Sherman R. Alpert

The cognitive consequences of object-oriented design

The most valuable tools or methodologies supporting the design of interactive systems are those that simultaneously ease the process of design and improve the usability of the resulting system. We consider the potential of the object-oriented paradigm in providing this dual function. After briefly reviewing what is known about the design process and some important characteristics of object-oriented programming and design, we speculate on the possible cognitive consequences of this paradigm for problem understanding, problem decomposition, and design result. We conclude with research issues raised by our analysis.

User Attitudes Regarding a User-Adaptive eCommerce Web Site

Despite an abundance of recommendations by researchers and more recently by commercial enterprises for adaptive interaction techniques and technologies, there exists little experimental validation of the value of such approaches to users. We have conducted user studies focussed on the perceived value of a variety of personalization features for an eCommerce Web site for computing machinery sales and support. Our study results have implications for the design of user-adaptive applications. Interesting findings include unenthusiastic user attitudes toward system attempts to infer user needs, goals, or interests and to thereby provide user-specific adaptive content. Users also expressed equivocal opinions of collaborative filtering for the specific eCommerce scenarios we studied; thus personalization features popular in one eCommerce environment may not be effective or useful for other eCommerce domains. Users expressed their strong desire to have full and explicit control of data and interaction. Lastly, users want readily to be able to make sense of site behavior, that is, to understand a site’s rationale for displaying particular content.

Personalizing the user experience on ibm.com

In this paper, we describe the results of an effort to first understand the value of personalizing a Web site, as perceived by the visitors to the site as well as by the stakeholder organization that owns it, and then to develop a strategy for introducing personalization to the ibm.com Web site. We started our investigation by conducting literature reviews, holding brainstorming sessions with colleagues around the world, and performing heuristic usability evaluations of several relevant Web sites. We adopted a User-Centered Design approach and conducted a number of usability studies applied to the subset of the ibm.com Web site that business customers use for all aspects of purchase, service, and support of computer equipment. These studies employed a number of low- and medium- fidelity prototypes that we developed for this purpose. Our proposal for personalizing ibm.com consists of a set of 12 personalization features, selected for the value they offer to customers and to the business.

A view matcher for learning Smalltalk

The View Matcher is a structured browser for Smalltalk/V. It presents a set of integrated and dynamic views of a running application, intended to coordinate and rationalize a programmers early understanding of Smalltalk and its environment. We describe the system through two user scenarios involving exploration of the model-view-controller paradigm.

The EFX editing and effects environment

The EFX digital editing and effects environment integrates facilities for nonlinear editing of digitized film, video, and audio with sophisticated image-manipulating special effects. EFX offers an intuitive, visual, direct-manipulation user interface for building multimedia compositions. This front end, discussed in the paper, is coupled with a powerful parallel-processing computer that computes the special effects and plays back the uncompressed digitized film or video in real time.

Self-describing animated icons for human-computer interaction: a research note

Abstract Animated icons may offer substantial advantage over static icons for human-computer communication. Nonetheless, problems and challenges remain. For example, the constant motion of animated icons can be distracting or tedious for users. Another challenge relates to the ease of learning and use of iconic interfaces in general: how can icons provide more helpful information to users regarding their intended use? In this research note, we describe animated icons we have implemented which attempt to address these issues.

Graceful interaction with graphical constraints

The graphical constraint editor (GRACE), a graphical editor that lets users define graphical, or geometric, constraints, is reviewed. Graphical constraints specify relationships among graphical objects that the system must maintain. Constraints are useful in graphical drawing editors, design activities supported by CAD systems, and graphical user interface construction. GRACE provides mechanisms for explicit and implicit constraint specification using simple and natural means. These include simple direct manipulation methods and a constraints-by-demonstration facility that incorporates both novel heuristics for inferring user-demonstrated relations in an economical fashion and a natural-language explanation tool that helps the user understand the systems inferencing behavior. An overview of GRACEs user interface is presented and details about how users specify graphical relations and query the system to obtain information about them are provided.<<ETX>>

Comprehensive mapping of knowledge and information resources: the case of webster

To maximize the representational and pedagogical effectiveness of computer-based concept maps, such maps should be able to incorporate any sort of media that can be represented in the computational environment. This chapter proposes cognitive and educational rationale for this thesis, and discusses an instantiation of these ideas in the form of a Web-based concept mapping tool named Webster. Webster permits broad flexibility in terms of the kinds of knowledge and information that may be represented and the structuring of their visual presentation. One result of this approach is the integration of knowledge visualization and information visualization in a single representational medium. These facilities also make Webster a convenient tool for personal knowledge management, facilitating individual organization of knowledge and external knowledge and information resources for reference and learning purposes.

“THAT’s what i was looking for”: comparing user-rated relevance with search engine rankings

We present a lightweight tool to compare the relevance ranking provided by a search engine to the relevance as actually judged by the user performing the query. Using the tool, we conducted a user study with two different versions of the search engine for a large corporate web site with more than 1.8 million pages, and with the popular search engine GoogleTM. Our tool provides an inexpensive and efficient way to do this comparison, and can be easily extended to any search engine that provides an API. Relevance feedback from actual users can be used to assess precision and recall of a search engine’s retrieval algorithms and, perhaps more importantly, to tune its relevance ranking algorithms to better match user needs. We found the tool to be quite effective at comparing different versions of the same search engine, and for benchmarking by comparing against a standard.

Summarizing technical support documents for search: expert and user studies

One factor that may affect whether users of technical support Web sites can rapidly find information relevant to their needs is the quality of the summary of documents returned as the result of search queries. This paper reports on two studies that were part of an effort to create high-quality machine-generated summaries for the presentation of search results for technical support documents. The initial study asked experts to compose document summaries. The results of the first study were used to guide the development of heuristics for generating programmatic summaries that were tested in the second study, which was a user evaluation that compared the effectiveness of four types of document summaries for search purposes: programmatic summaries based on selective sentence extraction using knowledge of the semantic structure of documents, a term-hits-in-context (THIC) summary, the current summaries on the companys live site, and document titles alone. This comparison sought to determine the techniques most likely to help users find information, hence increasing customer goal attainment and satisfaction. The implications of our results for summarizing technical support documents for search are discussed.