By February 2009, all over-the-air television broadcasts in the United States will be digital. There are good reasons for the switch such as better use of bandwidth. However, people who still use rabbit ear antennas for TV reception will need a new digital converter box which is not a simple undertaking. While this video is obviously tongue-in-cheek, the switch-over will not be easy for many. As the video illustrates, it is not clear how to get an antenna, and afterward, how to install it.
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 points out his age (55) and his words-per-minute with Swype (50). Not bad.
If you’re interested in research on alternate text input devices, check out some of the following:
Wobbrock, J.O. and Myers, B.A. (2008). Enabling devices, empowering people: The design and evaluation of Trackball EdgeWrite. Disability and Rehabilitation: Assistive Technology, 35-56.
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 a $50,000 gift from Google to study how older adults navigate the Web and what Web site design features make searches easier. The grant will fund an extension of his research on aging and technology.
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“The findings are that when you take a Web site and organize it hierarchically — like how you might organize your documents on your computer with folders within folders — older adults are much slower and make more errors when they are searching for information compared to younger adults,” Pak said. “We think that this is the case because the situation does not allow older adults to use their greater knowledge toward the situation. However, when you take that same Web site and organize it around keywords or concepts instead of folders, older adults are able to bring their wealth of general knowledge to the situation and perform almost equivalently to younger adults in the task.”
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That is, older adults seem to perform better using so-called “tag-based sites,” which are Web sites that organize their information around frequently used keywords. Pak said that while tag-based sites are still relatively new, several popular sites use tags. These include Amazon.com, Gmail.com, and the photo sharing Web site Flickr.com.
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 I became interested in HF) and have been a keen observer ever since. The movie was so-so but I distinctly remember the interfaces for the ship being fluid, novel, and cool.
Or more recently, the multi-touch, gestural interface used by Tom Cruise in Minority Report.
Mark Coleran creates infographics/visualizations for film/tv. His demo reel is definitely worth a look (quicktime web plug in required).
Interesting scenario of the future web browser from Adaptive Path and Mozilla. I can see many potentially interesting human factors research questions. It seems overly complicated on first look but I guess that’s an empirical question!
NEW YORK - If Sen. John McCain is really serious about becoming a Web-savvy citizen, perhaps Kathryn Robinson can help.
Robinson is now 106 — that’s 35 years older than McCain — and she began using the Internet at 98, at the Barclay Friends home in West Chester, Pa., where she lives. “I started to learn because I wanted to e-mail my family,” she says — in an e-mail message, naturally.
Blogs have been buzzing recently over McCain’s admission that when it comes to the Internet, “I’m an illiterate who has to rely on his wife for any assistance he can get.” And the 71-year-old presumptive Republican nominee, asked about his Web use last week by the New York Times, said that aides “go on for me. I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself.”
Technology can send a man to the moon, help unlock the secrets of DNA and let people around the world easily communicate through the Internet. But can it substitute for nature? Apparently not, according to a new study that measured individuals’ heart recovery rate from minor stress when exposed to a natural scene through a window, the same scene shown on a high-definition plasma screen, or a blank wall.
