Archive for the ‘UX Book Reviews’ Category
Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug – Book Review
Steve Krug’s new book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, aims to be the only book someone new to user experience will need to start performing usability testing on their company’s website. And, with a few qualifying remarks, it is.
Krug’s previous book, Don’t Make Me Think, aimed to introduce the idea of web usability to a general audience, and had a number of key characteristics. It was short, designed to be read during a plane journey, and it was accessible, so that anyone could read it and understand usability. It also had a chapter on performing usability testing, which was removed in the second edition. Rocket Surgery Made Easy is that chapter.
In the decade since the emergence of this first book, Krug has been honing his usability testing skills, and through running numerous workshops, has perfected how to teach usability testing. This book is the summary of that experience, and in a wonderfully brief and readable style, is the only book someone new to user experience will need to start performing usability testing. Looking at that statement in more detail will give a deeper insight into the book.
Pictured: Steve Krug, international man of mystery
“The only book”
Krug’s book is a complete introduction to testing your company’s website, and guides the reader through every step of the process, from recruitment, and pre-test setup (including the equipment required), through to running the session and the debrief. The book also offers all the test-scripts and task cards you’ll need. Throughout the process Krug offers his best practise techniques, useful maxims to remember, and pitfalls to avoid. Essentially, you could start performing usability tests with this book alone as a reference.
“someone new to user experience”
This book aims to be an introduction, and so requires no prior knowledge (although reading his other book wouldn’t be a bad start). It also assumes that you are not a usability professional, just an interested party at a company, and that there isn’t a large degree of company buy-in, and believes that many rounds of semi-amateur testing is superior to one round of professional testing, which is valid. Because it assumes you don’t have a large amount of support from your company, in particular monetarily, it focuses on how to perform usability testing with a large degree of constraints – how to do it cheaply, how to do it quickly (just one morning a month) & how to get people interested through pastry!
“will need to start”
Because of its small size, Krug’s book is only designed as an introduction to usability testing, and won’t contain any new information if you’ve done this before. At best you could pick up a few best practises, but you’re not the intended audience. Just for you, the book has suggestions for further reading “for overachievers only”, with some interesting books to continue studying this field, but the book is largely aimed at newcomers to the field.
“performing usability testing”
Also due to its brevity, the book only covers one on one think aloud tests with websites, and only hints that other forms of usability testing possible. The book ends with a short chapter on remote research, but only hints at the possibilities that we saw at the UX Brighton event. Other types of usability research, such as quantitative methods, expert analysis, or focus groups, are left out entirely of the books remit. Although the book offers a complete solution, it’s a complete solution for one particular type of usability testing, and only covers websites (although the skills could easily be applied elsewhere).
Its not rocket scien.... oh.
Conclusion
Krug’s new book is short, and simple. However neither of these points are negative. It’s short because it has to be, to introduce a wide audience to usability testing, and to emphasise how easy it is to begin. It’s simple, because usability testing can be simple, and done for just a morning a month. If you’re someone who has been doing usability testing for years, or a professional who does a large amount of usability testing, perhaps it’s better to look elsewhere. However if you’re looking for an introduction to usability testing, having never donae it before, or just need a short walkthrough guide to getting usability testing started at your workplace, Krug’s book should definitely be your first choice.
A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Ralph Koster – Book Review
Koster’s book isn’t written explicitly for user experience professionals, but it covers a subject in which we should be very interested – what is ‘fun’ in games, and what makes a game fun? Since we are involved in crafting a positive player experience, it is a topic that we should care deeply about, and A Theory of Fun for Game Design aims to deepen our understanding of what makes a fun game.
The most obvious thing that strikes you about Koster’s book is the tone, and the format – despite it being said that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, the cover of this book, a notepad covered in doodles, is a preview of the format of the book. The book is written in a personal, conversational tone, and every page of text has a corresponding picture page, with a hand drawn doodle, serving to summarise the text next to it. It’s immediately clear this is not an academic book, and this makes it all the more useful to people trying to understand fun in video games.
Reflecting the light tone, and doodled illustrations is the books approach to the subject. Koster is not interested in an academic definition of fun, instead he wants to know why it exists, why games can be fun (or dull), and how we can improve a player’s experience of fun with the game.
These guys are having so much fun, they don't even have to plug the controllers in!
To understand fun, A Theory of Fun for Game Design starts with cognition theory, explaining how the brain works, and what it enjoys. These chapters essentially condense down to an understanding that the brain enjoys challenge, and learning how to overcome these challenges (‘grokking’). Successful games give sufficient opportunity to learn, and then challenges the player by offering variations of application for the learnt skill. For an example of this, consider jumping in Mario – the player learns to jump over a hole, then many holes, then holes that spit lava, then holes where the landing space is moving, then holes where the landing area disappears, then all of the above together! By challenging the player to stretch their application of the new skill they’ve learnt, the game continues to be fun.
Games are an important medium, as they can offer this opportunity to challenge in a direct manner, which other mediums can only abstractly offer. Hence, games can be used to teach life skills – how to aim, how to gamble, how to win. Koster offers an explanation to why these are common goals in games due a cultural background of power and hierarchy – human’s have evolved needing to fight, and win, and games offer a way to learn and challenge these skills (as do sports).
So why are some games boring? Koster tells us that games fail to be fun either when we’ve learnt everything they have to teach, or we feel we are not learning anything from the game. Games that are too hard are ‘boring’, as the learning is above our ability. Games where all the main elements are learnt early on, without variation through the later levels, get boring early, as we’ve learnt everything. This can be seen in Assassin’s Creed, where reviews often commented on it being repetitive – you’ve seen everything there is to see in the first hour. As people interested in user experience, we can see the value here for longer play test sessions with real players, to uncover the long term appeal of games.
Pictured: Not Fun.
The latter half of the book considers the question of whether games are art, and what they need to achieve to become art. Currently the book identifies games as offering only a choice between ‘fun’ and ‘boredom’. When they move beyond this medium, and become open to interpretation, and a way to teach us about ourselves, they will become art. Perhaps we can see the beginning of this development in great introspective games, like Deus Ex, Half Life 2, or Lego Rock Band.
Ultimately, for user experience practitioners, this book will not change how you do your job. It won’t give you set rules on how to make a game more fun, or on what to do to discover whether something is fun. However it will give you a deeper understanding of why some games are fun, why some games are boring, and give an ethos for improving the player experience. And it might just change how you think.
Selling Usability by John Rhodes Book Review
Last month, the UX Brighton Book Club read Selling Usability, a new book by John Rhodes that claims to reveal the secrets to infiltrating usability and UX practises into your workplace. Having not finished the book by the time of the meeting, I missed what the UX Brighton people thought of Selling Usability, however I’m sharing my own thoughts here. I’d be interested in hearing what the UXBrighton group thought of the book, so please comment!
Essentially the book is divided into 40 short chapters, each claiming to reveal another secret about how to sneak user experience practises into your company, and how to make your position relevant to how the business works. As you can imagine, this is an important contemporary issue as still today many large multinational companies do not employ dedicated usability and user experience specialists, and it’s easy to see that the company’s products suffer because of this. Think about the last time you got lost trying to use an online bank, or had to suffer through a terrible interface on a piece of software. These are the problems that usability specialists should be fixing for their employers, and so a book like this offers a way that usability specialists can get their services recognised.
My initial impressions were that this book could easily have been a series of blog posts, due to the short nature of each chapter, and the overlapping nature of some of the topics. A large section of the book is taken up with guides on how to deal with every level of the business, from sales people, through consultants, to CEO’s. Most of this advice can be condensed to a few key points – teach them about usability, and get them to talk about UX in their own terms, by bribing them with the promise of increasing profits. These chapters, despite having different audiences, all seem rather similar.
and if talking about money doesnt work...
Another main angle proposed by the book is changing the language you use, to one more in line with business needs. Call users ‘customers’, and translate your findings into money (i.e. ‘50% of users found this feature harder to use’ becomes ‘50% of customers couldn’t complete this form, losing us £2,000 in sales a week’). In short, hide the UX language and processes, and present results in a quantifiable manner to impress the company.
Selling Usability also advocated volunteering to do the jobs no-one wants to do, like taking notes, proofreading, or giving presentations, and give them a UX angle while writing them. The book then extends this idea to documenting finished projects, and giving them a UX focus in the write up, presenting them as case studies. Although undoubtedly an effective model to increase the reputation of usability within a company, this does seem a little.. Stalin-esque. It probably works though.
one upset user is a tragedy; one million is a statistic
The book seems most snappy and useful when it moves onto miscellaneous ‘tips’ – good ideas for getting UX out there. Things like including a UX quote in your email signature, using physical examples like DVD players or remotes to illustrate UX points, including quantifiable results on your CV, or writing a newsletter. These short ideas all add up, and pique interest in usability and user experience among otherwise uninterested colleagues.
Ultimately Selling Usability does do as it claims, and helps you sneak UX and usability ideas into a business, so that people start talking and thinking about it. The book’s 40 chapters do contain a lot of helpful information, even though it seems sometimes that the book has less than 40 points, leading to repetition. However the approach advocated fails to promote the idea that UX should be integrated into every stage of a project’s development, and so I wouldn’t recommend it as a complete guide to usability in business, simply as the first stepping stone if faced with an environment hostile to usability. It’s a good start, but without moving beyond the constraints in the book, your company will never experience the full benefits that proper user experience based development can give.
Game Usability: Advancing the Player Experience Book Review
I’ve recently finished reading Game Usability: Advancing the Player Experience, edited by Noah Schaffer and Katherine Isbister, which (as its title may suggest) tries to give a complete overview of the field of usability within computer games. Game usability is a relatively new topic, yet all the key figures of the field are included in the book, including contributions from Microsoft’s User Experience labs, Sauli Laitinen and the Super Mario Club and interviews with figures from many major companies. Game Usability recognises that this field is new, and aims to provide an introduction for complete novices to how usability is developing within computer games, and the shift from ‘hardcore’ games, towards a friendlier user experience.
The topics are widely spread, and try to cover every aspect of usability and UX within computer games, including an introduction to heuristics, how to perform an expert evaluation, and guides to many of the processes of user experience testing. Since the topic is relatively new, there is a wide range of material than can be drawn upon – maybe this book wouldn’t be so useful in ten years time, after a greater degree of precision is applied to each area of usability testing.
Where this book excels is when it covers the actual ‘how to’ of usability processes. If the reader had never performed an expert evaluation before, this book would give them a great introduction and allow them to get started. Similarly for running user tests, articles in the book tell you what to do (and what not to do), common problems encountered, and what results you should be looking for. This is supplemented well by concrete examples, such as Microsoft telling us how they use heat mapping to work out which areas of Halo are causing problems, and what actions they took to fix it.
now try to capture the flag
It also covers the difference between ‘casual’ and ‘power’ gamers, and how games should adapt to the shift towards casual games that can be seen through the success of the Wii. Unlike Alan Cooper (whose book Inmates says that the divide between casual and power users should not exist), this book recognises that ‘power-gamers’ have grown up developing a different skill set to casual gamers, and are more prepared to put up with issues like dying repeatedly, and a higher degree of challenge. By addressing the differences between gamers, and what their expectations are, this book would be a useful aid in the design of personae, and at targeting your game to an intended audience.
Some aspects of the books seemed a tad odd however: An interview with Georgios Yannakakis of Copenhagen University asks only three (very brief) questions (maybe Georgios wasn’t aware it was an interview). Another interview is with someone who shares Schaffer’s last name, and looks to be the author’s dad. Schaffer’s dad has been established in the field of usability, but has little to add with regards to games.
Perhaps the main issue not covered by the book is that all the contributors to the game are established in companies that accept the value of their work. The book briefly covers some counter arguments to common complaints about performing user testing (“It’s too expensive = It’s cheaper than shipping a rubbish product”, or “It takes too long = It’s integrated with the design process so doesn’t take much longer”). However it’s getting into a position where UX is a consideration at all within a company that will be a consideration for many (and is the subject of John Rhodes’ book Selling Usability ). Maybe future revisions of this book will include techniques for making usability a priority within your company.
The focus of the book is maybe sometimes too wide, and only lightly touches each subject before moving on. If you were already familiar with the topics covered in this book, there will be nothing new for you here.
These oversights are only minor though, compared to the large amount of ground the book covers as an introduction to usability. It offers more in terms of practical “how-to” guides than Alan Cooper’s Inmates, and its focus on Games means it can offer fairly comprehensive coverage of the main topics of the field. If you are new to the subject, or a non-usability specialist looking to understand the subject, or can only afford one book, Game Usability would be a great introduction to the theory and practice.
Also, to finish, my quick Usability fail discovery, from Sussex University.
Instead of letting the user break it, how about… not offering the ability to make mistakes (See: Macs)
The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin
Along with Alan Cooper’s book, when starting studying Human Computer Interaction, we were recommended to read Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface. Having recently finished The Humane Interface, written by a designer of the original Mac (credited with the design of the one button mouse), I will briefly summarise its topics, and give my impressions.
My immediate thoughts are to compare this to Alan Cooper’s the inmates are running the asylum. This book is a harder read than Cooper’s – often going deep into highly technical topics (like how he would like to notate mouse clicks), and lacking the wit or lightness of Inmates. The most readable parts of Raskin’s books are the anecdotes about the development of the Mac and Canon Cat, and these are too few. However, this is likely due to a change in the intended audience, as Cooper’s book intends to sell usability concepts to a business audience, whereas Raskin aims his book directly at computing professionals.
Another key difference between Cooper and Raskin is they favour different methods of investigating the quality of an interface design. Whereas Cooper’s book favours qualitative data and methodology, through the establishment of persona’s and attempting to get inside user’s heads, Raskin favours quantitative methods. He includes a chapter on GOMS, a method of assigning arbitrary times for actions such as typing a keystroke, moving a mouse, thinking and moving from the mouse to the keyboard. Then by adding up the times it takes to do these actions, you can compare interaction methods by the time taken. (Its important to note that these times will not relate to the real world, as user’s act at different speeds, and can only be used to compare against other GOMS scores.)
My initial impression of this form of quantitative research is that it would highlight the speed/efficiency of an interaction, but not the quality – which is not necessarily the same thing. If a task takes a few seconds more, but is considered a lot more fulfilling, GOMS wouldn’t record this. This is particularly relevant to the field of videogames, where a purely GOMS based method to check interaction quality would lead to games such as this below:
Maybe the computer could press the button for you?
GOMS can be a useful tool to help compare interaction times, but should not be used exclusively.
Raskin also documents a number of problems with current interaction, with a particular dislike for modes (i.e. interactions that do different things in different concepts). A simple way to explain modes is the ‘caps lock’ key; turning on this mode will make ‘TEXT LIKE THIS’, despite my keystrokes being the same as when making ‘text like this’. He advocates an elimination of modes, as they introduce cognitive dissonance, and make it harder to form habits. A useful compromise, Raskin say’s is quasimodes, which is a mode that requires a constant input to achieve (and hence can be part of habit formation). This would include holding the shift key to produce capitals.
The elimination of modes extends into the elimination of applications – typing ‘SUM 7 + 6’ should produce ‘13’ everywhere, not just in a calculator. This improves the quality of interaction by allowing the user to be clear that the methods they have learnt will work anywhere. I believe this trend can be seen in current operating systems (such as the amalgamation of windows explorer and IE), and this is one of Google’s main aims with their OS.
Raskin also advocates an unlimited undo feature (even through closing and re-opening documents), and the elimination of dialog boxes asking ‘are you sure?’ These two are linked, giving that level of undo freedom would make ‘are you sure’ unnecessary, and is more technically feasible now than when the book was written. I assume it’s a matter of conventions, and momentum which would hinder people advocating these new interaction methods, and it is this mindset Raskin is trying to overturn.
An even more radical suggestion is Raskin’s radical redesign to information architecture. Looking at the hierarchical, folder methodology we have of storing files currently, Raskin notes that it is inefficient – from any point, you cannot see what’s in the folders below, or in the level above you. Since the book was published in 2000 we can see efforts have been made to combat these criticisms – in Windows, folder icons now show the file types inside (and previews if they are pictures), and have made it easier to go up a level. On Macs, they have additional folder view types that make it possible to see ‘up’ the hierarchy.
Raskin however has a more radical suggestion, which he calls ‘Zoom World’. Imagine, flying over a world with a series of zones, ‘I.e. pictures, home, work’. Then you zoom in on pictures (while still being able to see the others), and note that closer up we can see the pictures has it own sub zones, entitled ‘pictures of France’, ‘pictures of the dog’, ‘pictures of lily’ etc. Zooming in on ‘pictures of the dog’, now we are close we can see some individual pictures, one of the dog smiling, one of it playing with a ball
One of the dog playing counterstrike
Zooming in further on this picture would let us read and alter it, but we always have the option to quickly and freely zoom out and see any area of ZoomWorld. The advantage of this system is it solves the issues with being able to see the files above and below at any point, and not be restricted to your current folder. It has been implemented in ‘Archy’, which includes many features Raskin advocates in this book.
Ultimately its interesting seeing how many of the ideas Raskin advocates are ahead of their time, and were included in later revisions of Macs, and in general interaction. (such as searching starting from the first character you type, rather than waiting for you to press ‘enter’). As a book though, it’s harder to get through than Inmates, and does go on in exceptional depth about less than inspiring topics. Raskin talks endlessly about the Canon Cat, a system from the eighties with which he had tried to implement many of his interface ideas. He notes however that it met resistance from users who were used to the existing human computer interaction paradigm, and was not commercially successful. Perhaps, with the moves made by the leading Operating Systems, and Google OS breaking down the barriers between an OS and a browser, people would now be more susceptible to higher quality interaction with computers, and are prepared to unlearn their bad habits.
