From the monthly archives:

September 2008

Older adults prefer less choice than younger adults

by Richard Pak

In the recent issue of the journal Psychology and Aging, researchers Andrew Reed, Joseph Mikels, and Kosali Simon examined whether older adults would prefer having fewer options when faced with a decision-making task.  Confirming previous research, they found that across 6 domains (e.g., prescription health plans, hospitals), older adults preferred having fewer options rather than greater.
In their study, 102 older [...]

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Hospital Bracelets Face Hurdles as They Fix Hazard – NYTimes.com

by Richard Pak

New York’s 11 public hospitals are at the forefront of a national movement to standardize color coding of hospital wristbands to designate patient conditions, in which purple — the color of amethyst — means “Do Not Resuscitate.” Red, or ruby, indicates allergies, while yellow — call it amber — marks someone at risk for falling.
The goal is to prevent potentially [...]

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Infovis in the Debates

by Anne McLaughlin

I‘m currently watching the first presidential debates, presumably with some fair percentage of America.
There is a graph at the bottom of the screen called “Audience Reaction.” I cannot figure out the data.

As you can see, the two parties and independents are represented by colors on to the left. The Y-axis seems to increase (I think the center is zero, but [...]

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Live… from New York, it’s HFES!

by Anne McLaughlin

Richard and I are currently attending the Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. I thought I’d report on some of the interesting work we saw this week.
First, a shameless plug for research conducted at my own university. David Sharek and Mike Wogalter presented data on how clueless and careless the “wired” generation can be when it [...]

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Mac-based usability testing software: Silverback

by Richard Pak

Easy usability testing on the Mac is now possible with Silverback.  The software looks incredibly simple and is quite inexpensive.  Although it appears to have much less functionality than Morae (on the PC), it is about 30 times cheaper!  They probably shouldn’t be compared since Morae has so much more functionality, but Silverback looks like a good solution to capture [...]

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Pew Internet: Use of Cloud Computing Applications and Services

by Richard Pak

A new Pew report examines the usage of cloud computing applications and services which is a topic I’ve been interested in recently.  Something noteworthy was that, as we suspected, older adults don’t appreciate the benefits of cloud computing compared to other age groups:

Older adults’ are seemingly the ones who could benefit most from cloud computing.  Keeping mail or other information [...]

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“Science of fun”; User testing the game Spore

by Richard Pak

Here are some interesting videos about game testing at the user experience firm bolt|peters.  The first is an overview of user testing games and the second video is some humorous test sessions of the game Spore.  Really fascinating stuff.  Note the extensive use of think aloud

Science of Fun from bolt peters on Vimeo.

Spore Research: Outtakes from bolt peters [...]

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Visualizing election news

by Richard Pak

Here is an interesting website that aggregates news items about both US presidential candidates and visualizes that data providing a nice dashboard-like “snapshot”.  Once you click on a bar or candidate name, it shows you word-sized historical graphs (sparklines) of their popularity.  For more information on sparklines or other ways of visualizing data, see Edward Tufte.

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Text Input in a Mobile World

by Anne McLaughlin

I‘ve always thought text inputs from anything other than a keyboard were clunky. Cliff Kushler, the man who invented T9 (a word completion aid) has developed Swype, a new text entry method that capitalizes on eliminating the press and release component of the touchscreen. What was once a discrete target acquisition task becomes a continuous one.

In the CNET interview, Kushler [...]

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Tag-based interfaces and Aging

by Richard Pak

I was recently interviewed by our campus news service about receiving a Google Research Award to study information retrieval and aging. The research involves designing information retrieval interfaces around the capabilities and limitations of older adults (those age 60 and above). Here is a snippet from the press release:
Richard Pak, an assistant professor of psychology, has received [...]

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Everything in, Garbage out!

by Anne McLaughlin

But where? Well, that probably depends on where you live. I ran across this post on the Freakonomics Blog (part of the NY Times) bemoaning the difficulty of sorting recycling in Germany*.
We have four different containers in front of our building: paper (blue), packaging (yellow), biological (green), and the rest (gray) — and that doesn’t include the containers for three [...]

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Vigilante Warnings

by Anne McLaughlin

I snapped this picture near NCSU today. Looks like the garbage workers or apartment dwellers decided to take matters into their own hands.

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Google Chrome: Incognito

by Richard Pak

You may have heard the news of the new Google web browser and while I do not have deep thoughts about it yet I found the following interface element humorous. One of its lauded features is the ability to surf without leaving “tracks” (e.g., cookies).  When you are in that mode (incognito mode) you see the following creepy guy staring at you:

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(too) Minimalist design

by Richard Pak

How do you work this thing?

[via kottke.org]

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Infographics in Movies

by Richard Pak

Have you ever seen those cool interfaces or graphics that are shown in movies, mostly sci-fi, and wondered who created them?  I ran across this old post on Flowing data about a guy who creates those “infographics”.  Sounds like a very cool job!  I think I first became aware of infographics/visualization in the 1997 movie Event Horizon (which is when [...]

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