and integrated in an E-commerce site.

To frame or not to frame: the role and design of frameless displays in ubiquitous applications

A frameless display is a display with no perceptible boundaries; it appears to be embodied in the physical world. Frameless displays are created by projecting visual elements on a black background into a physical environment. By considering visual arts and design theory together with our own experience building about a dozen applications, we argue the importance of this technique in creating ubiquitous computer applications that are truly contextualized in the physical world. Nine different examples using frameless displays are described, providing the background for a systematization of frameless displays pros and cons, together with a basic set of usage guidelines. The paper also discusses the differences and constraints on user interaction with visual elements in a frameless display.

User-following displays

Traditionally, a user has positioned himself/herself to be in front of a display in order to access information from it. In this information age, life at work and even at home is often confined to be in front of a display device that is the source of information or entertainment. The paper introduces another paradigm where the display follows the user rather than the user being tied to the display. We demonstrate how steerable projection and people tracking can be combined to achieve a display that automatically follows the user.

Understanding Merchandising Effectiveness of Online Stores

While techniques and tools for Web marketing are being actively developed, there is much less available for Web merchandising. This paper contributes to the understanding and analysis of merchandising effectiveness in online stores. First, we categorize the requirements of business analysis for online stores. Especially, we distinguish the analysis requirements of Web merchandising from those of Web marketing. Then we focus on Web merchandising by identifying its elements, such as merchandising cues, shopping metaphors, store design and layout, and product assortment. Second, we tackle the problem of measuring the effectiveness of these elements of Web merchandising. For tracking and analyzing the merchandising performance, we introduce a new set of metrics, which we call micro-conversion rates . We explain how these metrics provide detailed insight into the performance of different business strategies. Finally, we describe a set of system and data requirements for tracking micro-conversions in online sto...

Augmenting a retail environment using steerable interactive displays

This paper describes a prototype retail environment in which information interactions occur in situ, within the actual space of the merchandise. By combining a steerable projected display and recognition of user gestures and actions, and user position tracking through peripheral cameras, we have developed several innovative interaction techniques designed to augment the reality of a retail store.

Social mobile Augmented Reality for retail

Consumers are increasingly relying on web-based social content, such as product reviews, prior to making to a purchase. Recent surveys in the Retail Industry confirm that social content is indeed the #1 aid in a buying decision. Currently, accessing or adding to this valuable web-based social content repository is mostly limited to computers far removed from the site of the shopping experience itself. We present a mobile Augmented Reality application, which extends such social content from the computer monitor into the physical world through mobile phones, providing consumers with in situ information on products right when and where they need to make buying decisions.

PICASSO: Pervasive Information Chronicling, Access, Search, and Sharing for Organizations

Several researchers have pointed out and begun to demonstrate that it is now possible to digitize an entire lifetime of experiences into a pocket-sized storage device, and thus to create a rich and portable electronic chronicle of an individuals life and activities. This possibility has brought with it a host of significant challenges: How can the creation of these electronic chronicles be natural and effortless? How should these chronicles be organized? What kinds of navigation and search tools unleash the potential of the chronicled data allowing the user to receive and retrieve the information most relevant to their context at any time? How can such chronicles impact business organizations? How can people in organizations share chronicles and effectively combine chronicled data from different individuals in collaborative settings? Our research is beginning to address these issues with a focus on the business organizational setting. In this paper we introduce PICASSO, our work on pervasive chronicle creation and exploitation in enterprise applications. PICASSO enables the capture of rich user context (including PC/PDA interactions, audio, video, images, and location) and provides tools that enable users to search, navigate, share, and merge personal events, both from desktop computers and from mobile devices

An Architecture and Framework for Steerable Interface Systems

Steerable Interfaces are emerging as a new paradigm used in realizing the vision of embodied interaction in ubiquitous computing environments. Such interfaces steer relevant input and output capabilities around space, to serve the user when and where they are needed. We present an architecture and a pr o- gramming framework that enable the development of Steerable Interface appli- cations. The distributed multi-layer architecture provides applications with ab- stractions to services of several novel components - for instance, steerable pro- jection, steerable visual interaction detection, and geometric reasoning. The programming framework facilitates integration of the various services while hiding the complexity of sequencing and synchronizing the underlying compo- nents.