Human-Computer Interaction meets Economics: How to Measure Interface Utility

I am a very very new bee in the world of Human Computer Interaction. I found this Google techtalk interesting. Measuring user satisfaction of an user interface is still an open problem in HCI. Here these guys have made a monetary model to measure the user satisfaction.

Think of your job. What does your job offer to you. The list may be like this. Some tasks, enjoyment, challenge, self recognition and wage/salary. So these are the parameters to your overall job satisfaction. So if any parameter among these decreases like if the job is less enjoyable, less challenging then the employer may increase the salaries to keep employes. At the same time we can thin one step back and measure the other parameters than salary during the interview session, with how much salary the job seeker is asking for.

In this talk this job scenario has been used to evaluate multiple user interfaces for a particular task. First make multiple version of user interfaces for a particular task. Ask for real human to do the task with different interfaces, Now calculate the average cost associated with each interface. That will give you an idea about the user satisfaction of your user interface.

Google Visualization for Enterprise

Its been long time I am using Google Visualizations. Within Google Infrastructure its cool and with Google Spreadsheet it just awesome. Just get the URl put the query and bang with your visuals. Simple as it is. If you are in Appengine, Objectify can help you a lot. With objectify you need no more entity to DTO conversion. But Objectify is solely for Appengine. All these are the ways to do Visualization without implementing a custom Data Source. But when you are doing with enterprise that means you are in your private cloud/ hosting blah balh bla, you need to do some nasty stuffs. May be you need to do Entity to DTO conversion and some more extra effort on the client side or convert your legacy data to required response format for Google visualization that may lead to a custom data source implementation. And in this case you need an Introduction to the Data Source Library. Since you are in enterprise most probably  you are with JAVA. So in fact you need a Data Source in JAVA I found this very much helpful. It eased using Google VIZ in my office.

Remove duplicates from a List

This is a common need in day to day programming. Removing duplicates from a list. A easy and nice way I found here

public static <T> void removeDuplicate(List <T> list) {     HashSet <T> h = new HashSet<T>(list);     list.clear();     list.addAll(h);   }