Outline for Today
Administration
Assignments
Media
Transcript
Audio Transcript
-
Today Okay, thanks. Anyone catch some watch the TV this morning no TV or for our online videos of the funeral this morning a year for the humans anyway forward to today's visit she was
-
okay, so happy Monday and we have a guest presenter this morning. Send us who's the board member from our perk okay so we welcome send us
-
over here thank you everyone. Okay. All right. Hello everyone. My name is Cindy us and I'm from the Regina Public Interest Research Group here on campus also known as arburg, which is how I'll refer to it in the rest of my presentation. But I'm here today just to talk a little bit about what we do, how we interact with you guys on campus and why it's so important for get to know about this. So before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge that we are based on treaty for territory and the homeland of the maytee people. The Cree the Soto, Dakota, Lakota, Dakota and maytee. Peoples continue to be in kinship and practice reciprocity with a sled that has sustained them for countless generations. So it's very important for us at our product that we acknowledge that and that we try to be active in dismantling all the harm that has been done. Alright, so on to what our product does. Has anybody here heard of Hartford before? Just raise your hand? Oh, awesome. That's more than I expected. Okay. So we're a student run nonprofit here at the U bar, we operate as a resource center for students interested in social and environmental justice. So as computer science students, we don't typically get a lot of experience with that kind of stuff in our classes. And so this is a really good way to supplement that part of your university experience which might be missing and I'll talk about those resources as I could go on. So we focus on research, education and action. So research. There's an example that was done recently, so we helped someone do a study on our green patch garden. So we help somebody do a study on our green patch garden just to how to make it more sustainable. We do a lot of education. I don't know if any of you guys have heard of the disorientation week that happened this this past week can get a lot of guys have heard about it. And then action. So putting those initiatives and those things that we learned into action to make our campus more sustainable. So how do we operate? It's run by students. I'm a student myself. We have a board of directors that gets elected every two years or every one year depending on how many vacancies we have. And applications are available all year long. So if you're interested, go to Rp irg.org. And make sure you either sign up for our newsletter or you sign up to become a board member. And we're also funded by students. So every semester we collect a small fee from your tuition, and then we give back as much as we can in the form of funding in the form of events for our students. So definitely check us out because you guys are the ones that are funding us. These are some of our values. I won't read them all out but if any of these are interesting to you definitely check us out on our website. And then we have two major projects that we do every year so most of you guys have probably heard of the art period, green patch garden is just right outside classroom building in that little area over there. We also have an orchard over there and it's free for students to come and pick whenever they want. If you want to volunteer, this is also a really good place to get your volunteer hours into. And then we have a leadership camp called generating momentum every year. We didn't have it this year due to COVID. But it's usually around the end of August for anybody from the ages of 18 to 35. Interested in learning more about activism and gaining those necessary skills. So if you're interested in that, I think I put or this signup sheet will start up in the beginning of July next year. Probably. And if you sign up for our newsletter, we'll definitely be sending out reminders for that too. This is just a little bit more information about our garden. This is definitely one of our biggest projects that we put into place. And I think September 28 and 29th There's going to be a harvest celebration. So definitely come check us out there too. And then funding for students. This isn't the most important part to most students here. So if you're thinking of you know, putting any sort of project in place that aligns with our values, come and visit us online. We have many different funds available right here as you can see, and if you or even your like student group, if you guys are interested in putting a project in place and you don't have the funds. We're definitely one of the people that you can come check us out as a board member every month or every time we have one of these funding cycles. Sorry every time we have one of these funding cycles, we check out these applications and we make sure that we either you know fund as many of them as we can or we give advice to people on how they can make their applications more strong.
-
And we have more resources too. So we have an alternative library. Our office is located if any of you guys know where the Women's Center is or the Student Union. It's in that same area you just have to go down a small hallway. We have a button maker some of you guys might have seen us on the Greens making buttons for people. If you or your student group are interested in renting that out. We can definitely help with that. We have a parents on campus. So if you are a parent, we have lots of support for that as well. And then we have training so if you're ever interested in going to a workshop or something and you can't afford the plane ticket or anything like that, we can help out with that as well. And then our final thing is just major events in fall. So from the 12th to 16th. This already happened this orientation week was put on by us and then on the 22nd at 1pm. If you guys are available, come down to rebel center multipurpose room, or will also be live streaming the AGM and the workers rights workshop. If you guys are available, please attend because unless you've opted out specifically, which is one of the options for you guys, you guys can definitely do that. But if you haven't opted out then you are a artpark member and you can vote at our annual general meeting and we need to have as many people attend as possible so we can so we can put those actions into place. That we need to get done. All right. Are there any questions? All right, I will just make a if it's okay with you. I'll make a small note about our website on the whiteboard so you guys can go check it out. We have a newsletter like I mentioned several times. That's where you will get all the information about what we're doing. And then these are also our Facebook handles and Instagram and Twitter. Awesome. Thank you so much.
-
It's not just you Avara that has a look interesting research group. Talk about there's a larger
-
Sure. So every university typically has a Public Interest Research Group. There was a I think it's called the L PERT. That's one of the ones that we collaborated with in the fall with the Lethbridge University of Lethbridge Public Interest Research Group. So we definitely collaborate with these groups all over the country. And they're a good way to just get involved in these social advocacy schemes or anything that you guys are interested in bettering about your university as well.
-
So this is maybe just started by Ralph Nader, or I get the information to awesome thank you so much for letting me speak turned on to a microphone so let's see what we get.
-
So is it alright to fail it so we're gonna leave the PowerPoint on here? Yeah, so the PowerPoint is on the website under Files. So you can have a peek at it and get more if you want to get in
-
some more details there as well. Okay
-
so today we're meeting aid of Six. Thanks so there's there's the QR code for today All right. I didn't know if people planned it this way, or whether I jinxed it by mentioning it before noon on Friday, when there was 41 votes, but after 44 people voted that was equal split.
-
And I I flipped I took a penny from my desk that's been there for a while and I flipped it and decided on Friday. October
-
21 I didn't put the microphone thanks Can everybody hear me now? Can you Oh Wait Can you hear me now? Can you hear me? Now?
-
Testing testing let's try that the base station was turned off I think I think that's on now.
-
Can you hear? me okay. Okay so you're enrolled in the experiment with your courses.
-
Anyone want to? So I'm not going to delete people again from this but if there are problems that we observed, I'll just I'll get them fixed. Okay.
-
So let me switch to my role is look at this. Didn't change my role was going on there so magically so it says you have no roles but you really do have a beta teacher for learning role.
-
And I know people who are locked in before say like Laura, for example. Says you can have never been logged in. That's because I deleted Hugo on Friday. And then you've been restored since then. So
-
so if you if you observe any other issues with this role, let me know. The assignment is to claim a topic that's even creepier floor cuter I suppose. However you feel about it so Laura cleaned the first one. There's a few others Okay, so let me so we had this empathise of teachers due on September 26, which is a week from today. So how about we make made it a week later? I shouldn't really sorted by date. So make it a week later. October 3. So let's see him okay. All right any thoughts about what we've done? As
-
I wouldn't like a marble. You want one? It's all fine. To have to hold your dog and guests get to hear your messages
-
and I guess some people will leave messages to your dog you can maybe have a scented waterboy everyone, first a cartoon or something really professional checking his phone. The owner checking his phone for messages and the dog sniffing the fire hydrant. For his message.
-
So we have one vote for no. Anyone. Would you like? Would you consider having a marble latching machine in your home?
-
Not at all. So there's two aspects we like to think about is usability issues more practical issues about what to do with the marbles and how to organize them and keep them color coded, sorted and if you run out of marbles and different things like that,
-
yeah. Functional issue as well that occurred to me is that how do you stop a message if you don't want to keep playing it? There's no buttons or interface at all. You just have marbles that you push around the machine on my phone even though there's 30 different venues I have to go through if a telemarketer leaves me a message all I got to do is press the seventh one and it's
-
I guess you could just take the marble
-
My first guest would be take it out and then but then you put it back into the inbox or do you have a special erase block, have some other functionality read bits off the message to not take messages from that number again.
-
So there's also something called user experience which is important. So good thanks the barbel answer she might be fun to
-
work to Avature home. So is that an important part? Okay, so right now the fun aspects don't overwhelm a way the usability aspects and issues of keeping track of marbles.
-
So we usability issues we can address in a more practical way we have some we have some heuristics and but we also have theory that can guide us in terms of creating usable interfaces in terms of color contrasts and speaking of color contrasts, I have to deal with this bar at the top fails and the color. I do pretty well other places but that's one spot where I need to improve it. So we can deal with usability issues in a more direct way. Use user experience issues we can say. We can say that the interface is going to be fun to use or enjoyable experience but we can't make people say here's here's the marble answer sheet. You're going to have fun with that. You're going to enjoy it and you're going to be happy all the time and you're using it. I mean that could be our goal but that doesn't mean it's going to happen. So so we can encourage. So we can we as designers can encourage an experience what we can force people to have a certain experience with the interface. Does that seem okay? And I was volume with my microphone. Good. Okay. Throw that out so, what is empathy and is it important for user interface designers have empathy for users so, what are some other other options instead of empathy? Oh we can also go out and say well telepathy but
-
that's that's not a very good I think it's good to get a laugh in class and then let's move on. Anyway so empathy is. CMRA Camille, we can everyone apathy Do you agree with that error Stan
-
and sympathy understanding someone else's perspective is really too busy too expensive before getting to someone else feeling
-
I'm not sure that it's so much understanding.
-
My understanding of the difference between empathy and sympathy is good or not. You've experienced the same thing before.
-
So let me write out some put something down and see how this works. Maybe sadness.
-
Maybe sympathy is like college, someone's perspective and the other one is empathy is I looked at
-
it Okay, well so if we approach design problems with empathy we get to the goal is to put ourselves in the others position and understand their perspective.
-
Now, what else we designed with apathy will say that's good good. Design with accuracy. Don't generally Yeah. So we're just gonna say here's what the requirements say. I'm gonna do that in a way that makes no sense to me and I don't care.
-
Yes, because we use it or is always wrong.
-
Yeah. reading comments, user forums and so on. I get that some people have that new users ever right?
-
Maybe if it's more of like a sophisticated software like you're trying to teach the most efficient way of something you want the user to rise to a specific level and that way you like the user to like learn a lot.
-
So we have a user interface so it's a challenge that we're setting so that the user can develop themselves
-
that's pretty generous. I think. Many people feel like they see this idea that it builds character. And designers are forcing you to build character when you're using their software. Anyone. Does anyone know not clear? And what I mean by builds character is kind of an idiom. And you either prefer professor who told me and builds character and for us would put hair on my chest.
-
That wasn't recently so don't times have changed what's appropriate anyway, for I get you fired or remade say it's a badge of honor for people to accomplish a task. It was difficult to program should be difficult to use. These are these are statements and you can have interface design maybe comes from an apathy towards users. And one unless we approach design with sympathy towards users
-
all those like question mark symbols where it says like it's trying to help people but it doesn't.
-
So that reminds me. So Dave Palmer who who's alumnus of the department, who went on to write Windows Task Manager. He told us I told a variation of this joke before that. I thought maybe I should. I shouldn't I shouldn't stop using it. But then he's he told the version of it and I thought maybe it was okay for me to use it again. So his version someone's flying a helicopter around Seattle. And it's foggy, very low visibility. But he sees an office building there was a wet winter sun was on deck with windows open. He could communicate with somebody and he said you know, I can't I can't see I'm not sure I'm right. Can you please help me out?
-
He said while you're in a helicopter anyway, so took that information and made a course correction and found where he needed to go.
-
It said because information was correct. And completely unhelpful. The use of Microsoft?
-
Tough crowd Okay. Thank you not so, before user, I know what I can do, what I know what you need in the interface. I don't have to really focus on advertising, whatever you like and just I'll take care of you. So have those so say no.
-
No there. I went to the football game on Friday night. And they had a piece of film to put over the flashlight on phones so that you could do like the turn the lights out and then see all these green lights in the stadium.
-
There weren't that many people there to begin with. But then it took me quite a long time to get the film off my camera case. So I think that promotion was not designed with empathy
-
just wanted to really easy to put on and then to get it off. That's sort of what
-
wasn't easy to put on either. It was difficult to peel the film off because they gave him a piece of the game. A little card with a film on it
-
can reserve work on the assignment and or?
-
Well, I was just going to cover the last bit here so something that can help us in three minutes
-
so. So there's a
-
link in the assignment to a template for this. So a map is just the we're going to record
-
what a user might say or do when they're using an interface to complete a task when they're completing a task, so I'm asking you to empathize with teachers by using your courses to create little activity with a couple of constraints. So imagine as you go through this, that you say, Are you be mindful of what you say and do and record that. And then also, what you're thinking about and what you're feeling. While you're using this and say I can't believe I have to prep so much. That's my general feeling of requests
-
especially when you're getting stuck making this so many places to work
-
okay, so you might feel
-
confused.
-
All right. So there are right or wrong answers. For this is a way for you to put yourself in the shoes of somebody else trying to understand why some things might be difficult for other people who think this is better of course if we're designing for a particular group, say senior citizens. Then instead of trying to imagine like if your senior citizens Nice to talk to somebody from the people from the group of people who will be like to use software I was 20 athletes. So in a way better with my time anyway, thank you for today. I'll catch up responses actually thank you very much for joining
-
All right. So there are right or wrong answers. For this is a way for you to put yourself in the shoes of somebody else trying to understand why some things might be difficult for other people who think this is better of course if we're designing for a particular group, say senior citizens. Then instead of trying to imagine like if your senior citizens Nice to talk to somebody from the people from the group of people who will be like to use software I was 20 athletes. So in a way better with my time anyway, thank you for today. I'll catch up responses actually thank you very much for joining
Wiki
Link to the UR Courses wiki page for this meeting
