Exploring Design Factors of Dynamic Surface of Interactive Products
| Submitted by | Heekyoung Jung |
| Affiliation | Indiana University |
| All authors | Jung, H., and Lim, Y. |
| Keywords | Dynamic surfaces, emotional affects, interaction design |
| Paper link |
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| Submitted | 2008-01-08 19:15 |
| Submission history |
Abstract
The surfaces of products are one of the most directly accessed parts of a product by users when they use it. Interactive products involve more complexity in conceptualizing the characteristics of their surfaces comparing to static visual artifacts. In this research, we explore whether the different aspects of dynamic surfaces of interactive products affect people's emotional experiences in different ways or not. For this purpose, we identified three different modes of experiencing three different aspects of dynamic surfaces. From our study result of comparing these three modes of experience, we realize that people develop very different emotional responses toward those different aspects, and we then discuss the implications of this result in interaction design.
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Paper Summary
The paper offers a nice overview of the different emotional experiences of people and conducted a user study to identify the effect of dynamic surfaces of interactive products on these experiences. Based on the analysis results from this user study, it suggested implications for specific design elements in interaction design regarding visual, behavioral and functional aspects of user experience. Significance of the Paper Moderately significant The goal of this paper is exemplary. The paper could be more valuable if it was conducted with a bigger sample size, which could lead statistical analyses, such as factor analysis, which helps to categorize the closely related design elements and to identify the relationships under factor scales in a more accurate and precise way. Furthermore, to avoid any biases on user intuition and experience, it is important to take a user group with diverse ages, sizes and experiences. Originality of the Paper Moderately original, but close to average. The paper differed from other researches by focusing on the different aspects of dynamic surfaces and their affect to user responses rather than visual and usability aspects. However, it could be more original if it could be conducted with a different set of dynamic interactive surface products, such as mobile phone, radio and mp4 player, which could lead to identify how diverse products with similar function but different design features affect each of the three modes of user experience. Quality of the Paper The quality of the literature review is very good. The writing quality is very high. The paper is easy to read and has a well organized structure. Additional remarks It could be better if in user study part, the reasons why the two criteria are chosen could be described in a more clear way. |
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Heekyoung, can we get a submission history for this, please?
Thanks. |
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Sorry for missing the submission history. A part of this paper (user study and analysis) has been submitted to CHI experience report this year and rejected. The direction of the paper was quite different from this one submitted to alt.chi, with focus on measuring affective qualities. Encouraging reviews were about attempts for clear articulation of emotional experiences while negative reviews were about lack of user studies. We refined the previous paper by adding more literature reviews and clarifying design factors in this paper, which would be a conceptual foundations for further studies.
Thank you for the first review so far! As the reviewer suggested, we may specify conceptual design factors through more various user studies and their comparative analysis. |
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The authors have chosen a very challenging theme - the emotional aspects of interaction design and the quantitative investigation of them. This paper is a meaningful and necessary attempt and I am sure that some of CHI community finds it very interesting.
I was excited at the abstract and got very curious how the affective aspects are articulated through user studies. After reviewing, however, I don’t fully agree that the paper provide sufficient cues for the design of interactive products, mainly due to the lack of validity of the user studies. - Clarity of paper At the beginning, I like the explanation of the three aspects of interface, which analyzed the complex nature of interfaces. One little critic is, it would have been better if the definition of “dynamic surface” is discussed earlier and clearly. - Literature review Since “screen” is one important part of the dynamic surface, the description of the surface would have been more persuasive if some notions on screen (for example, as I recall, Lev Manovich’s) had been added. - User studies 1. Insufficient subjects: 15 is a too small number. More seriously, their personal preference on interface styles and experiences may vary, which I believe influences the answers for the SD questions. 2. Interference among the aspects (visual, behavioral, functional): as the authors induce at the conclusion, those three coexist and affect one another. For example, although the examiners asked not to think about the function at the first question, they may have done intuitively. For me, complete distinction between the aspects seems to be very difficult for the empirical studies. 3. Insignificant comparison: More elaborate statistical analysis is needed. I don’t see any meaningful result of the comparison of “sum of differences.” First of all, the word pairs should be validated to be significantly different between the modes (some words may not appropriate to evaluate the design.) And I suspect each SD should be analyzed individually, not the sum. So should the correlation between word pairs and modes. 4. Flash Prototype: screen prototype made with Flash is not the best to evaluate the physical products. Especially the behavioral and functional aspects are highly influenced by the tangibility. |
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As both reviewers mentioned, this paper lacks of rigorous user study and its statistic analysis, which should be supplemented later. However, in this paper, we more aimed at suggesting a new perspective to deal with dynamic factors of interactive product design by specifying different modes of product ‘surface’. Particularly, we considered overall results of our study (participants’ responses were more largely changed from only ‘seeing’ product surfaces to ‘interacting’ with those surfaces than from interacting them to using them) proved the important influence of behavioral design factors (dynamic aspects of surface) on user response beyond visual and functional factors. With this result as an initial foundation, we suggested some design implications about relationships among visual, behavioral and functional factors of interactive products considering users affective responses. Although we specified various affections to measure user responses, it was for measuring ‘how much overall’ or ‘whether or not’ their responses would change at each mode of experience, not for measuring ‘specific affective responses quantitatively’. (This can be a focus of a next study as both reviewers mentioned.)
About the definition of ‘dynamic surface’, we implicitly meant it as product interface composed of input and output elements with focus on its behavioral design factors, which are usually hidden at the mode of visual perception, appear at the mode of interaction, and afford/indicate the mode of functional use or cognitive understanding. I think it is a good point to define it more clearly through further studies. In similar regards, two criteria of designing various dynamic surfaces (distance between input and output elements, which the first reviewer mentioned, and their representation) were selected in this study because we consider them as what transforms both look and feel of familiar interactive products, for example with touch screens or other smart materials, by providing different user interactions. We expect that this discussion at alt.chi would be an appropriate venue to bring attention to 'interaction design factors' for affective user experience among design researchers and practitioners. Although many studies have already emphasized affective emotions in using interactive products, most of them are quite conceptual mainly dealing with a whole ‘experience’, instead of considering specific design factors for those experiences. Distinguished those studies, we aimed at specifying a model of interactive product design from perspectives of both user perception and design practice. Some comparison with similar or different perspectives such as Manovich’s interpretations about ‘screen’ (as the second reviewer mentioned), or Norman’s famous three levels of emotional experience (visceral, cognitive, and reflective) would be an interesting discussion to assess (and improve) our model of dynamic surface of interactive products. Thanks for your reviews so far, and feel free to leave any comments or reviews if you have! |
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This paper presented a new perspective on dynamic factors of interactive product design. Unfortunately, the quality of the writing of the paper, particularly in terms of English grammar, was so poor that I would not recommend it for publication. The problems confronting the reader throughout the paper can be plainly seen in the abstract above. While the other reviewers did not seem to notice this problem, I really struggled to make it through the paper.
In addition to the problems associated with the grammar there are two other fundamental weaknesses in the submission that lead to me giving it such a low score. The first is the quantitative study: * No statistical analysis was carried out, and even basic descriptive data were missing. * The sample size of 15 for examining quantitatively the manipulations is simply too small. * The study design did not systematically control for the possible impact of the various factors. * The qualitative findings were presented and discussed in the context of a quantitative study. This meant that the qualitative findings were not adequately described. * Main conclusions were qualitative. The second, content concern was the contribution of the paper. The paper presents briefly a nice theory of interaction design considerations for interactive surfaces - perception, user interaction, user understanding. However, the discussion was not detailed enough for a theory paper. The main results teased out of the study were qualitative; however they were not presented in a rich enough fashion to be compelling. So in the end, I felt the contribution was simply too small to be worthy of an acceptance at this stage. That said, I think the theory could potentially be of significant value if effectively articulated and studied. |
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The topic of this paper is very similar to another alt.chi paper (Kaye & Brown). Here the authors explore the relationship among different aspects of dynamic surfaces of interactive products and their effects on user responses.
The motivation of this paper is unique and commendable. Figure 2 can be seen as another version of Norman’s 3 layers of emotions (visceral, behavioral and reflective). So the model that is presented here is not a new one. However, the authors also provide user study focusing on three different modes. But the study raises several important questions. Can we really divide visual perception, interaction and understanding of product surfaces? Same way, can we distinguish between the visual, behavioral, and functional aspects of a product? E.g. in a keyboard, what are the visual aspects and what are the behavioral aspects. Is there a one-to-one relationship between visual perception and visual aspects, interaction and behavioral aspects and understanding and functional aspects? Several times the function of a product is to support evocative visual perceptions or initiate visceral reactions. E.g. website of Amnesty International. The authors talk about the “dynamic surface” of interactive products however in the 4 conceptual designs they focused mainly on the two design aspects (1) distance between input and output elements, and (2) level of specificity of indications for input and output elements. Is this all about a dynamic surface? As I mentioned, in the other alt.chi paper that I reviewed (Kaye and Brown), the authors focused on the haptic (touch) experience of different material surfaces of a same product. Overall, the way authors have conceptualized dynamic surfaces in their study is partly about usability. Their focus on distance between input and output; and level of specificity for input and output indirectly refer to the usability aspects of the 4 alarm clock radio. The results and implication are convincing but they are not new. |
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Thank you for your comments, Quentin and Dhaval.
I agree with that statistical analysis of the study was insufficient as mentioned above and that I need to clearly define "dynamic surface". The model we suggested as an initial hypothesis on the micro-level of user experience comparing to Norman's emotional model. We tried to more specify the level of visceral response by separating it to visual and behavioral modes. The understanding level may be similar with his cognitive level. Anyway, it should be more refined with more appropriate user study methods, I think. Also, thank you for your recommendation about Kaye and Brown's paper! It was really interesting and similar with what I intent in this study. |
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