Human-Computer Interaction, Information Architecture, and User Interface Design
How do you design interfaces so that people can access information quickly?
How do you design an interface that is easy and intuitive to use the first time you are confronted
with it and at the same time allows expert users to work with it in as specialized and unencumbered way as they want?
I think there is tremendous and important work to be done uniting what we know about information access from psychology
(did you know count items faster if we can point to them?) with the design decisions that software engineers have to make.
The trick is matching the information in the world to the metaphors in the mind.
Mechanical Turk and online data collection
With the pervasiveness of the internet and hand-held wireless devices,
there seems to be a huge opportunity for gathering large datasets. Typically cognitive science experiments
are done on a small set of people (approx 10-20 college students) and we generalize to the population from there.
But now we can get loads of data from a wide range of people, quickly, efficiently, and likely this will lead to the
invention of new kinds of paradigms that are now possible. One example of such a site is
testmybrain.org where people can participate in psychology experiments.
Another site that I use for this is Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
While the most common use of this site is to get people to do menial tasks we wish a computer could do but can't,
it's pretty easy to use for quick experiments and has a relatively low learning curve to get started.
PowerPoint is pervasely used in academia and industry, and has been unfortunately
given a bad rap by highly-acclaimed information-display expert Edward Tufte.
However, if you take away the ghastly auto-template, I think PowerPoint is an incredible
tool. The best presentations use more pictures and diagrams than words, and guide the
audience's attention and expectations through the content as skillfully as hollywood filmmakers
can.
In addition, PowerPoint has some suprisingly helpful alternative uses besides the
standard speak-in-front-of-an-audience use. You can see more by clicking on the PowerPoint link.
Website Design
I like designing websites, to figure out what information should go where, and
how to take into account the different kind of users of the site and what information needs
they will have when they enter the site. Too bad my html coding skills are lagging a bit
behind my design skills. That said, here are the websites I mustered up so far.
