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The Design of User Interface in Forming Reflective Behavior

8/17/2017

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How could people now recognize the meaning and function of the regularly changed strategy of visual language of Digital User Interface? Do they really think about the actions they are taking while interacting in a digital environment? As almost all the people are now dealing with their daily work and study through different screens, the digital environment of user interface does established its own context and system to mediate meaning and functions to its user. In term of the way how people learn and react to new things, which is reflecting past experience to forecast future activity in order to help getting better preparation for future as well as performing better in present. The strategy of User Interface design does follow the principles of how people identifying images in reflective level of processing structure in their mind. In general, a good User Interface design strategy should not make its user confused by how to interact with. What’s more, they should also understand what their actions means.

Back to 1946 when the first computer came to the world, it’s hard to imagine how people understand in what way the computer was working and how they can control it. Only a few of people that knew how to interact with the computer by typing in code, but there is no effective visual feedback at that time. Until 1973, the first GUI (Graphical User Interface) Xerox Alto released, the design around an “office” metaphor (also a first) was built as a research computer and therefore wasn’t available for commercial release. [1] The visual graphic language started to use the image of real world stuff to translate the meaning and function showed up in digital screen. Decades have been passed, now the user interface design still follow the basic principle, which is bring things that users are familiar with to help them understand digital environment. And now, people are quite experienced to interact with different interfaces, and even don’t reflect on their interacting behavior about what their actions mean in a digital environment.

Reflective design covers a number of fields. It is all about message, about culture, and also about the meaning and function of digital environment or its use. This research paper is dedicate to analysis and mediate the role of reflective behavior and reflective design play in User Interface strategy, which includes the discussion of how human reflection influence their cognition towards metaphor visual language in digital environment, and how to apply reflection to User Interface design.

Reflect and Understand Meanings in Digital Environment

Reflective as Emotion


We have powerful brain mechanisms for accomplishing things, for both creating and acting. We have skilled musicians, artists, athletes, writers, and carpenters. All this characters requires a much more complex brain structure than is involved in automatic responses to the physical world. Reflective level of processing sits in a bigger emotion system, which also contains visceral level and behavioral level. The three different levels of processing structures in human brain are considered to result emotions in the studies by Don Norman that mentioned in his book Emotional Design. [2] Thus how people reflect with design, especially a user interface in digital environment? Are what users seeing exactly how the functions working? Do users really understand the consequences of their choices of option? Most of time, the answer is not. Because not often time user could understand where their present actions sit in the whole sequence of a system, neither the potential meaning of the consequence.

Reflective upon Visual Language

In the early age back to 1980s, artists are the group of people who designed most of icons in user interface. Susan Kare's (an artist and graphic designer who created many of the interface elements for the Apple Macintosh in the 1980s) philosophy on icon design is simple, "I believe that good icons are more akin to road signs rather than illustrations, and ideally should present an idea in a clear, concise, and memorable way. I try to optimize for clarity and simplicity even as palette and resolution options have increased." This philosophy is at the core of Apple's early commercial success. People reflecting while they first seeing the icons that they are not familiar with, reflective emotion make them to build connections to those things they familiar with in their past experience. People may speculate a lens icon may represent picture taking or editing application only because they know what lens functioning in physical world.

User do need an understandable digital environment to let them interact with, and Skeuomorphic design, an effective way to help user to get the sense of what the things show up on the screen means plays an crucial role in the history of interface design. For instance, a folder icon meaning it contains files, and a trashcan means things that be deleted locate there. It is not exactly a folder or trashcan, but in digital environment their figures are mediate similar functions that works a more abstract way (Figure 1). Users actually are not reflecting how computer works by seeing those icons; instead they just interact with the screen under behavioral level because they understand the metaphor of images. Visual strategies could help to let user to reflect during their interaction. If the design of trashcan, for example, could indicate the status of how many days it hasn’t been cleaned (Figure 2), users will have direct visual feedback to direct them reflecting on what they have deleted and go check what they have deleted. Thus, the behavioral level is not conscious, which is why you can successfully drive your automobile subconsciously at the behavioral level while consciously thinking of something else at the reflective level. In traditional user interface, which are featuring game-like reactions for quick decision-making, users do not have a chance to slow down the speed of interaction and reflect on their behavior and experience.
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Figure 1. Real trashcan and trashcan icon in Mac OS
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Figure 2. The changing status of trashcan
Compared with Skeuomorphic design that used in user interface or operating system, Flat design requires more experienced understanding of how images and abstract figures means. How users recognize those icons, such as share, like and save with abstract figures located at specific places of an interface? Reflective helps people synchronizing the previous cognition towards digital user interface to understand what are those things represented. The accumulation of reflect in human brain could help to understand a more abstract and sophisticated context or system, while reflecting and forecasting happens simultaneously.

User makes assumptions about the functions and digital visual language they encounter. Browsing a website, opening a new downloaded application, interacting on social media. They generalize their experiences; future interactions are expected to be similar, and other functions or operating system of the same genre are expected to operate in familiar ways. Cognition build through time, and users are getting used to the “principle” of digital interface environment. Icons, symbols and even specific structure or location of elements could be hints to help user to understand what are these things mean and works. The coming issue is why people need reflective behavior of user interface? As the use of a certain kind of Digital Interface changes, there is often a need to reconsider the meaning and function behind its design.

How Reflective Design Could Help Improve A Better User Experience?

Why User Need Reflecting in Digital Environment

The design methodologies of traditional interface, such as User Centered Design are oriented towards efficient satisfaction of short-term interface goals, [3] but many not serve the best interests of the users in the long term. Sometimes, people do need a delay or confirm of their interaction under unconscious behavioral level. For instance, when people have to leave their computer and close their files that were working on, it’s necessary to remind them they haven’t save the file yet (Figure 3). Consider other circumstances like posting a comment, login an account, check out shopping cart and submit a form. Do users really want to post the comment right now? Do they remember to sign out when they want to leave the page? Do they really have the sense of how many things they added to the shopping cart? And are they sending the right file? All those issues could be omitted during a quick decision-making under an unconscious condition.
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Figure 3. Reminder pop out when closing a file without saving
The reason why reflective behavior is important in improve user experience is because people are lacking of cognition or conscious of the consequence of their interaction in digital environment, especially in social context. User may not know their comment will post to how many other users, unless information in somewhere displaying specific number. Imaging how the number will influence user’s comment behavior, are they tending to reconsider their comment content if the number changes from small to a large one? Most of time they do. Because the larger number of audiences shows on the interface, the less private comment users will post. Without reflecting on their interaction and consequence, users tend to do behave more visceral of their emotion. An effective user interface should keep its user clear with what they are behaving, instead of leading users’ interaction in unconscious level at some core parts of function, such as the area of privacy, communication and self-image building etc.

Users Who Need Reflecting on User Interface

As reflection applied to the design of User Interface, users will experience a “slow” or “delay” of digital environment decision-making process. For those users who experiencing stressful situation in social context, users who are new in a digital environment, and users that are facing important choices to make (such as personal bank account information, private message sharing, and school or work files to sign online etc.), a reflection of their actions and consequences is necessary right in time. In a culture sense, self-image building is another situation when people reflecting of their behavior. For instance, before you want to upload a picture with personal content, how would you suppose others would think about your picture? Most of time, people consider more about how to make others think the same way they would like the viewer to think. It is all about the relation between view and being viewed. Based on the needs of user’s potential desire of reflection as well benefits from reflecting, how to apply reflection to User Interface design seems reasonable to be considered in design practice.

Reflective Design Strategies

There are many aspects should be concerned in reflective design of User Interface, which including digital environment visual language, notification, action delays, displaying hidden consequences, and the visualization of aggregated data. All these methods in general could lead reflective behavior while interacting with digital interface. For instance, digital environment visual language, which users could get the meaning from different figures instantly. Usually the functional metaphor from another system that people may familiar with in their daily life will indicate a relative more abstract structure or system in digital environment. As we have mentioned (see the Figure 2.), the change of trashcan mediate different meanings to the user to lead a reflective behavior of considering the time of deleted files. Another one like visualization of aggregated data in social context; for example, a delay of post in 50 seconds later may be added to comment post function. Thus the inserted step between comment and post will lead reflective behavior in social context. Both of these methods do evoke user reflecting towards their behavior when interacting with different interface.

We define a Reflective Interface as a type of Intelligent User Interface, which applies Artificial Intelligence and knowledge-based techniques to the issues of human-computer interaction. [4] Apparently, reflecting in User Interfaces can encourage user to think about why they made the choice and what consequences will have after specific choice has been made. The core issue of how to apply reflection to design could borrow the framework from principles supported by Donald Schön on Reflective Design (Schön, 1983). Goel (2010) best summarizes Schön’s ideas,
Schön stated three notions of the reflective practitioner, “reflection in action,” “reflection on action,” and “ladders of reflections.” One would reflect on behavior as it happens, so as to optimize the immediately following action. One reflects after the event, to review, analyze, and evaluate the future. And one’s action, and reflection on action makes a ladder. Every action is followed by reflection and every reflection is followed by action in a recursive manner. In this ladder, the products of reflections also become the objects for future reflection. [5]

In the research study that organized by Hallnäs and Redström (2001), they offered helpful insights in how to apply reflection to design. A simple example mentioned in their study is imagining an electronic doorbell that plays short fragments of a very long melody each time you press it. To fully grasp the doorbell through its behavior, we have to stop and reflect for a moment each time it rings and only over time can we grasp the whole melody. It is technology that claims time. Is this ‘‘slow’’ doorbell a better doorbell than the ordinary one playing the same two or three tones over and over again? The difference in aesthetics between the two doorbells is a difference in philosophy of design; the ‘‘slow’’ doorbell is not designed to be ‘‘just’’ an efficient signaling mechanism for non-reflective use, but rather an artifact that through its expression and slow appearance puts reflective ‘‘use’’ in focus. [6] In digital environment, similar “slow” design strategies could be addressed at some parts of interface that user need reflecting about their interaction behavior.

Either designers of the User Interface have to reflect on their design strategies and principles. Why user need reflection at specific moment, where those moments sit in the system and how to communicate the choice user made influence the following steps in a system? What are other choices available there for the user when they are facing decision-making issues? The answers could form a well-build interface, through which the end-user will be encouraged (not forced) to think about the meaning of a given situation, and offered an opportunity to consider their options for reacting to it in a positive way.

Conclusion

User’s emotion in reflective level does influence decision-making process in Digital User Interface environment. On the other hand, the reflective behavior could also stimulating design strategy improvement of User Interface, which could evoke user’s further reflective behavior in a conscious way. User need reflecting on User Interface, because they have to understand what their interaction means, and what the consequences following their decision as well as what it means to other users. Under these circumstances, the design of User Interface in forming a reflective behavior will help user better understand both the context of digital environment as well as their behavior.

[1] Kate Mclnnes. (2010). Know Your Icons Part 1 – A Brief History of Computer Icons.
http://design.tutsplus.com/articles/know-your-icons-part-1-a-brief-history-of-computer-icons--psd-9805
[2] Norman, Donald A. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books, c2004.
[3] Birago Jones. (2012). Reflective Interfaces: Assisting Teens with Stressful Situations Online. 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[4] Lieberman, H., Liu, H., Singh, P. & Barry, B. (2004). Beating Common Sense into Interactive Applications. AI Magazines, 25(4), 63-76.
[5] Goel, Sanjay. (2010). Learning & Computing Education: Reflections and Ideation. Design is a Reflective Practice: A Summary of Schön’s Views. Retrieved from http://goelsan.wordpress.com/2010/08/20/design-is-a-reflective-practice-a-summary-of-schons-views/
[6] Hallnäs, L. & Redström, J. (2001). Slow Technology; Designing for Reflection. In: Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Vol.5, No.3, pp.201 212. Springer.
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3D Val

6/24/2015

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Graduate Research Symposium

3/25/2015

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The Tenth Annual NC State University Graduate Student Research Symposium

The Tenth Annual NC State University Graduate Student Research Symposium was held in the Jane S. McKimmon Center March 25th, 2015. The poster session was from 1:30 to 4:00.  This year, there are over 200 poster presentations representing research being conducted in 64 graduate programs.
This event is co-sponsored and organized by the NC State University Graduate Student Association (UGSA) and the Graduate School. 

The primary goal of the Symposium is to showcase the outstanding quality and diversity of graduate research at NC State. This was a great opportunity for all to take a look at the interesting research projects being conducted at the graduate level.
As one of two presenters of Graphic Design program, I presented my graduate thesis project at the symposium. My research study hasn't been done yet, which will be finished by April 28th; but the general scale of my research has been partly presented on the poster. Over all, this was a great experience both as a presenter and a viewer. Had fun browsing great researches of different disciplines other than design.
2015 Abstract Book
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Master's graduate thesis project

3/1/2015

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Research Questions:

Main Question:

How can the design of biofeedback data visualization
collaborate with digital interactions to assist patients/users
in executing a self-oriented recovery process?


Sub-questions:

1. How can available personal technologies collaborate effectively to track, report, and
mediate health data generated by a patient/user through daily activities help him/her form
correct habits during a recovery process?

2. How can the design of interactions with data visualizations, analysis and archives help to
provide clarification so that users can build effective self-awareness of their performance
and satisfy their motives during a self-oriented recovery process?

3. What data is useful during a tracked activity and what data contributes long-term to the
recovery path? How would the design of interaction in these cases help build meanings and
connections between short-term and long-term data visualization?



Scenarios:

The following three scenarios show three different potential ways of how users connect to the self-oriented recovery system on different occasions. Depending on their specific needs and what they are doing in real time, each user may not go through the entire system and functions. Thus, the entrance (where the user starts his/her interaction with the system) may vary.
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Each of the three users represents one specific situation. Marco will interact with the system by receiving a notification, Emily will execute exercises with the system, and Nolan will go through part of the system by setting up a new recovery and notifications.
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Marco is a second year graduate student. He’s now working at his studio on a project. A few minutes later, Marco’s wearable device started to vibrate. Marco then sees a pumping circle show up on his watch. Simultaneously, a notification sent from his iPhone shows a picture on the locked screen. The notification indicated that specific movement has been tracked from his patella. He suddenly realized that he had been crossing his legs for a long time while he was concentrating on his work. Because he is suffering from Chondromalacia patella, he shouldn’t have crossed his legs, but it is hard to control unconscious behavior.

He unlocked the screen, the system directly opened the application, and an animation indicated that pain is occurring around his left knee. By clicking the next step, he can report details about this tracked movement. Marco swiped the options that were available to describe what he was doing. He found the option of  “crossing legs”, and chose the pain type of  “numb pain” with pain level of  “1”, which means “acceptable” because the pain didn’t even attract his attention. Marco is then presented with a pattern consisting of many small dots, to represent the numb pain feeling, and uses his finger to paint on the screen over a leg anatomy to mark where exactly he felt the pain happening. By saving the report, Marco then got access to the data center, which shows all the movements that had been tracked so far today listed in a vertical way on the left side of the screen.

The system automatically showed the long-term data visualization according to the movement that just been reported, which indicated the reported times of  “crossing legs” for the past whole week. Marco tapped on monthly view, he realized though he kept forgetting not to cross his legs, the trend showed he was performing better. Marco also noticed that most of the pains that happened recently are acceptable pains through the “pain types” long-term data visualization right under the movement types data visualization. Switching from “Instant data” to “Pain types” visualization, the comparison of pain types and pain levels percentage data through the whole month Marco saw on the screen. He found “numb pain” held 20% of all types of pains the past one month, and 40% of the total pains are acceptable pains. Compared with the beginning several weeks of recovery, Marco felt the sense of accomplishment and motivated. Thus, he shared the recovery database with his doctor right away to update with his doctor.

After 4 months self-recovery process with the assistance from the system, Marco fully recovered from Chondromalacia patella. And all the recovery data has been saved as an archive in his profile, meanwhile, Marco decide to join Chondromalacia patella group to share his recovery data and experience with other patients.
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Emily, a User Experience designer who has been worked at a local company for 4 years. Two weeks ago, Emily felt sharp pain at her wrist of the right hand. She went to see doctor, and was told she got carpal tunnel problem.  The bright side is she doesn’t have to take a surgery at this moment, and she need to try to do some exercises regularly.

It’s a Monday noon after lunch; Emily takes out her phone and opens the recovery assistant system choosing the exercise option directly. She then takes a quick warm up report, which the screen shows a gesture of hand anatomy each time while she can try to do the same and report if she can do it “easily”, “painfully”, “hardly”, or “never” by choosing an appropriate word in the list. After several gestures report, Emily chooses one of the carpal tunnel exercises to start with. Firstly, a short animation shows basically how to execute the exercise. While Emily is doing the same as the animation showing, a notification send to both her wearable device and smartphone. Her wearable device on her exercise wrist start a one-second long vibration, and simultaneously her smartphone screen shows a picture that indicates the wrong gesture she might doing right now. After the exercise, Emily goes to the exercise performance data report center in the system, there she see her exercises frequency, how many wrong gestures tracked from each exercise, as well as her performance improvement over time according to the gesture she reported each time at the beginning of exercise. The whole process takes Emily only 7 minutes, and then she goes back to her work again.

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Nolan has been suffering sharp pain around his left knee for one month, and then he decides to see his doctor. The doctor told him that he got Chondromalacia patella problem, but the bright side is he doesn’t have to take surgery to recover from it. But Nolan also been told that he had to keep himself avoid from certain types of leg postures, those postures sometimes may not cause sever pains, but they could accumulate bad result over time, which is exactly what happened to Nolan. Thus Nolan has to recovery from Chondromalacia patella all by himself through over three months process.

It is really hard for Nolan to keep in mind of all types of leg postures that he shouldn’t do all the time. Thus he starts a new recovery in the self-oriented recovery assistant system. He taps “Start a recovery”, then he see a human body anatomy, which allows him to choose specific body part to locate a certain problem. By choosing the left leg patella, Nolan starts a recovery plan. He set up the estimate recovery time with 3 months, and selects a few of postures listed in the category that will start to track his daily movement. In order to get real time reminder, Nolan goes to the “Notification” center in the system to set up specific notifications that will send to him whenever certain movement has been tracked from sensor. Though every movement will be tracked, Nolan doesn’t want himself will receive notification from every single time. Thus, he set up one notification that will only sent him notification during the daytimes of weekdays, and only the every 5th movement being tracked that will he receive a notification. Nolan sets the wearable device will keep vibrating, while his smartphone will simultaneously shows up an image as well as a short message. He set the message as ”you are doing something wrong with your knee now”, and also turns on the Siri, which will read the message out. In order to make data become more accurate and better help in reflection, Nolan also activates the data report process, which will allow him to add detail information whenever he receives a notification.
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Pain types animation:
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contact me if you would like to know more details of this project.
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Augmented reality: Tangible & distributed user interface

3/7/2014

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AR used in navigation system displaying information on wind-shield glass
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Wearable AR device (Google Glasses)
As computer, smartphone and tablet are already become infrastructure both for the public and individual, virtual reality estrange humans from their “natural environment”. Different types of interfaces play crucial role in both work and daily life, which can provide the functional help in the fields of task support, navigation, social networking, education, advertising, art and entertainment etc. However, the Tangible User Interface suggested that rather than forcing users to enter the virtual world, one should augment and enrich the real world with digital functionality, which is closely tied to the initial motivation for Augmented Reality and Ubiquitous Computing.

Despite of the benefit or drawback of virtual world, the variety of ended devices sharing and creating data at real time is already an inevitable trend. This Multi-Device Environment consists of Multi-computer environment, Multi-display environment (MDE) and Multi-surface environment. The idea of displaying data on different interface simultaneously makes challenges for the Distributed User Interface. Because different devices have different screen size and resolution ratio, different input devices such as touch, stylus, mouse, voice and gesture etc. This makes difficulties for transfer the data seemingly between different interfaces. The Multi-Device Interaction Technology including input redirection, which is a key aspect of Multi-device Environment, PointRight (redirect pointer and keyboard input to different display) and Mighty Mouse (use VNC to redirect mouse input across different sessions on different computers and different platforms). Those technologies is to manage interactions in a MDE to help realize the data transfer, sharing, input, displaying and interacting smoothly. The developing of DUIs creates prerequisite of Augmented Reality, the cooperative relationships between physical space and virtual data will rely on it for user to interact with.

Augmented Reality (AR) has the characteristics of combines real and virtual information, allows user to interactive in real time, and is also used in a 3D environment. The prevalent utilize of simple AR could be easily seen nowadays in many fields. For instance, navigation, games, translation and advertising has already been designed as applications that could be used on smartphones. A product example is Google Glass, which makes AR technology wearable. There is confusion between Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (VR) should be clarified that Virtual Reality is a technology, which completely immerses a user inside a synthetic environment, and user can’t see the real world. In contrast, Augmented Reality is interacted in real 3D environment, which has to use camera to recognize a marker. Because of the technological challenge such as object recognition and sensor accuracy, the utilize of AR in the field of medical industrial, education and task support will take more time to cater the specific functional requirement. Although Augmented Reality is not a new word in the field of new media technology, it is still not well known by most of the public. Thus the lack of quantified user experience of Augmented Reality still influenced the creation of more functional, affordable, and low-learning curve experience design. There are challenges of AR in the future like technical problems (object recognition and sensor accuracy), social problem, privacy (this means a person walking around in the physical world will no longer just be a person, they will become part of the “Internet of Things”, and a fiction thriller “Freedom TM” by Daniel Suarez describes this type of scenario), real physical safety, as well as unauthorized augmented advertising. But the opportunities of AR is more than expect. It will play a bridge role to connect physical world to virtual space automatically, which helps to realize the Internet of Things that everything will be connected. Data in the cloud will build a new connection with the real world objects, and people will get access to data matches what they see immediately. Imagine that when seeing a building, all the relevant information including how many people in it, the history of it, what kind of function it provides…
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AR for smartphone applications (Konstruct)
freedom (tm) preview chapters
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