http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20100112/#2
Technology users are technology observers as well, monitoring for problems or opportunities that might arise. Designing interfaces to support the monitoring of technology presents unique challenges, like detecting situations and knowing how and when to respond, coping with a changing operating environment, and the changing knowledge of the observer.
Conrad describes "Heed," a scale and framework to help observers of a system evaluate which situations need scrutiny and when. He gives an example heed-based interface that encourages the development of situation awareness. Learn how the framework and interface can be applied in three different scenarios: server performance, a business's finances, and user experience in a community forum.
Talk 1: Growth Hacking Basics
• Metrics - The Core of Growth Hacking
• Categories of Growth Hacks
• What is viral & how do I measure it?
Talk 2: Growth Hacking Tools
• Tools for measuring your metrics
Do you want to succeed in digital but don't know where to start?Do numbers scare you?
This presentation breaks down the process into bite size chunks with guaranteed success.
Talk 1: Growth Hacking Basics
• Metrics - The Core of Growth Hacking
• Categories of Growth Hacks
• What is viral & how do I measure it?
Talk 2: Growth Hacking Tools
• Tools for measuring your metrics
Do you want to succeed in digital but don't know where to start?Do numbers scare you?
This presentation breaks down the process into bite size chunks with guaranteed success.
Incident Reviews for a Learning Organisation
We all aspire to have a culture of learning and continuous improvement in our teams and organisations but learning and improving when things go wrong is far from easy.
When dealing with the fallout from failure - Incident reviews, Incident reports, investigations etc. - the way in which we respond to is a crucial to improving safety and the performance of our organisations.
Andy will talk about how Major Incident Reviews are run in IT Operations at Auto Trader. He’ll discuss what works well for them and will bring together practical advice from industry experts for creating a culture of safety and learning. Andy will also cover what mistakes they’ve made, what to avoid and the factors that can prevent learning.
A granular look into The Do's and Don't of Post Incident Analysis, featuring Jason Hand - DevOps Evangelist - from VictorOps and Jason Yee - Technical Writer/Evangelist - from Datadog.
Topics include a breakdown of the process in the following order:
- Service disruptions
- Detection
- Diagnosis
- Post-incident analysis
- Framework
Congratulations! You're The New Security Person! (or, I've Made a Huge Mistake)Sean Jackson
Basically, Enterprise Security 101. Covering frameworks, and how to try and wrap your arms around running the whole Information Security program from the beginning.
Elicitation and requirements analysis are some business analysis skills that are extremely helpful in an agile setting especially for team members responsible for product ownership. Equally helpful, if not more so, are the skills that teams use to interact with stakeholders, make decisions, and react to actual situations as they arise. The best way to understand the relevance of these skills is to share stories of successful, and perhaps not so successful interactions on real projects and discuss what the team learned. Join Kent as he shares stories from his experiences as Submission System Product Owner and relates the things he learned to useful skills for all business analysts. You’ll get a chance to tell Kent where he went wrong and also consider how to apply the lessons learned in your own setting. Along the way you’ll hear about some techniques for addressing common project situations that work well as long as you get the nuances right.
Designing dashboards for a Sense of ControlAnn Wuyts
What makes dashboards so appealing to the human mind? We love dashboards because they help us establish a sense of control.
Good dashboard design offers this sense of control in three ways: it gives us a clear understanding of the current situation, the resources to predict and plan for the future, and it helps us complete critical tasks in time.
These, and the 'context' and work routine in which a dashboard will get used, are things not to loose sight of when working on dashboard functionality, UI and UX.
( This slideshow is a summary from the article on Dashboards & creating a Sense of Control at http://www.keek.be/2014/designing-dashboards-for-a-sense-of-control/ )
Leveraging Diversity to Find What Works and Amplify Mike Cardus
Academic & pragmatic ways to gather a wide variety of ideas, then create ways to implement the ideas. They are trying to shift the default mode of problem solving away from people who are senior or tenured within the organization.
Measuring user engagement: the do, the do not do, and the we do not knowMounia Lalmas-Roelleke
In the online world, user engagement refers to the quality of the user experience that emphasises the phenomena associated with wanting to use an application longer and frequently. User engagement is a multifaceted, complex phenomenon; this gives rise to a number of measurement approaches. Common ways to evaluate user engagement include self-report measures, e.g., questionnaires; physiological methods, e.g. cursor and eye tracking; and web analytics, e.g., number of site visits, click depth. These methods represent various trade-off in terms of the setting (laboratory versus in the wild), object of measurement (user behaviour, affect or cognition) and scale of data collected. This talk will present various efforts aiming at combining approaches to measure engagement. A particular focus will be what these measures individually and combined can tell us and not tell about user engagement. The talk will use examples of studies on news sites, social media, and native advertising.
With new vulnerabilities surfacing daily, businesses need a solid strategy and internal plans to deal with them. This vendor-neutral talk helps people discover the things they need to do to get their house in order before considering costly technology purchases.
React Faster and Better: New Approaches for Advanced Incident ResponseSilvioPappalardo
It’s impossible to prevent everything (we see examples of this in the press every week), so you must be prepared to respond. The sad fact is that you will be breached. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but it will happen. So response is more important than any specific control. But it’s horrifying how unsophisticated most organizations are about response.
This is compounded by the reality of an evolving attack space, which means even if you do incident response well today, it won’t be good enough for tomorrow.
The Importance of Facial Features, Gretchen Anderson at BayCHIBayCHI
What's the key facial feature of your design? That one element that grabs people on an irrational level, reflects the big concept, and becomes the icon for your product or service. Gretchen Anderson points to BMW cars' split grill, Tivo's big, bright "pause" button, and the Flip camera's flip-out USB plug as examples of successful facial features. Yes, strive for usability, but the most usable designs can be boring. Your design needs personality, too!
Incident Reviews for a Learning Organisation
We all aspire to have a culture of learning and continuous improvement in our teams and organisations but learning and improving when things go wrong is far from easy.
When dealing with the fallout from failure - Incident reviews, Incident reports, investigations etc. - the way in which we respond to is a crucial to improving safety and the performance of our organisations.
Andy will talk about how Major Incident Reviews are run in IT Operations at Auto Trader. He’ll discuss what works well for them and will bring together practical advice from industry experts for creating a culture of safety and learning. Andy will also cover what mistakes they’ve made, what to avoid and the factors that can prevent learning.
A granular look into The Do's and Don't of Post Incident Analysis, featuring Jason Hand - DevOps Evangelist - from VictorOps and Jason Yee - Technical Writer/Evangelist - from Datadog.
Topics include a breakdown of the process in the following order:
- Service disruptions
- Detection
- Diagnosis
- Post-incident analysis
- Framework
Congratulations! You're The New Security Person! (or, I've Made a Huge Mistake)Sean Jackson
Basically, Enterprise Security 101. Covering frameworks, and how to try and wrap your arms around running the whole Information Security program from the beginning.
Elicitation and requirements analysis are some business analysis skills that are extremely helpful in an agile setting especially for team members responsible for product ownership. Equally helpful, if not more so, are the skills that teams use to interact with stakeholders, make decisions, and react to actual situations as they arise. The best way to understand the relevance of these skills is to share stories of successful, and perhaps not so successful interactions on real projects and discuss what the team learned. Join Kent as he shares stories from his experiences as Submission System Product Owner and relates the things he learned to useful skills for all business analysts. You’ll get a chance to tell Kent where he went wrong and also consider how to apply the lessons learned in your own setting. Along the way you’ll hear about some techniques for addressing common project situations that work well as long as you get the nuances right.
Designing dashboards for a Sense of ControlAnn Wuyts
What makes dashboards so appealing to the human mind? We love dashboards because they help us establish a sense of control.
Good dashboard design offers this sense of control in three ways: it gives us a clear understanding of the current situation, the resources to predict and plan for the future, and it helps us complete critical tasks in time.
These, and the 'context' and work routine in which a dashboard will get used, are things not to loose sight of when working on dashboard functionality, UI and UX.
( This slideshow is a summary from the article on Dashboards & creating a Sense of Control at http://www.keek.be/2014/designing-dashboards-for-a-sense-of-control/ )
Leveraging Diversity to Find What Works and Amplify Mike Cardus
Academic & pragmatic ways to gather a wide variety of ideas, then create ways to implement the ideas. They are trying to shift the default mode of problem solving away from people who are senior or tenured within the organization.
Measuring user engagement: the do, the do not do, and the we do not knowMounia Lalmas-Roelleke
In the online world, user engagement refers to the quality of the user experience that emphasises the phenomena associated with wanting to use an application longer and frequently. User engagement is a multifaceted, complex phenomenon; this gives rise to a number of measurement approaches. Common ways to evaluate user engagement include self-report measures, e.g., questionnaires; physiological methods, e.g. cursor and eye tracking; and web analytics, e.g., number of site visits, click depth. These methods represent various trade-off in terms of the setting (laboratory versus in the wild), object of measurement (user behaviour, affect or cognition) and scale of data collected. This talk will present various efforts aiming at combining approaches to measure engagement. A particular focus will be what these measures individually and combined can tell us and not tell about user engagement. The talk will use examples of studies on news sites, social media, and native advertising.
With new vulnerabilities surfacing daily, businesses need a solid strategy and internal plans to deal with them. This vendor-neutral talk helps people discover the things they need to do to get their house in order before considering costly technology purchases.
React Faster and Better: New Approaches for Advanced Incident ResponseSilvioPappalardo
It’s impossible to prevent everything (we see examples of this in the press every week), so you must be prepared to respond. The sad fact is that you will be breached. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but it will happen. So response is more important than any specific control. But it’s horrifying how unsophisticated most organizations are about response.
This is compounded by the reality of an evolving attack space, which means even if you do incident response well today, it won’t be good enough for tomorrow.
Similar to Conrad Albrecht-Buehler at BayCHI: Heed or: How I Learned to Stop Monitoring and Love Situation Awareness (20)
The Importance of Facial Features, Gretchen Anderson at BayCHIBayCHI
What's the key facial feature of your design? That one element that grabs people on an irrational level, reflects the big concept, and becomes the icon for your product or service. Gretchen Anderson points to BMW cars' split grill, Tivo's big, bright "pause" button, and the Flip camera's flip-out USB plug as examples of successful facial features. Yes, strive for usability, but the most usable designs can be boring. Your design needs personality, too!
Peter Merholz at BayCHI July 8, 2008: Creating Great Products and Services in...BayCHI
The way most organizations think and work on products and services isn't suited to the unpredictable world we live in. Instead, companies need new ways of thinking and working to adapt into innovative, agile, and commercially successful organizations who creates great products and services. Peter Merholz, one of the authors of Adaptive Path's new book, Subject to Change, will share a handful of breakthrough ideas for succeeding in a future that you can't predict.
Jared Spool: Revealing Design Treasures from The AmazonBayCHI
Jared Spool at BayCHI: Revealing Design Treasures from The Amazon
On its surface, Amazon.com just seems like a large e-commerce site, albeit a successful one. Its design isn't flashy, nor is it much to write home about. But deep within its pages are hidden secrets—secrets that every designer should know about.
Jeff Johnson at BayCHI: Designing with the Mind in MindBayCHI
Jeff Johnson at BayCHI in July 2010: Designing with the Mind in Mind: The Psychological Basis for UI Design Rules
http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20100713/
Mindset for Achievement: How to Boost Achievement and Fulfillment Through Min...BayCHI
Carol Dweck at BayCHI, May 11, 2010: Mindset is a simple idea discovered by world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck in decades of research on achievement and success—a simple idea that makes all the difference. In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. Dweck's research also shows that praising intelligence can harm motivation by creating a fixed mindset. People also tend to believe that talent alone creates success—without effort. They're wrong. In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment. Virtually all great people have had these qualities. Teaching a growth mindset creates motivation and productivity in the worlds of business, education, and sports.
Designing Social Interfaces: 5 Principles, 5 Practices, 5 Anti-PatternsBayCHI
Christian Crumlish at BayCHI April 13, 2010: Designing for social interaction is hard. People are unpredictable, consistency is a mixed blessing, and co-creation with your users requires a dizzying flirtation with loss of control. Christian will present the dos and don'ts of social web design using a sampling of interaction patterns, design principles and best practices to help you improve the design of your digital social environments.
Elaine Wherry, Meebo: What Web Application Design Can Learn from the HarpsichordBayCHI
Baroque harpsichordists excelled at taking simple melodies and creating elaborate, beautiful pieces of music. But in their desire to push the boundaries of experimentation, these keyboard virtuosi eventually ornamented the music beyond the limits of good taste, making the composer's original melody unrecognizable. Listen to enough Baroque music, and you'll ultimately decide, "This is ridiculous. I never want to hear another harpsichord!"
Something similar happens in Web design. With new technology comes a natural desire to experiment, challenging fundamental design rules to push the limits of web applications. As designers explore just how far they can go, there inevitably comes a breaking point, where you think, "This is ridiculous. I never want to see another rounded corner!"
In both cases, the lesson learned is that just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Web application interaction design brings a wealth of creative freedom and makes it increasingly important to identify the functional rationale for UI choices rather than gut reactions like "this is the way users are accustomed to it" or "this just looks better." Elaine will discuss how to approach web application design when, instead of one dominant voice, there's a multitude of web product and design philosophies.
Elaine Wherry is co-founder and VP of Products at Meebo. Originally a classically-trained violinist, Elaine graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Symbolic Systems with a concentration in Human-Computer Interaction. After graduating, she became the manager of Usability and Design at Synaptics. She co-founded Meebo.com in 2005 with two good friends, Seth Sternberg and Sandy Jen. Initially, she wrote Meebo's JavaScript framework and went on to build and oversee Meebo's web, user experience, and product management teams. Today, Meebo has approximately 40 million unique users in the United States and nearly 100 million unique users worldwide, according to Quantcast.
Scott MacKenzie at BayCHI: Evaluating Eye Tracking Systems for Computer Data ...BayCHI
The human eye, with the assistance of an eye tracking apparatus, may serve as an input controller to a computer system. Much like point-select operations with a mouse, the eye can "look-select", and thereby activate items such as buttons, icons, links, or text. Evaluating the eye working in concert with an eye tracking system requires a methodology that uniquely addresses the characteristics of both the eye and the eye tracking apparatus. Among the interactions considered are eye typing and mouse emulation. Eye typing involves using the eye to interact with an on-screen keyboard to generate text messages. Mouse emulation involves using the eye for conventional point-select operations in a graphical user interface. In this case, the methodologies for evaluating pointing devices (e.g., Fitts' law and ISO 9241-9) are applicable but must be tailored to the unique characteristics of the eye, such as saccadic movement. This presentation surveys and reviews these and other issues in evaluating eye-tracking systems for computer input.
Scott MacKenzie is associate professor of Computer Science and Engineering at York University, Toronto, Canada. His research is in human-computer interaction with an emphasis on human performance measurement and modeling, experimental methods and evaluation, interaction devices and techniques, alphanumeric entry, language modeling, and mobile computing. He has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, including more than 30 from the ACM's annual SIGCHI conference. He has given numerous invited talks over the past 20 years.
Juliette Melton at BayCHI: Real World Remote ResearchBayCHI
Remote research can raise the quality and lower the costs of your user research efforts; using a combination of surveys, video, screensharing, and phone, you can connect with a much broader range of users than you could using traditional lab-based usability tests, while using resources more efficiently than you would doing contextual research. In this workshop-style talk, Juliette Melton will cover recruiting sources, technology tools, and caveats you might not have thought of, including managing time zones and participant distraction. We will also address pros and cons of increasingly popular non-scripted research services.
Juliette Melton at BayCHI: Real World Remote ResearchBayCHI
Remote research can raise the quality and lower the costs of your user research efforts; using a combination of surveys, video, screensharing, and phone, you can connect with a much broader range of users than you could using traditional lab-based usability tests, while using resources more efficiently than you would doing contextual research. In this workshop-style talk, Juliette Melton will cover recruiting sources, technology tools, and caveats you might not have thought of, including managing time zones and participant distraction. We will also address pros and cons of increasingly popular non-scripted research services.
Conrad Albrecht-Buehler at BayCHI: Heed or: How I Learned to Stop Monitoring ...BayCHI
http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20100112/#2
Technology users are technology observers as well, monitoring for problems or opportunities that might arise. Designing interfaces to support the monitoring of technology presents unique challenges, like detecting situations and knowing how and when to respond, coping with a changing operating environment, and the changing knowledge of the observer.
Conrad describes "Heed," a scale and framework to help observers of a system evaluate which situations need scrutiny and when. He gives an example heed-based interface that encourages the development of situation awareness. Learn how the framework and interface can be applied in three different scenarios: server performance, a business's finances, and user experience in a community forum.
Joy Mountford at BayCHI: Visualizations of Our Collective LivesBayCHI
The lines between art, design, and information are dissolving as we experience new places and objects. Consider, for example, the organic flow of air traffic over North America at daybreak, the bursts of search query memes spreading around the globe, and the pointillist surge of mobile phone usage on New Year's Eve. Using the new techniques of generative data visualization, a new generation of artist/designers/engineer/scientists are creating gorgeous, dynamic experiences driven by massive sets of data about our own lives. Their work comes to life in architectural spaces, on walls of wood and metal and light and shimmering glass clouds suspended overhead. Of course it must be touched to be appreciated and engaged with, simple gestures launch a thousand images and possibilities. Many of these projects have received international recognition. They are primarily 3D applications that can run in real time, but really can only be appreciated by watching them, as movies. These data movies aim to make information easier to understand while being enjoyable to watch. Surprising insights surface through looking at our 'data life' in new ways, and may compel us to design in different, even better ways.
For those who couldn’t attend Wikimania, the annual international Wikimedia conference, this panel of top contributors to the wiki community reviews some of the latest developments, lessons learned, and what to expect from Wikimedia in the future.
Adina Levin of SocialText leads a panel that includes Wikimedia executives and other noted wiki experts as they share highlights from Wikimania 2009. The panelists discuss a project that would allow Wikimedia to be more usable for contributers, opportunities to help Wikimedia move forward, and the latest wiki trends.
Yahoo!'s Micah Alpern describes the culture of Wikimania. Sue Gardner, Wikimedia's executive director, covers the foundations priorities and projects. Ed Chi of PARC summarizes his much-discussed research on the slowing growth of Wikipedia, with data, models, and possible explanations. Naoko Komura shows off the achievements of Wikimedia's Usability Project and describes its future plans. Jack Herrick of wikiHow describes his company's efforts to increase contributions to wikis.
The broad wiki community is strong, productive, and inventive, and our panelists are a few of the people who help make it a success. Whether you use wikis for reference, contribute to wikis at work, use other kinds of user-contributed media, or participate in open-source communities, you'll learn a lot from these experts.
Taming Complexity and Sparking Innovation Through Ideation and Design ThinkingBayCHI
Gayle Curtis, Design Consultant at BayCHI, December 8, 2009: A design thinking approach to product development gives us a place to start and a way to proceed with problems that are tricky and ill-defined. It can help tame their complexity and uncover innovative solutions. At the heart of this approach is ideation, the capacity for generating ideas and entertaining alternatives, which we most often practice in brainstorming sessions. In this talk we will look at the background, values and techniques of brainstorming and how to structure effective brainstorm sessions. We will also look at the ways group brainstorms can enhance team performance and serve as the sparkplug for an innovation pipeline.
Aiming for Innovation: Living Design in a Business WorldBayCHI
Brynn Evans and Krista Sanders at BayCHI, December 8, 2009: Design thinking and how it relates to software product development in general and HCI design in particular. The values and methods of strategic ideation and see how they can be applied in various real life/real work situations.
"Well, we did all this research ... now what?"BayCHI
Steve Portigal at BayCHI, June 9, 2009: One of the most persistent factors limiting the impact of user research in business is that research projects often stop with a cataloging findings and implications rather than generating opportunities that directly enable the findings. As designers increasingly become involved in using contextual research to inform their design work, they may find themselves holding onto a trove of raw data but with little awareness of how to turn it into design.
Steve introduces a framework for synthesizing raw data into insights, and then creatively using those insights to develop a range of business concepts.
Macroeconomics- Movie Location
This will be used as part of your Personal Professional Portfolio once graded.
Objective:
Prepare a presentation or a paper using research, basic comparative analysis, data organization and application of economic information. You will make an informed assessment of an economic climate outside of the United States to accomplish an entertainment industry objective.
A Strategic Approach: GenAI in EducationPeter Windle
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as Generative AI, Image Generators and Large Language Models have had a dramatic impact on teaching, learning and assessment over the past 18 months. The most immediate threat AI posed was to Academic Integrity with Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) focusing their efforts on combating the use of GenAI in assessment. Guidelines were developed for staff and students, policies put in place too. Innovative educators have forged paths in the use of Generative AI for teaching, learning and assessments leading to pockets of transformation springing up across HEIs, often with little or no top-down guidance, support or direction.
This Gasta posits a strategic approach to integrating AI into HEIs to prepare staff, students and the curriculum for an evolving world and workplace. We will highlight the advantages of working with these technologies beyond the realm of teaching, learning and assessment by considering prompt engineering skills, industry impact, curriculum changes, and the need for staff upskilling. In contrast, not engaging strategically with Generative AI poses risks, including falling behind peers, missed opportunities and failing to ensure our graduates remain employable. The rapid evolution of AI technologies necessitates a proactive and strategic approach if we are to remain relevant.
Introduction to AI for Nonprofits with Tapp NetworkTechSoup
Dive into the world of AI! Experts Jon Hill and Tareq Monaur will guide you through AI's role in enhancing nonprofit websites and basic marketing strategies, making it easy to understand and apply.
Welcome to TechSoup New Member Orientation and Q&A (May 2024).pdfTechSoup
In this webinar you will learn how your organization can access TechSoup's wide variety of product discount and donation programs. From hardware to software, we'll give you a tour of the tools available to help your nonprofit with productivity, collaboration, financial management, donor tracking, security, and more.
Read| The latest issue of The Challenger is here! We are thrilled to announce that our school paper has qualified for the NATIONAL SCHOOLS PRESS CONFERENCE (NSPC) 2024. Thank you for your unwavering support and trust. Dive into the stories that made us stand out!
Synthetic Fiber Construction in lab .pptxPavel ( NSTU)
Synthetic fiber production is a fascinating and complex field that blends chemistry, engineering, and environmental science. By understanding these aspects, students can gain a comprehensive view of synthetic fiber production, its impact on society and the environment, and the potential for future innovations. Synthetic fibers play a crucial role in modern society, impacting various aspects of daily life, industry, and the environment. ynthetic fibers are integral to modern life, offering a range of benefits from cost-effectiveness and versatility to innovative applications and performance characteristics. While they pose environmental challenges, ongoing research and development aim to create more sustainable and eco-friendly alternatives. Understanding the importance of synthetic fibers helps in appreciating their role in the economy, industry, and daily life, while also emphasizing the need for sustainable practices and innovation.
Normal Labour/ Stages of Labour/ Mechanism of LabourWasim Ak
Normal labor is also termed spontaneous labor, defined as the natural physiological process through which the fetus, placenta, and membranes are expelled from the uterus through the birth canal at term (37 to 42 weeks
June 3, 2024 Anti-Semitism Letter Sent to MIT President Kornbluth and MIT Cor...Levi Shapiro
Letter from the Congress of the United States regarding Anti-Semitism sent June 3rd to MIT President Sally Kornbluth, MIT Corp Chair, Mark Gorenberg
Dear Dr. Kornbluth and Mr. Gorenberg,
The US House of Representatives is deeply concerned by ongoing and pervasive acts of antisemitic
harassment and intimidation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Failing to act decisively to ensure a safe learning environment for all students would be a grave dereliction of your responsibilities as President of MIT and Chair of the MIT Corporation.
This Congress will not stand idly by and allow an environment hostile to Jewish students to persist. The House believes that your institution is in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and the inability or
unwillingness to rectify this violation through action requires accountability.
Postsecondary education is a unique opportunity for students to learn and have their ideas and beliefs challenged. However, universities receiving hundreds of millions of federal funds annually have denied
students that opportunity and have been hijacked to become venues for the promotion of terrorism, antisemitic harassment and intimidation, unlawful encampments, and in some cases, assaults and riots.
The House of Representatives will not countenance the use of federal funds to indoctrinate students into hateful, antisemitic, anti-American supporters of terrorism. Investigations into campus antisemitism by the Committee on Education and the Workforce and the Committee on Ways and Means have been expanded into a Congress-wide probe across all relevant jurisdictions to address this national crisis. The undersigned Committees will conduct oversight into the use of federal funds at MIT and its learning environment under authorities granted to each Committee.
• The Committee on Education and the Workforce has been investigating your institution since December 7, 2023. The Committee has broad jurisdiction over postsecondary education, including its compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, campus safety concerns over disruptions to the learning environment, and the awarding of federal student aid under the Higher Education Act.
• The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating the sources of funding and other support flowing to groups espousing pro-Hamas propaganda and engaged in antisemitic harassment and intimidation of students. The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is the principal oversight committee of the US House of Representatives and has broad authority to investigate “any matter” at “any time” under House Rule X.
• The Committee on Ways and Means has been investigating several universities since November 15, 2023, when the Committee held a hearing entitled From Ivory Towers to Dark Corners: Investigating the Nexus Between Antisemitism, Tax-Exempt Universities, and Terror Financing. The Committee followed the hearing with letters to those institutions on January 10, 202
86. Help know when and what to monitorAlarm Heed Attention Dashboard Report Information
87. Reduce Mental Effort To Parse Support Subjective Evaluation Identify When to Monitor Customize & Filter By Situation Help To Forecast Situations Only Necessary Detail Offer More Detail On Demand Encourage Frequent Revision
To be more be more precise, I think that they’re incomplete.
I would classify monitoring tools into three types,based on how they’re designed to draw your attention, and how much information they contain.
Reports containa lot of information – information that’s focused on a subject and may contain data analysis, but it’s not designed to draw your attention to it, and so it’s pretty easy to ignore.
By comparison, an alarm or alert, is designed to direct your attention, but contains very little information – typically, just one bit of data.
Dashboards contain a lot of data, which is typically unanalyzed data and not necessarily organized around a subject or situation, and so less information than a report, but they’re designed to direct your attention somewhat
So, a way to think about Monitoring UIs ison this sort of continuum.
And there’s this gap. For monitoring Uisto be complete, we need to create interfaces that bridge this gap.
I’llmake the argument that, to bridge the gap, what we need are interfaces that are designed primarily to direct attention, but contain some information. Enough to know when and what to monitor. In other words: when to use dashboards and reports.
To make my case, I’m going to tell you THREE REAL user stories about monitoring, and the difficulties each person has.I’ll discussthe situations that are important to each of them, and how they each perform their monitoring.Each story is as an example of a monitoring task that competes with many other responsibilities, and is onefor which alarms and dashboard don’t always work.
The first story is about monitoring servers
The second is about monitoring business performance by reading financial reports
The third is about monitoring user experience in a discussion forum
Our first story is about a CTO working in a small start-up.The company’s business is based on a web site, and he is charge of everything technical at the company.In addition to his Executive duties – like raising funds and doing interviewshe’s also the Lead developer, in charge of the team creating the web applicationsBut he’s also the Systems admin – builds and maintains all the desktops and all of the servers the company needs.As a sys-admin, one of the things he monitors is the performance of his Web, Database, and Mail servers
He actually has powerful server dashboards but rarely uses them. His dashboards are a lot like this one.
So why doesn’t our CTO use these dashboards – it sure looks like a lot of great data.The problem is…NEXT
Our CTO has a whole lot of other responsibilities besides monitoring, and skimming and interpreting the dashboard takes time.He’s not an air traffic controller who can primarily focus on his monitoring task. But maybe we can learn something from those air traffic controllers…
Air traffic controllers do focus their attention, but have a multitude of information that they have to manage.
They, and the designers of their tools, rely on a concept most of you are probably familiar with called Situation Awareness. Mica Endsley is has done a lot of great work in this area, and gives us the canonical definition of Situation Awareness, but for today I prefer "the perception of elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future,"
Jeannot., Kelly,& Thompson’s.Jeannot, E., Kelly, C. & Thompson, D. (2003). The development of situation awareness measures in ATM systems. Brussels: Eurocontrol.
At a very high level, to help develop SA, monitoring interface designers should help the user by guiding attention to information relevant to a user’s goal, help interpret the information’s meaning, and help them to make a forecast.Designing for Situation Awareness: An Approach to User-Centered Design, by Endsley, Bolte, Jones 2003
Dashboards can sometimes help interpret data meaning, and when they include time-domain data like graphs, they can actually help make a forecast.Stephen Few has written a lot of good material on dashboard design, as has of course Edward Tufte.
But even a well-designed dashboard requires mental effort to parse to find the information relevant to a goal.This is an issue of grouping more than of highlighting
What makes the data relevant, together, is the bearing it has on a particular situation:For example: The application server bottlenecking, the server being compromised, the network being misconfigured, the storage reaching capacity, etc.
But we can at least define a couple of design goals at this point: to try and reduce the mental effort required to parse the monitoring UI for info relevant to a goal, perhaps through customization and filtering of the data by situation. These aren’t exactly lofty design goals, and in fact, we do see them enacted, but maybe not often enough. But it’s a start.So, back to our CTO. if he’s not using his dashboards to monitor his servers, what is he using?
He workson his servers at various times through out the day: updating application code, installing a patch, etc.When he happens to be logged into one of the servers, I noticed that he usually runs ‘uptime’ to check that server’s load.
He samples the server load, and if he happens to catch it at a moment of high load and if he has time, he might investigate the situation.In other words, is the server load high enough, that he needs to investigate?“High enough” What is “high enough”? NEXT
That’s pretty subjective. What might be high enough to me, may not be high enough to him.He’s making a subjective evaluation from objective information. If this is what he actually does to monitor his servers, we as designers should support that.
Implicit in the question is another one: is there enough time for him to investigate? Remember he has a lot of other responsibilities.
Essentially, what he’s really asking is: is it important enough for me to investigateThis is the cornerstone of how I think we can improve monitoring UIs. We need another kind of monitoring UI to tell us that there’s something important enough to attend to and begin actively monitoring.Doesn’t that sound suspiciously a lot like an alarm? Couldn’t our CTO just use an alarm to tell him his server load is high enough?
As I mentioned in the beginning, alarms are actually another monitoring UI.But Alarms have their own set of problems:
You never know that they’re comingThey Force you to act, even when you can’tIf you can’t address them, what do you do? Snooze, Cancel, Ignore?
Our CTO also has alarms to tell him about incidents, but he mostly ignores them too.He filters them into their own mailbox, and all but never looks at them. Sometimes, if something goes wrong, he’ll use the cache of alerts to trace back to try and find a root cause, but then he’s using them as an analysis too, not a monitoring toolTo be fair, He does use one sort of alarm regularly though:
Sometimes, someone from his customer support team tells him that they’re getting angry calls. You could say that he lets his customers monitor the system for him and act as an alert system.But that’s not ideal.Let’s look more closely at why an alarm doesn’t work for his uptime monitoring method
Here’s a quick graph of server loadSo, Is load high? Here’s where it get’s subjective.To me, if it’s not above .9 it’s not high. To him, above .7 is high
Here’s the problem with using an alarm: If it goes off, he won’t necessarily have time to drop everything to investigate. And when he has time, the alarm doesn’t tell him anything unless it goes offNEXT
The root of the problem is, that this what an alarm does. It divides the data range.Into data he should ignoreNEXT
And data he should to attend to.NEXT
Remember,he said that he’d investigate if the load was high enough. An alarmjust tells him that it’s high.And what’s more, only tells him that once it’s happened, nothing before.But the graph tells us more. He can see how it’s changing, and see where it is, and where it’s been. But at a cost. He has to interpret the graph, and he’s already dismissed using his dashboards for that reason. Furthermore, it takes up a lot of screen real estate.In part, that’s why network operations centers look like this:
With monitoring displays as far as the eye can see, but our startup CTO can’t afford to do this.So maybe there’s something in between a graph and an alarm we can come up with.
Instead, what if we change how the data range is divided up? From this to
To This.
Instead of showing the whole graph, We could just show a region priorto the alarm threshold. Then the position in the region can identify the importance of attending to a situation. If the data is below the ignore threshold, it might as well be at the ignore boundary. Likewise, it doesn’t matter how high the load is, we can consider any reading to be at the attend boundary.
The rangein between enables us to indicate that there is a degree of importance to attending the situation. I refer to this range as “heed.” The closer it gets to the alarm threshold, the more important it becomes to attend to the situation.And we can just use the familiar slider widget to indicate the heed.
Now our CTO has a way of knowing if the load is high enough. Now we can offer him a simple dashboard that relies on the the way he already monitors his servers. One that doesn’t give him too much detail, and can still help him to decide if he should turn his attention to the servers depending on how much time he has. In other words, it helps him make tactical decisions about his time.It does so continuously, so when he has time he can quickly identify if he should use that time to investigate.By making this tiny dashboard easily and persistently visible, he can quickly evaluate the situation and develop some awareness about how often his servers become heavily loaded.But in this case the situation he’s interested in is indicated by a single sensor. Situations may be based on several sensor readings.This is a situation he may need to check on several times a day. But what about monitoring for situations that occur far less frequently?
Let me tell you a little about a CEO that I worked with that has a very different monitoring problem.She is in change of a medium-sized company that offers services online. She has launched several programs to grow the business, and needs to keep her eye on the performance of those programs. However, she doesn’t need to look in on them every day, once a week is probably enough.But she, like our CTO, also has too many responsibilities and is constantly dealing with more immediately urgent problems.As a result she often forgets to check up on the programsFurthermore, she feels quite a bit of anxiety over the performance of these problems which doesn’t help the situation, and only encourage her to avoid checking up on the programs
She monitors the programs by reading reports generated for her that basically look like this.If the report shows that a program is not performing well enough based on her expectations, she would investigate the situation.In many ways, this is a lot like our CTO’sserver monitoring problem, except that the values change much more slowly,So we can try to apply a similar solution.
Here we can see how close each of her clients are to being under-performers.We could just show her these four indicators, but what happens when the program grows to 20 clients? 200 clients?We need a way to compact the display, so she can just decide if she needs to read the report.
Let’s assign some values to the heed range and make it a scale.We can set 0 to minimum heedAnd 1 to maximum heed.
Now we can elect the maximum heed value to represent the whole report.That means, that instead of saying Client M needs your attention, it says the report needs her attention. It says that unless the whole program is performing well, she should investigate the situation.
That is essentially like an OR operation from fuzzy set theory applied to these four heed values.Now she has a single representation that summarizes the report, and again, if we make it persistently visible she will have a continuous evaluation of the program’s performance
And if it looks like the program might need her attention, she can delve into the display, first giving her a more detailed evaluation, and then giving her access to the data itself to investigate
We can use this a model for how heed UIs. should directing user attention:Presenting them with a subjective evaluation of the information and moving them toward more detailed, objective analysis. Going from Simon to House.
This is another way to improve monitoring UIs – show minimal detail, but make more detail directly available to the user through the interface.Everybody’s favorite UI paradigm: Progressive Disclosure