Talking-Points presented at the School of Information expoSItion on Monday, March 17th. We received a flood of positive response on our demonstration at the exposition. In addition to a display board containing information about the Talking-Points project and video clips of our WOz (Wizard of Oz) exercises, we were also able to have a clickable dummy of the Talking-Points system available to individuals, giving them the ability to gain an interactive sample of the Talking-Points experience.
Check out our blog to see more details.
Posted by jhild at 10:07 PM | Comments (0)
There are a couple of news about our Talking-Points project. You can read them by going to our own Blob at http://talking-points.org but I will also put a little summary here:
First we defined what our "Wrap" is going to be. We hope to deliver a research paper, a prototype of a Talking-Points mobile device and a working internet database to create and edit location information. Read more ...
Then we will be presenting our project at the School of Information's expoSItion on Monday between 12:00 and 2:00pm. Read more ...
And finally we started developing our client software last week and wrote a blog post about how the client architecture is going to look like. Read more ...
Posted by jhild at 09:49 PM | Comments (0)
Last week we conducted a “Wizard of Oz study” for our Talking-Points design. This is "an experiment in which subjects interact with a computer system that subjects believe to be autonomous, but which is actually being operated or partially operated by an unseen human being." [Wikipedia]
Method
We equipped two test participants with a cellphone with headset and let them walk down South University Street. We wrote a script with location information that we read to the participant over a second cellphone when he passed the respective locations. This information would later come from the social Talking-Points database. While the participant walked down the street we followed him with a video camera and observed how he would behave. We also recorded what the participant was saying as well as what the Talking-Points narrator was reading. After the experiment we gave the participants a short survey and interviewed them about their experience and suggestions. There were two different runs: on the first run we told the participant that he should use voice commands to control the systems on the second run he should use the keypad of his phone.
Data
So we ended up with two videos of the two runs we completed. Those videos we uploaded to Youtube for everyone to see.
In addition to that we have all the information we gathered from the surveys and the interviews.
Findings
We got very valuable insights on how to improve the design of our product as well as the design of this study.From the participants feedback it seemed that a voice controlled user interface would be a better than an interface through the cellphones keypad. We also got a lot of suggestions for new interactions with the system that we had not thought about in our initial design. For example, the user used the previously non existing command “repeat” because he couldn’t understand what the system was saying because of background noises. Another thing that showed to be really important would be a feature to skip ahead in the information the system is giving you.
A problem with the methodology of the study was that the narrator was walking to close behind the test person. The test person repeatedly tried to establish eye contact with the narrator when using voice commands. The task of the study was to get to TCF Bank on the Corner of South University and Church Street and see what kind of comments users had left about this location. We realized that in the future we would have to come up with a more realistic background task for the study. But all in all we were very pleased with the results of the WOz study and are planning to repeat it with blind or other sighted participants.
Posted by jhild at 01:54 PM | Comments (0)
This is a first try of a diagram for the social database that is going to store all the location data for the Talking-Points project. The database has two main goals:
1) make it as easy, accessible and usable as possible to contribute to the database
2) provide relevant and reliable information for each location
The format of the diagram is similar to an ER diagram but at this point only intended to show the concept of the database and not yet the actual tables that it will consist of.
The basic concept of the database is to differentiate between two kinds of location information. On the one hand (marked with the red ellipse) the core location information and on the other hand additional information.
The core information is supposed to include the most relevant, straightforward and reliable information about the location. This includes a meaningful title, a short description and location metadata such as coordinates, address, official URL and so on. This information is created when a location gets tagged with an RFID tag. Important about this information is that it needs to be objective and reliable. We are not 100% sure how we will ensure this, but there will be some form of checking and moderation. You can think of it a little bit as stable versions for Wikipedia.
The additional information is where the social part comes into play. Once the user has some basic information about the location he might want to know more. In this case we would like to offer different directions/types of additional information:
* One direction is going to be opinions. Here the users can rate the location on a 5-star scale and state their opinion.
* A second direction would be current information about the location. This could be opening times, news stories related to the location or also current special offers in case the location is a business.
* The last direction would additional general information about the location. This information would be stored in maintained in a wiki page so that every user could add what they think is relevant concerning the location. One topic that would probably be interesting for many locations, would be something about its history.
In addition to that you will also be able to add links and tags to the locations. The tags could be used to only get notified about certain locations that are tagged with for example “blind” or “tourist”.
To see which information will actually be presented to the user of the mobile device I have marked those with the green ring. Anything else will be used only indirectly for this part.
One really major thing that we still need to address are incentives for putting information into the database. The design should already be fairly easy and usable, so that barriers to use it are low. But lack of barriers is not enough, there also need to be positive incentives. There is the incentive that you will help blind people by maintaining location information in this database, but how could user make personal use of that?
As with anything on this blog, any feedback that you have concerning our database design is very welcome and will be highly appreciated.
Posted by treker at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)
GROCS '07 PROJECTS [Winter 2007]
GROCS '06 PROJECTS [Winter 2006]
GROCS '05 PROJECTS [Winter 2005]
grocs.info@umich.edu
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
