CS295J/Application Critiques

Applications

A list of analytical applications we will consider critiquing and the pros and cons of proceeding with each.

Craigslist

Description of application: A website that hosts user-submitted classified ads, from job postings to garage sale items.

• Workflow to critique: The process of purchasing an item from the site (for example, "men's size 10 shoes").
• Pro's of critiquing
  1. Most people are familiar with the site, or can readily try using it.
  2. Has a design clearly different from most websites, yet is extremely popular (despite its design?).
  3. May be a source for discussing cognitive limitations such as information overload and problems with categorization.
• Con's of critiquing
  1. Not used for scientific analysis, so it doesn't exactly meet the criteria for the type of application we're looking for.

Microsoft Excel 2007

OWNER: Andrew Bragdon

Description of application: A spreadsheet application that helps users perform complex financial and scientific calculations and analysis.

• Workflow to critique: A sensemaking task in a large spreadsheet, such as understanding why the project is over budget by more than 20%.
• Pro's of critiquing
  1. Most people are familiar with it or can readily try using it.
  2. Excel is heavily used by the users who use it, and is frequently used to do analysis and sensemaking tasks such as the workflow outlined above.
  3. Contains many visualization features including graph generation, equation flow visualization, and conditional formatting.
  4. Is often used to ask questions of the nature "what if..." and even includes basic features to support this workflow.
  5. Is used extensively for scientific analysis and visualization. Although it does not include some of the features of other scientific analysis packages, it is generally seen as much easier to use and there are third-party add-ins which accommodate many of these features.
• Con's of critiquing
  1. Spreadsheets may not be seen as fun.

Photoshop

Description of application: A graphics-editing program for complex image manipulation or analysis. E J Kalafarski 15:43, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

• Workflow to critique: A goal-oriented task requiring a series of non-linear operations, such as the application of masks, the organization of layers, the application of filters, and the navigation of paths, color channels, and the 2D space.
• Pros of critiquing
  1. Has a non-linear workflow and 2.5D space (layers and masks require semi-three-dimensional thinking), allowing for goal-oriented tasks with various approaches each.
  2. Is familiar in goal and purpose to most users, but most users will need to explore the application space and discover functionality.
  3. Applications of design principles such as simplicity (or lack thereof), predictability, feedback and control, and interruptibility. These have cognitive analogues in affordance (e.g., time-dependent widgets like history and space-dependent widgets such as channels and paths), retention, etc.
• Cons of critiquing
  1. Image manipulation has relation to limited scientific analysis, in fields such as computer vision, object recognition, HCI, etc.

Google Scholar

OWNER: Gideon Goldin

Description of application: A web search engine for scholarly articles.

• Workflow to critique: The process of finding and selecting an article with incomplete information (e.g., partial title, single author, etc.).
• Pros of critiquing
  1. Used often by those in research. In some metrics considered to be biggest journal searching program.
  2. Very similar to general purpose web search such as Google. Obvious implications.
  3. Advanced search allows highly customizable searches.
  4. Simple program. Not too in-depth.
• Cons of critiquing
  1. Not used directly for scientific analysis (except for right now).
  2. 2D interface

MATLAB

OWNER: Jon Ericson

Description of application: A programming language and computing environment that permits easy manipulation of matrices, flexible data plotting, as well as algorithm and GUI development.

• Workflow to critique: Flexibly graphing data through a GUI developed within MATLAB (e.g. quickly changing the independent variable or axis scale via a drop-down menu, etc.)
• Pro's of critiquing
  1. MATLAB is widely used in the scientific community for data analysis and visualization.
  2. It is often used in conjunction with Excel (it has Excel import/export functions), and therefore might permit analysis of how two workflows interact or flow into one another in the context of two popular scientific applications.
• Con's of critiquing
  1. Requires some knowledge of the MATLAB programming language and basic matrix operations.
  2. Because it is such a flexible environment it is generally used in highly idiosyncratic ways; perhaps it would be best to focus on the design of the MATLAB interface itself and one of the workflows it permits (e.g. script-writing, making GUI layouts, or debugging).

Autodesk's Maya

OWNER: Trevor O'Brien

Description of application: Maya is a commercial software package for high quality 3D modeling, animation, visual effects, and rendering.

• Workflow to critique: Designing, modeling and navigating an expansive 3D scene.
• Pro's of critiquing
  1. Maya is the industry-leading environment for 3D modeling and animation, and is becoming prevalent in medical and scientific visualization.
  2. A good deal of research on the design of Maya tools has been published in the HCI community. May be interesting to compare design decisions against workflow analysis.
  3. 3D nature allows for interesting perceptual analysis.
• Con's of critiquing
  1. Potentially finding enough users who are comfortable with Maya. (Although it may be interesting to analyze novice users, having a group of experts as well would be ideal.)

SPSS

OWNER: Steven Ellis

Description of application: SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) is, as the name states, a statistical analysis program which facilitates data analysis via various descriptive and test procedures, as well as 2D visualizations.

• Workflow to critique: Determining the important features of a set of data.
• Pro's of critiquing
  1. SPSS is one of a small group of leading statistical packages and is used by social scientists across the country (including here at Brown).
  2. Statisticians and social scientists often are not particularly tech-savvy, and have often been trained with highly theoretical models. Ease of use is thus a critical aspect of a program such as SPSS.
  3. Tasks are all highly formal, thus making them salient for non-techies will prove an interesting exercise.
• Con's of critiquing
  1. Not the kind of program which one would ever have need to pick up on their own, thus having a somewhat steep learning curve is not necessarily a negative.
  2. Small choice-set of visualizations.

NCBI BLAST Searching

OWNER: Ian Spector

Description of application: BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) is a tool used in bioinformatics to compare the similarity of genetic or proteomic information that may be discovered by scientists to a known database of genomic information.

• Workflow to critique: Determining similarity between a discovered genetic sequence and known sequences.
• Pro's of critiquing
  1. BLAST searching through NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) is a heavily used resource for genetic research around the world
  2. There is a massive amount of information available to be mined in the NCBI databases and any improvement to the existing way the system works would likely be appreciated by all who make use of the service.
• Con's of critiquing
  1. Outrageously complicated for anyone who doesn't know anything about genetics, and possibly even those who are quite familiar
  2. The learning curve is vertical