Emotional Design

by Don Norman

Emotion is actual what guides us in our product choices. It is not in fact the simplicity, elegance, and usefulness of the design but how it makes us feel on an emotional level. One of three in fact according to Norman.

• Visceral
• Behavioral
• Reflective

Norman describes visceral as being the emotion related to the initial impact of a products touch, feel and appearance. He then goes on to describe behavioral as the part that controls our everyday actions. Reflective is described as more of an unconscious thought/contemplation about the visceral and behavioral attributes. Meaning that the first two aspects will engage us faster but after a while we grow a larger attachment or enjoyment out of the item due to its reflective value. However this can work in reverse as well, if even though you may have had a happy feeling associated with an object having a couple of bad experiences can cause you to change your reflective outlook on the object and override the previous happy memories.

Overrall the book discusses how emotions help dictate how useful something appears to each of us and so must be taken into account when designing things. By making something easy to use your creating a sense of happiness for the user which will help them forget about some problems with the product. The Mini Cooper is mentioned to be fun to drive and so owners overlook of the problems with it. In conculsion Norman changed his mind and now believes that products should be designed for their emotional impact.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum Ch 1-7

by Alan Cooper

In the first half of his book Alan discusses the many problems with allowing a programmer design a program/product as of 10 years ago. He does this by bringing up two distinct categories of users, the apologists and the survivors, who deal with "cognitive friction" slightly differently. The apologists blame themselves for the their problems and troubles with technology; while the survivors are those who just barely scrape by. He discusses the differences between interaction and interface design and how they should effect how something is programed. He rants a lot about dancing bear products that were a problem at the time of the book being written and the reasons, or should I say reason, behind it, the programmers. He also makes a good argument for not wasting money on always hitting a deadline but instead actually making a good product that will help prevent customer disloyalty. Which he then goes on to discuss that if you can bring customer loyalty you don't have to worry about time to market as much and you can make better products that will bring higher customer loyalty. He raps up the first half of the book by putting almost all of the blame on programmers and saying that they are a completely different species called homo logicus.

Overall I think the first half of the book was better than Don Norman's "Design of Everyday Things" but I dont believe that the issues discussed apply as much to today's programming world because almost all of the things he discussed have been atleast partialy addressed by todays companies.

Team Analytics: Understanding Teams in the Global Workplace

by Jan H. Pieper, Julia Grace, Stephen Dill


This paper discusses an application called Team Analytics which combines information from many different enterprise tools for groups of people, specifically ad-hoc teams that communicate via email, instant messaging and video conferencing. It uses things such as an organizational chart, offering time zone awareness based on time pain calculation for the group needing to meet, picture gallery to help put a face to a name, and an attribute pie chart to help graphically show the percentage of each part of the team is associated with each part of the organization.



There was a survey done by a third party, the web site host, that had rather positive feedback for this application and all of its features. The only real complaint was that the time zone pain chart was hard to understand how to use; which I believe was because be people not knowing how to mark their time because the word "pain" confused them.

Overall I think that we do need a program such as this incorporated with any type of online team but I don't know if I would necessarily pick this one because its testing and usage was very specific to the company that made it.

A Reconfigurable Ferromagnetic Input Device

by Jonathan Hook*, Stuart Taylor, Alex Butler, Nicolas Villar, Shahram Izadi

This paper discussed the creation of a ferromagnetic input device which allowed the creation of any shape input formed with ferrous. The device has the ability to take input from such things as ball bearings, ferrous bladders, and any other kind of magnetic substances and use them as if they a were a track ball, a touch pad, or anything else you would like them to be. This was done through the use of multiple coil rapped permant magnetics configured in a checkerboard pattern (i.e. opposite poles) on top of a board that processed the data and sent it to the computer and was translated using a custom C# library.

This paper is very interesting because it offers a very user configurable input method. However with that diversitility there is a requirement of a complete library to be able to use any shape input device which I dont feel is possible as of yet. This is do to the fact that literly any touch or change of shape could/should be transfered into a type of input and even though the sensors will pick this up I dont see it being possible to then use that input in a meaningful way easily in a variety of programs which severly hampers the uses that can be obtained from this technology. But I do see the many possiblities this has to offer due to the magnetic displacement of almost every object once the technology has progressed far enough almost anything will be able to used as an input device and not just ferrous.

User Guided Audio Selection from Complex Sound Mixtures

by Paris Smaragdis

This article disscussed the use of complex sound, mainly human voice, to filter out specific sound in audio recordings for editing or removal. The concept behind the idea is that a user mimics that sound which they would like to work with and then the application filters out that sound. This can be used for such things as removing a singers voice from a track for those who wish to be able to hear just the background music. This is not a new concept to sound editing however the ability to use a specified sound "object" input is new to this field.

I believe that this is an awesome idea that could very well revolutionize normal user sound editing and mixing. However some faults I see with this work is the ability to truely mimic only the soudns that you would like to remove may limit your ability to properly filter the audio file.

The Design of Everyday Things

by Donald A. Norman,

The book is written about how the design of everyday things should be done and the existing issues with current designs as of 20 years ago. The author mainly focuses on the simplification of devices and the need to have their functions follow more natural mappings. Such things as stoves should not require you to have to think about which nob to turn in order to turn the correct burner on. He also describes designs that are so straight forward that you don't need anything except to have the knob for the correct burner to be in the natural location for that burner i.e. the knobs should not be in a row on top of the stove unless the burners are arranged in that way. Another example that he talks about is the fashion in which sinks are designed and how there are many natural mappings that can be applied to their design but due to the desire for creativeness and elegance there is no set standard in faucet designs. This causes many headaches for everyday users that must determine how to use each faucet they come to in their busy lives because there is not standard with which they can rely on.

One of the things you will notice when reading the book is that the author repeats points over an over again which is good to drive those points home but causes readers like me to find the book very repetitive. This also makes is seem almost like he is ranting about a small set of things instead of describing a very wide spread problem at the time he wrote the book.

Moving past his slight ranting I really enjoyed the part of the book devoted to human memory and how we handle situations and the way in which we explain them to ourselves. After reading this book and reflecting I find that I do the same kinds of things on a regular basis and always have to remember that upon new information I might have to rethink they way I think things work such as an air conditioning thermostat or a fridgerator as he describes in the book.

Overall I think it was a good read that will help me keep in mind the problems faced by designers today and the need to devote as much time as possible to making a product or application as user friendly and straight forward as possible to help users be able to take full advantage of the designs with out the lack of use of features that the author describes so much.

A Practical Pressure Sensitive Computer Keyboard

by Paul H. Dietz, Benjamin Eidelson, Jonathan Westhues and Steven Bathiche

This UIST article is devoted to describing how to manufacture a cost effective pressure sensitive keyboard and some of its application advantages. A design is proposed that is very similar to the current way of manufacturing keyboards that due to a slight design change will allow the measure being used on a key. Some of the applications they discuss that can be used to help improve things such as gaming, instant messaging and typing. In gaming they point out that with their new design gamers will not run into a problem with ghosting, which is where a set of three or more keys are pressed that exist on the same row and same column which in turns hides the pressing of one of the keys. For instant messaging they suggest ways of configuring pressure sensitivity to control style and size as you type. For typing they discussed the ability to sense the amount of pressure that is applied in order to determine if a key was meant to be pressed or only touched while reaching for another key. One of the other major advantages of this type of keyboard is that it will only affect a users use of the keyboard if the correct software is setup to interpret their typing.

I found this paper very interesting and kind of surprising. As a gamer I can see the tremendous advantages to having a keyboard that can interpret how fast you want to run or how far you want to throw a grenade just by the amount of pressure applied to the keyboard. Some faults I find with this idea is that until the ability to use the readings from this keyboard are made available in the software such as instant messengers, games, and word processors the ability to capitalize on the advantages on this innovation will be very limited. I would say that the next step in this work should be the push for wide spread adoption in manufacturing of this keyboard and the program changes needed to make the most use from it in current applications.

TapSongs: Tapping Rhythm-Based Passwords on a Single Binary Sensor

by Jacob O. Wobbrock

The UIST about TapSongs describes a method by which users can login into devices that have limited input via a tap melody being correctly entered. This is accomplished by a user creating a TapSong based on a melody and entering it 5 to 15 times in order to form a reconizable pattern that is more specific to that user. However this was said not to be a requirement and one way mentioned was to have preset jingles/songs that a user selected for their TapSong and then over time the device would build a more taylored TapSong for that user. This method of logging in is reported to be reliable due to the diffuculty there is in evesdropping on a users TapSong and then being able to reporduce it in an attempt to login.

This paper is intersting because it is offerring a way to secure devices that don't have keyboard access or microphone for voice recognition. It is also very interesting because as it points out in the paper a user is not required to look at the device in order to enter the password while also keeping the inputs at only one. One are I could see this being used in is in intelligince where it is possible that a user may need a device that can handle multiple different things and yet can not contain anything extra for space. With this software a user could initiate different comands by merely tapping out the correct song/jingle for it. I would say one of the faults I see in this work is that those like me that can not keep a rythm to save their life will most likely always have issues with this software and those who are musicaly talented and can pick up a rythm just by watching will become very adept at logging into others devices.