Joanna McGrenere
About the author:
No description available of Joanna McGrenere...
Publications by Joanna McGrenere (bibliography)
» 2009 «
Findlater, Leah, Moffatt, Karyn, McGrenere, Joanna and Dawson, Jessica (2009): Ephemeral adaptation: the use of gradual onset to improve menu selection performance. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2009. pp. 1655-1664. Available online
“We introduce ephemeral adaptation, a new adaptive GUI technique that improves performance by reducing visual search time while maintaining spatial consistency. Ephemeral adaptive interfaces employ gradual onset to draw the user's attention to predicted items: adaptively predicted items appear abruptly when the menu is opened, but non-predicted items fade in gradually. To demonstrate the benefit of ephemeral adaptation we conducted two experiments with a total of 48 users to show: (1) that ephemeral adaptive menus are faster than static menus when accuracy is high, and are not significantly slower when it is low and (2) that ephemeral adaptive menus are also faster than adaptive highlighting. While we focused on user-adaptive GUIs, ephemeral adaptation should be applicable to a broad range of visually complex tasks.”
Copyrights may apply
» 2008 «
Findlater, Leah and McGrenere, Joanna (2008): Impact of screen size on performance, awareness, and user satisfaction with adaptive graphical user interfaces. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 1247-1256. Available online
“Adaptive personalization, where the system adapts the interface to a user's needs, has the potential for significant performance benefits on small screen devices. However, research on adaptive interfaces has almost exclusively focused on desktop displays. To explore how well previous findings generalize to small screen devices, we conducted a study with 36 subjects to compare adaptive interfaces for small and desktop-sized screens. Results show that high accuracy adaptive menus have an even larger positive impact on performance and satisfaction when screen real estate is constrained. The drawback of the high accuracy menus, however, is that they reduce the user's awareness of the full set of items in the interface, potentially making it more difficult for users to learn about new features.”
Copyrights may apply
Moffatt, Karyn, Yuen, Sandra and McGrenere, Joanna (2008): Hover or tap?: supporting pen-based menu navigation for older adults. In: Tenth Annual ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Assistive Technologies 2008. pp. 51-58. Available online
“Tablet PCs are gaining popularity, but many users, particularly older ones, still struggle with pen-based interaction. One type of error, drifting, occurs when users accidentally hover over an adjacent menu, causing their focus menu to close and the adjacent one to open. In this paper, we propose two approaches to address drifting. The first, tap, requires an explicit tap to switch menus, and thus, eliminates the possibility of a drift. The second, glide, uses a distance threshold to delay switching, and thereby reduce the likelihood of a drift. We performed a comparative evaluation of our approaches with a control interface. Tap was effective at reducing drifts for both groups, but it was only popular among older users. Glide surprisingly did not show any performance improvement. Additional research is needed to determine if the negative findings for glide are a result of the particular threshold used, or reflect a fundamental flaw in the glide approach.”
Copyrights may apply
Allen, Meghan, McGrenere, Joanna and Purves, Barbara (2008): The Field Evaluation of a Mobile Digital Image Communication Application Designed for People with Aphasia. In ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing, 1 (1) p. 5
“PhotoTalk is an application for a mobile device that allows people with aphasia to capture and manage digital photographs to support face-to-face communication. Unlike any other augmentative and alternative communication device for people with aphasia, PhotoTalk focuses solely on image capture and organization and is designed to be used independently. Our project used a streamlined process with three phases: (1) a rapid participatory design and development phase with two speech-language pathologists acting as representative users, (2) an informal usability study with five aphasic participants, which caught usability problems and provided preliminary feedback on the usefulness of PhotoTalk, and (3) a one-month field evaluation with two aphasic participants followed by a one-month secondary field evaluation with one aphasic participant, which showed that they all used it regularly and relatively independently, although not always for its intended communicative purpose. Our field evaluations demonstrated PhotoTalk's promise in terms of its usability and usefulness in everyday communication.”
Copyrights may apply
Chan, Andrew, MacLean, Karon and McGrenere, Joanna (2008): Designing haptic icons to support collaborative turn-taking. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 20 (5) pp. 333-355
“This paper describes research exploring the use of haptics to support users collaborating remotely in a single-user shared application. Mediation of turn-taking during remote collaboration provides a context to explore haptic affordances for background communication as well as control negotiation in remote collaboration: existing turn-taking protocols are rudimentary, lacking many communication cues available in face-to-face collaboration. We therefore designed a custom turn-taking protocol that allows users to express different levels of urgency in their request for control from a collaborator; state of control and requests are communicated by touch, with the intent of offloading visual attention. To support it, we developed a set of haptic icons, tangible stimuli to which specific meanings have been assigned. Because we required an icon set which could be utilized with specified, varying levels of intrusiveness in real attentionally challenged situations, we used a perceptually guided procedure that consisted of four steps: initial icon set design, perceptual refinement, validation of learnability and effectiveness under workload, and deployment in an application simulation. We found that our haptic icons could be learned to a high degree of accuracy in under 3 min and remained identifiable even under significant cognitive workload. In an exploratory observational study comparing haptic, visual, and combined haptic and visual support for our protocol, participants overall preferred the combined multi-modal support, and in particular preferred the haptic support for control changes and the visual support for displaying state. In their control negotiation, users clearly utilized the option of requesting with graded urgency. The three major contributions in this paper are: (1) the introduction and first case study using a systematic process for refining and evaluating haptic icons for background communication in a primarily visual application; (2) the usability observed for a particular set of icons designed with that process; and (3) the introduction of an urgency-based turn-taking protocol and a comparison of haptic, visual and multi-modal support of our implementation of that protocol.”
Copyrights may apply
Allen, Meghan, Leung, Rock, McGrenere, Joanna and Purves, Barbara (2008): Involving domain experts in assistive technology research. In Universal Access in the Information Society, 7 (3) pp. 145-154
“Teams engaging in assistive technology research should include expertise in the domain of disability itself, in addition to other areas of expertise that are more typical in human-computer interaction (HCI) research, such as computer science and psychology. However, unexpected problems can arise when HCI researchers do not adequately plan the involvement of domain experts in a research project. Although many research teams have included domain experts when designing assistive technologies, there has been little work published on how to best involve these experts in the research process. This paper is a first step towards filling that void. Based on the authors' own experiences involving domain experts in research, as well as those documented in the literature, five types of domain experts and three broad roles that domain experts can play are identified, and five guidelines for their involvement are presented. This analysis will be useful to anyone in the assistive technology and universal accessibility communities, especially those who are in the early stages of conducting research in this area. It is intended to lay the foundation of best practices for involving domain experts in assistive technology research.”
Copyrights may apply
» 2007 «
Gluck, Jennifer, Bunt, Andrea and McGrenere, Joanna (2007): Matching attentional draw with utility in interruption. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2007. pp. 41-50. Available online
“This research examines a design guideline that aims to increase the positive perception of interruptions. The guideline advocates matching the amount of attention attracted by an interruption's notification method (attentional draw) to the utility of the interruption content. Our first experiment examined a set of 10 visual notification signals in terms of their detection times and established a set of three significantly different signals along the spectrum of attentional draw. Our second experiment investigated matching these different signals to interruption content with different levels of utility. Results indicate that the matching strategy decreases annoyance and increases perception of benefit compared to a strategy that uses the same signal regardless of interruption utility, with no significant impact on workload or performance. Design implications arising from the second experiment as well as recommendations for future work are discussed.”
Copyrights may apply
Bunt, Andrea, Conati, Cristina and McGrenere, Joanna (2007): Supporting interface customization using a mixed-initiative approach. In: Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces 2007. pp. 92-101. Available online
“We describe a mixed-initiative framework designed to support the customization of complex graphical user interfaces. The framework uses an innovative form of online GOMS analysis to provide the user with tailored customization suggestions aimed at maximizing the user's performance with the interface. The suggestions are presented non-intrusively, minimizing disruption and allowing the user to maintain full control. The framework has been applied to a general user-productivity application. A formal user evaluation of the system provides encouraging evidence that this mixed-initiative approach is preferred to a purely adaptable alternative and that the system's suggestions help improve task performance.”
Copyrights may apply
Moffatt, Karyn and McGrenere, Joanna (2007): Slipping and drifting: using older users to uncover pen-based target acquisition difficulties. In: Ninth Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies 2007. pp. 11-18. Available online
“This paper presents the results of a study to gather information on the underlying causes of pen-based target acquisition difficulty. In order to observe both simple and complex interaction, two tasks (menu and Fitts' tapping) were used. Thirty-six participants across three age groups (18-54, 54-69, and 70-85) were included to draw out both general shortcomings of targeting, and those difficulties unique to older users. Three primary sources of target acquisition difficulty were identified: slipping off the target, drifting unexpectedly from one menu to the next, and missing a menu selection by selecting the top edge of the item below. Based on these difficulties, we then evolved several designs for improving pen-based target acquisition. An additional finding was that including older users as participants allowed us to uncover pen-interaction deficiencies that we would likely have missed otherwise.”
Copyrights may apply
Allen, Meghan, McGrenere, Joanna and Purves, Barbara (2007): The design and field evaluation of PhotoTalk: a digital image communication application for people. In: Ninth Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies 2007. pp. 187-194. Available online
“Talk is an application for a mobile device that allows people with aphasia to capture and manage digital photographs to support face-to-face communication. Unlike any other augmentative and alternative communication device for people with aphasia, PhotoTalk focuses solely on image capture and organization and is designed to be used independently. Our project used a streamlined process with 3 phases: (1) a rapid participatory design and development phase with two speech-language pathologists acting as representative users, (2) an informal usability study with 5 aphasic participants, which caught usability problems and provided preliminary feedback on the usefulness of PhotoTalk, and (3) a 1 month field evaluation with 2 aphasic participants, which showed that both used it regularly and fairly independently, although not always for its intended communicative purpose. Our field study demonstrated PhotoTalk's promise in terms of its usability and usefulness in real life situations.”
Copyrights may apply
McGrenere, Joanna, Baecker, Ronald M. and Booth, Kellogg S. (2007): A field evaluation of an adaptable two-interface design for feature-rich software. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 14 (1) p. 3
“Two approaches for supporting personalization in complex software are system-controlled adaptive menus and user-controlled adaptable menus. We evaluate a novel interface design for feature-rich productivity software based on adaptable menus. The design allows the user to easily customize a personalized interface, and also supports quick access to the default interface with all of the standard features. This design was prototyped as a front-end to a commercial word processor. A field experiment investigated users' personalizing behavior and tested the effects of different interface designs on users' satisfaction and their perceived ability to navigate, control, and learn the software. There were two conditions: a commercial word processor with adaptive menus and our prototype with adaptable menus for the same word processor. Our evaluation shows: (1) when provided with a flexible, easy-to-use and easy-to-understand customization mechanism, the majority of users do effectively personalize their interface; and (2) user-controlled interface adaptation with our adaptable menus results in better navigation and learnability, and allows for the adoption of different personalization strategies, as compared to a particular system-controlled adaptive menu system that implements a single strategy. We report qualitative data obtained from interviews and questionnaires with participants in the evaluation in addition to quantitative data.”
Copyrights may apply
Bunt, Andrea, McGrenere, Joanna and Conati, Cristina (2007): Understanding the Utility of Rationale in a Mixed-Initiative System for GUI Customization. In: Conati, Cristina, McCoy, Kathleen F. and Paliouras, Georgios (eds.) User Modeling 2007 - 11th International Conference - UM 2007 June 25-29, 2007, Corfu, Greece. pp. 147-156. Available online
Findlater, Leah and McGrenere, Joanna (2007): Evaluating Reduced-Functionality Interfaces According to Feature Findability and Awareness. In: Baranauskas, Maria Cecília Calani, Palanque, Philippe A., Abascal, Julio and Barbosa, Simone Diniz Junqueira (eds.) DEGAS 2007 - Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Design and Evaluation of e-Government Applications and Services September 11th, 2007, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. pp. 592-605. Available online
» 2006 «
Nekrasovski, Dmitry, Bodnar, Adam, McGrenere, Joanna, Guimbretiere, Francois and Munzner, Tamara (2006): An evaluation of pan & zoom and rubber sheet navigation with and without an overview. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2006. pp. 11-20. Available online
“We present a study that evaluates conventional Pan and Zoom Navigation and Rubber Sheet Navigation, a rectilinear Focus+Context technique. Each of the two navigation techniques was evaluated both with and without an overview. All interfaces guaranteed that regions of interest would remain visible, at least as a compressed landmark, independent of navigation actions. Interfaces implementing these techniques were used by 40 subjects to perform a task that involved navigating a large hierarchical tree dataset and making topological comparisons between nodes in the tree. Our results show that Pan and Zoom Navigation was significantly faster and required less mental effort than Rubber Sheet Navigation, independent of the presence or absence of an overview. Also, overviews did not appear to improve performance, but were still perceived as beneficial by users. We discuss the implications of our task and guaranteed visibility on the results and the limitations of our study, and we propose preliminary design guidelines and recommendations for future work.”
Copyrights may apply
Zheng, Qixing, Booth, Kellogg S. and McGrenere, Joanna (2006): Co-authoring with structured annotations. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2006. pp. 131-140. Available online
“Most co-authoring tools support basic annotations, such as edits and comments that are anchored at specific locations in the document. However, they do not support meta-commentary about a document (such as an author's summary of modifications) which gets separated from the document, often in the body of email messages. This causes unnecessary overhead in the write-review-edit workflow inherent in co-authoring. We present document-embedded structured annotations called "bundles" that incorporate the meta-commentary into a unified annotation model that meets a set of annotation requirements we identified through a small field investigation. A usability study with 20 subjects evaluated the annotation reviewing stage of co-authoring and showed that annotation bundles in our high-fidelity prototype reduced reviewing time and increased accuracy, compared to a system that only supports edits and comments.”
Copyrights may apply
» 2005 «
Tee, Kimberly, Moffatt, Karyn, Findlater, Leah, MacGregor, Eve, McGrenere, Joanna, Purves, Barbara and Fels, Sidney (2005): A visual recipe book for persons with language impairments. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2005 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2005. pp. 501-510. Available online
“Cooking is a daily activity for many people. However, traditional text recipes are often prohibitively difficult to follow for people with language disorders, such as aphasia. We have developed a multi-modal application that leverages the retained ability of aphasic individuals to recognize image-based representations of objects, providing a presentation format that can be more easily followed than a traditional text recipe. Through a systematic approach to developing a visual language for cooking, and the subsequent case study evaluation of a prototype developed according to this language, we show that a combination of visual instructions and navigational structure can help individuals with relatively large language deficits to cook more independently.”
Copyrights may apply
Chan, Andrew, MacLean, Karon E. and McGrenere, Joanna (2005): Learning and Identifying Haptic Icons under Workload. In: WHC 2005 - World Haptics Conference 18-20 March, 2005, Pisa, Italy. pp. 432-439. Available online
» 2004 «
Findlater, Leah and McGrenere, Joanna (2004): A comparison of static, adaptive, and adaptable menus. In: Dykstra-Erickson, Elizabeth and Tscheligi, Manfred (eds.) Proceedings of ACM CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria. pp. 89-96. Available online
“Software applications continue to grow in terms of the number of features they offer, making personalization increasingly important. Research has shown that most users prefer the control afforded by an adaptable approach to personalization rather than a system-controlled adaptive approach. No study, however, has compared the efficiency of the two approaches. In a controlled lab study with 27 subjects we compared the measured and perceived efficiency of three menu conditions: static, adaptable and adaptive. Each was implemented as a split menu, in which the top four items remained static, were adaptable by the subject, or adapted according to the subject's frequently and recently used items. The static menu was found to be significantly faster than the adaptive menu, and the adaptable menu was found to be significantly faster than the adaptive menu under certain conditions. The majority of users preferred the adaptable menu overall. Implications for interface design are discussed.”
Copyrights may apply
Moffatt, Karyn, McGrenere, Joanna, Purves, Barbara and Klawe, Maria (2004): The participatory design of a sound and image enhanced daily planner for people with aphasia. In: Dykstra-Erickson, Elizabeth and Tscheligi, Manfred (eds.) Proceedings of ACM CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria. pp. 407-414. Available online
“Aphasia is a cognitive disorder that impairs speech and language. From interviews with aphasic individuals, their caregivers, and speech-language pathologists, the need was identified for a daily planner that allows aphasic users to independently manage their appointments. We used a participatory design approach to develop ESI Planner (the Enhanced with Sound and Images Planner) for use on a PDA and subsequently evaluated it in a lab study. This methodology was used in order to achieve both usable and adoptable technology. In addition to describing our experience in designing ESI Planner, two main contributions are provided: general guidelines for working with special populations in the development of technology, and design guidelines for accessible handheld technology.”
Copyrights may apply
Bunt, Andrea, Conati, Cristina and McGrenere, Joanna (2004): What role can adaptive support play in an adaptable system?. In: Nunes, Nuno Jardim and Rich, Charles (eds.) International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces 2004 January 13-16, 2004, Funchal, Madeira, Portugal. pp. 117-124. Available online
“As computer applications become larger with every new version, there is a growing need to provide some way for users to manage the interface complexity. There are three different potential solutions to this problem: 1) an adaptable interface that allows users to customize the application to suit their needs; 2) an adaptive interface that performs the adaptation for the users; or 3) a combination of the adaptive and adaptable solutions, an approach that would be suitable in situations where users are not customizing effectively on their own. In this paper we examine what it means for users to engage in effective customization of a menu-based graphical user interface. We examine one aspect of effective customization, which is how characteristics of the users' tasks and customization behaviour affect their performance on those tasks. We do so by using a process model simulation based on cognitive modelling that generates quantitative predictions of user performance. Our results show that users can engage in customization behaviours that vary in efficiency. We use these results to suggest how adaptive support could be added to an adaptable interface to improve the effectiveness of the users' customization.”
Copyrights may apply
Davies, Rhian, Marcella, Skip, McGrenere, Joanna and Purves, Barbara (2004): The ethnographically informed participatory design of a PD application to support communication. In: Sixth Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies 2004. pp. 153-160. Available online
“Aphasia is an acquired communication deficit that impacts the different language modalities. PDAs have a form factor and feature set that suggest they could be effective communication tools for people with aphasia. An ethnographic study was conducted with one participant both to learn about communication strategies used by people with aphasia, and to observe how a PDA is incorporated into those strategies. The most significant usability issues found were file access and organization. A participatory design phase followed, resulting in a paper prototype of a file management system that addressed the key usability issues identified. The participatory approach continued during the implementation of a high-fidelity prototype.”
Copyrights may apply
» 2003 «
McGrenere, Joanna, Davies, Rhian, Findlater, Leah, Graf, Peter, Klawe, Maria, Moffatt, Karyn, Purves, Barbara and Yang, Sarah (2003): Insights from the aphasia project: designing technology for and with people who have aphasia. In: Proceedings of the 2003 ACM Conference on Universal Usability 2003. pp. 112-118. Available online
“This paper explores a number of HCI research issues in the context of the Aphasia Project, a recently established project on the design of assistive technology for aphasic individuals. Key issues include the problems of achieving effective design and evaluation for a user population with an extremely high degree of variance, and user-centered design for a user population with significant communication impairments. We describe the Aphasia Project and our initial approaches to dealing with these issues. Similar issues arise in many areas of assistive technology, so we expect our paper to be of general interest to the research community.”
Copyrights may apply
Sullivan, Jim and McGrenere, Joanna (2003): Designing cognitive technologies for people with disabilities -- perspectives for theory and practice. In: Proceedings of the 2003 ACM Conference on Universal Usability 2003. pp. 148-149. Available online
“This panel will identify and discuss practical and theoretical issues in the design, implementation, and evaluation of technologies to assist persons with developmental and acquired cognitive deficits.”
Copyrights may apply
» 2002 «
McGrenere, Joanna, Baecker, Ronald M. and Booth, Kellogg S. (2002): An evaluation of a multiple interface design solution for bloated software. In: Terveen, Loren (ed.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2002 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 20-25, 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota. pp. 163-170.
» 2000 «
McGrenere, Joanna and Ho, Wayne (2000): Affordances: Clarifying and Evolving a Concept. In: Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2000 May 15-17, 2000, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. pp. 179-186.
McGrenere, Joanna and Ho, Wayne (2000): Affordances: Clarifying and Evolving a Concept. In: Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2000 May 15-17, 2000, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. pp. 179-186. Available online
McGrenere, Joanna and Moore, Gale (2000): Are We All In the Same Bloat?. In: Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2000 May 15-17, 2000, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. pp. 187-196. Available online
Baecker, Ronald M., Booth, Kellogg S., Jovicic, Sasha, McGrenere, Joanna and Moore, Gale (2000): Reducing the Gap Between What Users Know and What They Need to Know. In: Proceedings of the 2000 ACM Conference on Universal Usability 2000. pp. 17-23. Available online
“Universal usability [17] is currently impeded by system complexity and poorly-crafted interfaces which lead to confusion, frustration, and failure. One of the key challenges is the gap between what users know and what they need to know [17, p.86]. This paper describes and presents early results from three related research projects designed to identify and close this gap and to examine how users might learn what they need to know.”
Copyrights may apply
» 1997 «
Inkpen, Kori, McGrenere, Joanna, Booth, Kellogg S. and Klawe, Maria (1997): The Effect of Turn-Taking Protocols on Children's Learning in Collaborative Environments. In: Graphics Interface 97 May 21-23, 1997, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. pp. 138-145. Available online
SHOW THIS LIST ON YOUR HOMEPAGE
What do YOU think?
Give us your opinion! Do you have any comments/additions
that you would like other visitors to see?
You say:
Mar 20th, 2010
Changes to this page (author)
23 Feb 2010: Enabled abstracts to be shown on Joanna McGrenere's author page.25 Jul 2009: Author was edited 27 Jun 2009: Author was edited
12 Jun 2009: Author was edited
05 Jun 2009: Author was edited
03 Jun 2009: Author was edited
30 May 2009: Author was edited
09 May 2009: Author was edited
07 Apr 2009: Author was edited
12 May 2008: Author was edited
12 May 2008: Author was edited
12 May 2008: Author was edited
12 May 2008: Author was edited
24 Jul 2007: Author was edited
29 Jun 2007: Author was edited
22 Jun 2007: Author was edited
22 Jun 2007: Author was edited
22 Jun 2007: Author was edited
22 Jun 2007: Author was edited
19 Jun 2007: Author was edited
19 Jun 2007: Author was edited
19 Jun 2007: Author was edited
28 Apr 2003: Added the author to the bibliography
