Designing and Deploying an Information Awareness Interface

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Designing and Deploying an Information Awareness
Interface
JJ Cadiz, Gina Venolia, Gavin Jancke, Anoop
Gupta Collaboration Multimedia Systems
Team Microsoft Research

• Human Computer Interaction
• CSG 170
• Presenter AJ Ferrigno

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Overview Peripheral Interfaces

• Peripheral Awareness interfaces
• what they are
• how they function
• Few success stories

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IntroductingSideshow
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IntroductingSideshow
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Features of Sideshow

• Tickets have minimal amount of motion
• Clickable alerts are posible (a la AIM)
• Fully extensible (via DHTML or C)
• Written according to design principles of
  Peripheral Awareness Interfaces

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Design Principles

• Make It Always Present
• Minimize Motion
• Make It Personal
• Make It Extensible
• Support Quick Drill-down and Escape
• Make it Scalable

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Deployment
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Surveys

• First Survey distributed
• 860 current users (36 response rate)
• Asked about a variety of Sideshow's features
• Second Survey distributed
• 698 casual users (26 response rate)
• Asked why users stopped using Sideshow

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Survey Results

• Reasons users continued to use Sideshow
• Easy to work with Calendar and E-mail (26)
• Easy to stay aware of a variety of data (20)
• It's fun (15)
• Reasons users stopped using Sideshow
• Too buggy (35)
• Slow startup time / lack of relevant tickets
  (22)
• Didn't work offline (15)

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My Evaluation

• The Good
• Seems Successful
• Very Useful
• Easily Extensible
• Iterative Development

• The Bad
• Offline problem
• This Start bar too much real-estate?
• Truly peripheral?
• Fairly obvious?

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Extending Sideshow

• Obvious E-bay example (mentioned)
• Embed in Operating System, web browser
• Some way to track all available tickets (similar
  to Firefox extensions)
• Doesn't auto-hide defeat the purpose?

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Windows Vista
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Windows Vista

• Will Support
• Online gadget library at http//gallery.microsoft.
  com
• Gadget Builder Depot API still DHTML (not C!)
• Mac OS X-like design

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Thank You!