Author Archives: Lana Yarosh

About Lana Yarosh

Svetlana “Lana” Yarosh is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science & Engineering Department at University of Minnesota. Her research in HCI focuses on embodied interaction in social computing systems. Lana is currently most proud of being one of the inaugural recipients of the NSF CRII award, of her best papers at CHI 2013 and CSWC 2014, and of receiving the Fran Allen IBM Fellowship. Lana has two Bachelors of Science from University of Maryland (in Computer Science and Psychology), a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Institute of Technology, and two years of industry research experience with AT&T Labs Research.

Pocket++: Changing Pants to Fit Phones

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A very long time ago, I complained that women’s pant pockets are too small for a smartphone. Since then, smartphones have only gotten bigger! Here’s what it looks like when I try to fit my phone in my pocket (that is a regular iPhone 6, not a 6+!):

My phone won't fit in my pocket!

My phone won’t fit in my pocket!

Since then, I’ve created a number of rough prototypes to address this issue and finally came up with a solution that I see as the most efficient way of dealing with it. Namely, change your pockets! Here is what the solution looks like for me:

Now, my phone fits in my pocket!

Now, my phone fits in my pocket!

It fulfills my criteria of being comfortable while both sitting and standing, not being something I have to carry (i.e., a purse), and being easy to access. You can do this yourself if you have a sewing machine (hand-stitching won’t hold up to long-term wear, as I found out). However, the good news is that it’s also really easy to “outsource” the solution. Simple steps:

Measure how much of your phone sticks out and add one inch. That's how much more pocket you will need.

Measure how much of your phone sticks out and add one inch. That’s how much extra pocket you will need to add.

  1. Put the phone in your pocket and measure how much is sticking out with a ruler or tape measure. Add one inch to this amount (for comfort and future phone size increases). Do this for every style of jeans/pants that you want to alter (since pockets seem to vary drastically in size).
  2. Take to a local seamstress to alter. All they need to know if how many inches to extend each pocket (which you should have from step 1). You just need one pocket extended on each pair of pants. Image below shows what the pocket looks like from the inside. If you’re in the Twin Cities area, I recommend Blue Serge (the cost is $10 per pocket, but you could get a bulk discount to $7 if you bring more than two pairs of pants).
A well-sewn pocket is a thing of beauty!

Final outcome. A well-sewn pocket is a thing of beauty!

My favorite thing about this approach is that not only was I able to finally solve my smartphone problem, but that I was also able to support a wonderful seamstress in my local community. If you are the kind of person who doesn’t have a million types of pants and hates carrying a purse, see whether this solution works as well for you as it has for me!

Note: Mini blog post this month as I’m pretty caught up in teaching, an apartment move, and the upcoming wedding. But, I hope to be back in full force in June!

Cross-Cultural Parenting and Technology

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My parents had two primary sources for parenting advice: my grandparents and the Dr. Spock book. If you are a parent today, you know that this is no longer the case! Millions of sources in printed literature, online, and in your local community all have opinions on how you should parent! How do parents manage so many diverse opinions? What happens when the values of the parents conflict with their community, with other family members, or even with each other? We thought that cross-cultural families (where the two parents are from different cultures or who are raising their child in a different culture from their own) may have a particularly salient perspective to offer on these important questions.

The idea for this project grew out of a workshop on family technologies. Over the last two years, I’ve had the honor of working with three great collaborators — Sarita Schoenebeck, Shreya Kothaneth, and Liz Bales — to try to understand cross-cultural parenting and to find opportunities for technology to help. All four of us are members of cross-cultural families (in one way or another) and we wanted to learn more about this fascinating phenomenon, so we interviewed parents from 18 cross-cultural families all around the United States. We investigated how these families respond to conflicts while integrating diverse cultural views, as well as how they utilize the wealth of parenting resources available online in navigating their lives. In our upcoming CHI 2016 paper (available as a pre-print here), we share what these parents told us about how these families find and evaluate advice, connect with social support, resolve intra-family tensions, incorporate multicultural practices, and seek out diverse views. But, what I want to share here are three design ideas for new technology that were inspired by these interviews. We think that they may not only be good for cross-cultural families but may help all kinds of families better integrate multiple cultures into everyday life. We show some very preliminary sketches of these ideas below:

Some ideas for new technology inspired by our interviews with cross-cultural families!

Some ideas for new technology inspired by our interviews with cross-cultural families!

For me personally, this project was fascinating because I got to talk to so many interesting families. It was gratifying to think that maybe cross-cultural families could inspire ideas that could help all families and bring us all a little closer. What do you think, would you use any of the ideas we suggested in the paper if we went ahead and built it? Let us know below!

Community Engagement in the CS Classroom

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This past semester, I taught a user interface course (basically, an intro to HCI class with an app development project). I tried something a bit different. Instead of letting students come up with their own projects, I asked them to select from a set of local community partners that needed apps developed for their non-profit organizations. I worked with our community engagement program to recruit organizations and also sent out a few feelers myself. Here is the final list of community partners and the mobile apps the students developed for them:

  • Communities United Against Police Brutality:  an internal app for managing their social media calendar and online presence; an external app as a guide for civil rights when dealing with the police.
  • Dakhota Language Society: a vocabulary quiz game app; a storytelling app for reading/listening to Dakhota folk tales in both Dakhota and English.
  • Early Childhood Family Education: an app to help the parents and educators easily message each other, potentially anonymously (i.e., like YikYak for parents).
  • Frogtown Green: an app for capturing and reporting illegal trash dumping in the neighborhood to the city.
  • Campus Wellness Program: several apps for tracking activity and program points. This project was not done with a community partner but rather with a university faculty member interested in this domain.
  • All Parks Alliance for Change: curated community F.A.Q. and community support forum app for people living in mobile home parks in the Twin Cities Area.
  • Hope Community Outreach: two apps for literacy outreach, one to provide curated learning resources to parents and another for vocabulary practice for kids; one app for the youth gardening program to help children plan and budget a vegetable garden.

At the end of the semester, I surveyed both community partners and students about their experiences. I’ll share the findings below…

Questionnaire responses from students and community partners regarding these kinds of partnerships for future projects.

Questionnaire responses from students and community partners regarding these kinds of partnerships for future projects.

Six of the organizations responded to the questionnaire and the responses were largely positive. All of them agreed or strongly agreed that this program should continue in the future, that they would recommend that other organizations participate, and that the students met or exceeded expectations on the project. However, there was some mixed feedback about how the expectations were communicated, with two of the groups not being sure about what to expect from the student teams. Additionally, there was some confusion about who should be a regular contact point for students, with some groups not roping every relevant person into the process (particularly common when the organization included both community and university partners).

Sixty students responded to the questionnaire as well. I was interested in understanding how community projects affected the students’ learning, with two competing theories that could be influencing this. On one hand, the learning theory of constructionism suggests that students work best when working on personally meaningful projects. Indeed, 25% of the students agreed or strongly agreed that they would have preferred to choose their own project. On the other hand, the theory of thick authenticity suggests that students learn well when they view the work they’re doing as authentic and in line with “real world” work. 83% of the students agreed or strongly agreed that working with community partners made them see the project as realistic and authentic; additionally 73% of the students felt that the work was contributing to a bigger cause. However, only 54% agreed or strongly agreed that working on a community project helped them learn. Overall, the class was split: 62% agreed or strongly agreed that future classes should do this, 30% were neutral, and 38% disagreed.

Why did the students who were negative about the idea respond this way? Looking through the free response comments, the major con of working with community partners mentioned by the teams was that scheduling was a pain and that the partners were not technical enough to help guide the project. I see this as a pro, not a con of working with community partners! If there is anything this class is supposed to teach the students it is that working with real users is tough and requires a different set of skills than just programming! The second issue mentioned by the students was that there was a great deal of inconsistency between the partners and teams in terms of partner commitment and availability. This is actually a valid and real problem! I tried to grade around it, but this is certainly something that I would like to level if I am to try this again in future iterations of this course.

Will I do this again? I will likely try this again in some shape or form in the future, but I think I will need to make more of an effort to create a better experience for the students. I think it would be reasonable to set more specific expectations for the organizations that want to participate in the program, particularly in terms of scheduling and availability to meet and work with the students.

Have you ever tried something similar in one of your classes? How did it go?