Interaction 08: Concept Models

Concept Models: A Tool for Planning Interaction by Dan Brown

My Notes:

You are trying to build a web application and you have scenarios or use cases, now what? You could do a flowchart and start thinking about steps and screens. However, this limits you to the screen approach when attempting to do interaction design. To break free of the screen, we can utilize concept models.

What is the process?

You take your requirements document and circle relevant nouns (concepts). Then you create relationships among concepts. The hardest part is selecting the right nouns and relationships. It is important to think about which concepts/relationships are important.

A concept model bridges the gap between requirements and design, especially if the requirements are not clear and you need to have a solid understanding of the design problem.

In the least, a concept model will allow you (and your team) to agree on a vocabulary, and at most you will learn something interesting or new.

So, a concept model is bunch of circles connected by lines. Concept maps are graphical tools for organizing and representing knowledge (Novak, originally came up with concept models)

What are concept models for?
To Analyze and Understand
Synthesize and Design

Creating Concept Models…

Gather concepts through research
Make a list of nouns
Start with most important concepts
In the beginning, more is better
Ask questions
Start creating connections
Research and elaborate concepts
Validate concepts and connections
Economize connections
Eliminate redundancy

Sharing Concept Models…

Determine purpose and objectives
Set expectations and keep an eye on the crowd
Remember the purpose of the document – why are you creating it?
We are going to look at something abstract, but here is how it can help
Go into the meeting with a set of questions – trying to generate a conversation
Be transparent with client
Generate questions and explain implications
What’s missing?
Are these relationships correct?
Do these relationships matter?
Can we enforce the relationships?

If A has a relationship with B, A will always be in the context of B on the webpage
If we take away this node, users will lose X

Final Ideas

Use concept models to clarify underlying structure (when product or feature is unclear)
Use concept models to escape the “page” metaphor
To bridge the gab between understanding a problem and solving a problem

Technorati Tags: interaction08

Filed under: Conferences, Thoughts , IxDA08

Communities and Technologies Conference

C&T Conference, held in East Lansing, Michigan. June 28-30, 2007.

I presented at the Public Practices, Social Software: Examining social practices in networked publics workshop.

Below are a some notes that I made from the workshop, mainly around interesting questions or quotes:

Gina Walejko asked whether attitudes towards privacy have changed as a result of media influence or other influences?

David Gurzick wondered if SNS sites/identities will become more universal? Will we be able to break free from walled gardens and communities?

Zeynep Tufekci provided a very interesting perspective on SNS by framing them in terms of “grassroots surveillance” (other scholars call this “lateral surveillance”). This is evidenced by coaches checking up on athletes, employers checking up on students, and campus police using SNS to find out party locations. Will this kind of surveillance cause identities on SNS to be constrained as people will be conscious of the surveillance?

Lee Humphreys conducted a study on mobile SNS. She wondered how social software empowered its users and/or contributed to a “participatory panopticon”

I am not sure where I got the following (Bernie Hogan perhaps?)
Inductive software design is making changes to software based on user interaction and playfulness with software. Users will often repurpose technology beyond the original or intended design, especially social software. Both systems and designers need to be flexible enough for change.

Here are some books that Marc Smith recommends:

Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod
Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom
The Presentation of Self in Everday Life by Erving Goffman
Hidden Dimenson by Edward Hall
Communities in Cyberspace by Marc Smith (coming out with a new book soon)
Anything by Tufte

I also had the distinct pleasure of meeting Michael Muller at the workshop. Michael works for IBM labs in Cambridge and does research on Dogear, their internal tagging system. From Michael I got the following tagging resources:

“Tagging, communities, vocabulary, evolution” by Sen et. al. presented at CSCW 2006

“Dogear: Social bookmarking in the enterprise” by David Millen

“Social Implication of the Internet’” by DiMaggio et. al.

“Why we blog” by Bonnie Nardi

Finally, after listening to some of the talks, I learned that tagging is often used to provide indirect contextual information. For example, in Slashdot, the tags are used by Rob Malda for moderation. While on Flickr the tags are used as part of the “interestingness” score and also for location specific information.

Technorati Tags: cct2007

Filed under: Conferences

new home

I originally tried to host this blog on my home computer, but wacky DNS settings made it mostly inaccessible from anywhere outside of California. Thus, I moved my blog to a new home. Taaddaa!

With the move, I hope to pick up blogging again and catch up on that to-blog list that I made back in August. I am also going to try to blog about the most recent conferences and workshops that I attended, as well as progress on my dissertation.

So let’s get started …

Filed under: Thoughts