UCL INTERACTION CENTRE

Location: Room 8.18 University College London Malet Place Engineering Building (8th Floor) Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, U.K Telephone: +44 (0)20 7679 7849 (x37849) Email: s.wiseman@cs.ucl.ac.uk

Research Interests

Background

My research aims at understanding more about the process of transcribing numbers. This page explains more about the projects involved and links to publications and other media. Currently there are two main themes in my work:

• Number Entry Error
• Digit Distributions

Number Entry Error

Number entry is a highly pervasive task, whether it be entering our PIN at an ATM, or dialing a phone number to entering in financial data or medical information. The errors made in these contexts, particularly in the medical domain, can have very serious consequences.

I created a Number Entry Error Taxonomy after collecting together many examples of number entry errors. Previously, a corpus of number entry errors like this did not exist. The taxonomy groups the errors together according to their potential causes and consequences.

The work is on going, and the taxonomy at present needs to be honed further. This taxonomy can be used to consider the types of errors users may make when using an device; different errors may be associated with different tasks and different interfaces.

I presented this work at 2011 to BCS HCI. A poster overview of the work is also available.

Digit Distribution

My work on digit distribution looks at the digits that are really being used in hospitals. Motivated by my error work, I wanted to know more about the frequency of each digit. Just as in English, the letters 'e' appears far more often than 'q', I wondered whether there would be similar patterns in digits.

For more information, please read my CHI 2012 WIP paper. Or see the associated poster.

In 2011 I presented the work at York Doctoral Sympoisum. The presentation video is available online.

During my recent Bright Club comedy stand-up routine, based upon my research I discussed some of my findings. The stand-up video can be found online.

Comedy

I have had the opprtunity to perform some comedy sets at the fantastic Bright Club. These stand-up routines are all based around my research into numbers and error. My most recent set is listed below, to see all of them, please see my youtube channel!