Living With Complexity

Reference Information: 
Title: Living With Complexity
Author: Donald A. Norman
Editors: The MIT Press (2010)

Chapter 1:
Summary: In the opening chapter of Norman's latest novel, his explains what exactly complexity is, and how it affects our everyday lives. He explains how poor design often leads to complexity, and provides several examples of complex designs. He ends the chapter discussing means of measuring complexity, such as how long it takes someone to master a task.

Discussion: Norman does a very good job of introducing complexity in his first chapter. The examples he used were thought out, and to the point.

Chapter 2:
Summary: In the second chapter of Living With Complexity, Norman discusses conceptual models, and how a good conceptual model can aid in making things easier to understand. He warns against featuritis, and talks about how simple looking products can often be highly complex.

Discussion: Norman's discussion of featuritis was incredibly insightful. We're having to deal with feature creep in our final project, so it's nice to see him discussing the matter.


Chapter 3:
Summary: In the third chapter of Living with Complexity, Norman discusses how with increased numbers, there is increased complexity. When trying to remember several different things, such as computer passwords, the complexity involves greatly each time you add a new item. Norman elaborates, discussing scaling problems, and how complexity increases exponentially, not linearly.

Discussion: This chapter remained interesting, although a lot of what was discussed seemed pretty straight forward or obvious. Overall however, it was still entertaining to read, and highly enlightening.

Chapter 4:
Summary: In his fourth chapter, Norman discusses social signals, and the inherent environmental cues that people pick up on. He discusses perceived affordances as well, and discusses several instances where cultural values actually end up complicating things further.

Discussion: As someone who has to drive from College Station to Washington DC every summer, I really appreciated his discussion on traffic. Some of his observations were incredibly insightful.

Book Reading #52: Living With Complexity

Reference Information: 
Title: Living With Complexity
Author: Donald A. Norman
Editors: The MIT Press (2010)

Chapter 3:
Summary: In the third chapter of Living with Complexity, Norman discusses how with increased numbers, there is increased complexity. When trying to remember several different things, such as computer passwords, the complexity involves greatly each time you add a new item. Norman elaborates, discussing scaling problems, and how complexity increases exponentially, not linearly.


Discussion: This chapter remained interesting, although a lot of what was discussed seemed pretty straight forward or obvious. Overall however, it was still entertaining to read, and highly enlightening.


Chapter 4:
Summary: In his fourth chapter, Norman discusses social signals, and the inherent environmental cues that people pick up on. He discusses perceived affordances as well, and discusses several instances where cultural values actually end up complicating things further.


Discussion: As someone who has to drive from College Station to Washington DC every summer, I really appreciated his discussion on traffic. Some of his observations were incredibly insightful.

Book Reading #51: Living With Complexity

Reference Information: 
Title: Living With Complexity
Author: Donald A. Norman
Editors: The MIT Press (2010)

Chapter 1:
Summary: In the opening chapter of Norman's latest novel, his explains what exactly complexity is, and how it affects our everyday lives. He explains how poor design often leads to complexity, and provides several examples of complex designs. He ends the chapter discussing means of measuring complexity, such as how long it takes someone to master a task.

Discussion: Norman does a very good job of introducing complexity in his first chapter. The examples he used were thought out, and to the point.

Chapter 2:
Summary: In the second chapter of Living With Complexity, Normand discusses conceptual models, and how a good conceptual model can aid in making things easier to understand. He warns against featuritis, and talks about how simple looking products can often be highly complex.

Discussion: Norman's discussion of featuritis was incredibly insightful. We're having to deal with feature creep in our final project, so it's nice to see him discussing the matter.

Book Reading #51: Living With Complexity

Reference Information: 
Title: Living With Complexity
Author: Donald A. Norman
Editors: The MIT Press (2010)

Chapter 1:
Summary: In the opening chapter of Norman's latest novel, his explains what exactly complexity is, and how it affects our everyday lives. He explains how poor design often leads to complexity, and provides several examples of complex designs. He ends the chapter discussing means of measuring complexity, such as how long it takes someone to master a task.

Discussion: Norman does a very good job of introducing complexity in his first chapter. The examples he used were thought out, and to the point.

Chapter 2:
Summary: In the second chapter of Living With Complexity, Normand discusses conceptual models, and how a good conceptual model can aid in making things easier to understand. He warns against featuritis, and talks about how simple looking products can often be highly complex.

Discussion: Norman's discussion of featuritis was incredibly insightful. We're having to deal with feature creep in our final project, so it's nice to see him discussing the matter.

Paper Reading #25: Agent-Assisted Task Management that Reduces Email Overload

Comments: Jacob Lillard, Derek Landini.
Reference Information:
Title: Agent-Assisted Task Management that Reduces Email Overload
Authors: Andrew Faulring, Brad Myers, Ken Mohnkern, Bradley Schmerl, Aaron Steinfeld, John Zimmerman, Asim Smailagic, Jeffery Hansen, and Daniel Siewiore.
Venue: IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China.

Summary: The authors of this paper have designed and developed a system known as RADAR, or  Reflective Agents with Distributed Adaptive Reasoning. RADAR is a email management system that uses a task-based metaphore to attempt to organize a user's inbox. Using machine learning, the system analyzes incoming email to detect if the email is talking about a particular task. Once it has detected a task, it groups all future emails together with the initial email, allowing users to gather emails in a much more logical fashion.

The researchers ran several tests cases with users, and found that the test users on the RADAR system had an easier time finding emails. The researchers were pleasantly surprised at how few false-positives there were with the system.

Discussion: This research was incredibly interesting. It reminded me of Gmail's tagging feature, but not reliant on users to create tags. The overall contents of the article seemed incredibly technical. Overall, it was a good paper none the less.

Why We Make Mistakes

Reference Information: 
Title: Why We Make Mistakes
Author: Joseph T. Hallinan
Editors: Broadway Books (2009)

Summary: In Hallinan's novel Why We Make Mistakes, he discusses the various reasons why, as the title suggests, people make mistakes. He discusses various topics, such as people's lack of observation skills, and how we only notice, "what we want to see." This is further explained when Hallinan mentions the decision making progress, and how people will often latched onto mostly insignificant facts.

Continuing on into the novel, Hallinan discusses the formation and recall of memories. His primary example is the "Rose Colored Glasses", or in other words, our tendency to view out past self better than we actually are. Finally, Hallinan brings up examples from topics such as multitasking, framing, our belief that we perform average.

Hallinan's novel focused greatly on the use of examples. In each section of the book, he told a clear, concise narrative, connecting the ideas with examples. In the conclusion of the novel, he gave the user several different ways that they can fully integrate the lessons from his book into the reader's everyday life.


Discussion: I greatly enjoyed Hallinan's novel. His book echoed some of the lessons that Normand had attempted to teach in his book. However, unlike Normand, Hallinan's book sounds less like a rant, and it knows when to stop using an example, and move onto something new. In total, the book was a very enjoyable read, and I would definitely be open to reading more of Hallinan's work in the future.

Paper Reading #24: Personalized Reading Support for Second-Language Web Documents by Collective Intelligence

Comments: Derek Landini, Aaron Kirkes.
Reference Information:
Title: Personalized Reading Support for Second-Language Web Documents by Collective Intelligence
Authors: Yo Ehara, Nobuyuki Shimizu, Takashi Ninomiya, Hiroshi Nakagawa
Venue: IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China.

Summary: The authors of this paper are working on a system which can analyzes and translate certain phrases in real time. Rather than a traditional translation system, which converts entire pages over to a user's native language, their system analyzes a page to determine what the primary language on the page is, and then it converts any word it cannot detect are written in that language.

The system uses logistic regression to predict which words are written in a second language. The overall results of the system were highly promising. The user feedback they recovered from their test subjects showed that they enjoyed using the system, and that it was overall highly effective.

Dissuasion: This pair's research was incredibly interesting. It seems like this would be a great browser plugin, or perhaps an extension of Google Translate. I hope that this sort of research continues and improves over time.