Ted Selker

Attention and intention goals can mediate disruption in human-computer interaction

Multitasking environments cause people to be interrupted constantly, often interfering with their ongoing tasks, activities and goals. This paper focuses on the disruption caused by interruptions and presents a disruption mediating approach for balancing the negative effects of interruptions with respect to the benefits of interruptions relevant to the user goals. Our work shows how Disruption Manager utilizing context and relationships to user goals and tasks can assess when and how to present interruptions in order to reduce their disruptiveness. The Disruption Management Framework was created to take into consideration motivations that influence peoples interruption decision process. The framework predicts the effects from interruptions using a three-layer software architecture: a knowledge layer including information about topics related to the ongoing activity, an intermediate layer including summarized information about the user tasks and their stages, and a low level layer including implicit low granularity information, such as mouse movement, context switching and windowing activity to support fail-safe disruption management when no other contextual information is available. The manager supports implicit monitoring of ongoing behaviors and categorizing possible disruptive outcome given the user and system state. The manager monitors actions and uses common sense reasoning in its model to compare communication stream topics with topics files that are active on the desktop. Experiments demonstrate that disruption manager significantly reduces the impact of interruptions and improve peoples performance in a multiapplication desktop scenario with email and instant messaging. In a complex order taking activity, disruption manager yielded a 26% performance increase for tasks prioritized as being important and a 32.5% increase for urgent tasks. The evaluation shows that the modulated interruptions did not distract or troubled users. Further, subjects using the Disruption Manager were 5 times more likely to respond effectively to instant messages.

Understanding considerate systems — UCS (pronounced: You see us)

Interactions between people occur in a social realm. On the other hand, “things”, including devices for communication and computation, are generally socially deficient. Imagine socially aware systems moving from an interruption model of communication to an introduction model. To create considerate systems, there is a need to model social context, social behavior, and communication goals. This paper describes early systems that work to understand and eliminate the socially disruptive qualities of the ubiquitous systems people increasingly use and rely on in all aspects of their personal, educational, social and business lives. We show performance improving systems: an instant message arrives after you have finished typing a sentence, not while you are forming it; a car waits for you to complete a difficult maneuver before giving you distracting feedback This work relies on dynamic task, user, system, and communication models. The goal is to stimulate more work to understand and create considerate systems. Such systems will improve peoples experience and performance. Social responsiveness can become the norm for the technology that pervades our lives.

Human–Computer Interaction and International Public Policymaking: A Framework for Understanding and Taking Future Actions

This monograph lays out a discussion framework for understanding the role of human–computer interaction HCI in public policymaking. We take an international view, discussing potential areas for research and application, and their potential for impact. Little has been written about the intersection of HCI and public policy; existing reports typically focus on one specific policy issue or incident. To date, there has been no overarching view of the areas of existing impact and potential impact. We have begun that analysis and argue here that such a global view is needed. Our aims are to provide a solid foundation for discussion, cooperation and collaborative interaction, and to outline future programs of activity. The five sections of this report provide relevant background along with a preliminary version of what we expect to be an evolving framework. Sections 1 and 2 provides an introduction to HCI and public policy. Section 3 discusses how HCI already informs public policy, with representative examples. Section 4 discusses how public policy influences HCI and provides representative public policy areas relevant to HCI, where HCI could have even more impact in the future: i laws, regulations, and guidelines for HCI research, ii HCI research assessments, iii research funding, iv laws for interface design — accessibility and language, v data privacy laws and regulations, vi intellectual property, and vii laws and regulations in specific sectors. There is a striking difference between where the HCI community has had impact Section 3 and the many areas of potential involvement Section 4. Section 5 a framework for action by the HCI community in public policy internationally. This monograph summarizes the observations and recommendations from a daylong workshop at the CHI 2013 conference in Paris, France. The workshop invited the communitys perspectives regarding the intersection of governmental policies, international and domestic standards, recent HCI research discoveries, and emergent considerations and challenges. It also incorporates contributions made after the workshop by workshop participants and by individuals who were unable to participate in the workshop but whose work and interests were highly related and relevant.This monograph lays out a discussion framework for understanding the role of human–computer interaction HCI in public policymaking. We take an international view, discussing potential areas for res...

Peripheral interaction: shaping the research and design space

In everyday life, we are able to perform various activities simultaneously without consciously paying attention to them. For example, we can easily read a newspaper while drinking coffee. This latter activity takes place in our background or periphery of attention. Contrarily, interactions with computing technology usually require focused attention. With interactive technologies becoming increasingly present in the everyday environment, it is essential to explore how these technologies could be developed such that people can interact with them both in the focus and in the periphery of attention. This upcoming field of Peripheral Interaction aims to fluently embed interactive technology into everyday life. This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners from different disciplines to share research and design work and to further shape the field of Peripheral Interaction.

Task Load Estimation and Mediation Using Psycho-physiological Measures

Human performance falls off predictably with excessive task difficulty. This paper reports on a search for a task load estimation metric. Of the five physiological signals analyzed from a multitasking study, only pupil dilation measures correlated well with real-time task load. The paper introduces a novel task load estimation model based on pupil dilation measures. We demonstrate its effectiveness in a multitasking driving scenario. Autonomous mediation of notifications using this model significantly improved user task performance compared to no mediation. The model showed promise even when used outside in a car. Results were achieved using low-cost cameras and open-source measurement tools lending to its potential to be used broadly.

MIME: Teaching Mid-Air Pose-Command Mappings

Mid-air gestures are initial hand poses with a subsequent movement. Existing gesture guides reveal this dynamic part of a gesture. Initial poses, however, are either revealed by space-consuming cheat sheets or time-consuming demonstration videos. Mime is a novel interaction concept that (1) reveals how to form complex hand poses and (2) teaches pose-command mappings: Mime reduces hand poses to space-efficient line figures that users mime with their hands; these abstract lines are embedded into command icons or names to create a mnemonic. We present several applications of the Mime concept, and implemented a prototype based on mid-air back-of-device interaction on off-the-shelf mobile phones. We compared both mnemonics, iconic and textual, to a baseline without embedding to test learnability and memorability of a 12-item vocabulary. Users in the iconic condition required significantly less training than both other conditions and recalled significantly more items after one week compared to the no-cue baseline.

Multi-focus and multi-level techniques for visualization and analysis of networks with thematic data

Information-rich data sets bring several challenges in the areas of visualization and analysis, even when associated with node-link network visualizations. This paper presents an integration of multi-focus and multi-level techniques that enable interactive, multi-step comparisons in node-link networks. We describe NetEx, a visualization tool that enables users to simultaneously explore different parts of a network and its thematic data, such as time series or conditional probability tables. NetEx, implemented as a Cytoscape plug-in, has been applied to the analysis of electrical power networks, Bayesian networks, and the Enron e-mail repository. In this paper we briefly discuss visualization and analysis of the Enron social network, but focus on data from an electrical power network. Specifically, we demonstrate how NetEx supports the analytical task of electrical power system fault diagnosis. Results from a user study with 25 subjects suggest that NetEx enables more accurate isolation of complex faults compared to an especially designed software tool.

Who said what when?: capturing the important moments of a meeting

Meeting information capturing paradigms such as pen and paper has been found to be tedious and distractive. This paper presents Meeting Essence II, a mobile phone based, one screen meeting information capture system to address these issues. We also introduce a new social interaction centric recording paradigm, where events in the meeting are identified by meeting participants and are recorded, classified by time and person with a single screen touch. Results from our pilot experiment shows that our system positively contributes to the quality of meeting reconstruction, while being minimally distractive to the meeting participants.

Beyond Rhetoric to Poetics in IT Invention

Two kinds of discourse typically define scientific productions: logical (epistemology of science) and rhetorical (sociology of science). We suggest that research projects can also be analyzed as poetical productions. While rhetorical strategies anticipate controversies and deploy techniques to defend projects and findings, poetical practices deepen the cultural and symbolic dimensions of technologies. Based on use cases that show different ways the poetics come to bear on research and development projects in information technology (IT), we discuss the play on words and images and how they contribute to the definition and creation of a new technology within research projects. Three cases of poetical practices are presented: naming technologies, christening projects, and designing logos. We give examples of naming and project identity formation to underscore how such a poetic stance impacts projects. Images and words help people imagine what the technology is about by giving imaginary traits and cultural substance. This paper’s analysis is a call for further work exposing the value of conscious use of poetical approaches to deepen the framing of IT projects.

Considerate supervisor: an audio-only facilitator for multiparty conference calls

This paper shows that automated feedback on an audio-only channel can reduce dominance in collaborative tasks. In a study of multiple three-person distributed groups solving Hangman, a word guessing game, the Considerate Supervisor reduced the difference between the most dominant and the most dormant participants significantly. This paper points towards opportunities for computers to improve communication between people through a pro-active and considerate interface, and calls for further exploration of the effectiveness of such interfaces.