We discuss the development and ongoing evaluation of The American Horsepower Challenge, a pedometer- based fitness game for middle school students that is being used in over 60 schools across the United States.

Full text [PDF]

]]> http://www.andrewmiller.net/2010/04/04/stepping-outside-the-classroom-fitness-video-games-for-k-12-settings/feed/ 0 http://www.andrewmiller.net/2010/04/04/horsepower-challenge/ http://www.andrewmiller.net/2010/04/04/horsepower-challenge/#comments Sun, 04 Apr 2010 23:40:33 +0000 andrew http://www.andrewmiller.net/2010/04/04/horsepower-challenge/
A mobile application for managing your
financial life. iPhone version just released
in Hong Kong!]]> Studying a pedometer-based fitness game for middle school students Platforms: Website, sensors Developed by Humana Games For Health and sponsored by The Humana Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Humana Inc., the American Horsepower Challenge (AHPC) is a game that turns everyday walking activity into a team sport. AHPC addresses two trends: a decrease in youth physical activity levels and an increase in online and computer-based social play. As part of the Georgia Tech-based research team, I’ve been following the participants in this competition over two school years by collecting step data, surveying stakeholders in the game, conducting focus groups and individual interviews with students and teachers.

Studying a pedometer-based fitness game for middle school students Platforms: Website, sensors Developed by Humana Games For Health and sponsored by The Humana Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Humana Inc., the American Horsepower Challenge (AHPC) is a game that turns everyday walking activity into a team sport. AHPC addresses two trends: a decrease in youth physical activity levels and an increase in online and computer-based social play. As part of the Georgia Tech-based research team, I’ve been the participants in this competition over two school years by collecting step data, surveying stakeholders in the game, conducting focus groups and individual interviews with students and teachers.

I became active in the project in the fall of 2009, and helped conduct on-site interviews and focus groups. I am now contributing to the qualitative analysis of our interview data, and have participated in presentations of our findings to Humana. This project is closely related to my own research, and is helping to inform my methodological approach as I plan my own deployments.

The continuing epidemics of diabetes and obesity create much need for information technologies that can help individuals engage in proactive health management. Yet many of these technologies focus on such pragmatic issues as collecting and presenting health information and modifying individuals’ behavior. We argue that viewing health management from an identity construction perspective opens new opportunities for research and design in technologies for health.

Full text [PDF]

But recently I’ve come to regard that latter statement as a real key to understanding the somewhat confused nature of our nascent field of Human-Centered Computing. Are we mere record-keepers of the state-of-the-art—observing and interviewing people about their relationship to technology for the benefit of techno-historians? Or are we trying to use our observations of the present to help shape the future?

In traditional Computer Science (an outgrowth of the engineering school paradigm), the label “future studies” might actually make sense. My CS Phd colleagues are busy inventing new encryption strategies, or re-architecting the Internet, or optimizing multi-core processing algorithms—all necessary preconditions for technologies which will be ready for prime time in the next 5-1o years. Industry research havens like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC (both still alive but in humbled reincarnations) are no longer the lifeblood of CS innovation they once were. As a result, industry is an important partner in the academic research process, to such an extent that important discoveries made by today’s computer scientists really are quite likely to be translated into future products and thus shape the future.

But the relationship between interaction design and academic HCI(Human-Computer Interaction) is significantly more strained. A company like Microsoft doesn’t need an academic partner to create new interaction strategies; to my knowledge, the Surface tabletop computer was created mainly in-house with some consulting provided by my former employer. In fact, I think I can assert uncontroversially that if you want to explore new ways of visualizing information, create new and compelling interaction techniques, or otherwise revolutionize the way humans and computers interact, you are equally likely to succeed outside the ivory tower as within. Google may have started as a Stanford academic project, but its founders had to leave academe to really make it a success. And as for Apple? They’re notoriously secretive, even and especially within industry—and yet they’ve had more impact on our relationships with machines than any other company in the last 20 years.

The reasons for this are simple enough. In general, new HCI techniques in themselves aren’t feats of engineering, but they are judged based on qualities such as robustness and speed, and thus require a lot of cash to design, test and bring to market. Which do you think would produce a better product faster: hiring a bunch of distracted interns and compensating them with course credit and a small stipend, or turning to a team of seasoned professionals accustomed to fast-paced large-scale projects?  This means that someone with a fantastic concept for a new service or product can (and probably should) get some venture funding and create a start-up to make his or her dream a reality.

There are ways around this conundrum, of course, and I certainly don’t view academics’ efforts as wasted, otherwise I would have stayed in industry myself. The ‘living laboratory’ technique has been used to great effect. There’s a room somewhere in the MIT Media Lab where post-it notes are interactive, and Georgia Tech’s Aware Home is anything but an ordinary house. The ‘Wizard of Oz’ technique (in which a man or woman behind the curtain imbues an interface with more intelligence than is currently possible or pragmatic in order to study the interaction) is also pretty effective, although completely unscalable. [See Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" for my favorite literary example of Wizard of Oz techniques 'in use'] I’ve used these and other techniques with much success—card sorts, paper prototypes, and GOFUS (Good Old Fashioned Usability Studies).Using these techniques a researcher can skip over some present-day technical hurdles and get to the good stuff faster. If we could solve the lag issue, or if we had more advanced voice recognition, here’s what the future would look like.

But for many Human-Centered Computing (HCC) researchers these techniques are just totally impractical for two main reasons: they don’t afford studying social effects, and they ignore one half of the equation: when we bring real people into our labs or research settings, we are studying people from today—with today’s expectations and biases.

So what are we to do? Ethnographic “deep hanging out”, semi-structured interviews and other ‘qualitative’ techniques offer one way out. By getting deep insight into the complex interplay between person, social cohort, technology, and physical environment, we also unlock the information firehose that is people’s everyday lives. If, through studying today’s technology, we can gain future-proof insights into what makes people tick, we can provide solid guidelines for the future and offer a service to humanity, both key goals of any academic institution.  But again, we run up against the difficulty that today’s immutable biases may simply be hard-coded cultural trends that will wear off.

For example, when preparing for my research into privacy effects and online photo-sharing, I read over and over that people prefer to share personal photos via email rather than sharing sites. And indeed, for a certain kind of person even just four years ago, this was technically true. But I found that what was really motivating this was the desire of people in the Kodak Culture (you can generally guess what that means, I hope) to tell different stories through their photos to different audiences, and to share through a medium over which they felt they had control. Email’s reliability and distribution control (ignoring the “forward” button for the moment) allowed people to mimic the kinds of practices they had been used to with in-person or by-mail photo-sharing pre-computer.

But what did I actually find? I generated some ‘design implications’ and got some solid data about people’s motivations and desires with respect to online photo-sharing. I also showed that many of the tenets of ‘Kodak Culture’ which had been observed in the film photography days were still operating, at least in America (cellphone photography had not yet hit our shores) and at least for that moment. But what I still don’t know is the extent to which I was simply observing a cultural moment, and the degree to which the photo-sharing norms and mores of my participants will simply disappear with them and not be carried on in the next generation. In short, my vision of the future was severely constricted by the very things that made my research successful in the short term.

To deal with this, much of our work in HCC proceeds by positing an underlying set of motivations and desires that we hope are future-proof, and then re-imagining them in the context of future or bleeding-edge technology.  Nokia’s Jan Chipchase calls this process “future perfect.” I still suspect there’s a fundamental re-evaluation of the role of the future in HCC waiting to happen, and I’m interested to think what others in the field (or at least in the bivouac) have to say. Have I uncharitably mischaracterized your work, or your vision of the field? Comment below, or email me here.

This age of social data presents us with a new set of tools for self-presentation and peripheral awareness, and countless new ways to be awkward. For example, a former colleague used to update twitter so comprehensively that he even tweeted his bathroom breaks. But such early-stage hiccups are not the big story here – every electronic medium has its own specific “reply all” potential. The real change is the new computational layer mediating our interactions with each other and our environment. Using FourSquare on my iPhone, I can tell people when I’m at a bar (or when I’m actually in the office for a change!). Using Google Reader I can share blog entries or newspaper articles I find interesting, and attach a short note (especially important if irony is involved). Using Last.fm I can share what music I’m listening to right now, and anyone who clicks through to my profile can get a pretty good picture of my music-listening preferences. Facebook lets me share all of the above, as well as update my status and comment on any of my friends’ actions. And of course, there’s Twitter, which I use mainly as a way to stay in touch with techie friends in academia and industry, but which often veers into in-jokes and gossipmongering anyway.

In fact I create so much social data every day, that when setting up my ‘lifestream’ I found myself selecting a subset of all the possible data I could push. I told myself at the time that this was to avoid the andrewmiller.net visitor from feeling overwhelmed, but really it was an exercise in self-curation – the selection of information about myself that I wanted to represent me as if it were my real-time CV. I chose to make this a service-level decision, excluding FaceBook (which is where I discuss emotional, political, and other semi-private topics). But I have on occasion gone in and removed certain tweets that for one reason or another I felt were not appropriate for andrewmiller.net but I didn’t feel like removing from Twitter.

I admit I’m an early test-case, but I think we’re months, not years away from my generation having to deal with these issues. As services like FaceBook open up our homepages to the public (or at least allow us to do so) and as services like Twitter, with a culture of public sharing, reach mass adoption, our virtual and physical identities are going to have to merge. This is one of the central issues I’m trying to unpack in the Human-Centered Computing program here at Georgia Tech, and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. Comment, shoot me an email, send me a tweet @andrewmiller or whatever other channel you’d like.

In this position paper, we present our initial work in designing and developing Salud!, a web-based platform for supporting health self-management. Salud! will allow its users to track personally-relevant aspects of their everyday life, and provide visualization and analytics tools with which to make sense of the resulting datasets.

Full text [PDF]

During the presentation, a representative from LifeScan showed off a blood glucometer that connects to the iPhone to allow immediate measurement and transmission of blood glucose levels. Not only can the peripheral be controlled directly using the touchscreen interface, but it can tap into the iPhone’s always-on connectivity, allowing a caregiver, parent, adult child, or diabetes counselor to track the user’s insulin needs in realtime from anywhere. I owned a Visor, and the ability to extend its capabilities at will was a powerful one. By snapping an MP3 cartridge into it the Visor became a media player; add a camera module and you could take photos and videos on the go.

From a technology standpoint, this announcement marks the rebirth of Handspring’s ambitious but ultimately stagnant SpringBoard system introduced in the late 90s as part of their Visor product, which in turn, was a return to basics by the founders of Palm as that company got acquired, split, merged, and split again into near-obscurity. Most of the difficulties HandSpring encountered were distribution-related, given the niche audience and relatively high costs of stocking physical peripherals, and the digital distribution powerhouse that is the App store has solved those.  Since apps can completely take over the iPhone’s UI, Apple has allowed developers to come very close to the extensibility provided by the original SpringBoard platform. The one thing missing has been the ability to add physical computing elements — sensors and actuators — to allow the iPhone to more actively participate in its users’ world.

This announcement is also important from a research standpoint.  As part of her dissertation work, my colleague Lena Mamykina here at Georgia Tech has shown the benefits of the collection, analysis and discussion of regular blood glucose readings.  Her participants feel more in control of their health and are able to create and test hypotheses about their diet.  For her work, Lena created her own infrastructure, customizing cellphones herself and connecting them to glucometers and her web-based forum.  (you can watch her give a talk about her MAHI project at CHI ‘08 here) Far be it from me to speak for Lena, but it seems to me that the existence of a blockbuster mobile phone that has built-in pathways to connect to sensors could greatly expand the impact of work like this, and smooth the transition from research prototype to commercialized product.

But the porting of a robust prototyping platform (like Arduino, for example) to the iPhone would also have implications in the earliest stages of research. Being able to mock up several different physical design directions and test them with potential users without having to worry that the technical infrastructure is going to come crashing down at any moment is every researcher’s (and prototyper’s) dream.

Of course, Apple has a long history of closing down such opportunities in the name of convenience and simplicity, but we can still hope that this time is different. It seems that the infrastructure for some serious mobile ubicomp is finally taking shape.  Now we have to go out and build it.

A major global consumer bank was looking to extend its mobile relationship with its customers beyond just balance inquiries and ATM finders.

As the User Experience designer on the project, my challenge was to fit all this functionality into a simple interaction model that could be easily adapted for future functionality and worked on a number of displays, including an associated website where consumers could perform more detailed tasks.

A mobile application for managing your financial life.
Platforms: Mobile app, PC website

A major global consumer bank was looking to extend its mobile relationship with its customers beyond just balance inquiries and ATM finders.  The service, to be launched later this year, is a Java app for mobile phones that lets users see their transactions, create and manage a simple budget, monitor and trade stocks, find and redeem coupons, and even send money mobile-to-mobile.  They also wanted to launch the service simultaneously in two pilot markets: one in the US and one in Asia.

As the User Experience designer on the project, my challenge was to fit all this functionality into a simple interaction model that could be easily adapted for future functionality and worked on a number of displays.  They also wanted a companion website which would work in coordination with the bank’s existing website to allow consumers to manage their mobile payments, stock trades, budget and other functions unique to “Mobile Money.”

In order to make sense of it all, I approached this project in true user-centered design fashion: first by visiting the target markets and observing mobile phone use, then creating storyboards based on scenarios rooted in my observations.  From the storyboards I generated a series of paper prototypes, which we user tested in both markets.  I also worked closely with the Creative Director to make sure that the visual look and the wireframes were in sync, and the Solutions Architect to make sure that what we were proposing was feasible.

An iPhone version using our IA and design templates was launched for the Hong Kong market in 2008, and the J2ME versions appeared early 2009.