Design Team

"Real World" Digital Pet on Handheld Projector

Yuhang Zhao, Chao Xue, Xiang Cao

Digital pets (aka Tamagotchi) have been an extremely popular mobile toy. However they are completely separated from the player's real world experience. We create a digital pet that is projected into everyday physical world using a mobile handheld mini-projector. Using a camera and an orientation sensor, the digital pen senses the physical environment and objects it is projected onto, and behaves accordingly. Take your pet to a real grass field to play, a real swimming pool to swim, or feed it with a real apple! The game now becomes part of your life.

Mobile Language Learning

Darren Edge, James Landay, Jae-Hyun Seok, Elly Searle, Jing Zhao, Kevin Chiu, Daesung Kim, Hyeongmook Lee & Stephen Fitchett

Learning a new language is hard, but learning to use it confidently in conversations with native speakers is even harder. We are reshaping the activity of language learning around the lifestyles of learners, using mobile applications that deliver personalized, contextually-relevant content for continuous study and use throughout the day, powered by social and game-mechanics that help communities of learners to motivate and help one another.

Activity-Based Design Tools

Darren Edge, Sergio Paolantonio, James Landay

Ubiquitous computing technologies have the potential to reshape our lives for the better, but only if their design accounts for the multiple facets and forms of human activities. Drawing on Activity Theory, we are developing tangible design tools that combine abstract analysis, user research, and design thinking to support systematic, workshop-based explorations of design problems and their potential solutions.

Exertion Interfaces & Exergaming

Darren Edge & Florian Mueller (University of Melbourne)

Staying healthy, having fun, and being social are all significant life activities, but these activities often compete with one another for our free time. Exertion Interfaces solve this problem by blending the health and fitness benefits of exercise with the social and motivational aspects of gaming. We are developing frameworks for the design of exertion experiences and building prototypes of exertion games to inform the next generation of embodied interaction.

MyLife

Eric Chang, Anh D. Nguyen, Sergio Paolantonio, Yangzi Li, Xiumin Lin

Designing mobile phone solution to motive people taking the first step toward wellness. Adopting user-centered design process to achieve the right complexity relevant to user needs. Final design interface conveys our ideas on improving health and received positive feedback from our survey users through our mock-ups and prototypes. This interface can serve as front-end for research on mobile health.

Application:http://designteam/?p=286
Scenario:http://designteam/?p=273

Twinkle: Connecting People at Work

Chen Zhao, Dongzhing Xia, Qiufeng Yin

Social software promises a "grass roots" approach to creating and exploiting knowledge within enterprises. It will also become crucial in supporting and strengthening collaboration and communication within and between businesses. A major growth opportunity for both new and existing social networking sites and applications is inside the workplace. However, the success of web social applications has not yet been replicated in the enterprise. In this project, we are exploring social roles in the enterprise and the impact of personal networks to redesign enterprise social software. Our goal is to enable users to discover the right information by leveraging the knowledge of many, share content and expertise, connect to the right people, help users to manage business information more efficiently, and improve productivity.

Team social networks and performance

Chen Zhao, Haifeng Du (Xi'An Jiao Tong University), Baozhong Liu (MSRA intern), Yang Zhang (MSRA intern), Zhichun Wang (MSRA intern)

There has been a lot of interest in the relationship between network structure of a team and that team's performance, but many of the current studies focus on classical social network analysis. In this project we are focusing on understanding both the characteristics of social networks within enterprises, including social support networks and social discussion networks, and the effects of social network structure on information transmission speed. We are also looking at the effects of social network structure on team performance, and the effect of community structure on personal performance within a team.

Cross-Cultural Design

Chen Zhao, Ge Gao, Jieun Shim, Jiawei Gu, Xinyuan Fan, Xi He

In this research, we are aiming to understand how to design better websites for Chinese users. We will examine the effects of individual differences, national culture and different task types on implications of web user interface design through a A/B testing survey study. We are able to answer what are key factors to drive customer satisfaction and loyalty through quantitative statistical analysis of our survey data.

Time-Shifted Collaboration

MSRA: Chen Zhao, Jieun Shim, Xiang Cao

MSR Redmond: John Tang, Kori Quinn, Asta Roseway, Aaron Hoffman

Study globally distributed teams that work across time zone differences of around 8 hours or more. We will design collaborative systems which enable remote people to be able to engage effectively and naturally by building on an understanding of collaborative work practices and the emergence of devices that enable working from anywhere, anytime.