Too Much Information – Context-Aware Applications 67
ChelleChelle writes with a link to IBM research on the limits to and lessons learned from two context-aware computing projects:
"As the researchers Moran and Dourish put it, 'Context awareness is fine in theory. The research issue is figuring out how to get it to work in practice.' The article lays out two attempts by IBM to do just this. Grapevine and Rendezvous are services offered to IBM employees as a means of looking into the promise and perils of context-aware computing. From these two experimental services the authors have drawn several valuable lessons." From the article: "What computer scientists commonly call context often has more to do with technology than with work situations, people, or frames of mind."
Information Overload... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Lesson learned: don't work with clients who have a right-click phobia.
Re:Information Overload... (Score:5, Funny)
If they answered no to the first and yes to the second, then you'll probably be fine.
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printer version - all one page (Score:1, Informative)
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Computer-arrange social gatherings (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Computer-arrange social gatherings (Score:5, Funny)
In the voice of HAL.... (Score:5, Funny)
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No! (Score:5, Insightful)
As I commented on the intuitive OS thread or whatever it was called, users (or at least I) don't want an OS that acts unpredictable. I don't want to wait around for hours for a message before finally figuring out that my cell phone decided I didn't want to be reminded of them right then. Consistency is uncompromisable.
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There does need to be room inside of the human/machine interface for choice, however. I would love to see interfaces be deve
Re:No! (Score:4, Interesting)
For example, I'd want my phone to not ring between 11pm and 7:30am unless it was somebody in my 'close friends and family' group, because they only ring me during that time if they need me urgently, right now, yes I do need to wake you up.
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Unfortunately at least one person in that circle has had the telephone company permanently disable caller ID from their line, and I can't set it up so "if there's no number, ring". It can be overridden on a per-call basis but anyone in my closest family/friends who needs to call me at 2am is unlikely to be in a fit state to remember that.
Re:No! (Score:5, Insightful)
Being able to customise something is one thing. A computer deciding what should be customised and how is something entirely different. You can have one without the other.
Just because I called Jane Doe's work phone the last time I called her doesn't mean that I want her mobile phone number to replace her home number as my preferred number. If I want that, I can set that.
Just because I looked at a book at the online book store that was incorrectly classified as "Juvenile" doesn't mean that I want "Juvenile" added to the top of the list of categories that show up.
Just because I recently paid yearly taxes doesn't mean that I want "Town of Springfield" to show up each time I enter a "T".
Just because I haven't used the CD ripping program for a month doesn't mean I want it to disappear from where I know it is in the program menu.
Let me choose these things, dammit!
Remembering things you have done is fine. It doesn't imply replacing something else with what you have done, which is what appears to happen way too often. An easily accessible history function is nice. A mandatory history replacing your own configuration is not.
Regards,
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*Art
Re:No! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, we don't learn well by reading each and every option given to us each and every time, because the options change. We learn by repetitiveness, and always finding the same options in the exact same place is necessary for that. Context sensitivity is HELL on users who try to use tools efficiently instead of having to check for possible layout changes every time they do something.
Context sensitivity impresses the suits, who only sees a tool once or twice, if that, and it's the suits who decide. IBM is all for catering to the suits.
Regards,
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*Art
Re:No! (Score:5, Informative)
I have noticed that users generally fall into two distinct groups, those who understand the underlying concepts and those who don't. This difference seems to dictate how a user will actually respond to a change in interface.
Someone who doesn't understand the underlying concepts completes computer related tasks by mimicking a previous action that brought about the desired results. They couldn't answer a single question regarding what they were actually doing or how it worked. These are the type of people who cannot transition between OSes or even APP versions very well. This group is exemplary of your statement.
The second group has a firm grasp on the concepts they are working with. They can transition between OSes and APP versions much quicker because they understand WHAT it is they want to do, they don't rely on the HOW.
I do agree that if you had a constantly changing interface that it would be difficult to become an efficient operator. Yet I can also see how some people might function better with something like this. There is the opportunity to strike a nice balance between constantly changing interfaces and completely static ones. Your web browser is a perfect example of this. High level functions that have triggers in a static layout, but content navigation that changes drastically from site to site. While there are some best practices concerning site navigation, they are still extremely dynamic. Just look at how frequently the terminology changes from site to site concerning the navigation.
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I've always noticed that the users who memorize the steps (who probably think they are being efficient) associated with a particular task tend to be the most spaced out when minor elements change - perhaps due to a quick slip-up or oversight of their own - which then changes the context of the app's response. Then they're completely lost, and mad at the computer to boot.
As a person involved in HCI work, I often wonder if we'll be able to bridge the gap between these two camps. Clearly, everyone who
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DVD killed the VCR with its menu, instant ff/skip and reliable freeze-frame... all ways by which the user controls how cont
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Aside from the menu, ff/skip and reliable freeze have to do with the manner of consumption - not presentation. The same material is presented in the same way, all your doing is regulating how you consume it. This is true on websites too. You are controlling the consumption of pop ups and ads by thwarting them. The content is provided to you as it, it doesn't change depending on who you are. Your browsing agent does that for you.
Even th
Re:No! (Score:5, Interesting)
You may not want an unpredictable OS, but I don't like wasting my time, either. You're probably thinking of instances like Windows' "feature" to customize your menus, which is more annoying than helpful. Or Clippy, for that matter.
On the other hand, if I'm trying to contact my cousin, in 2006, I have four options: e-mail, text message, cell phone, home phone. I would rather not go in order if some sort of context-aggregator service knows that her cell phone is on the move somewhere in north-central Illinois. Businesses would appreciate knowing where their employees, or other employees, were at any given point in time.
Or, imagine a website (Gmail, for example) that responds to the user depending on if it knows you're at work, home, or the library, and adjusts its security settings accordingly.
I'm not a time freak and I don't demand to utilize 100% of my time, all the time, but if this could save me some hassle that's come in this age as a result of our technology, I'm for it.
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Re:No! (Score:5, Insightful)
- You leave while a 6h long computation is running, come back later to discover that Windows XP decided to work for 30 min and hibernate for 5.5 hours.
- At a critical moment, Norton decides its pop-up is more important than whatever you're doing.
- You want to show a video to people but your media player decides it should first spend 5 minutes auto-updating.
- You leave your car headlights on and walk in the woods to take a leak at night. Some timeout feature decides to turn off the lights and leave you stranded in the dark.
Some technologies are past their prime. Engineers are bored, so they add automatic features. Consumers have to waste time understanding those features, and turning them off or outsmarting them.
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Yes! (Score:1)
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Chris Crawford defines interaction as a form of conversation - http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/JCGD_Volume_7/Fu ndamentals.html [erasmatazz.com]
Computers are getting pretty good at their end of the conversation, and this IBM work suggests the thinking about a response part is improving. But they still really suck at listening to us.
Just a simple way of telling a computer good/bad when it does something "automatically" would help immensely. It's how we train a computer to rec
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Worse than dumb, closed, so you can't fix it!
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I suggest that your cultural assault include unpredictable cell phones.
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Put the worst of them into one with "personalized" buttons - the "least used" buttons are hidden by default...
Look at Douglas Englebart's 1968 demo. We sure haven't really got very far in the past 40 years.
I definitely don't like those stupid "innovations" like "wobbly windows" and silly animations that actually _DELAY_ responses to user commands.
Funniest sentence from the article: (Score:5, Insightful)
And in further news, the Thought Police reported today that Winston Smith has rented an apartment without a telescreen.
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What they need... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What they need... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What they need... (Score:5, Funny)
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He pointed out that these devices will attempt to be context-aware, and will do or not do certain things based on what they think you want. These devices will screw this up.
He suggested that the usability community come up with a simple, but flexible system for giving devices positive or negative reinforcement. I believe he proposed three buttons: "thumbs down," "not what I
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Question the use of the term (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, CAC is the newer and hipper acronym.
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I question the use of the term "context-aware computing" in these two projects, which simply convey to users whether other users are available for IM.
That's only the grapevine project. The other one, rendezvous, doesn't involve IM, and does modify menus -- specifically conference call system menus based on knowledge of the user and the user's calendar.
I for one... (Score:1)
The Context of Context (Score:4, Interesting)
The trouble is, when you say you want something to be 'context-aware' you are saying you want it to be aware of all the complexity. Software cannot do this. You want to create something can run on your computer that is more aware than a human is and not just aware in the data sense of facts and trivia, nor simply in the analytical sense of adding facts to facts and substracting trivia. What you want is intuitive awareness and this is the one thing you cannot have in software and systems of the complexity available today (it remains to be seen if it can ever be gained through deterministic computation - the rote addings and subtractings of on and off states or, if it can be found, if it will collapse what was previously thought of as intuition into merely imperfect analysis that would only be acceptable for a human to conclude).
So what am I saying? I'm saying that "context awareness" is just a buzzword for a de facto implausibility. I point you to this quote from the article: "While people clearly do these things today without additional help from context-aware services, the goals of such services are to allow people to make better communication choices, engage in a richer and more valuable interaction, and waste less time in accomplishing their interactions, while providing significant cost savings to the enterprise."
This is contextual statement. It sweeps all the true complexity away in exchange for semantic complexity. It really says nothing and simply uses 30 or so words where two would do: work better.
Why am I going on about this? Becuase it is intellecutally dishonest to pretend that you can brush away the complexity of the world by calling it context. It leads to pointless research projects where aggregations are made, imperfectly, from imperfect information when it could already be obviously judged from the outset that they would ultimately not scale to complexity at hand. It results in 'Xanadu' projects that will forever be stuck in a state of being 'so close' to being useful, but never actually becoming so. There are more concrete things we can attack, things were we can make actual statements rather than vague and amorphous statements about what a system might theoretically do. It's just a matter of rolling up the sleeves and doing some work instead of engaging in intellectual laziness and then wasting other people's time with our frivolities.
Which is all to say that I found the article and information contained therein not worth the time of reading.
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HELP! (Score:4, Funny)
The only context aware application (Score:3, Insightful)
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Context-aware applications? You mean like... (Score:1, Funny)
Like, "Hello, I noticed you are writing an essay on "prostate problems". I have faxed your essay to a local proctologist for you. Thank you, have a good day."
Contextual Systems must be rules based (Score:1)
- You're in a meeting with project team-mates and the project leader calls - ring through.
- You're in a meeting with project team-mates and a non-project relate
Half the time even humans aren't context-aware... (Score:1)
It's all the fault of you stupid people out there! (Score:2)
Rather than computers and systems that allow stupid humans to stay just about as stupid as they are.
There is a difference between the two. Really!
For the latter, the goal is making AI or some other system to second guess individual humans (who are assumed to be stupid) and make decisions for them, or have some "expert" or "centralized authority" make the decisions for them (e.g. the RIAA decides whether you get to play the son