General News (From UsabilityNews)

Social Science meets Computer Science at Yahoo

Editor — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:00:41 +0000

By James Temple

Shortly after Carol Bartz took over as chief executive of Yahoo Inc. early last year, she met with Prabhakar Raghavan for an overview of the Sunnyvale Web giant's research division. As the head of Yahoo Labs ran through the catalog of computer scientists on staff, Bartz turned to him and asked: "Where are your psychologists?"

Raghavan was stunned the newly installed CEO had so quickly gotten to a question he'd been asking for years. His answer was they didn't have enough.

That's changing. In the last year, Yahoo Labs has bolstered its ranks of social scientists, adding highly credentialed cognitive psychologists, economists and ethnographers from top universities around the world. At approximately 25 people, it's still the smallest group within the research division, but one of the fastest growing.

The recruitment effort reflects a growing realization at Yahoo, the second most popular U.S. online site and search engine, that computer science alone can't answer all the questions of the modern Web business. As the novelty of the Internet gives way, Yahoo and other 21st century media businesses are discovering they must understand what motivates humans to click and stick on certain features, ads and applications - and dismiss others out of hand.

Yahoo Labs is taking a scientific approach to these questions, leveraging its massive window onto user behavior to set up a series of controlled experiments (identifying information is always masked) and employing classic ethnography techniques like participant observation and interviews.

The insights have been published in academic journals and have already changed how the company organizes search results, sets reserve prices in ad auctions and leverages human politeness to keep people glued to Yahoo.

Internet access is 'a fundamental right'

Editor — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:00:55 +0000

Almost four in five people around the world believe that access to the internet is a fundamental right, a poll for the BBC World Service suggests.

The survey - of more than 27,000 adults across 26 countries - found strong support for net access on both sides of the digital divide. Countries such as Finland and Estonia have already ruled that access is a human right for their citizens. International bodies such as the UN are also pushing for universal net access.

"The right to communicate cannot be ignored," Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), told BBC News. "The internet is the most powerful potential source of enlightenment ever created." He said that governments must "regard the internet as basic infrastructure - just like roads, waste and water. We have entered the knowledge society and everyone must have access to participate."

The survey, conducted by GlobeScan for the BBC, also revealed divisions on the question of government oversight of some aspects of the net. Web users questioned in South Korea and Nigeria felt strongly that governments should never be involved in regulation of the internet. However, a majority of those in China and the many European countries disagreed. In the UK, for example, 55% believed that there was a case for some government regulation of the internet.

The Net generation, Unplugged

Editor — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:55 +0000

THEY are variously known as the Net Generation, Millennials, Generation Y or Digital Natives. But whatever you call this group of young people—roughly, those born between 1980 and 2000—there is a widespread consensus among educators, marketers and policymakers that digital technologies have given rise to a new generation of students, consumers, and citizens who see the world in a different way. Growing up with the internet, it is argued, has transformed their approach to education, work and politics.

“Unlike those of us a shade older, this new generation didn’t have to relearn anything to live lives of digital immersion. They learned in digital the first time around,” declare John Palfrey and Urs Gasser of the Berkman Centre at Harvard Law School in their 2008 book, “Born Digital”, one of many recent tomes about digital natives. The authors argue that young people like to use new, digital ways to express themselves: shooting a YouTube video where their parents would have written an essay, for instance.

Anecdotes like this are used to back calls for education systems to be transformed in order to cater to these computer-savvy students, who differ fundamentally from earlier generations of students: professors should move their class discussions to Facebook, for example, where digital natives feel more comfortable. “Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach,” argues Marc Prensky in his book “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”, published in 2001. Management gurus, meanwhile, have weighed in to explain how employers should cope with this new generation’s preference for collaborative working rather than traditional command-and-control, and their need for constant feedback about themselves.

But does it really make sense to generalise about a whole generation in this way? Not everyone thinks it does. “This is essentially a wrong-headed argument that assumes that our kids have some special path to the witchcraft of ‘digital awareness’ and that they understand something that we, teachers, don’t—and we have to catch up with them,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, who teaches media studies at University of Virginia.

Rewriting the Human-Computer interaction Handbook

Editor — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:00:04 +0000

On March 8, as the world celebrates International Women’s Day, all eyes were on 31-year old Indrani Medhi when she stepped up to the podium at Emtech 2010 to receive her honour as a technological trendsetter.

Medhi, an Associate Researcher at Microsoft Research India, is the only woman in the sought after India TR35 roll of honours, a list of 20 promising young innovators under 35 handpicked by an eminent jury selected by Technology Review India. The 111-year old technology magazine from MIT unveiled its list at the emerging technologies conference EmTech in Bangalore.

Medhi gets the accolades from the India TR35 jury for her work in helping those who cannot read use mobile phones and PCs easily. A student of design, Medhi has developed text-free user interfaces (UIs) to allow any illiterate or semi-literate person on first contact with a computer, to immediately know how to proceed with minimal or no assistance.

As Medhi points out, in text-based conventional information architecture found in mobile phones and PCs, there is a number of usability challenges that semi-literate people face. By using a combination of voice, video and graphics in an innovative way, Medhi has overcome this challenge. Medhi discovered the kind of barriers that illiterate populations face in using technology through an ethnographic design process involving more than 400 women from low-income, low-literate communities across India, the Philippines, and South Africa. “In addition to the general inability to read text, the other major challenge was the difficulty in navigating hierarchical menus in current information architectures,” says Medhi.

To overcome these barriers, Medhi applied a few key principles: extensive use of hand-drawn, semi-abstracted cartoons with voice annotation in the local language, aggressive mouse-over functionality, a consistent help feature, and looping full-context video dramatizing the purpose and mechanism of the application.

Demonstrating sensitivity in understanding the needs of the illiterate population who will be using this interface, Medhi has applied these principles to design four applications: job-search for the informal labor market, health-information dissemination, a mobile money-transfer system, and an electronic map. A lot of thinking has gone into her design, where she has studied cultural context, motivation and cognitive difficulties before building her framework.

Lip reading Mobile promises End to noisy phone calls

Editor — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:04 +0000

Technology that could see an end to the bane of many commuters - people talking loudly on their mobile phones - has been shown off by researchers. The prototype device could allow people to conduct silent phone conversations.

The technology measures the tiny electrical signals produced by muscles used when someone speaks. The device can record these pulses even when a person does not audibly utter any words and use them to generate synthesised speech in another handset. "I was taking the train and the person sitting next to me was constantly chatting and I thought 'I need to change this'," Professor Tanja Shultz of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology told BBC News. "We call it silent communication."

The device, on show at the Cebit electronics fair in Germany, relies on a technique called electromyography which detects the electrical signals from muscles. It is commonly used to diagnose certain diseases, including those that involve nerve damage. The prototype that is on display in Germany uses nine electrodes that are stuck to a user's face.

"These capture the electrical potentials that result from you moving your articulatory muscles," explained Professor Shultz. "Those are the muscles that you need in order to produce speech." The electrical pulses are then passed to a device which records and amplifies them before transmitting the signal via Bluetooth to a laptop. There, software translates the signals into text, which can then be spoken by a synthesiser.

In the future, said Professor Shultz, the technology could be packed in a mobile phone for instantaneous communication.

Games User Researchers band together

Editor — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:00:04 +0000

GUR-SIG is the worlds first group dedicated to supporting the needs of games user researchers. Its members include researchers from the major platform holders, large publishers, smaller developers, consultancies and individual researchers.

PlayableGames’ manager, Ben Weedon, will be speaking at the first annual summit of the Games User Research Special Interest Group (GUR-SIG), a special one-day event, to be held in parallel with GDC 2010 in San Francisco. Ben will be speaking about ways of conducting user research on games with children, alongside Carla C. E. Fisher of Cornell University. He will also discuss methods for conducting international game user research, drawing on practical experiences from recent research studies.

Ben said: ‘I’m very excited to be speaking at the summit. The very fact that this event has been organised shows how games user research is becoming more and more part of the development process, which can only be a good thing for gamers, and the industry as a whole.’

The summit takes place on Wednesday March 10, 2010. All seats for the event have been taken, but interested parties can find out more, and sign up for video recordings of the summit, by joining the Games User Research SIG on LinkedIn, or by contacting PlayableGames.