How do you improve your interface of apps?

Konnichiwa (“Hi” in Japanese ) this is Yuki. I had my graduation ceremony on Monday, so I finally officially hold a BSc degree in Computer Science – feeling amazing! I wore Japanese traditional academic clothes called “Hakama” and top the British academic robe. It was a very hot day but I enjoyed a lot. 🙂

Currently, I am working on designing the interface of a crime report app, with which anyone can easily report a crime from their smartphone/tablet. Thanks to active discussions, I now have a number of ideas regarding the interface, such as text-based, tree-based and tagging-based. I didn’t think there were so many varieties of options! BTW, I used an online wireframe tool “Cacoo”  to make wireframes. I really like this online-wireframe tool because it allows me to easily show my ideas and share them with people! Here are some of my wireframes.

They look different, however the input factors are the same. Now I need to consider about not only quantity of the crime report but also quality. This app should encourage people to report useful information but not spam. So now, we need to think how to get useful crime reports. This is quite an interesting topic and I guess I need to research many kinds of aspects, such as HCI and psychology. It is just only the beginning, and I look forward to seek this topic and I hope I can (b)log the progress next time!

Have I bitten off more than I can chew?

Sorry for the slight delay posting, this week has been a little crazy with graduation. So my latest news . . .

So to further my role as the usability/design guru I have been allocated a new project. I am exploring what effect the user interface has on Turkers (paid participants on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project) in relation to accuracy and efficiency of results. This sounds like a fantastic opportunity to further investigate the impact of design. The idea is to “gamify” the interface to add extra motivation incentives.

I have spent the last two days reading papers about crowdsourcing and the recent papers on mechanical turk. Even in this early stage of research I am surprised by several of the paper’s finding, including the fact that the combined efforts of non-experts can be just as good as experts in accurately completing tasks (http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W10/W10-0701.pdf). I also hadn’t considered the different ways that users can be exploited (possibly a strong word) to complete tasks which computers currently cannot do. Several of these tasks invovled pairing up with a random stranger online and trying to guess the same labels for a photo or guess the word that the other is trying to describe. For a full explanation on these gamification models see Designing with a Purpose (http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1378704.1378719). So before I go on for pages, repeating all my reading I should probably say what else I have been getting up to.

I have signed on to CodeSchool to try and familiarise myself with angular.js, more jQuery, backbone.js (just to name a few). I would highly recommend it (apart from the fact that you have to pay). However, for a quick month of intensive learning it seems pretty worth it (http://www.codeschool.com/). I would also recommend having a look at Codecademy which is free and I think a fantastic tool. Unfortunately it didn’t have the range of courses that I required but for the well known languages, definitely worth a look (http://www.codecademy.com/).

I have also started . . .

It is really easy to read but I have to admit I’m not as far as I would like as I have been reading all this other material as well :p.

There is more to say but even more to do so I should probably get back to it. In my next post I will let you know how I am finding Mechanical Turk and whether the implementation of this user interface is quite as traumatic as I am starting to fear it might be.

P.S. If anyone has any useful tips about implementing dynamic pages on Mechanical Turk feel free to comment below =)