The final presentation

Rate your environment 
our 2nd presentation

This is our 2nd also the final presentation. There is still room for improvement. Hope the current problems can be fixed in the DVD2 in spring.

Joy the app and welcome any comments!

Questions discussed in our presentation

At the end our our concept presentation we presented some questions that we discussed with our contact person from the ministry on Friday. After our discussion we have a pretty good view on how we are going to proceed.

The questions we presented and the answers to those are presented below.

1) How to show detailed results on the map?

How to indicate to the user what location you have chosen to view, if you cannot display information based on named areas? E.g. “Chosen location” vs. “Helsinki, Finland”
--> We won't show the user the name of the place (s)he has chosen, but will rely on their knowledge of geography. We will also display the names of major cities on the map (similar to google earth, for example).

What is the most user friendly way to move from the map view to viewing detailed results? So when will the clickable symbols appear, and from which range will reviews be displayed from?
We have been benchmarking different solutions in for example hotel booking portals and the Urban Mediator app that was recommended for us to check out. We haven't found out what the best solution would be yet, but decided to try to discuss with people who have experience in creating similar apps right when the spring's course has started, and we know what kind of resources we have during the spring.

2) Color schemes? 

Are we going to separate the expert data from common user data by using different color schemes? If so, how does the user understand the idea?
We will be using the same color schemes for both reviews, displaying them in the same view. The expert data is different from the common user's opinions essentially because this data is from country level, but it will be good to have at lest some data in the beginning, so the results section isn't completely empty, and all parts of the world have been rated at least once.

3) Logging in?

To view “my review history”, the user has to be log in. Also, (s)he has to be logged in for the ratings to appear here. At which point is the user offered the opportunity to log in?
The user will be asked to log in only when trying to access the "review history" section. This is not relevant to those users who do not want to record their own review history, but may be an interesting option for frequent users.

At this point, we have a pretty good idea on how were going to proceed next year. Only thing we need now is more information on next years course, e.g. what kind of resources and time frame we are going to have. No one of our group knows how to code, which will surely make things more difficult.

Concept presentation

Last week, we presented our concept to both our client on Monday, and our classmates on Thursday. What was really positive was that our contact person from the ministry of environment seemed to be very pleased with our presentation. The only major thing he wanted to change was moving from an area based thinking into location based thinking. This means, that we wouldn't give the user the chance to rate a certain city, like Helsinki, or a part of the city, like Arabia in Helsinki, but instead we should just ask him to rate his current location within a 1 km range.

This proved to be really problematic to change by our thursday's presentation, and resulted in some critique about the user friendliness of the app. I perfectly understand this critique, since we were struggling with this problem quite a bit, and it was good to hear that others had similar thoughts to ours. I was a little disappointed though that we didn't receive that much of constructive criticism, or ideas on how this could work better, but we were only told that this doesn't quite work. Which we already knew. This is also our fault, since we failed to send the presentation to our opponents in time, which was partly due to lack of information, and partly due to the changes we still had to make after discussing with the client on Monday.

So what we will have to do, is to really think about this location vs. area thing, and hopefully talk to a person with more experience on GIS systems. What makes this problem really tricky is that whichever solution we decide to go with, it should be applied consistently throughout the app, so both in the review tool, and in the results tool.

Overall, the presentation to our class gave some valuable ideas on what we will have to develop further, but I have to say that most comments were about the exactly same things we already had considered, over and over, and didn't help us get any closer to a solution. At this point, perhaps we would have needed a more in depth discussion with someone who has experience from building an app like this. The suggestion to discuss with the research group responsible for creating the urban mediator app was really helpful, and we might also contact the GIS department in Otaniemi. I met one of their professors Paula Ahonen-Rainio a few weeks ago when she was giving a guest lecture on cartography at our school, and she seemed really interested in helping us find the GIS knowledge we need to further develop this app. There apparently is a whole master's degree program dedicated to GIS systems in Otaniemi, so perhaps we could find someone from there to help us in the app development during spring, if needed. We currently have no info on the spring's course, so it's hard to plan that far ahead yet.

We will meet with the client again tomorrow. We will go through the same questions we presented in our presentation, and hopefully agree that the next step is to consult people with more expertise on our subject.

Our presentation on visual attention

Two of the previous posts have already discussed some of the topics we covered in our theory presentation on Thursday 25.10. in detail, so this post intends to sum up and give some examples of what we discussed.

First of all, why do we need visual attention? 

Wouldn't it be more convenient to just perceive everything so we wouldn't miss out on important information?

When thinking about the amount of visual stimuli around us, it would be impossible for our brain to attend to everything and process it in a way that would allow us to effectively act upon the visual information we receive from our surroundings.

How does visual attention affect our perception?

According to Wolfe (2002) there are four types of "seeing" with different levels of attention:
1) Vision before attention: Some information is available prior to directing attention to an object
2) Vision with attention: Attention enables visual processing
3) Vision after attention: What happens after attention is deployed away from an object?
4) Vision without attention: What about the visual stimuli we never attend to?

The full text is available here for those interested in finding out more.

What does it mean that we don't perceive everything that goes on around us?

Here is a really good video you should watch to see this effect by yourself. Watch it now before reading on, because otherwise it's spoiled.

The idea is that when you focus closely to a task you omit all other, non-task-related information. In this case, the lady with an umbrella is unrelevant to the task at hand, so we fail to se her. At least I did the first time i watched the video.

This also happens when reading and searching information from the web. Commonly known as banner blindness, we are able to filter out information we don't expect to be relevant. If you have worked with or researched advertising, you might know that this is how the 'weak theory of advertising' explains what kind of ads affect us, suggesting this also happens outside the web environment.

How about our visual memory?

Simply put, its really bad. Watch this video if you don't believe it.

How bad our visual memory really is is pretty scary. I came across a really interesting presentation by Daniel Simmons about inattentional blindness. It's recorded at TEDxUIUC 2010 (4/10/10), and has really good examples on the real life implications of visual attention, and what it causes us to omit.

Visual attention can truly be a matter of life and death, as Simmons explains in his example on death rows based in eye witness testimonies gone wrong.

Finally, here are our presentation slides.