You can always change this.

The designer’s “I think the controls are intuitive”-claim

roman — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 15:19:56 +0000

When I hear or read that line, it’s like a red flag in front of a bull, a warning light. It’s translation is: “Hello user experience, haven’t seen you for a while, but I got it right.”

The best addition to it is: “…and no manual is needed.”

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My recent interesting links

roman — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 18:31:54 +0000

With our researchers we recently talked about ways to share interesting stuff. Email is for other purposes, but here: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/roman.bednarik you can find a list and feed of the things I found interesting. Send me yours!

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Why is a white-text-on-black theme a poor choice?

roman — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 18:24:10 +0000

Try to read such text in low light, such as in the evening with just a little reading lamp on. Try a wider paragraph width, larger line-spacing. A 150% of this blog will make it too.

Then look away from the text. You won’t see a thing, but just nice blinds, all ‘burned’ into your retina. The recovery of vision seems much longer than from a black-on-white scheme (reading a newspaper on a direct sun).

And why do I then use the scheme? It looks good. But after this experience, I am considering a change to basic.

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Deadline extensions, everywhere

roman — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 07:45:36 +0000

It seems like every conference, workshop, and meeting now sends out deadline extensions (including the events organized by us). Can the financial crisis be the cause that there is not enough submissions?

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ETRA’10 proceedings online

roman — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 19:26:11 +0000

So, the ETRA latest proceedings are online.

http://portal.acm.org/toc.cfm?id=1743666&coll=Portal&dl=GUIDE&type=proceeding&idx=SERIES053&part=series&WantType=Proceedings&title=ETRA&CFID=81339532&CFTOKEN=94206173

Acceptance rate of 31% is quite tough. We got a short paper about eye-movement biometrics, check it out!

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Pearls of today

roman — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:45:43 +0000

During today’s interview with Henrik Hansson, I produced few bright ideas for which you can quote me (paraphrased, the original will be soon online, hope not):

R: “You go twenty kilometers away from Joensuu and there is nothing.” – when comparing North-Carelia with Africa.

H: “Is there any special characteristics a phd student must have?” R: “Let me think for a while…hm, no.”

R: “If I don’t hear anything from a student in one week, I start to be afraid he might be sick!”

H: “How did you select the topic of your thesis?” R: “Well, we were building a usability lab, that’s how it happened.”

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The Lisbon Treaty and the Czechs

roman — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 18:57:27 +0000

You must have heard about the ratification process of LT. At the time of the writing, most countries 26 out of 28, the Irish included (they had a second go and said OK), had approved=ratified the treaty. Italy is just depositing the documents, so we have one and only remaining country. (Now, there is some talk about Åland, but let’s keep it out of business, no pun intended).

The last one is the Czech Republic. Can you now use the best of your imagination, and tell us all, what is the real reason?

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Meet the TV stars – eye-tracking in media

roman — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 06:13:53 +0000

Few weeks ago we had the Channel 5 from St. Petersburg shooting in our lab for their programme Progress. Have a look how we did (the eye-tracking bit in the stream starts around 9:55, our appearances around 15:00 and later).

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4 airports in a day, PPIG’09 day #0

roman — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:31:13 +0000

Traveling is always nice. I enjoy getting surprised and affected; smelling new scents, interacting with strangers, learning how a toilet works, finding a way. All new and contrasting, but lot of same and similar, just done in some other way.

On my way to Ireland and PPIG’09, there were few moments of contrast-’aha’. Seeing the chaos at the Charles de Gaulle airport after the organized and effective Vantaa and Joensuu airport (“can I check you boarding pass?” is phrase I heard today first time at CDG and then about 10x again and again at CDG, when changing terminal, when entering the queue for bag scan, before getting scanned, when boarding (1x before the bus, 1 x at the aircraft! (“I want to make sure, sir, you entered the right plane”, “no no, I wanted to fly to Honolulu with this miniature aeroplane for 50 people” I thought) ;in Helsinki nobody asked for it, people just orderly show it when boarding the plane, and that’s it). Do you by the way also share the feeling that many male flying attendants are not always 100% straight?

At the same place, however, seeing how smile (nearly everybody) and short joke (bartender to get more tips out of 5 euro) can make a difference; while in Helsinki the guy who cashed for my lunch at the sky-high price of 15 euro even haven’t looked at me.

The cab-driver here at Shannon, Ireland, was quite surprised that I wanted to jump into his seat. “Oh sir, left please.” Again, forgetting that things can be different trapped me into a funny situation there, but cost me eight bucks for forgetting the right mains electricity adapter at home and buying it from CDG.

Oh yes, and they still check passports when you arrive to here, let long live the EU.

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Monkeys, dolphins, robots, children, and autism: An Exploration of Shared Visual Attention in Collaborative Programming

roman — Thu, 14 May 2009 08:23:24 +0000

It seems that joint attention has been well studied in several interesting domains. For example, development and evolutionary studies (do not mix with international development) have confirmed that our elaboration of the skills related to joint attention are our main advantage against other species. Other major contributions are then from monkey research. Somebody even studied dolphins. The latest attempts focus on implementing architectures that imitate the shared visual attention mechanisms! So we have robots, to top the bunch.

Now, we will be researching programmers’ shared (visual) attention. Imagine that extreme title of this post as an upcoming paper title!

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