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Robotic Cellular Secretary
Over at gizmodo.com I found an interesting article where a guy at MIT is doing research into using a robot to interface between you and your cell phone. At the moment, its a squirrel that when someone...
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Reflection on wearable technology
After the lecture on Monday, I decided to do a bit of reading on wearable technologies. The reason for this is mainly because I found the lecture not very HCI related and more related to cost,...
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The iButton!
As I was searching around for wearable devices, I came across this fantastic piece of hardware. The iButton! While it is not directly a wearable device, it is a great piece of technology and can be...
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Emotion in Music Selection
This blog post is going to take a look at a music player application for the computer which uses a novel approach to playback. Most of us have gotten used to traditional methods of interaction, such as...
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Organising Our Files
For the past few days I've been thinking a lot about the problem of file management on a computer. "The notion of files and folders has been with us for so long that it almost seems axiomatic" -...
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(P) The Blue Screen of Death...
During a meeting, we discussed how computer systems can crash and how this affect would our system, which is mostly a computer based system. What if the user was driving along in our intelligent car...
View Article(P) Legal Issues
Another issue that came to light from our meeting was the question of legal reponsibility. Ben has given a scenario where a car suffers the inevitable blue screen of death, familiar to all windows...
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Attracting Attention
Mac OS X has a nice way of alerting a user to events by having items on the dock to bounce up and down to alert the user. This method is a good way of getting the users attention but it has to be used...
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(P) Questionaire - Demographic
The resutls of our questionnaire seem to show that a large percentage of car drivers are male and between the ages of 16 and 25. I'm not sure how representative of the population these results are, but...
View ArticleConsumers Are Stupid
According to Reuters, 50% of product returns are due to customers not being able to operate it. This surely is one of the many studies that point towards the idea that "consumers are stupid". The...
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Office 12 and "Ribbon UI"
In an extention to the previous post, I'm going to talk a little bit about the usability issues that Microsoft found with Office 2003 and below, and how they are trying to fix it for the next version,...
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Tactile File Browsing: Crap
I've just been reading articles around the web to do with future envisioning of user interfaces in operating systems as it's an area that I've caught an interest in recently. This is just a report on...
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Microsoft's Origami: New, unique and pointless?
Microsoft has released their new ‘Mini PC Project’ called Origami. It is a cross between a laptop and a pocket PC in an attempt to fill a gap in the market. They believe that people want the power of a...
View Article(P) Task Analysis
Music PlayerTurn on player.Change volume.Track changeTurn OffNavigation SystemSetting of destinationChange of destinationTurn OffHazard Avoidance SystemEnable systemDisable systemChange notification level
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(P) Voice Recognition Testing on Prototype
As part of the user centered design process we have created a user evaluation plan which will evaluate a particular sub set of our prototype. The problem with testing our system is that although we...
View Article(P) Music Control
There was some discussion today concerning how we would change the volume in our car by using our voice. We came to the conclusions that if the volume is really high, our car wouldn't be able to hear...
View Article(P) The prototyping...
As Mike discussed below, we set up a small prototype, found here (Music Player), where we asked people to say what voice commands they would use to do certain tasks.The Music PlayerThe first voice...
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I want one for Christmas!
I can’t seem to believe what I was reading when I was doing my usual BBC News website crawl. Remote controlled insects! At first, I thought they meant robotic insects… but no!They are on about...
View Article(P) The Final Prototype...
An interactive flash animation of the final prototype can be viewed here. It's the final result of many weeks of constant tweaking as part of the user centered design.Please note its 3.5mb in size so...
View Article(P) Questionnaire Design
In order to write an effective questionnaire a number of points needs to be considered: clarity, leading questions, phrasing, and prestige bias. When designing our questionnaire we were careful to make...
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(P) Intelligent Car Article
I came across an article about an intelligent car. This article both envisions levels of intelligence in a car and explains commercial technologies that have been developed with improving the driving...
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(P) Reaction game (experiment)
To test the reactions of people (for our hazard avoidance system), what better way to do it than a good old pub drinking game? We have taken a well-known game and adapted it to test people’s reactions...
View Article(P) Summarising the Project
Here is a brief summary of the life cycle of our design process:Brainstormed initial ideasRefined idea of intelligent car - brainstormedWorked out specific areas we wanted to concentrate on...
View ArticleReflection
I think after completing this module, I can say probably for my whole group, that i've never realised how much HCI is really a philosophy and how it teaches you not to think in a conventional way. We...
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