GVU Technical Report Series

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GVU Technical Report Series

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 43

Evaluating the InfoCanvas Peripheral Awareness System: A Longitudinal, In Situ Study

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2005) Stasko, John T. ; McColgin, Dave ; Miller, Todd ; Plaue, Christopher Michael ; Pousman, Zachary L.

A longitudinal, in situ study of the InfoCanvas, a prototype peripheral awareness system, was conducted. The InfoCanvas provides awareness of information through "information art", acting as a kind of electronic painting in which visual elements change appearance to represent changes in the information being monitored. Eight people used the system for a month in their offices. We observed and documented the scenes they designed, how they used the system, and their opinions of the system. Overall, participants felt the system was useful, informative, and fun. With respect to aesthetics, some participants felt that it was appealing but others desired further improvement. Lessons learned from the study may benefit other forms of peripheral displays and ubiquitous computing systems.
An Empirical Study of the Effect of Agent Competence on User Performance and Perception

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004) Catrambone, Richard ; Stasko, John T. ; Xiao, Jun

We studied the role of the competence of a user interface agent/assistant that helped users to learn and use a new text editor. Participants in the study made a set of prescribed changes to a document via the editor with the aid of one of four interface agents. Participants could ask questions out loud to the agent and the agent would respond using a synthesized voice; the agent would also make proactive suggestions. The agents varied in the quality of responses and suggestions made. One group of participants were provided with a help screen as well as the agent. We focused on assessing the relation between users' objective performance, interaction style, and subjective experience. Results revealed that the perceived utility of the agent was influenced by the types of errors made by the agent, while participants' subjective impressions of the agent related to the perceptions of its representation. In addition, allowing participants to choose their preferred assistance style(s) (agent vs. online-help) improved objective performance. We correlate quantitative findings with qualitative interview data and discuss implications for the design and the implementation of systems with interface agents.
Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? An Evaluation of Information Awareness Displays

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004) Plaue, Christopher Michael ; Miller, Todd ; Stasko, John T.

Little is known about what makes a peripheral or ambient display effective at presenting awareness information or simply, if one is better than another. Furthermore, techniques for evaluating these types of displays are just beginning to be developed. We conducted an evaluation of the InfoCanvas, a peripheral display that conveys awareness information graphically as a form of information art. We assessed people's comprehension of information presented by the InfoCanvas compared to two other electronic information displays, a Web portal style and a text-based display, when each display was viewed for a short period of time. We found that participants noted and recalled significantly more information when presented by the InfoCanvas than by either of the other displays despite having to learn the additional graphical representations employed by the InfoCanvas.
An Interview-based Study of Display Space Management

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003) Hutchings, Dugald Ralph ; Stasko, John T.

There are a number of challenges for researchers in the area of window and screen space management: (1) many systems have been proposed, but little study on people's window interaction habits exists, (2) users of emerging display systems have different properties and needs than users of single-display systems, yet users might also interact with several different types of systems, and (3) evaluation is difficult since habits are unknown but more importantly there are two very different roles that managers must fulfill: allow the user to complete one task through the aid of several windows and be able to switch to or monitor a different task. To begin to answer these challenges, we present a interview-based study of window system users that investigates the way they manage screen space. Results include the characteristics common across all users as well as a classification of management styles. We also present some implications for building and evaluating window and display space management systems.
Be Quiet? Evaluating Proactive and Reactive User Interface Assistants

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003) Xiao, Jun ; Catrambone, Richard ; Stasko, John T.

This research examined the ability of an anthropomorphic interface assistant to help people learn and use an unfamiliar text-editing tool, with a specific focus on assessing proactive a ssistant behavior. Participants in the study were introduced to a text editing system that used keypress c ombinations for invoking the different editing operations. Participants then were directed to make a set of pre scribed changes to a document with the aid either of a paper manual, an interface assistant that would hear and respond to questions orally, or an assistant that responded to questions and additionally made proactive sug gestions. Anecdotal evidence suggested that proactive assistant behavior would not enhance performance and would be viewed as intrusive. Our results showed that all three conditions performed similarly on objecti ve editing performance (completion time, commands issued, and command recall), while the participants in the l atter two conditions strongly felt that the assistant's help was valuable.
Mobile Computing in the Retail Arena

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003) Newcomb, Erica Wingo ; Pashley, Toni George ; Stasko, John T.

Although PDAs typically run applications in a "stand-alone" mode, they are increasingly eq uipped with wireless communications, which makes them useful in new domains. This capability for more powerful information exchange with larger information systems presents a new situated context for PDA applicati ons, and provides new design and usability evaluation challenges. In this work we examine how grocery shopping could be aided by a mobile shopping applicati on that consumers access via a PDA while in a store. The interactive relationship between the physical space of the store and the human activity of shopping are crucial when designing for this application. To better unde rstand this interaction, we studied people's grocery shopping habits, designed and evaluated prototypes, and perfor med usability tests within the shopping environment. This paper reveals our design process for this problem an d a framework for designing and evaluating situated applications for mobile handhelds.
What's Happening?: Promoting Community Awareness through Opportunistic, Peripheral Interfaces

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2002) Zhao, Qiang Alex ; Stasko, John T.

Maintaining an awareness of information about one's own community and its members is viewed as being important, but is becoming more challenging today as people are overwhelmed by so many different forms of information. We have developed the "What's Happening" suite of tools to help convey relevant and interesting community information to people in a manner that is minimally distracting and disruptive, with little or no user set-up and interaction. The tools are more lightweight than e-mail and Usenet news, and opportunistic in providing information to people when they are not deeply focused on some other task. This paper describes these tools and the techniques that they use, as well as our observations of their utility and impact.
New Operations for Display Space Management and Window Management

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2002) Hutchings, Dugald Ralph ; Stasko, John T.

We present a set of new operations for managing screen real estate that allow windows to acquire more desktop space. This set of operations obeys the following guidelines: (1) the visible information contents of each window are preserved (i.e., operations never result in covering already-exposed window contents), (2) operation invocation requires only simple user action, and (3) windows grow and move in a natural and easily understandable manner, mimicking the interactions of colliding physical objects. We call the main operations expand and shove. Expand and shove represent two endpoints on a space-acquisition scale, and we give other possible operations called jostle and ram that fall between these two points. Additional concepts of undo (to allow windows to revert to earlier sizes and positions) and relevant regions (to allow more tightly controlled window information regions to be indicated) are also introduced. To theoretically support the methods used by the operations, we present a classification of the possible ways that pairs of windows can initially overlap and subsequently interact during the operations.
Anthropomorphic Agents as a UI Paradigm: Experimental Findings and a Framework for Research

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2002) Catrambone, Richard ; Stasko, John T. ; Xiao, Jun

Research on anthropomorphic agent interfaces has produced widely divergent results. We suggest that this is due to insufficient consideration of key factors that influence the perception and effectiveness of agent-based interfaces. Thus, we propose a framework for studying anthropomorphic agents that can systematize the research. The framework emphasizes features of the agent, the user, and the task the user is performing. Our initial experiment within this framework manipulated the agent's appearance (lifelike versus iconic) and the nature of the user's task (carrying out procedures versus providing opinions). We found that the perception of the agent was strongly influenced by the task while features of the agent that we manipulated had little effect.
Artistically Conveying Peripheral Information with the InfoCanvas

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2002) Miller, Todd ; Stasko, John T.

The Internet and World Wide Web have made a tremendous amount of information available to people today. Taking advantage of and managing this information, however, is becoming increasingly challenging due to its volume and the variety of sources available. We attempt to reduce this overload with the InfoCanvas, an ambient display of a personalized, information-driven, visual collage. Through a web-based interface, people identify information of interest, associate a pictorial representation with it, and place the representation on a virtual canvas. The end result is an information collage, displayed on a secondary monitor or net appliance, that allows people to keep tabs on information in a calm, unobtrusive manner. This paper presents details on how a person can create and manage information with the InfoCanvas, and how we provide such capabilities.