Protos

Day two at persuasive technology
It’s day two at the The Persuasive 2008 conference and its starting out really well.

General conference chair Harri Oinas-Kukkonen is watching some of the many posters that have been on the conference.

The days keynote is really exciting Virpi Roto (Principal Scientist Nokia Research Center) is giving a great keynote.

She is for instance making a clear differentiation between Usability (optimal functional ease of use) which we can measure versus User Experience which is subjective.

Virpi Roto managed to make the whole auditorium silent, and people were just taking pictures of her slides (like the two below).

Different emotions during interactions are not equally important
-Virpi Roto

User Experience is the attitude towards the product. It its the key to get people loyal to our devices.
-Virpi Roto

Virpi also introduced the “dream of brand building” as seen below. Total brand dedication that people get a tattoo:

She went on to state that although Nokia is the world 5′TH most valued brand, she has never seen a Nokia tatoo.

Another key point Virpi made was the need for clear metrix

You need to be able to measure [UX] – if you cannot measure you will be miserable
-Virpi Roto

Day one at persuasive technology
The Persuasive Technology 2008 conference is really promising and there have been some really high quality speakers. There is a really nice atmosphere =)

The first keynote by Kristina Hook was really interesting. Basically she and her team are taking affective computing to another level. I would almost say, that she de facto is investigating “pathos” appeals in technology (mobile, tablet and gamings systems). I really liked her presentation.

Standford has made a super cool presentation on Facebook and is thus taking the lead in the sense of new learnings. B.J. Fogg and Daisuke Lizawa had a great paper on differences in types of interaction in Japanese social networks versus Facebook/western social spaces.

Brian Cugelman made a nice presentation on website credibility:

I had my own session on the persuasive design of Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) and I had both positive and negative feedback.

Also really interesting at the persuasive is the short paper sessions. This year short papers are presented for 10 minutes in clusters of three and then a short discussion. This is a great format, since you get a lot of short pitches

For instance Evan Rosenfeld had a good session entitled: “How to build persuasive web applications: Three fundamental feedback loops”

Again we got some some nice practical design patterns from Stanford. It seems that they have undertaken the task to actually map out all persuasive interaction design patterns that they can find. This will be very useful in taking Persuasive Technology Design to the next level – enabling us to prescribe design.

Below professor B.J. Fogg and Julie Leth:

Day 1 will close with a closed with a panel where I will be participating.

Overall a lot of interesting viewpoints emerged on day 1 and it was evident that there is still plenty of issues to be discussed in regards to the future of rhetoric and persuasion.

More on this tomorrow – where I will use a better compression for the pictures ;-)

I have had it with SPAM, just running this little blog I get loads.

Aksimet helps a lot:

Akismet has caught 42,892 spam for you since you first installed it.

…but I still get some messages that somehow makes it past some spam-algorithm.

AnnnSensua: HI there…My nick is ChicaSensual20…I’m naughty and playful…….wanna see me on my page? …my page!

Naughty and playful – no way, you are selling low quality stolen porn or “whatever”. So I have to get a mail about “whatever” and once again I wonder why the CIA doesn’t hunt down and kill spammers (even if just for practice).

Anyway, before I get a stroke, I think I finally found someone that have come up with a nice solution @ recaptcha.net they have come to the conclusion that so far the spammers have the advantage.

No matter how you twist and turn, your end-user will have to endure some additional cognitive strain typing in words that the blasted SPAM bots cannot read.

The additional cognitive strain would be unnecessary if we killed all people that produce SPAM, but since that is not possible (why is this not possible?) the additional unnecessary cognitive strain is used to helps us determine that you are human and not just a dammed SPAM bot.

recaptcha takes a different approach. The user has to type in two words. One that a computer can read and a computer can’t.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

via: recaptcha.net

Basically with recaptcha at least the end-users cognitive strain is used to help digitize books that could not be digitized using OCR scanning alone:

Installing it on wordpress the only bad thing was that it was a bit hard to actually skin/theme the recaptcha (as seen below in my comment section). the original is RED I had to set the theme to WHITE.

I could only do it by opening the actual plugin file: recaptcha.php and change it manually:

/**
* Embeds the reCAPTCHA widget into the comment form.
*
*/
function recaptcha_comment_form() {
//modify the comment form for the reCAPTCHA widget
$recaptcha_js_opts = << sGGript var RecaptchaOptions = { theme : 'white', tabindex : 5 }; /sGGript
OPTS;
$comment_string = <<