Assignment 8: Will Hui (wth4)

A few of my friends and I have a bad habit of ordering late night food way too often. When we decide to order stuff to eat, one of us will volunteer to place the order on Campusfood. The rest of us may stand around/near that person’s computer screen so that we can decide what we want to order. Typically we decide together what place we’re ordering from, and then we take turns sitting at the computer to place our order.

One issue is that every person has to wait their turn to peruse the menu and make their selection. Scott, et. al. argue that an effective group display should actually support simultaneous user actions. They claim this would let users try “different interaction styles to suit the task requirements.” For us, this means we could finish placing our orders more quickly if we could all browse the menu and make selections at the same time. This could be done by using a tabletop display to show several copies of the menu to each person at the table. Natural territory control would arise from your location at the table.

Another issue (as described in Scott, et. al.) is that this system doesn’t have consideration for the appropriate arrangement of users. People can (and do) look over the shoulder of the person ordering at the computer. But Scott, et. al. point out that people feel most comfortable working at arm’s length, and that closer interactions generally violate personal space and feel socially awkward. Thus a more convenient layout for this activity might be a face-to-face seating arrangement. The tabletop solution mentioned earlier would support such an arrangement, and it would let people see the screen more easily than if everyone tried to crowd around a computer.

Lastly, a good single-display group technology should support interpersonal interaction. The current system does this poorly -- people face the screen rather than each other, and few can look at the menu simultaneously, so conversation about the order is more terse and less fruitful than it could be. As mentioned in the paper, the face-to-face arrangement tends to be conducive to conversation -- which is useful when talking to your friends about where to order from and what to order. The tabletop display would allow you to interact face-to-face while looking through the menu. Therefore it’s much more likely to encourage useful discussions.