Due to CHI + internship travel, and then some family care yesterday, today was the first opportunity I had to see any capstone projects. On the docket were five HCI-ers, including Adam Knoll whose capstone was a year delayed.
- Chat in MMO—Nick Quagliara examined the disconnection between using chat and battling demons in massively multiplayer games, like World of Warcraft. Using definitions by Bartle and content analysis coding by Bales, Nick studied current use in order to generate a heuristic for designing game chat. These included: automate when possible; keep consistency; give users access to relevant information; alert users to messages; don[‘t assume prior knowledge ; and look to the Mod community to identify what is not working. He also generated a number of concepts from these rules.
- Ionian Story—Craig Birchler dissected the narrative to figure out what went into building a story, equating it to adding meaning to experiences. There were a few broad assumptions that may have been overstated, but the end concept was interesting. Craig proposed an iconic, network approach to storytelling that asked for each bigger event to be broken into three component events and used to stimulate collaborate associations with other people’s experiences. He chose a very rich design space.
- Virtual Lab—Eldridge Doubleday examined the use of the web to create a virtual lab for introductory anatomy students. The term “lab” is loosely applied in this context, since the current implementations are essentially texts on the web. Eldridge came up with a redesign using Flash that tried to emulate the advantages physical labs have, such as being able to understand how muscles overlap with each other in a way a flat, static image can’t explain. The end tool looks quite impressive, and E is contracted to build it for somone.
- Sports data visualization—Steve Marshall looked at the sources of data for sports fans and what kinds of information they were interested in mining. In the end, he focused on people who use a college basketball team schedule and results to compare future opponents. In the traditional layout, the schedule information is presented in a three-column table that contains date, location, opponent, margin, outcome and any national ranking. Steve designed a two column visual schedule that splits losses to the left and wins to the right, using physical spacing to indicate the quality of the game and where in the schedule it falls. In this way, it is relatively easy to look at two teams and get some sense of how they match up. I’m not sure if this is the basis of the business plan, but Steve, Arvind and Ryan Varick are creating a start-up in Cali this summer.
- Greek Logic—Adam Knoll came back to discuss his research and initial designs for a payment tool for fraternities and sororities that addresses the madness that is their billing process. National, local and third-party organizations interact with students and their parents in a very redundant and inefficient manner. Adam sees that as an opportunity to create a tool to better account for that $28 million annual revenue stream.
The storytelling and schedule visualization concepts are potentially relevant to Kosmix work. I liked Steve’s ability to include lots of information in the layout of the schedule, something that Shveta has been working on for a blog widget. The narrative is a way to bind and propagate community, and the idea of a communal story might be an interesting approach to local construction of identity.
Congratulations to the master’s students who completed their degrees. For the rest? … We’ll see you at some point next year.
