The Racing Geek

Helping organize the Mobile Spatial Interaction (MSI) workshop at CHI 2007 has made me very sensitive to the usage of the term MSI. Most people see Mobile and Spatial attached to Interaction and immediately start talking about location aware applications and services. However as someone who has spent the last few years working on location-aware applications, I have always felt that MSI and location-aware apps are two slightly different classes of research. As a result I’ve been spending some time thinking about how to define MSI as well as understanding how it differs (if it differs at all) from the current of location aware applications. My definition of location aware will of course be highly biased by projects like FireEagle, ZoneTag and Zurfer)

Location
I define location aware systems as systems that know the users absolute position. The accuracy of the location will of course change as will the source input (IP, Cell tower, GPS, user sumitted), used but by definition all location-aware systems can locate the user down to some arbitrary level of accuracy. The available accuracy may vary widely from country to city to zipcode to lat/long, and typically the best possible accuracy comes from GPS receiver which has an average error rate of about 30 feet.

MSI on the other hand requires not only the users physical location but also their spatial orientation (heading at a minimum but possibly including information like tilt, height, etc…). Typically MSI also requires a greater level of location accuracy – most spatially aware systems cannot do much with city level location and generally require at least GPS level location accuracy. In many ways you can consider the MSI grade location (and orientation) to be the logical conclusion of ever improving location aware technologies.

Interaction
To me the greatest difference between location aware and MSI applications is in terms of the interactions that they can enable. A location aware application has more of a “smart” interaction where the app tailors the content based on your location. ZoneTag is an excellent example of a location aware app that suggests tags based on your current location. To the user it appears to be a smart application that just knows what the user probably wants.

MSI interaction on the other hand can go much deeper than just smart apps. Sure it would be awesome to have a version of ZoneTag that showed the tags for the object you just took a picture of but that’s the obvious and (relatively) easy part. To me the real killer app for MSI is in enabling the creation of tangible* intuitive user interfaces. Interfaces that actually interact with their physical surroundings will not only have greater adoption (due to easy learnability) but peoples innate curiosity and playfulness will make the interaction more pleasurable (if you’ve ever seen a group of tenured professors act like children at a SmartSkin table you know what I mean :)).

Magic
Ubicomp researchers have been trying to make these intuitive interfaces for years but have been hampered by the artificial nature of the sensing technology. With mobile phones becoming more powerful and increasingly including things like GPS, digital compasses, accelerometers, tilt sensors, etc… it isn’t going to be too long before every person is walking around with an MSI/Ubicomp enabling device in their pocket. If MSI researchers have their way people will no longer have to squint at tiny screens, explicit interfaces will disappear and users will directly query and interact with their real world environment. We still have a long way to go before we get there but projects like Air Messages, Point and Find, relateGateways, etc… are beginning to show how users can interact with the real world. They are opening a while new set of research questions about how people will react to such technology – I don’t know what the killer app will be but I’m pretty sure the interaction will be indistinguishable from magic.

* I am using the word tangible since even gestural MSI is situated in the physical environment.

[tags]MSI, Mobile spatial interaction, location-aware, lbs, research[/tags]

Our paper titled “World Explorer: Visualizing Aggregate Data from Unstructured Text in Geo-Referenced Collections” just won the Vannevar Bush Best Paper Award at JDCL 2007. A big thanks to my co-authors Shane Ahern, Mor Naaman and Jeannie Yang for all their help in both building the system and writing the paper - it was a great joint effort. You can read the paper, see the demo or look at my slides below.

Judith Bush has a report about my presentation as well.

The following is the abstract of a talk I will be giving at the Ricoh California Research Center on Monday (11-Jun-07)

What’s in a place: Using geotagged images to explore the world
Can we automatically create an “attraction map” of the world from Flickr geotagged images and their associated tags? We performed an analysis of Flickr data and developed a visualization technique called Tag Maps to do exactly that. Using the analysis and the Tag Maps visualization, we created an exploration tool called World Explorer that allows one to, well, explore the world like never before.

The idea behind the data analysis is simple: by taking a photo, photographers essentially express their interest in a particular place, and implicitly “vote” in favor of that location. This gives us a set of highly representative tags associated with each map location. The World Explorer visualization is facilitated by placing these representative tags on a map (“a Tag Map”). We augment the Tag Map with photos that represent each tag at its specific location. Together, World Explorer effectively provides a sense of the important concepts and attractions embodied in each map area and zoom level, and allows users – tourists planning a trip, virtual world-discoverers or just some bored individuals – to explore the world via photos.

I’ll also give a brief demo and overview of Zurfer, a novel mobile phone context-aware software prototype that enables access to images on the go. It utilizes the channel metaphor to give users contextual access to media of interest according to key dimensions: spatial, social, and topical. Zurfer attempts to be playful and simple to use, yet provide powerful and comprehensive media access. A temporally-driven sorting scheme for media items allows quick and easy access to items of interest in any dimension. For novice users, and more complicated tasks, we extend the application incorporating keyword search to deliver the long tail of media and images.

[tags]talk, presentation, Ricoh, RII, CRC, TagMaps, Zurfer[/tags]

TagMaps is the latest research project to come out of my group at YRB. It is a visualization technique that displays text on geographic maps. TagMaps can be used to communicate characteristics of location-based data in an easy-to-understand way. The World Explorer in particular uses TagMaps to display Flickr tags that denote the ‘important’ tags in any given geographical area. You can play with it at http://tagmaps.research.yahoo.com/worldexplorer.php

I built much of the back end for the system and am in charge of the data apis that we uses. If you want to play with this API for yourself I suggest you head over to either the Yahoo Developer Network or to the TagMaps Yahoo group.
For more info on TagMaps check out the post on the YRB blog.

I have been spending a lot of time looking for various bits of software that will allow me to visually inspect the huge GPS dataset we have collected as part of the MMM project. Here is a quick listing of software that will hopefully save someone else some time

1)USAPhotomaps: a freeware tool written by Doug Cox that will display GPS route and waypoint information over maps and aerial photos that it downloads from the USGS and the MS Terraserver. It also can display USGS points of interest along with TIGER streets information. A triumph of freeware with available source code though no licensing information is mentioned.
2)TopFusion: This is a shareware program that also plots GPS routes and waypoit info over different types of maps. Is a little bit more user friendly that USAPhotoMaps and also allows you to easily add and remove multiple datapoints sets for quick comparisons across datasets. It can also convert between different data formats. The demo version is almost fully functional while the full version is $40.
3)Google Maps: As you can see from my earlier posts I am a big fan of the Google Maps interface and its relative hacker friendlyness. Engadget had a wonderful article on how to add you own waypoints to google maps. Geoblogging.com also has some easily modified code to display GPS coordinates and image thumbnails on Google Maps
4)GPSVisualizer: This is very cool site that lets you upload GPS coordinates in a variety of formats and displays them as SVG, PNG and JPEG files.
5)Mapserver is the result of a NASA funded OSS project at the University of Minnesota to develop web apps that can display spatial information. While not a full fledged GIS tool it does support have a good amount of functionality including the display of GPS points. The fact that it is an internet app just makes it an attractive deployement option.
6)Mappr is a geobloggers like site that displays georeferenced Flickr images on a map.
7)The Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is a USGS initiative to mark the locations of almost 2 million physical and cultural geographic features in the United States and its territories.
GPS Coordinate converter is a site that can covert between different coordinate formats and display a map of the area
9)GPX format: GPX or the GPS Exchange Format is an XML based format used to exchange GPS information. A full specification of the format can be found at TopoGrafix.com

UPDATE: I’d like to add some more tools to this page
10) TagMaps widget: This is a YRB project that allows you to make a flash map that displays tags using just a simple GeoRSS feed (or file). You can see a samples of what is possible here and here.
11) GeoRSS maker: This is a mashup that I wrote to allow you to quickly make a GeoRSS feed using the GeoNames database as well as the geocoded articles on Wikipedia. When you enter a search term and press the “Search” button, GeoRSS maker returns the top 5 results that match the users query. Once you have verified the location from the description and/or links, just hit the “Add (Item)” button to add the item to the GeoRSS displayed on the bottom of the page. Just keep on doing more searches and adding items till you have the required GeoRSS which you can copy and paste into a separate file. More details are available in this blog post.

I was browsing through the STC Usability SIG when I found a wonderful heuristic evaluation checklist. I especially like the arrangement where it is broken up into
1. Visibility of System Status (29 points)
2. Match Between System and the Real World (24 points)
3. User Control and Freedom (23 points)
4. Consistency and Standards(51 points)
5. Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover From Errors (21 points)
6. Error Prevention (15 points)
7. Recognition Rather Than Recall (40 points)
8. Fexibility and Minimalist Design (16 points)
9. Aesthetic and Minimalist Design (12 points)
10. Help and Documentation (23 points)
11. Skills (22 points)
12. Pleasurable and Respectful Interaction with the User (17 points)
13. Privacy (3 points)

It’s very well written though I’m not sure if using a term like “Aesthetic and Minimalist Design” is a good choice for a corporate report-sounds a little too Tufte’sque

Cooper design has a couple of online “take home” style questions as part of its recruitment process. They are an interesting read and can serve as a good warm up for a prospective interview. The positions are
Interaction Designer (pdf)
Design Communication(pdf)
Interaction designer(pdf)

Chauncey Wilson, the moderator of STC Usability SIG has compiled and shared this list of interview questions with his community. Most ar3e pretty standard but some are really thought provoking (eg: A participant in a lab study has been struggling on the same task for a long time. What would you say to get them to move on to the next question?)

——————————————————————-
1. What 2-3 usability design books would you recommend to colleagues?
2. Why are you looking for a new position?
3. What do you like most/least about your current job?
4. What are some of the ethical issues that can arise in a usability/UI design position? Have you experienced any of these personally? What did you do to resolve the ethical issue?
5. Describe how you have marketed usability/Design in your current position? How would you market usability if you were the first usability/UI design person in a company?
6. Describe a project that didn’t go well for you in your current position and tell us what you might do differently?
7. What 2-3 usability evaluation methods are you most experienced with?
8. What usability/UI design methods would you like to know more about or are least experienced with?
9. Have you taught any courses or seminars in usability or UI design? What topics did you emphasize in the course?
10. What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a GUI or Web style guide? If you have worked on a style guide, describe your method for developing it.
11. How have you addressed issues of UI consistency across products in your current position? (if yes, please describe how you did and the success and failures that you had).
12. About how many usability tests have your run?
13. What courses or seminars have you taken on usability or design?
14. Have you been involved in gathering requirements in your current or past positions? How did you go about gathering requirements? What would you do differently?
15. Can you describe a specific design problem that you work on and some of the issues or problems that you had to solve?
16. What are some of the differences in designing for the Web versus a Windows (or other platform) GUI application?
17. What percent of time to you spend in evaluation versus design in your current position?
18. What role can QA play in improving the usability or UI design of a product?
19. If you were going to visit a beta customer and were asked to take an engineer along, how would you prep the engineer for the visit?
20. What have/can you do to make usability lab testing as realistic as possible?
21. How much experience do you have recruiting external customers for evaluation or design activities?
22. Could you describe how some usability/UI design activities would fit into the development process?
23. How do you define when a product is “usable enough”?
24. Here are a few screen shots from an application. What problems do you see here (usually give a person about 15 minutes and then go over the screen shot - don’t make it too hard).
25. How have you reported the results of a lab or field study to the appropriate parties?
26. What tools do you use to prototype screens, windows, or Web pages?
27. What do you like most about the usability field? Least?
28. How would you test the usability of online or paper documentation?
29. What do you know about the products that this company makes? (check to see if the person did any research before coming to the interview)
30. What steps have you taken to convince a recalcitrant developer to listen to your advice?
31. What are some design techniques for preventing errors rather than displaying some kind of error message?
32. How would you present the results of a usability test to a senior VP? A development group?
33. Can you give a few examples of cognitive principles that should influence design?
34. How do you get answers to usability or design questions that you have in the absence of another colleague in the area?
35. Pose some human factors problems to the person to get at some general problem solving capabilities. I once interviewed with a firm where they asked me to re-design the faucets for a bathtub. Not your typical UI design problem, but it brought up issues of control-display compatibility, feedback, errors, safety, efficiency, etc. Several of the good HF textbooks have a number of examples that could be adapted for this?
36. What are some general internationalization/localization problems and solutions?
37. What are some visual design principles that you would try to follow when designing Web pages or windows? (I’m thinking about things like balance, symmetry, consistency, clutter, minimalism, etc. - there are a lot of things that would be OK here).
38. How do you decide what tasks should be part of a usability test? (I’m looking for things like - most frequent tasks, focus on a new critical feature, low-use, but extremely critical task that is catastrophic if done incorrectly, again there are a number of answers).
39. You are going to work at a company where everyone says that “we have a really distinct culture here.” How would you go about figuring out what that statement means and how it will affect your usability/design work? How did you find out about the culture at your current company?
40. Describe your worst experience as a [fill in current position]. How did you deal with it?
41. How do you analyze qualitative field data in a way that is useful for informing developers how to make design changes?
42. A participant in a lab study has been struggling on the same task for a long time. What would you say to get them to move on to the next question?
43. Show the person a 15 minute segment of a usability test and ask him/her to list the problems that they see during the segment. (Make sure that you have permission to sue that segment from the participant). Review the tape with the participant.
44. Ask the person to do the Heuristic Review at the end of Jakob Nielsen’s Usability Engineering book. Jakob has an answer list and this gets at a large number of design issues.
45. You have time to interview or test 5 users. What criteria would you use to choose the 5 people?
46. What are the advantages and disadvantages of Contextual Inquiry (only ask if they have listed this on their resume)?
47. How have/would you conduct a competitive analysis of two applications or web sites (assuming that there are no legal prohibitions)?
48. The lack of good requirements is often cited as the major flaw in producing useful products on time and within budget? What methods would you use to gather requirements?
49. Describe how the physical environment can have an impact on the design of a GUI application.
50. Here is a list of user attributes. Tell me how these attributes would affect design (for example, 10 percent of users are colorblind, the users are elderly, the users are disabled).
51. What are some general guidelines for making applications or Web pages accessible to users with visual, hearing, or motor disabilities?
52. Given that a usability person often delivers “bad news” how do you (or your management) keep good relations with the group that you are delivering the bad news to?