As you may already know, I’ve been a member of BayCHI, the local San Francisco chapter of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIG CHI), since 1991. At that time I was still living on the East Coast. SIGCHI was only in its 8th year. The first BayCHI monthly meeting happened on September 12, 1989. I got the newsletter and learned what was happening in the Bay Area.

In 1989 I had joined an interdisciplinary work team part of the larger User Interface Institute at IBM Research, where I learned about Human Computer Interaction, a (new) discipline that drew on computer science, psychology, and several other established practices. It suited me well. Our team presented at the highly competitive SIG CHI conference in Spring 1991 and Spring 1992. My role was a 2-year rotational assignment; I was definitely interested in returning to California after 20 years on the East Coast. While I didn’t find an IBM role on the West Coast, I did relocate in late 1992.

Once in the Bay Area, I became a regular at the monthly meetings. In those days we met at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in person. One of the PARC staff served as our local host there, while BayCHI volunteers ran the meetings. Initially (for a dozen years) Richard Anderson was the program chair. You can learn more about him and those early days from our recent retrospective about Richard (October 2023’s monthly BayCHI meeting). The memorable factoid for me was that once Richard stepped aside from his role, it took 5 or more volunteers to replace him (selecting and scheduling speakers, updating the calendar, notifying members, handling logistics with the PARC A/V staff, hosting the monthly meeting, and all the related tasks). And keep in mind this was before social media existed.

Entry to Pake Auditorium at PARC (December 2012). Photo by Travis Woo via Flickr

Richard started the BayCHI tradition of offering a vast range of topics through the months. in contrast to some other local chapters’ programming of thematic topics for a year, e.g. CHIFOO’s tradition. (Still other local chapters hold a single meeting per year, rather than BayCHI’s schedule of a monthly meeting.) And Richard’s successors, Rashmi Sinha, Christian Crumlish, Paul Sas, Ted Selker, Smitha Papolu, and I have all followed that “potpourri” tradition.

We’re open to topics about humans and computing and interaction in hardware, software, psychology, business processes, media, management, architecture, art, and of course the many design disciplines, especially interaction design (IxD). BayCHI has featured projects or products across the spectrum of venues: tech, health, transportation, games, law, privacy & security, collaboration, ethics, civic engagement, productivity tools, B2B and B2C. Our presenters are well-known authors or founders of up-and-coming startups, newcomers and long-timers, and people from beyond HCI or User Experience. They’ve shared novel techniques or adaptation of methods and analytic tools. I’ve often said I earned a PhD before I knew about BayCHI, and I’ve earned another Master’s degree or two from the education I got on the second Tuesday of the month for 30+ years.

I remained an audience member only, until 2008, when the Steering Committee tapped me to become Chair. Chair (one of three elected positions) handles the routine – and unexpected – governance issues of the chapter, along with a Vice-Chair, and a Treasurer. The officers and any other volunteers or interested parties comprise the Steering Committee. I’ve continued to serve as a Steering Committee member even after two terms as Chair. In 2017, when Paul Sas was taking a sabbatical with his family away from the SF Bay Area, I offered to take on the role of Program Chair. And I embraced that role with backup from co-chair, Smitha Papolu, for the past 6 years. Ted Selker joined us about 3 years ago, where we followed a pattern first set by Rashmi and Christian, alternating months. Note that all these folks are volunteers. So far BayCHI has no paid positions.

The Future of BayCHI Programs

This month marks my 75th birthday. I’m taking the occasion to announce my retirement from BayCHI at the end of this calendar year. I’m going to let go of my long-term responsibilities as a Steering Committee member, as program co-chair, as social media maven, and calendar updater. I think after 15 years it’s enough.

My retirement opens space for you or someone you know

The key role – Program Co-Chair – is the person (or team) who will plan monthly meetings by soliciting & scheduling speakers on topics of interest. The program chair may also invite a guest host to organize a panel on a topic of interest (as planned for Tuesday, November 14 meeting, “Inclusive and Natural: Making AI work for everyone,” which developed after a conversation with Mary Parks, our moderator for the evening.)

We – the leadership team of BayCHI – are proposing a more open process for selecting a new member of the program team. (Previously, the outgoing chair would invite the next program chair or chairs.) We’ll announce it shortly and invite people to declare their candidacy for the role. Watch the BayCHI.org website and the social media feeds on Facebook, Twitter/X, and LinkedIn to learn about informational meetings, how to apply, and how the Steering Committee will make a decision.

We consider the case of civic engagement: City of San Jose uses Budget Games to get residents to give feedback on annual budget proposals. Negotiations with play money about real proposals gets genuine feedback from 150 people during a single Saturday morning. Budget Games, organized by Every Voice Engaged and Innovation Games®, in conjunction with the City of San Jose’s staff, aided by volunteer facilitators and observers, have been the successful alternative for 3 years to traditional methods for getting public feedback about municipal budget proposals.

The same general technique that we show here can be used to help make decisions about new product features in a corporate setting, and equally well for other decisions where there are too many choices, not all of which require the same amount of resources or effort. And, other related playful techniques are useful for getting authentic feedback from a small group.

As mentioned in the previous post, the role of the moderator of a focus group changes when we make the group about interacting with other players, and not with the moderator. For Budget Games, a moderator at each table tracks which citizen, representing which neighborhood, led the effort to fund the library proposal or the additional police officers. The observer at each table took notes on arguments put forward for or against each proposal, and who supported those arguments. This way the organizers (other trained facilitators) can analyze the outcomes (which proposals were funded by which tables – the “WHAT”), as well as the rationale for those outcomes (the WHY). Moderators for this event come from user experience research, agile software development, project management and design backgrounds.

Facilitators & Observers for San Jose Budget Games 2013

For more about the Budget Games in San Jose, see the articles in Business Week  from August 2012 and Financial Times from November 2012. For reflections on being a facilitator at this event from others, see posts by Steve Rogalsky  and Wil.

User experience professionals need to get clear about what’s wrong about focus groups, and what’s so attractive about them. The March (2013) BayCHI monthly program abstract ends with the words, “why you should never, ever hold a focus group.”  Now we’ve got a timely discussion.

Later this week, I’ll be adding additional information about what kinds of useful results you can expect to get from a focus group that uses activities (vs one that follows a script narrowly), how these newer kinds of focus groups are changing the face of civic engagement, what kinds of questions will get useful answers, and how to recruit people to provide meaningful answers.

"Prototyping with Junk" at UC Berkeley

Award for Junk

Did you catch the New York Times word of the year (WOTY) for 2010? It’s junk! The editors of the “On Language” column chose this word as representative of the zeitgeist of the past year. The honor acknowledges the basic meaning of rubbish or trash, debris or detritus, as well as extended meanings: From junk bonds (devalued securities) to junk food (nutritionally empty), to junk shot (stuffing debris and mud into BP’s leaking gusher in the Gulf). Their award called out one euphemistic sense, the male genitalia. The TSA started full body pat-downs in 2010, as an alternative to scanning, and air travelers gave warning, “Don’t touch my junk.”

Next month I’ll be hosting the activity “Prototyping with Junk” at Interaction Design 2011 (IxD11) in Boulder, Colorado. As I’ve previously written, I occasionally get pushback from people who feel junk is not appropriate language for professional settings. Or, perhaps their reaction is that junk — the actual stuff — is not for the workplace. Now I can respond to those objections with the citation of WOTY2010. I’m hip!

JunkFest (2007)

And I’m in good company: Bernie DeKoven, author of Junkyard Games, and funsmith extraordinaire, recently shared a video from 2007 celebrating Junkyard Sports. Here’s an news report from JunkFest in Redondo Beach [warning: narration lacks captions]

Kinetic sculpture with junk

Another wonderful example of how using apparent junk (PVC pipes plus a bunch empty plastic bottles, and other stuff) can turn into something magical: see how kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen simulates animals walking, powered by the wind near the sea.
[warning: narration lacks captions]

Read more at Talking Science: Dance of the Strandbeests, the BBC article about this project.

Jansen’s example shows how prototypes evolve into working “products” or art, depending on your perspective. His process of successive refinements suggest agility: at each juncture, he stops and tests his creatures, from human-propulsion of walking machines to wind-propulsion (which simulates self-propulsion), and all from vernacular materials with clever engineering.

Learning with junk

We used Prototyping with Junk at ACM CHI2004 (in Vienna, Austria), when we challenged the participants in the pre-conference design collaboration to create a product for elders. As I’ve written for interactions magazine special issue on prototyping, this is an opportunity for creativity and fun in a social context. And, it’s yet-another communication tool for your collaborative design kit.

More recently, students at UC Berkeley’s iSchool engaged in Prototyping with Junk as one among many prototyping techniques they experimented with this past fall. You can see still images and a few short movies. Notice all those smiles!

Eager to meet the group in Boulder. I’ll bring one of the several design challenges I’m currently mulling over, …and plenty of junk.

Flexiflyer with wheels (used with permission)

Long-promised video here!

Here’s an historical post. The key part is the video below which was created in 1972.

The video has been promised to accompany my chapter in the Festschrift for Ursula Bellugi and Ed Klima published in 2000. In that chapter I analyzed Lou Fant’s live interpretation of a spoken reminiscence.  I was the (English) speaker; Lou used American Sign Language (ASL). My story told about trying to ride a Flexiflyer down a steep U-shaped driveway and back up.

Spoiler alert:  I crashed.

Key Findings:  Fant managed to get the description of the relationship of the house, the driveway and the sled’s riders correct, if mirror-image of the actual space, without having seen the place, without any gestures from me (the speaker), and with the English input message being pretty sketchy. And the cool part? He continues still interpreting for at least a full minute, before he commits himself to those spatial relationships.

It takes a village…

Support from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation over the past 40 years fueled the research of Klima and Bellugi, and many of their students and colleagues. I was privileged to be a member of the laboratory research staff from Fall 1970 through Spring 1973, and an irregular visitor thereafter. This video was created in 1972 at the Salk Institute. It was preserved during the early 1980s (on VHS cassette). It was digitized in 2000 with help from Stanford’s Academic Technology Laboratory (a support facility for faculty), and from Treehouse Video. I’m thrilled to report that the .mov (Quicktime format) video still plays, and has now been uploaded to YouTube, and is presented for your viewing pleasure, with gratitude to all those who helped along the way.

Pack rat unveiled

I saved that bit of video from Fant’s first (or perhaps second) visit to Salk Institute on one of my irregular visits back to La Jolla. When copying from helical scan 1/2″ videotape to VHS cassette, I remembered that I had consciously chosen to tell about an event that no one in the room had heard before, one from my childhood, so that it would be a genuine listening and viewing experience for both the hearing and deaf people present (not a retelling of a familiar story). Of course the interpreter hadn’t heard this story before, and he didn’t have much context about me either. I thought I had been quite clear about the physical space – I could picture it even many years after the event – how the house was situated, where the driveway started, turned, and ended at the street again, and what it was like to ride the wheeled sled. On listening again, I realize that the physical space is difficult to imagine if you were depending on the spoken message only.

Interpreter stays vague for a full minute

Our visitor, the exemplary interpreter and sign language educator, Lou Fant agreed to contrast “transliteration” and “interpreting.” I’ll offer a brief definition of these terms, knowing full well that other experts out there can elaborate in greater depth. Transliteration is a more English-influenced rendering into signs; interpreting is provides simultaneous translation into ASL, a different language, with English influence kept to a minimum. The excerpt shown here was the first part of the illustration of “interpreting.” The key surprise for me in reviewing the video was that Fant managed to keep the message vague as he worked out how all the different parts of the space described fit together. The ability to be vague had never been catalogued as a characteristic of the competent interpreter before. When I told him I was planning to look at this bit of video at long last and asked whether he’d like to see what I was finding and writing about him, he gave his blessing to my work without his review. I’m delighted to be able to present his spontaneous interpretation now almost 40 years after it was first produced.

And thanks to an interpreting instructor who uses the chapter from the Festschrift for asking where that video is.  Rachel, it’s here now.

Poster announcing Course 27 at CHI2010

What can you do in 90 minutes to introduce a professional audience to the set of practices which are Innovation Games®? Quite a bit!  But not all of what we had planned.

The course announcement

Here’s what people saw on the web when they considered whether to enroll in this course “Innovation Games® for User Research in an Agile Environment”, which competed against about 10 other sessions in the same time slot.

This course describes a set of qualitative research methods that will be attractive to user researchers, customer satisfaction specialists, Chief Happiness Officers, marketing professionals, among others. People who participate on Agile teams and those who are considering making a change to Agile practices will enjoy learning new techniques that fit into an Agile framework. Designers, engineers, and others with limited research background are welcome to join in the fun.

Courses are the update for tutorials at CHI. For the past 4 years or more, the conference has made a change from half day or full day training courses (offered at a significant increment to the already pricey conference) to modestly priced, smaller modules of 90 minutes each. This course was scheduled for the last session before the closing plenary session, which I used to our advantage.

On site on Thursday afternoon, April 15

Thirty-four (34) people enrolled in the 90-minute course about “Innovation Games®” at CHI2010. Twenty-three (23) people arrived in the hard-to-find room. Indeed, the printed program showed 2 courses simultaneously in the same room.  Luckily we caught the room conflict the day before, and coordinated with the conference management to handle.

Logistics

We waited a bit longer than we might have for people to find this room.  I’m aware that several of those who enrolled were dealing with airplane issues:  It was Thursday afternoon, April 15, the day after the Icelandic volcano started erupting, the day air traffic in Northern Europe started being disrupted.

While I have done an introductory demonstration version of the Games in 60-90 minutes, most frequently it’s been with groups for whom responses to the question we posed (e.g., “Finding your next or ideal job”) were more prominent than the techniques we used (e.g., “Product Box”).  User experience people attending CHI are probably more interested in scrutinizing the techniques, than they are in the answer to the prompt.

I believe we met our goal of having fun, at the expense of a clean closure to the course. That’s what a follow-up blog post is about.

Big Picture Comments

My general attitude is that experiencing one or two games tells more than I can possibly describe in the same amount of time. I actively prefer spending our time together playing a game or two instead of me lecturing, as the key discussion points come out in the experience, and in the players’ reflections on their experience.

Let me repeat here what I said onsite:  you can learn much of what you need to know about using Innovation Games from the book Luke Hohmann wrote. I invite you to buy the book. Luke wrote it for an audience of Product Managers or marketing folks. If you’re in a different job category, you may have to do some translating to your setting and skill set. He wrote it for corporate clients, but the techniques work just as well for non-profits, government entities and community groups. He wrote it thinking about software or hardware as the product category, but it works well for services and non-digital stuff, in short all manner of things that you might consider “products.”

The book doesn’t make a strong distinction among “market research,” “customer research,” and “user research.” If you have a good handle on those differences and how people customarily conduct and analyze research from those 3 perspectives, you’re ready to go. If you feel uncertain, let me help you and your team to get clear about interacting with audience segments. I’ll coach your team for the first few engagements with customers until you’re smarter than me about how to make it work in your organization and with your customers (and users and markets).

Lessons Learned

In a typical Innovation Games event, the time is divided into at least 3 not-necessarily-equal parts:  (i) an ice-breaker, where players and observers meet each other; (ii) the game with its creation and discussion phases; and (iii) any further debriefing discussion with the players.  As long as you’ve gone to the trouble of recruiting players, it’s often worth spending a bit more time with them and playing a second game (giving you 5 parts).

The actual time for preparation is of course greater, stretching over the recruiting days, collaboration with the team about what questions to focus on and which activities to use. After the session, the team may have an additional debrief to capture what they heard and noted while the ideas are still “hot.”  Then the organizers spend a day or several days (depending on how many players were present, how many games were played and how much data was collected) analyzing the results and putting recommendations together for the team.

Lesson 1: Why an ice-breaker?

The goal of an opening (ice-breaker) exercise is to get acquainted. In user or customer research sessions where we are physically together, another goal often is to build a collaborative spirit. In this case I gave the same prompt for both games, but the players were segmented by their prior CHI experience. An additional goal in the post-lunch spot is to get everyone moving about to prevent dozing.

At CHI2010 our ice-breaker exercise asked people to sort themselves by moving around the room, to labeled stations, and when arriving to introduce themselves. We repeated this task 4 times with different identifying categories. There are probably several other relevant dimensions, but these were enough to get us started.

SECTOR

• Industry
• University
• Research Lab
• Government
• Consultancy

CHI EXPERIENCE

• First time
• 2-3-4th time
• 5th-Nth CHI

PRESENTATIONS?

• Just here to attend
• Submitted but did not present
• Paper or Note author
• Other venue presenter
• Student Volunteer

CHI COMMUNITY or DISCIPLINE

• User Experience
• Engineering
• Management
• Hybrid
• Other

Lesson 2:  Consider the timeslot when choosing the prompt

Just as important as recruiting the right participants and segmenting them appropriately in game play is choosing the right question for the context. For the event, I asked people to respond to this prompt:

Now that you’re here on the final day of CHI2010, in the last session before the closing plenary, what can you tell the committee for CHI2011 about how it can make an even more awesome conference next year?

I’ve played this game at other conferences with a similar prompt, but being assigned this particular timeslot (last before the closing session) made the prompt ideal:  everyone had been through nearly all the conference. If a course or tutorial is scheduled early in a conference, using a prompt like this one falls flat among newcomers. They’ll talk about pricing and heat in the room, but you won’t get the detailed ideas you can get from people who may have already sat through 3 days of 4 or more sessions per day, been frustrated by the signage, enjoyed the entertainment, and packed to go home.

Lesson 3: Two Games at once, a stretch goal

Rather than have everyone respond in the same way, we divided the group into i) more experienced CHI folks playing Prune the Product Tree, and ii) new conference participants playing Product Box. (People with 2, 3, or 4 years of conference experience at CHI could self-select into either game.)

My goal was to give everyone a sense of what kinds of interactions and results you can get with different games. The two games we chose contrast on several dimensions.

Prune the Product Tree is a group game:  you want at least 4 and as many as 8 people contributing to each Tree.  The players’ conversations are as important as their individual contributions. You can seed the Tree with the organizers’ product attributes or just let the assembled group create attributes on site. (We chose the latter option.)

People who had more than 5 years experience at CHI conferences were assigned to the Prune the Product Tree exercise. We briefly talked about representing parts of the conference as leaves or fruit and then placing them in 4 places on the large tree schematic:  the trunk, representing primary, central features or functions; the outer branches, as secondary features and functions; “spoiled fruit” lying on the ground surface (showing undesirable aspects or no longer relevant activities), plus the roots, showing those all important items below the ground, representing infrastructure or basic values.

In keeping with best practices, we divided them into two groups. One group had 4 players, the other 7 or 8.

People who were newer to the CHI conference were invited to create a Product Box about next year’s conference.  The verbal instructions invited them to the pre-conference experience, what happened during the conference, and their expectations post-conference or all of it.

A key part of Product Box is telling the story (“selling the box”). One participant understood immediately that this exercise is all about metaphor. A symbol on the box or inside it stands for an idea in the world. A conference is about physical space (too hot, too cold) and amenities (WiFi), as well as content – new as well as familiar ideas – and the people you meet.  It’s about the artifacts of the conference (the program on paper, the iPhone app for schedule, the slides in the room) and the schedule, the costs and benefits.

You can encourage players in Product Box to work on individual or team efforts.  On this occasion we had one team and a lot of individuals.

And, we did have some quite distinct, segmented responses.  Check out the flickr.com set from this course to see some of those amazing responses.  And remember:  we shortened the recommended time from 1 hour to less than 20 minutes.  Amazing.

Lesson 4:  Take all your photos and notes before cleaning up.

While I’ve argued above that this was the ideal timeslot for this prompt, it’s also a tight spot for doing all the documentation we might have wanted. We all wanted to attend the closing plenary. The student volunteers quickly helped me pack up.  Thanks to them, for sure! We transported some of those fragile boxes, but several didn’t remain intact while sitting waiting for my return. I’ve invited the participants to help annotate the flickr set, so stay tuned to track any further insights!

Next steps

Lesson 5:  Capture Expectations and Respond

All who attended the course in person wrote their key questions and expectations. While they worked on creating artifacts in response to the prompt, I read and categorized those questions and expectations. Our time together was brief, and didn’t allow me to respond to the questions on site. A few expectations go beyond ones I’m able to address.

So here’s my plan:  I’m taking the 40 questions/8 categories posed by participants and I’ll continue to respond to those over the next few weeks. Folks who are available to attend my next session, a full-day at Usability Professionals in Munich at the end of May, will have a head start on understanding what’s going on. And they can ask new, great questions! Plus in a full-day session, expect fuller answers and an even better overall picture of what’s you can do with Innovation Games in a user research setting.

Alice Rigby was the first person who came to mind to honor on Ada Lovelace Day 2010.  In fact I thought of her for 2009, but didn’t manage to write it in time. Here’s hoping no one will mind that I’m just an hour or so beyond the deadline in my timezone. (Let’s pretend we’re in Hawai’i where it’s still not midnight.) Oh, have you not heard about Ada Lovelace or the celebration? FindingAda.com has a quick biography of the inventor of software, who lived from 1815-1852.

Alice was a family friend and supporter long before we became colleagues at IBM. Alice was raised in Upstate New York. She played the doting aunt to her sister’s 4 children. Those kids thought the initial “A” in her signature looked a lot like an “S,” which was the source of her nickname “Slice.”  In our house we referred to her by initials “A.R.”  She attended Mt. Holyoke College in the late 1930′s or early 1940′s, and upon graduation took a teaching position in mathematics at a prestigious private girls’ school in Virginia.

She stayed as a high school teacher only a few years before being recruited to IBM in the mid-1950′s. She arrived at IBM during a period of rapid expansion of the IBM workforce, along with my father Mort Frishberg and Dick Bergstresser, the now-retired Director of IBM’s US Scientific Centers.  Both Mort and Dick were Applied Science Representatives in their initial assignments, comparable to technical marketing support specialists. I don’t recall what Alice’s first assignment was.

By the time I met Alice, she had been in IBM about 10 years, and was living in a small house in Saratoga, California. She was an instructor for new technical marketing people along with the rest of her team; her specialty was databases.

For me she was a role model of a single professional woman: smart and knowledgeable, yet interested in continuous learning; a homebody, yet interested in travel; non-confrontational, yet informed about public policy and active in making her views known to public officials. She participated in her church choir, seemingly as much for the companionship as for the musical or spiritual content. She was active in her alumnae association, again both for the relationships and as a way of giving back to the community she felt grateful to. And, she held both her family of origin and her created family of friends close. She supported civility, yet could disagree. She acknowledged discrimination exists, but wouldn’t be strident in challenging the status quo. For example, she loved the sentiment within the aphorism “the brotherhood of man,” but couldn’t abide the surface exclusion of women in the phrase. She took great pleasure in wearing a custom T-shirt celebrating “The Siblinghood of People.” I’ll find the photo of her wearing it.

Alice was not a complainer. I heard her express frustration with IBM only once, late in her career:  She  had a new manager and felt he was underprepared to manage her very experienced team. She said in effect: Why are we, a well-functioning team, expected to train this guy who is going to be promoted beyond our group, and yet we will get no reward or recognition for doing this? He’ll just come in here, try out the latest business school trend on us, and we’ll have to spend a lot of energy helping him either figure out why it won’t work in this context or needs tweaking to make it work. Why not let us manage ourselves instead of training someone less able?  The subtext to me was Why have I been passed over as a potential manager of our group or a similar one? Why are my gaps not supported and coached in the way we provide support and coaching for yet-another newly minted executive?

She was a person of regular habits:  she ate the same thing for breakfast every day.  She smoked daily but limited herself to two cigarettes, one after lunch and one after dinner. She planned her vacation route well-ahead, stayed a few nights with each of several friends in her drive up the Eastern Seaboard, or down the California coast. She bought a retirement home well ahead of her anticipated retirement.

One summer she took an assignment teaching in Brazil for several months, and loaned me her sewing machine and her car, which made this high school student very happy. I remember at least one project I made that summer, but nothing I’ve done in the sewing domain equals her prowess at making a slipcover for her living room couch. While it was not actually upholstery, her project was both an ambitious undertaking and a masterful accomplishment. It required that she first make a pattern before cutting the actual upholstery fabric. When she finished it looked like a professional job, with the pattern of the fabric matching at the seams, and an apparently endless amount of handmade welting.

Alice hid her disappointment as best as she could, when I turned down entry to Mt. Holyoke (South Hadley, Massachusetts) and registered as a freshman at nearby Smith College (Northampton, Massachusetts). She had written a strong alumnae support letter supporting my application, which was no doubt influential in my being accepted. She may have been secretly relieved when I made the decision to leave the East Coast women’s college milieu, and return to California to attend UC Berkeley for the remainder of my undergraduate career.

Roughly 20 years later, I was an IBMer. Both Dick Bergstresser (then my manager) and I were invited to her retirement luncheon from IBM. Dick and I were working in Milford, Connecticut, and we made the trek across the country for the celebration in Los Angeles. What a pleasure for both of us to fete this old friend!

When Alice died several years ago, she left no biological children. I will claim her  – if not as an extra parent, then – certainly an aunt-without-portfolio, a quiet advisor, and special person in my life. Perhaps a few of those pesky managers who were thrust upon her ought to pay tribute also.

[I reserve the right to update this piece with further details about Alice Rigby's career and life, as I contact the people I know who remember more about her than I may.]

Tuesday, March 9, we got the next update on YouTube’s automated captioning efforts. I heard it on NPR’s “All Things Considered” afternoon program, in which Robert Siegel interviewed Ken Harrenstien of Google with a (female) interpreter providing voice for the Google engineer.

Audio and transcript are available at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124501330.

Harrenstien acknowledges that automated captioning today stumbles on proper names, including trademarks and product names:  ”YouTube” that comes out “You, too!” And automated captioning has difficulty with videos that have music or other sounds in the background. But, he characterizes himself as a technology-optimist, anticipating that in 10 years things will be much improved.

Benefits of captioning

Like “curb cuts” which have become the symbol indicating that solutions for disabled people (here, those in wheelchairs) resolve needs for others (strollers, roll-aboard luggage, shopping carts), captions have benefits that extend beyond hearing impairment.

• Deaf and hearing impaired people can enjoy the huge inventory of videos on YouTube. (The still frame that opens this post is from an announcement by President Obama in response to the Chilean earthquake. Making emergency and other time-sensitive news available to those who cannot hear meets the requirements of laws and regulations in the US. And more importantly, it meets the moral or ethical standards we expect from a civilized society where we include everyone in the polity.)
• If you’re in a noisy environment or located close to others who will be bothered by the audio, you can figure out what the video is saying even without benefit of headphones
• Small companies can afford to provide captions on their webcasts, often the heart of learning about new products
• Non-native speakers of English have a much better chance of understanding speech at ordinary (rapid) rates with the assist of captions
• Captions provide input to machine translation services, so that there soon will be captions in other languages besides English as well; as automated speech-to-text technology improves, we’re going to see other input languages as well
• Captions provide much better input to (current) search technology than speech does, so there’s hope of finding segments of videos that might not appear in written form

Professional captioners need not despair

I read the YouTube blog post of March 4 and the comments following it, and recalled the announcement of the limited trial with selected partners last November.  James expresses concern in his comment about the recent YouTube announcement that people, like him, who earn their living as captioners for post-production houses will lose their jobs as a result of the automated captioning.  My response seconds HowCheap’s comment that professional captioners will continue to find work both as editors of the automated speech-to-text and for organizations prefer doing their own captioning. Organizations that produce professional quality video typically start from a written script, adjust for the few changes that happen in the spoken version, and then set the timing of the text with the video.

The huge number of videos on YouTube are uploaded by individuals or by small organizations who may not be aware of the benefits from captioning, and likely don’t know about the tools available.  According to YouTube’s fact sheet: “Every minute 20 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.” That’s a volume that is beyond the capacity of professional captioners and the organizations that employ them.

A proposal for improving the quality of captions

How shall we improve the quality of automatically produced captions?

I’d like to see interpreter training programs (ITPs) make editing automated captions a course assignment, a program requirement, or a component of an internship. Engagement with spoken language, not one’s own, is a challenge.  People phrase things in ways you don’t; they use unfamiliar vocabulary and proper names (streets, towns, people, products) that I need to look up.  Both ITPs for training sign language interpreters and those for people learning to interpret between 2 spoken languages may allow entry to students whose skills in listening, writing or spelling may be lacking.  How many caption-editing assignments are enough? Shall we also coordinate quality checks by others in the same or a different program?  Such assignments will guide students toward greater appreciation for the challenges of speech in online settings, with a task that provides an authentic service.

VRS and VRI

In the case of ITPs for sign language interpreters, the improved listening to online speech is great preparation for work settings such as VRS and VRI.  Video Relay Service (VRS) in the US is regulated by the FCC: deaf signers who cannot use the telephone (because their speech is not intelligible and they cannot hear well enough to understand speech over the phone) make use of intermediaries (interpreters) to communicate with hearing non-signers. (Think of simple tasks such as calling the school to notify them that your child will be absent; scheduling a haircut; ordering a pizza for delivery, not to mention more complex transactions involving prescriptions, real estate contract negotiation, billing disputes.)  Video Remote Interpreting (where the deaf and hearing parties are physically together, with the interpreter remote from them) is a service with similar requirements for the interpreter (listening to speech over a phone or data line, and rendering accurate translations in real time).

Broad multi-disciplinary open source content quality

Programs training instructors in English as a Second Language (ESL) could also participate.  Students in speech therapy and audiology would benefit from both the direct engagement with spoken language “in the wild” and with future colleagues in other disciplines. There are advantages to engaging a variety of people who are studying for professions that emphasize expertise in spoken and written English.

Looks like an open source content development effort to me. Yes, it will require a little bit of coordination, but not terrific overhead. How about it, ITP program directors?

Watching the Oscars

Okay, I was embarrassed.  Just a little.  And I don’t need to be anymore.

We hosted the annual Oscar party at our place this past Sunday. Homemade chili, cornbread, slaw, plus tasty salads, yummy side dishes and amazing desserts to share. One guest came prepared with appropriate trivia questions involving statistics and history.

Only one of the guests was hearing impaired. He functions as a hearing guy, because he was a hearing guy for most of his life. After his surgery a few years ago, he’s now got a hearing loss and a hearing aid. I knew that. He knows I know (more than) a bit about deafness and hearing loss, including and especially how to include everyone in a group whether for a discussion or viewing media like this event.

I appreciate the value of captions for all sorts of reasons. The obvious circumstance is that it allows a hearing impaired person to understand what’s said on television. But of course, the rest of us find the captions handy when we’re temporarily hearing impaired, as in a noisy bar or restaurant. I remember a time before we could get captions, and the struggle to improve the ratio of captioned to non-captioned television shows and commercials, when access using captions was still voluntary.

Remote controls

At our place, we’ve got the now-standard big screen digital TV with cable service that supplies us more channels than anyone needs to look at most hours of most days. It lives in the great room, which has areas that function as the kitchen, dining table, living room, and office.

I know there’s a way to make one remote do all the work, but I haven’t figured out how to implement that, so we still live with 3 remote controls (TV, Blu-Ray player, and DVR-cable). Our typical thing is to turn on the TV using its remote, the cable box using its remote, then adjust the volume with the TV remote and the channels with the cable remote. Pretty silly, no? To watch a movie on disc (instead of through the cable), we have to press control buttons on the TV remote to switch to HDMI-2 from HDMI-1. Occasionally we find a disc for which the volume is set too low even for ordinary aging ears, and that becomes an issue. No running the water or starting the dishwasher during those times.

What neither my friend nor I anticipated was that the captioning wouldn’t work. Or that we couldn’t figure it out. At first we thought the evening would be fine without the captions, but with over 15 people in the room, any side comments drowned out the TV audio for him. By the time we realized we needed to do something about captions, the program was upon us. But we weren’t going to do anything drastic that might prevent the rest of the group from viewing the program. We played with the TV remote and found the on-screen indicators for Analog CC and DTV CC (which we assumed mean “closed captions”), but they were locked (indicated by the red circle with a diagonal slash through it, as in the image below).  Trying to select either of those lines (Analog CC or DTV CC) with the up-down arrows on the TV remote just caused frustration, because the selection line jumped between Sleep Timer (above) and PIP (below).

TV menu options

We played with the cable remote and couldn’t find anything that would select controls for CC.

Better late than never

Just this morning (Wednesday following Sunday’s broadcast) I finally went to the ‘net and entered a search string that included the brand name of the TV and the words “closed captions.” And what did I find out? A helpful site with user-contributed content seems to have the answers. Ah! I need to turn OFF the cable box (aka “set top box” STB), use the menu that’s available only when the STB is off (counter-intuitive, no?), and select captions from there, because we’re using the HDMI setting rather than directly viewing via the TV or component settings. Then turn on the STB again and captions should appear.

Set Top Box "User Settings" (captions enabled)

Set Top Box "User Settings" (captions disabled)

The images left and right show the screen when the STB is off and MENU is selcted, left one with captions off, the right one with captions selected. There are so many attributes for captions that I hadn’t known about! Font size, color, style, opacity.  Change the types of edges or color of the background. I like the idea of background “transparency,” which makes the captions show up, while not blocking the scene behind them. I’ll need to try using that setting for a real show to find out if it works as well in practice as in my rich imagination.

Resources:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/How_to_use_a_Motorola_DVR/Setup#Closed_Caption

Research methods are divided into various categories. One familiar distinction is the qualitative and quantitative. Sometimes we think of these categories as distinct types of research:  either-or. A research project collects qualitative data (e.g., an interview with questions that invite open-ended responses) or quantitative data (e.g., a survey with multiple-choice, true-false, or scalar responses). Or is it that the analysis uses qualitative methods (affinity diagrams) or quantitative methods (statistical packages)?

Christian Rohrer suggests that qualitative research methods are more likely to involve direct engagement with users, while quantitative are more likely to involve indirect techniques, but that these methods live along a continuum:  more or less, not either-or.

The diagram below maps out Rohrer’s ideas about this continuum.  (Click the image to enlarge.)

Christian Rohrer's Landscape of user research methods

Registration form entries are subject to quantitative analysis

Here’s a case where my colleague and I interrogated a database of responses from roughly 10,000 people using simple quantitative methods. While it’s not data mining with datasets the size that Google or Yahoo! might have, it certainly is a type of data mining – see the upper right corner of the diagram.

Our client’s website offered a weekly newsletter for people involved in affordable housing and community development. For research purposes, we had access to the information from registration forms of prospective subscribers. The form contained at least 4 fields of interest to us, as we confirmed (or revised) our ideas about who was using the original website (Knowledgeplex.org) and its companion site (Dataplace.org) combining geographical data with statistics collected from the US federal government. Besides giving an email address, people who registered were asked to include their job title and the name of their employer, and to select from a list of fixed roles which role(s) fit them best.

We were able to make inferences about users and uses from this large database of qualitative and loosely structured information, in conjunction with other more familiar (qualitative) user research methods (interviews, usability studies). For example, we could show that Researchers (an amalgam of several job titles and roles) were more likely to register through Dataplace, the site with interactive maps and statistics, than at Knowledgeplex, the site with news and policy updates.

We described the work for an audience of peer researchers, at a workshop at CHI 2007. Now some 3 years later, the funding for Knowledgeplex and Dataplace has ended, development has stopped, the sites have been taken down, and evidence of our contributions to this work are even more difficult to document and track. The conference report contains less detail than the report we provided to the client. And yet it gives the flavor of turning qualitative data (job title, organization name) into quantifiable results (Researcher registrations are growing more quickly on one site than the other), confirming that we were indeed headed in the right direction in attracting the audience we hoped to reach for each of these companion sites.

Christian Rohrer’s Landscape of User Research Methods: Slide 20 from the (.pdf) of Rohrer’s presentation to BayCHI.  His blog post about this experience includes a link to the full set of slides: Christian’s Greatest Hits

CHI 2007 Workshop Website:  Imaging the City:  Exploring the Practices & Technologies of Representing the Urban Environment in Human-Computer Interaction

Our contribution:  CHi2007DataPlace-workshop-3 (.pdf download, 336K) (also available from the workshop website)