Kristina Höök Swedish Institute of Computer Science kia@sics.se

PERSONA

The PERSONA project investigates a new approach to navigating information spaces, based on a personalised and social navigational paradigm. The project team is developing a navigational instrument (tool/method) that will help designers of systems which include navigational aspects to choose appropriate metaphors and navigational aids, and assist them in designing tools. The fact that the project is looking at navigation in relation to social aspects has given rise to several new design ideas, or a whole new design perspective.

The review

I remember feeling very much at a loss when I was preparing the PERSONA presentation for Nyborg. What could I say that would both catch the attention of the other i3 project members and give the reviewers a fair picture of whether we had achieved what we set out to do in our first year? My anxiety grew as I listened to the other project presentations: the responses — or rather, the sometimes rather harsh questions — which they got from the audience showed that the situation was not totally clear. Was the main purpose of the presentations to demonstrate that the project plan had been followed? Or was it to convey the main philosophy/approach/issue of the project, so that everybody could understand what the different projects were about? Was the purpose of the questioning to make everybody else's projects look bad, so that one's own project compared well and got good reviews? And wasn't the the point of a long–term proactive research effort to postpone issues of exploitation until the ideas had matured somewhat?

Despite this confusion — or perhaps because of it! — I learned a lot about the other projects, as well as about the role of our own project within the whole i3 initiative. Our experience in Nyborg also made it very clear that being part of i3 is important to us — so important, in fact, that we decided to ask for a six–month extension, so that we can follow the work through until February 2000.

Making all the i3 projects stand on their toes for the review probably forced all of us to sharpen our presentations. But it also generated extra workload, and things like spending money on fancy posters drew resources away from the main research of the project. It seems crucial to find a better balance in this respect next time; my own feeling is that less money should be spent on surface presentation, and that there should be more emphasis on content.

After Nyborg

As the PERSONA project is quite small and very focused, neither our reviewers nor we ourselves saw any need to make major changes. So apart from the six–month extension, we are essentially going ahead along the lines first planned. That means that our primary goal for the second year of PERSONA is to proceed full–speed with the implementation of four different systems: the on–line shop, the soundscape environment, the Agneta & Frida system, and the Navigational Instrument. The first three illustrate different aspects of our concept of social navigation; the fourth is a method for evaluating systems from a navigational point of view. (for more information on these systems see www.sics.se/humle/projects/persona/web/index.html ).

Our second goal is to reflect more on the idea of navigation as a metaphor, and on social navigation. We are doing this by studying both real–world situations and our own systems. Our experience at Nyborg forced us to think more deeply about how the meaning of usability changes when you move from a tool–based to an experienced–based view of interaction. All i3 projects demonstrate different aspects of this, and almost none of them can be evaluated from a purely traditional usability viewpoint, as that would not address the core of the systems. Rather than producing tools, the i3 projects produce “experiences” which involve, for example, group interaction in mixed–reality environments (like the eSCAPe Blob), or navigating the world (for instance with the COMRIS “parrot”).

In summary, the event in Denmark had both positive and negative sides. It drew the i3 projects closer together, but it also put pressure on projects to produce fancy "surface" presentations, and added to an already heavy workload. I feel it would have helped if the Commission's review procedures had been spelled out more clearly in advance, to avoid undesirable consequences like the temptation to try and make one’s own project look better by criticising other projects. Co–operation between EU projects is unusual and gives rise to a whole new culture; and this should manifest itself in the organisation of the reviews. I am sure that this culture will be enhanced by events such as the upcoming i3 Spring Days.

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