Steve Bromley's UX Blog » HCI

UX Updates: What’s going on (Writing Workshop, Flash Games and a Conference!)

Steve — Wed, 25 May 2011 12:33:18 +0000

Just a short update this week, as it’s been a busy few weeks of exams, travel and more. So, a few things to look out for:

I’m going to the “UX Writing Workshop” by Cennydd Bowles and Martin Belam in two weeks. The workshop promises to give tips on how to improve my blog writing skills. So, expect this blog to be much more compelling and readable from then on!

Also, when I manage to get the pre-loader working, I’ll be able to share the flash game I’ve been working on. Hopefully next week if I find the time!

Lastly, I’m excited to share that myself and Pejman Mirza-Babaei will be presenting our paper “Playing to Win?” at the Multi.player conference. We’re on on the Friday, and will be covering the links between social interaction and biometric responses in co-located gaming (i.e. shouting at your friends during Mario Kart!). I’ll update with more information soon.

Heres a picture of a duck. Its nose is a dog:

Quack

Have a great week all!

The Reflective Practitioner in User Centred Design

Steve — Thu, 12 May 2011 11:01:20 +0000

The reflective practitioner, as described by Schon in his 1983 book, is the idea of continually reflecting on your work and the process during the design or production of a system. By continually reviewing, and improving the manner in which you work, and the deliverables, the process can be continually refined and improved, leading to better products. This fits in well with the philosophy behind the Agile design methodology, since this also requires a dedication towards continued reflection and iteration (also, Jazz music). But how does it work with User Centred Design?

UCD in action

User Centred Design, and participatory design, typically allows users to lead the design process, with their input and feedback being sought throughout an agile development. Unlike the reflective practitioner, where the impetus to improve comes from self-reflection, UCD externalises this and hence the impetus to improve comes from users surrounding the ‘expert’, rather than the ‘expert’ themselves.

So do you still get the benefits from reflective practice? Since understanding users, and applying this knowledge is a complex and ill-defined problem, there is are a large degree of potential approaches with no one approach being considered ‘best’. Hence there is the space, and need, in UCD for improvement. Contact with external people, such as the users, also gives a clear route for feedback from the results of UCD, and the ability to judge success in an objective manner. Hence, user insight seems like a suitable vehicle and impetus for reflection when improving practice.

If the impetus is coming from outside, rather than self reflection, does this avoid the self-reflection typically needed for expertise? Does this mean that no-one can ever become an expert in UCD? An interesting parallel that can help unravel this is considering how one becomes an expert in chess. Expert players in Chess have been found to be no better at conscious thought than a beginner, yet are much better at recognising established patterns or plays, and acting on their previous knowledge to make decisions quickly.

Hence expertise in these fields, and seemingly UCD too, is the ability to be a better reflective practitioner, and quickly dismissing areas that have been evaluated before. Although it isn’t a pure implementation, it does seem that the idea of the reflective practitioner is applicable to the field of user centred design!

A Celebration of Ludic Interfaces

Steve — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 11:11:11 +0000

Where traditionally people try to design technology with goals such as efficiency, accuracy, and ease-of-use, ludic interfaces instead aim to prioritise a different set of ideals, such as play, user-generated content, and co-operation. Ludic interfaces are typically low-cost and aim to encourage playfulness (as you can see from the name’s origins in the word ‘ludicrous’).

They remind me of the ‘impossible things’ found in Don Norman’s ‘The Design of Everyday Things’, including the teapot with a spout over its handle, and a bicycle which pedals in both directions simultaneously. However, unlike those items, these ludic interfaces perform a function.

The impossible teapot

Today we’ll look at examples of Ludic Design, and what this means for including users in design.

Some examples of ludic interfaces include a university project to make ‘Guitar Hero Football’, applying the concept of a ludic interface. By creating a new method for playing the game, by kicking a football at different over-sized boards, a new method of interacting with the game was created which emphasised fun over efficiency or accuracy. A video of Kasabian being played in this way can be seen here

Dr Chris Frauenberger also told us about a ludic Sat Nav. Unlike traditional Sat-Nav’s, which aim to get you to your destination in the minimum amount of time, this Sat Nav takes the driver a long and pointless route to their destination, hence introducing the idea of fun and playfulness into the typically utilitarian task of driving to a destination.

So what is the significance of ludic interfaces to participatory design?

Participatory design is the idea of involving all stakeholders in the design process, and can suffer from some barriers to entry, for example when all the stakeholders do not share an equal understanding of the problem, or its constraints.There are therefore two ways in which ludic interfaces can prove an asset to the participatory design process:

The origins of ludic interfaces are rooted in computer games, art experiments and interactive media, and hence encourages people to think and act creatively, breaking outside of their normal boundaries. This can be especially useful when working with people in a typically ‘serious’ setting, such as within a workplace. This can also be seen as a way of putting on a “green hat” in the Six Thinking Hats model created by de Bono.

The second benefit of using a non-traditional interface or method when approaching a problem is that it helps break down social barriers that pre-exist within the group. Often, due to factors such as organisational hierarchy or existing relationships, participants can be less than forthcoming with ideas, feedback or co-operation. By presenting the ideas in a non-traditional way, and allowing people to engage in a ‘fun’ manner, ludic interfaces help prevent this reservation and allow everyone to participate fully.

Good stuff.

Dark Pattern – RedSave & Chairman Mao

Steve — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 18:36:46 +0000

Harry Brignull has introduced the idea of Dark Patterns – website’s using UX principles to promote business goals over the end-user’s experience. When shopping online for a replacement watch, I stumbled upon a particularly nasty one. I thought I’d share:

Let’s start with some back-story. While in Hong Kong recently, I found the most amazing watch I could possibly imagine. It’s Chairman Mao, and it waves with each second. I had to have it, and bought it straight away from the local market.

Hi There!

Probably because I bought it from a market, it’d broken before I got back to the UK – it wouldn’t wind up, and just stopped waving. I was heartbroken. Watch repair shops refused to touch it (possibly due to the watch’s cheap and nasty nature!). It looked hopeless until I found a shop online which sold the very same watch for just £5. I was once again happy.

Here’s the page I was going to buy it from:

A saving of £25? How could I go wrong? So I added it to my basket:

Oh hey, I get a free ‘thing’ too. What’s that? Doesn’t really matter does it, I still get my watch for £5.

On closer inspection, the other item in the basket is not free. It’s the opposite of free. It’s expensive. It’s a subscription to their ‘RedSave’ programme, which costs £20 a month. Googling RedSave turns up a wide range of complaints about people who have fallen for this scam, and unwittingly signed up for a monthly charge without realising, and ended up with a huge bill.

Removing RedSave from your basket jacks up the price of the watch to £30. So, to buy the watch at a reasonabe price, you have to sign-up for this monthly charge. Because of this, and particularly because this transaction is snuck into your basket without advertising the full terms of the deal, this meets the “sneak into basket” dark pattern discussed by Harry Brignull. This must surely be bad business sense from a customer experience perspective– customers are either going to be unhappy because they were forced to sign up for a subscription, or oblivious to the huge charge they’re racking up – which must be RedSave’s true business goal!

I still haven’t replaced my watch.

You can find more examples of Harry’s Dark Patterns here

Perfect Dark – Game Usability from the 90’s

Natural Language Programming – Can players become designers?

Steve — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 11:01:10 +0000

It has been identified that an issue preventing user’s from fully understanding, and taking design decisions in the development of technology projects is the lack of ability of typical users to create code themselves, and articulate their ideas fully.
To truly engage a user as a design partner, it therefore seems useful to make programming accessible to them. This is the goal of natural language programming, which is my focus for today.

not that sort of NLP!

Natural language programming is the idea of allowing people to type code using natural syntax and language they’ve learnt from typical communication, for example “if the player is inside the cave, then the dragon attacks the player”. As an idea, it has been around a long time, yet difficult to implement, since natural language syntax is almost infinitely complicated and subjective. Perhaps one of the most interesting projects which implement aspects from this field is the computational engine WolframAlpha, which will attempt to compute any free-text query entered into it.

So could natural language programming allow users to become designers? By breaking down the barrier between users and programmers, it’d allow the users to be engaged as equal stakeholders. They would be able to make changes directly, without having to have their ideas filtered through a third party, and reach a purer representation of their desired outcome.

However, current implementations of Natural Language Programming have revealed a number of issues preventing NLP from being the perfect tool for engaging users on an equal footing. Currently NLP languages such as Supernova are still dependent on the correct use of syntax, even if the syntax is closer to written language. For example, the condition of an if statement would need to be presented after the if statement (not “kill the player if players health is 0”). Other programming concepts, such as for, if and while still need to be known to be utilised, otherwise the language won’t understand it, or the user will not fully articulate the conditions.

A team at the University of Sussex has been looking into this, with the Flip project, which identified that a better way of making un-technical users, such as children, successfully create working code was not through the use of NLP, but through the implementation of constraints. By giving the users an accessible, but limited tool set of coding concepts, and allowing them to utilise them by filling in the blanks (such as the actors), children were successfully able to create Neverwinter Nights 2 scenarios. This approach can also be seen in the game WarioWare DIY, which allows users to create mini-games by ‘slotting in’ pre-defined elements of code, to build a complete game.

In these instances, constraining the way in which code can be input into pre-defined ‘chunks’ reduced the error rate, and gave important signposting towards the format and syntax that important concepts needed to take. It seems that this is a much more effective method of allowing users to become designers.

User Centered Design vs. Genius Method – Which Approach Is Best for you?

Steve — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 19:23:08 +0000

This is a guest blog post by Devin Jordan of IdentityMine.com. Devin discusses some of the benefits of using an expert-evaluation based model, rather than a pure user-centred method. Read on to see his argument, and comment on what you think!

Imagine you are standing at an intersection of a dusty road in the middle of nowhere. You have to make a choice regarding which direction to go. Do you flip a coin? Follow an instinct? Check for footprints from earlier travelers? Stand in one place until someone else comes by to provide insight?

You are faced with decisions every day – this may be as simple as choosing the correct freeway exit, or deciding between health insurance policies. You might even be choosing between software development companies. Each time you are faced with a decision, you most likely take one of two approaches: Methodical or Instinctual. They both work just fine, but more than likely, one works better for you.

Design engineers are unique because they are faced with decisions regarding someone else’s needs and goals, rather than their own. The methodologies most often deployed by User Experience Designers are User Centered Design (UCD) and The Genius Method (aka Rapid Expert Design). While it may seem counter intuitive, our UX team actually needs to understand how our clients make decisions first, and deploy the appropriate methodology for them (rather than require our clients to adapt to our preferences.) Luckily our team has been around the block a time or two (or three) so we can easily work with either approach.

It is critical to understand the distinctions between the Genius Method and User Centered Design, as each approach can benefit and facilitate the design process differently. In addition to client comfort zones, we also have to consider time/budgetary constraints, and team dynamic.

User Centered Design

User Centered Design involves a methodical approach, including hypothesize, test, analyze, adjust, test, analyze, adjust, and so on until certainties are in place and the project can launch. A project taking a UCD approach most likely includes extensive wireframes, user research (including user testing, and focus groups), A/B testing, beta launches, etc. User-Centered Design processes are well-known, stable, and can guide teams when creating software applications. UCD moves slower, but with greater certainty. UCD, combined with our project management discipline and advanced development teams, ensures that your users get the most predictable outcome possible with your software development project. Although UCD is one of the most common practiced design methodologies, it has a few drawbacks: focus groups may not be representative of the actual user base; and it can be a longer process, which often costs more money. Nonetheless, UCD is still a very effective approach to concepting and designing software applications with measurable benefits to the end users.

Here’s an example a project IdentityMine created using the UCD approach.

IdentityMine worked with Graphic.ly, a startup focused on comic books and the ecosystem built around them. The challenge was to translate their passion for comics and their leadership in the space to a mobile application for the pre-released Windows Phone 7 platform. We focused on a selection of user scenarios that highlighted what was to come in the final shipping build. The resulting application is a culmination of all of the feedback we received from both users and Graphic.ly personnel as we developed the entire experience using Silverlight from login to purchasing and reading comics.

The Genius Method

The Genius Method is inspiration-based – it relies on the visual design and user experience teams to make decisions based on their intuition, experience and expertise without significant external input. The Genius Method is certainly the more romantic of the two – it implies that creative geniuses are at play inventing delightful experiences that surpass convention. If you are fond of certainty, this may seem like a barbaric approach – but when it comes to creating a product, you may benefit from the unconstrained approach. Since the Genius Method relies heavily on inspiration, it is best suited for designers with many years of experience. This approach is generally faster than UCD, with sizeable cost benefits because it relies on the intuition of the design team, rather than using a controlled data set and user research. You will come to conclusions faster and with less systematic documentation, and there is less risk that a brilliant concept will be dismantled by research participants that don’t actually know what they want in the context of your concept, and team meetings. It is the individual nuances of the Genius Method that makes it such an effective and innovative design methodology.

Here’s an example of a project IdentityMine created using the Genius Method

Intergraph is a leading global provider of engineering and geospatial software. We were asked to revamp their Security, Government, and Infrastructure division. Using the Genius Method, key improvements were made across Intergraph’s application suite to standardize UI, improve screen layouts, and streamline user workflows. We successfully completed this by employing our expert UX design gurus to brainstorm, envision, and then architect the overhaul of the application suite.

So how do you decide which way to go? Is User Centered Design right for you and your project, or are you more suited to the Genius Method?

Go with UCD if:

You like predictable, measurable results
User testing is a significant source of decision-making confidence for you and your team
You are risk averse
You have the time and budget to devote to repeated testing and validation

Go with the Genius Method if:

You are working with a highly experienced team (like ours!)
You trust your colleague’s intuition
You trust your own intuition
You have a deep understanding of your end users’ ultimate goals

How do we do it?

IdentityMine is significantly proficient at both the Genius Method and UCD – our team of experts has the essential background and knowledge to make educated design decisions – resulting in a rich user interface that complements the end-user experiences. We’ve also navigated the complex waters of User research, and UX design. Hopefully this information will help you as you launch your next project (or take your next road trip).

Does WarioWare DIY make users into designers?

Steve — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 08:47:38 +0000

As established in a paper by Allison Druin, there are degrees to which user’s can be engaged into the design process. At the very low end of the scale are simple users, with the level of engagement increasing through ‘testers’, ‘informants’ up to full ‘design partners’. Design partners have the strongest level of engagement and have considerable influence over the final product created.

WarioWare DIY is a Nintendo DS game released last year that gave players the ability to design and build their own mini-games, by creating art, music and code using easily accessible in-game tools, and requiring little experience. As well as providing an easy to use toolkit to create games, WarioWare also gives players the tools to share their creations with other players. Today I’ll be considering whether this makes the player into a design partner, and hence becomes participatory design.

WarioWare DIY

There are many arguments why WarioWare DIY can be considered to be participatory design. By giving control to the player over the art, sound and game play, it empowers the players into being able to make important design decisions, and have significant influence over the final product. By allowing players to share their content, this influence extends beyond their personal copy into the general population, and becomes a major part of the public impression of the game (much like Little Big Planet’s levels, or Minecraft’s creations!).

WarioWare is not a clear-cut example of participatory design however, and touches on many of the prominent debates in this field. Although players are free to create anything within the tools given, they are still subject to constraints. For example, if the player wanted to create a massively multiplayer online game, WarioWare wouldn’t be able to do this…

Do the tools artificially constrain the player’s creations? By allowing them to create only in a safe space, are they not true designers? It can be argued so.

But then again, aren’t all stakeholders in any project subject to constraints? If Steve Jobs decided Apple should make a time travelling DeLoreon, he wouldn’t be able to, despite being the CEO, due to constraints such as budget, and technology. So the real question is: if WarioWare isn’t participatory, what is?

The iPhone 5?

How presentation affects perception when working with users

Steve — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 10:19:38 +0000

In our Human Centred Computing Systems lecture, Dr Chris Frauenberger relayed a story where shoppers were asked, after having walked past a row of products, which item they preferred. Inevitably, all shoppers said they preferred the final option presented to them – regardless of the order in which the items appeared. This is a key example of the setting in which a question is asked influencing the answer, a bias that needs to be recognised and mitigated when performing usability and user experience research.

I’ve noticed examples of this when taking part in user testing sessions, where – having been shown an initial option for a UI or webpage, user’s will typically stick with it as their ‘favourite’ over any potential alternatives – regardless of which specific one they are shown first. To minimise this bias this creates, the usability expert will typically randomise the order in which options are presented.

including the cuddly toy!

It’s obvious therefore that presentation affects perception. This seems to me like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which explains it is impossible to measure the position of an electron accurately without disrupting it’s speed, or vice-versa. The act of measurement corrupts the purity of the data, just like in our HCI examples above.

It’s important when working with real users to account for the bias that measurement introduces and attempt to minimise it. One of the key methods of doing this is making the test setting as natural to the user as possible. This can be seen in professional labs, where the room is often mocked-up to look like a traditional living room, or in game testing, where the participants can enjoy a large sofa and free refreshments, to put them at ease. When there are a large amount of viewers, they are often physically remote, and watch via video-link to prevent the subject from being intimidated.

Why would you feel intimidated?

Another technique used to minimise the bias that measurement introduces to a test-environment is by concealing the nature of the study. By hiding the goal of the research, or by misleading participants towards the focus, the participant will be more likely to act naturally in the real focus area without feeling like they are being watched. This can be seen in the famous Milgram experiment, where the participant was under the impression that they were assisting in a study of memory , when actually it was their own willingness to defer to authority that was being tested.

A perfect set up would be observing someone without their knowledge in natural settings. Obviously this is almost impossible, and ethically dubious, which is a topic for another time…

Ethnography as an application of third space theory

Steve — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 08:37:19 +0000

After many competing companies had failed, IBM were tasked with creating an air traffic control system. As you can imagine in this setting a correct solution was crucial – lives were at risk if anything went wrong. The first thing IBM’s designers did was go to the air traffic control tower for a few weeks, and watch how they worked. But why? And how did this influence the design process? Today, we look at ethnographic research, and how it is based in the theory of the ‘third space’.

Ethnography

Ethnography is the idea of conducting research in the ‘real world’, through observation of the end-user in their natural setting. It has a historical basis in the field of anthropology, when explorers would go live with groups of people from unexplored cultures, to come to a greater understanding of their lifestyle. As a research tool for software design, it usually encompasses visiting a workplace for designers to come to a greater understanding of the context in which the program needs to work.

So where can I plug in my modem?

The advantages of ethnography will become visible through the discussion of the third space, below, however it’s important to note that ethnography isn’t a perfect design tool, and so the inherent disadvantages with using ethnography as an aspect of a design methodology have to be considered too.

Primarily there’s the practical issue of cost and distance. Often in a project, the designers are physically remote from the end-users, and so there is the expense of sending the designers out to the user’s location (although this can be mitigated by remote research techniques and software). There is also the additional cost of the time spent observing users – it’s time when the designer’s aren’t designing. There is a strong argument however that this time spent properly understanding the design problem prevents unnecessary re-work later, which would be at much greater expense!

Secondly there are lesser issues when bringing ‘outside’ designers into a workplace, including issues of security and data-handling, as well as the disruption that outside observers may bring to a typical work day. It’s also important to keep in mind that the act of observation will alter the thing being observed, and so the end-user’s may not represent their typical workflow accurately, intentionally or not. I know I’d work harder if someone was looking over my shoulder and making notes!

Ethnography and the 3^rd space.

Ethnography can be seen as the direct application of Muller’s idea of a ‘third space’ in design. Muller describes the third space as a design space that takes place neither in the worker’s domain, (i.e. the air traffic controllers in our example), or the designer’s own domain (the dark cupboard in which the programmer lives).

The idea of moving the designers into the worker’s space is that it’ll create a ‘third space’ – a region bridging these two experience sets. According to Muller this allows all the participants, including the end-users and the developers, to combine their knowledge and approach the design problem with a fresh perspective, rather than relying on ‘traditional’ solutions from their own space.

Such as grass roots marketing campaigns

As an aspect of participatory design, this is therefore important for giving all stakeholders – including the end-users – an equal opportunity to influence the design of a product or service, and not be considered subsidiary to the designer’s ideas or traditions. Bringing designers into the end-user’s space gives the opportunity for the designer’s long-held assumptions to be challenged by first-hand experience, and for the problem to be negotiated, and designed co-operatively, encompassing a range of voices.

Therefore we can see that ethnography is a way in which this ‘third space’ can be accessed and achieved in the design process. This means that the designers and end-users can benefit from mutual learning, and improve the final product. Similarly, giving designers a true understanding of the context in which their solution needs to operate prevents ‘obvious’ errors from being made – for example creating a system that relies on audio alerts in a noisy workplace. Ethnography, and incorporating the idea of a ‘third space’ into the design process makes better software. And isn’t that what it’s all about?

Unintentionally designing with users.

Steve — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 16:34:03 +0000

Participatory design is the idea of involving every stakeholder in design decisions when creating or maintaining a product or service. As a formal process, it is at the more extreme end of human centred design – rather than just analysing users and using this to inform the design; it gives the user’s direct control over the direction a project takes.

Sometimes this handing over of control can happen accidentally, when user’s behaviour or meme’s become formally incorporated into, or define the very core of how a service works. Today I’ll be considering a few examples of this.

Unintentional user-led design can be seen in the development of Twitter. Originally there were no common ways of directing a tweet towards an individual (@), or indicating an ongoing conversation between multiple people (#). It wasn’t until a year after twitter’s launch was introduced that Chris Messina suggested using # for group discussion, which he later pitched to the Twitter team. They rejected it, stating it was ‘too nerdy’. However it was users who adopted the practise, such as during the reaction to San Diego’s forest fires, and now the practise is commonplace.

Such as #outsideyourwindow

The adoption of hashtags (and the @ sign) by users caused the Twitter team to incorporate it into their service, with ‘trending topic’ hashtags now being displayed on twitter’s front page. Although the idea was initially rejected by Twitter, we can see that users did, unintentionally, guide design decisions in the evolution of Twitter.

A second example of unintentional user behaviour being incorporated into the design of a product was found during the production of Burnout Paradise. Play testers were brought in to play the game and allow developers to understand a ‘real player’s perspective’. However, they noticed that some play testers developed some interesting behaviour. Within the game there were spaces between parked cars or scenery, and play testers were accelerating towards them, pulling a handbrake turn, and performing ‘extreme parking’. Think Arnie in True Lies, or Jim Carrey in that terrible Ace Ventura sequel style parking.

Something like this...

Having noticed that multiple players were acting in this way, making their own ‘meta game’ during play, developers then incorporated this as official challenges and objectives within the game’s campaign. Hence, user’s once again become unintentional design partners.

A similar incorporation of user behaviour and design can be seen in forums and ‘link’ websites such as reddit. When linking to …sensitive… material, users commonly denote this by tagging a link with NSFW (“Not Safe for Work”), or somethingawful’s NMS (“Not Mind Safe”) for the more surreal content. This practise, created by users, has been formally incorporated by many websites, as can be seen in reddit where, if an item is marked ‘NSFW’, the thumbnail preview image is turned off.

In all these examples we’ve seen that users can not only provide useful insight into how a system should works, but, particularly with collaborative services with the ability to iterate behaviour quickly over time, can create and define the very way in which a service works. Unintentionally, they have become design partners, and have come closer to embracing the idea of participatory design.