Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

I just finished reading over a paper for my Field Methods intensive course (starts Monday!) that I found extremely interesting. Instead of relying on a traditional usability test or interview to get users to talk about their thoughts and feelings on mobile phones, this particular researcher used a more artistic medium: collages. The act of creating an artifact to express one’s thoughts on a project is not entirely new (people have been asked to draw things before), but collage is, by nature, an extremely rich medium for expression. As it turns out, it works extremely well for UX research when you’re trying to find out people’s opinions on products or services they’re already familiar with. The collage remains long after the user has left the session, and they are relatively easy to analyze (especially when you compare them to sifting through heaps of traditional data).

I never thought you could do research with such a creative form of expression! This is all incredibly interesting research.

Identity. Let’s say your name is Bob Smith. If for whatever reason you couldn’t be called Bob Smith tomorrow, would you care? How much of our internal identity is tied to our name? If you’re not “Bob Smith,” who are you?

I’ve been writing a paper for my Visualizing Information class over the last two weeks. It focuses in on information graphics, particularly in the way that images and text can be used in conjunction with one another to reinforce meaning and reduce cognitive workload. My love of video games managed to work its way into the accompanying visualization, which had to take explain (with verbal and visual components) a problem difficult to explain with just words.

I present to you a brief overview of capture the flag on Team Fortress 2’s 2Fort map! It was my first time using Adobe Illustrator CS3, and I think it turned out rather well. I really want to keep practicing with the tools, so maybe I’ll end up making more of these for the other maps.

I’ve been doing some research for my latest Information Visualization paper on decision-making up here in the library, and I’m finding that the decision making process is influenced heavily by a number of cognitive biases, which are basically faults in the way we process information. While not all of them apply directly to the decision making process, anything that distorts or alters our information storage/retrieval/processing capabilities is also affecting our evaluations of various options. It seems like being able to effectively make decisions is as much about acknowledging and circumventing those biases as it is about managing attention and minimizing load on working memory.

The actual biases are really interesting to read about. While I don’t recommend relying on Wikipedia for your research papers, you can run some of cited names from these articles through Google Scholar and tap into a plethora of research.

Something else that’s really cool: if you happen to be at a college or university (like Bentley!), Google Scholar actually picks up on your IP range and points you towards full-text articles available at your school library. Nifty!