CS295J/Application Critiques

Applications

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

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.

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.

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.

OWNER: Gideon Goldin

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

OWNER: Jon Ericson