TEI Journal - Module 1 Week 1 -

Johannes Lund With

My first week of the course was greatly affected by being ill for the first two days of the
course, thus missing both group formation and the seminar on tuesday.
This had the consequence that I couldn’t meaningfully work on the assignment, as by
the time I got to campus all the other groups were so far along that I didn’t feel like I
could join in without burdening them with more work. This means that my group - which
will be formed next week, probably being Niki and myself, as she also missed group
formation on monday - will have to make the assignment next week concurrently with
the week 2’s assignment. Therefore, this journal will focus on preliminary reflections for
that work, based on my peers’ presentations and their feedback, rather than reflections
on the process itself. As such, it will not be broken down into a day-by-day format,
though I intend to follow this format for future journal entries. Likewise, the lack of
visuals in this text is due to this week’s detached nature and is not an indication of
future entries where I’ve done active design work.
Additionally, as i missed the seminar on tuesday, I have to summarize each of the four
texts included in the course literature (summaries included at the end of this entry) so I
will also include some general reflections on the literature overall.

Reflections on assignment
Glanceability is a very interesting topic, and seeing my peers’ work with the literature
fresh in memory was very stimulating. Particularly the concepts surround cooking, both
in a professional and amateur setting, was interesting, as this is a case where one’s
hands are occupied in many different ways, many of which can be obstructive to
interacting with a screen (greasy or wet hands, wearing gloves etc.). This particular
challenge wasn’t explored too much by either of the designs, but is nevertheless
stimulating to think about - particularly as glanceability, as I see it, is often most relevant
in cases where one’s hands are occupied in some way that doesn’t allow us to, say,
reach for our smartphone in the pocket. This concept was also explored in interesting
ways by other groups, like the ones working with biking in groups.

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 This is a good avenue for thinking about my own upcoming work on the matter: looking
for situations where the hands are occupied or inaccessible in some way, or there are
other good reasons to not jut reach for one’s phone.
Of course, this is not the only metric that a glanceable design should care about, but it
seems a good place to begin looking for problems that can then be expanded in other
directions.
With all this in mind, here are some preliminary ideas for concepts that I would like to
dicuss with my group next week, keeping in mind that early, immediate ideas are often
bad and simple, and that I want to leave space open for my group member’s input, so
these are very much just first stabs to get the ball rolling

Finding each other in crowds

Finding people in crowded situations like a concert or a festival can be difficult and is a
circumstance where checking one’s phone can be impractical with people bumping into
you etc. Usually, “find each other” functions are based on a map, but here a simple
arrow with 360 degree directionality pointing towards the other person might be a more
glanceable solution, as your position might not be meaningfully different in a
geographical sense (eg. you’re at the same concert venue) while your relative position
(eg. “she is to the left of me”) is more relevant.

Alternate GPS/Guiding styles

Following the point above, maps is not always the most appropriate way to give GPS or
route guidance information on an interface as small as a smartwatch, even though there
are many good uses for glanceable route information - this question can definitely be
explored more generally than concert venues.

Driving

Driving in cars is another case where glanceable information is relevant, but also
interesting, as diversion of attention, even for very brief periods, can be fatally
dangerous, though there is also a venue for making some information-gathering less
attention-demanding, and thus safer. This could be things like configuring a handless
head-set, getting trafic information pertaining to your route, manipulating GPS, or…?

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 Using motion tracking to keep track of whether the car is moving or not is an interesting
possibility for making the input safe to work with…

Working out / sports

Of course the canonical example here is an activity tracker for something like walking,
like discussed in the paper by Gueveia et al. but I feel like there are other venues to
explore: something like getting a measure of how well you are performing a given
activity or sport while you are doing it (like the score of a game) or perhaps tools for
practicing as a team in sports, like getting information about the location or status of
team-mates or even opponents.

Reflections on literature
Overall, the selection of literature for this week was quite interesting, if a little focused
on the smartwatch as a glanceable interface. This focus is understandable and good, as
we are working with the smartwatch ourselves in the projects, but it was also good to
get an example of something else in paper 3, where they discuss e-mail instead.
Learning about the problem in the context of more than one technology makes it easier
to discern what potentials and limitations there are to “glanceability” and what are from
the given technology. It is also an interesting topic for consideration how the same
glanceable information/interactions might differ across different media, even if it is a little
outside the scope of the practical work at hand.

For future reference for myself, I would say that the first paper felt a little disjointed and
incomplete without the context of the whole thesis, if it was ever written, though it
introduces some key terms in enough detail to have an idea of what it is. Useful as a
short entry into the subject if one isn’t bothered by some details not making too much
sense without the bigger picture.
The second and third papers are very enlightening. I particularly found the second one
useful, as the way they work in it feels very reminiscent of the kind of work we’ve been
doing during the studies: open up the design space, test with users, distill some
findings. It is very instructive as an example of how to conduct and write up the results
of such an exploration in a lucid and concise manner.

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 The third paper is a little less favourable on the “read time investment to useful
information”-ratio, but its exploration of the e-mail medium is very interesting and their
explanation of, and reflections on, how they set up the different experiments is
exhaustively explained and can probably serve as a good guide for how to set up these
kinds of experiments in my own future work.
The final paper was quite difficult to follow, did not seem interested in exploring their
design at all, and went on at length about the technical solution, something which is of
less interest to me as a designer. They did not properly probe the possible pitfalls of
their design, or satisfactorily represent any kind of usable user testing. I heard from a
fellow student that this was included as an example of a bad paper, something I find
very reassuring having read it. Do not recommend further re-reads, except perhaps as a
“what not to do” example.

As a final note, writing these summaries has actually been a very good way to digest all
the reading from the week. Unfortunately I cannot compare it to the efficiency of the
seminar, but I certainly feel elucidated on the subject and feel capable of working with it
- even though it has proved fairly time consuming, as I tend to need to get a grasp of the
text as a whole before I can start writing. But on weeks where I have the time, both
during this course and further on, I urge future me to pick up the habit of writing
summaries, just as a tool for effectively taking in a text.

Literature Summaries

Glance 1
Matthews, Tara. “Designing and Evaluating Glanceable Peripheral Displays”, 2006

The paper is a proposal for a thesis (?) that would outline guidelines for designing, and
an evaluation framework for understanding, glanceable peripheral displays, noting that
the existing terminology on the subject is inconsistent to the point of slowing down the
process. The paper summarizes preparatory work done by the author (and presumably
a bigger team, as she continually refers to a “we”) and proposes studies to understand
what design characteristics lead to the best glanceability.

Introducing the problem, peripheral displays are posited as an important way to let
users multi-task, something central to a lot of information work, as it lets them monitor

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 information with less disruption of their focal task, to allow for more informed decisions
about when to switch tasks and to more easily resume tasks set aside earlier. It should
be noted that work is focused on visual displays and on glancing rather than peripheral
vision or on questions of attention capturing – ie. on taking information in after already
looking at the screen.

Summarizing interviews with designers, the author notes a desire for greater ability to
meaningfully make choices between the myriad of options available. The author outlines
how analysis based in Activity Theory identifies peripheral displays as tools used at the
operation level, meaning something that requires low cognitive effort. Interviewing even
more designers, they find that they employ the following qualities for glanceable
displays: abstraction, distinction, matching user expectations and maintaining
consistency.

This is followed by a summary of an empirical study, in which it was found that showing
task-relevant information and change detection added benefit to multi-tasking and
positively impacted task flow, resumption and reacquisition.

The author then proposes two empirical studies to measure the glanceability of
peripheral displays, studied in the context of email technology. The first study compares
speed and ease of interpretation of abstract representations that the user has not seen
before to determine what dimensionalities lead to more interpretable representation.
The second study does the same with known representations, aiming to find out when
users switch from using their perceptive to their cognitive capabilities, and which
representations are quickest to identify.

The hypothesis is that there is probably a sweet spot where a display shows just
enough in a simple manner which is more effective than showing a lot of meaning
through complex visuals. This is a matter of balancing symbolism (complexity of
individual representations) and dimensions (amount of different representations).

Glance 2
Gouveia, Rüben et. al. “Exploring the Design Space of Glanceable Feedback for
Physical Activity Trackers”, 2016

The paper explores physical activity trackers, focused on “smart watch” technology. It
outlines two phases of the exploration, an initial mapping of the design space followed

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 by testing four concepts with a group of users and reviews the findings of these tests.
The paper is mainly concerned with affecting the activity of walking, using metrics like
“steps walked” to gauge activity.

The initial design space exploration resulted in 21 concepts and 6 design qualities. The
relevant concepts are summarized below, while the qualities are:

Abstract

Integrates with existing activities

Support comparisons to targets and norms

Actionable

Leads to checking habits

Acts as a proxy for further engagement

Four of the concepts, chosen for their diversity and feasibility, were deployed in the field,
during a 28-day study with 12 participants, all male and physically active, found through
a specialist forum on wearable tech on the website Reddit. These four concepts are:

TickTock: Shows the user a gauge of their activity within the past hour, in the
periphery of the smartwatch. This is done to reinforce checking habits through
scarcity (only information on the past hour) and to be actionable in inspiring short
bouts of activity on a regular basis, though it does not presume a daily goal.

Normly: Compares the user’s daily progress to that of users with the same goal
each minute. This is chosen in the expectation that normative feedback would lead
to more frequent action.

Gardy: Uses the metaphor of a garden blossoming to show progress towards the
user’s goal to sustain engagement through curiosity and attractiveness.

Goal Completion: A “baseline” app that tracks users’ activity in comparison to a

preset goal (10K steps by default, but configurable by the user)

Each participant used each application for a week, followed by interviews. The
participants used the interfaces for the full duration of the week.

The paper finds the Gardy to be the least effective design, both measured in terms of
usage sessions, steps walked and user satisfaction. This, the authors speculate, is due
to the design clashing with the user’s sense of fashion and self-identification, and a

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 steep drop-off in interest once the garden is fully explored and the users have seen all
that there is to see (motivation to see all the content being an important factor, some
users even lowering their goal to get through it quicker)

On the more popular side, the paper finds the self-regulating effect of TickTock to be
effective. Normly, while overall effective, particularly when the user is close to beating
their peers, was found to be demotivating for users who are either far below or above
this point, as successful levels of activity was seen as either unreachable or already
attained. The authors end up noting that while this can be seen as less important if the
users increase their activity, the mechanisms invoked do matter in terms of establishing
more sustained use patterns.

Glance 3
Matthews, Tara et. al. “Evaluating Peripheral Displays”, 2009

The text concerns the evaluation of peripheral displays and the criteria for doing so and
consists of three main parts: first it describes models and methods for evaluating
peripheral displays, then it goes on to present past evaluation criteria before using these
in a case study to demonstrate the pros and cons of two different evaluation techniques.
The text presents two models (or “evaluation frameworks”) and two methods. The first
of the models are based on work by McCricard et al. from 2003 and emphases of the
aspects of interruption, recation and comprehension.   The other model comes from
Matthews et al. (2007) and is based on activity theory – this uses the criteria of appeal,
awareness, distraction, learn-ability and effects of breakdowns.

The methods are the “context of use evaluation of peripheral displays” (CUEPD) by
Shami et. al. (2005) which focuses on increasing the realism of in-lab experiments. It
suggests the following categories for survey question categories: noticeability,
comprehension, relevance, diversion of attention and engagement. The other method
comes from Mankoff et al. (2003) and is a heuristic-focused method for delineating the
design space in the early phases of the design process.
As far as evaluation criteria goes,  the authors select four criteria from a longer list
compiled from a larger survey (Seffah et al.), namely learnability, error visibility,
usefulness and user satisfaction. In addition to these, they stress that an important
factor with peripheral displays is attention, which they divide into the topics of
awareness and distraction.

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 The chapter then goes on to describe the case study, in which two different peripheral
displays relating to multi-tasking around e-mails – one is a “tracker” style band with text
while the other one is a sphere which changes color to denote information about
incoming e-mails. These were tested in preliminary/heuristic evaluation, based on
interviews, and two summative studies, one in the lab wherein 26 participants were
tasked to sort e-mail, aided by either peripheral display, and quizzed on how well they
retained information about the task. Additionally, they conducted a field study with 4
participants in a A-B-A style was conducted over the course of 4 weeks.
These studies are reviewed in terms of their efficiency at gathering at gathering
information about the users. They found that heuristic evaluation and lab studies are
cost-effective and can provide valuable insights, though they rely on field studies to
quantify the findings. In terms of field techniques, questionnaires and interviews are
found to be effective, while ESM and log analysis can be useful with some modifications
according to the specific displays under scrutiny.

Glance 4
Kim, Siyeon & Yoon, Hyosek. “Evaluating Peripheral Displays”, 2009
The paper describes the authors’ work with designing an interface for the wearable
WearOS smartwatch designed to be used by kids and their parents for conveying
information about app usage, games, activities and location, as well as providing a
quick communication channel. They aim to relieve anxiety felt by parents who are apart
from their children for many hours during work. Additionally, the design includes themed
watchfaces to have better appeal to children.
The part of the system designed for the younger target group, the design includes four
components: an activity tracker, a tracker for stats in an educational app, voice search
and an app usage tracker, shown on a thematic face modelled after a cat tower.
The parents’ side of the experience also contained four components: a video player
working with YouTube, a location tracker for the child, a toggle for keeping track of
medicine/supplement consumption and a quick dial that calls the child.

The paper then presents some possible use scenarios and go over a discussion of the
technical implementation of their design. Following on from this, there is a discussion of
possible technical bottlenecks in their physical implementation: connection to the
external cloud database that the design relies on and having to internally check apps to
get the usage time information. The authors don’t consider the first problem, as it

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 depends on the strength of the user’s own network, and find the second problem to be
of so little consequence that it does not impact the experience (a 1-3 second operation
every hour/half-hour).
In conclusion, they admit some limitations of the design: the specs of the chosen device
did not allow for the expressive fidelity they were wanting, and so they had to use an
external cloud database to get around this limitation. Additionally, they acknowledge that
the design will deal with sensitive data and so follow-ups relating to security are of great
importance. Finally, they scope out working with other outputs than the visual, like
haptics or sound, as areas for future work.

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