1 User Interfaces for Pervasive Computing Devices Prof. James A. Landay January 7,

2 UI Challenges  Pervasive computing devices will not have the same UI as “dad’s PC” *there will be a range of devices -often with small screens & alternative input +pens, speech, gesture, etc. -many special purpose to particular applications +appliances *devices usually require other infrastructure  How to explore this further? *let 50 undergraduates at the problem!

3 Outline  HCI course & project description  Resulting undergraduate projects  Collaborative note-taking with NotePals  Directions for the future

4 CS 160: User Interface Design, Prototyping, & Evaluation

5 What is HCI? Organizational & Social Issues Humans Technology Task Design

6 Goal of our HCI course (CS 160)  Learn to design, prototype, & evaluate UIs *tasks of prospective users *cognitive/perceptual constraints affecting design *techniques for evaluating UI designs *importance of iterative design for usability *technology used to prototype & implement UIs *how to work together as a team *communicating results to a group

7 Project Structure  Iterative design of a real UI  Students propose & choose projects *4-5 person teams  Semester long project worth 45% of grade  Four presentations *one 7-12 minute presentation / team member

8 Scenario for last Fall  Soda Hall of the Future *everyone has PDAs -students, faculty, staff -assume IBM WorkPads *ubiquitous cradles or wireless networking  All projects involved this scenario *ubiquitous networking not used by all designs  IBM graciously donated WorkPads  The top 3 teams got to keep their WorkPads

9 Fall Semester’s Projects  Ink Chat  Pocket Change  PocketProf  Rendezvous  VMOD: Video & Music On Demand  NotePals II  Nutrition/Exercise Tracker  Shopping Companion  Video  Workstation Scheduler

10 Sketching & Storyboarding

11 Sketching & Storyboarding

12 Low-fi Prototyping

13 Low-fi Prototyping

14 Low-fi Prototyping

15 Heuristic Evaluation & User Testing

16 Heuristic Evaluation & User Testing

17 Heuristic Evaluation & User Testing

18 NotePals: Collaborative Note Taking on Pervasive Devices

19 How NotePals Works Meet in any environment Take free-form ink notes on WorkPads* 1 2 *WorkPads/Pilots are becoming ubiquitous

20 How NotePals Works (cont.) Dock WorkPads with PCs & press “HotSync” Browse notes on the Web 4 3

21 Conference Notes

22 NotePals for Classroom Note Taking  Students always want slides in advance *often not practical or advisable  NotePals solution *synchronize notes w/ presentation (slides or A/v) *students can browse their own notes w/ slides *students can share notes & cooperate  Expected success since NotePals has been successfully used by our group for 1 year *over 3000 pages of notes in our repository

23 Student Note Taking

24 Results of this Experiment  At start of semester 89% of students said they took notes in class (72% share)  After 4 weeks of this course, only 48% reported taking notes *all said because slides are online & complete  Only 17% with NotePals, others reported *application too slow *screen too small *UI hard to learn *paper more natural

25 Solutions to this Problem  Adopt NotePals II or TeamNotes UI *both eliminate gesture for moving cursor

26  Create a better slide/note browser  CrossPad client *more natural for note taking *lots of success since prototype came up in Nov. -has resulted in many more notes in the repository *would like to obtain pads for an entire class  Re-run the experiment in a class that is less dependent on detailed lecture slides Solutions & Future Directions  NotePals II or TeamNotes UI *both eliminate gesture for moving cursor