Posts Tagged ‘evaluating existing technologies’
All Change – Apple’s new social gaming network
Been playing iPhone games recently? Then you’ve probably been bothered by pop-ups asking you to sign in with OpenFeint, Plus+, Crystal, or one of the other many social gaming networks on the iPhone. When I started writing this post, I was going to cover the problems that having many rival social gaming networks causes, and what Apple needs to do to fix it. However, I’m too late. Last week, Apple announced they are going to launch their own social gaming network, called ‘Game Center’. So instead, we’ll be looking at what this new social gaming network needs to do, and what player experience issues it needs to address.
What is a social gaming network?
As seen with Xbox Live, or Playstation Home, social gaming networks essentially all do similar things:
- Store high scores, often with leader boards for comparison with other players, by day/week/all time.
- Gives, and records achievements (or trophies) from within the game: meta-objectives which are publically listed on the player’s profile
- Contains a ‘friends’ list, of other players, with messaging facilities so that multiplayer games with these players can be arranged.
- Match finding, allowing the player to find suitable games that match their criteria, or games with friends.
Admittedly not terribly useful in solitaire...
Problems with social gaming networks on the iPhone.
The problems so far with implementation of these networks on the iPhone are caused by the wide number of competing systems.
Unlike the PS3 and Xbox, which each has one social gaming network on their device, Apple had (until last week) refused to act on implementing their own system, which has lead to the rise of many independent systems. Currently popular are: Crystal, Plus+, Openfeint, Agon and a recently announced competing network by Namco. Even ignoring the smaller, less widely implemented systems, there is still too much diffusion here.
Having a large number of competing systems offers an inconsistent user experience, with similar tasks (i.e. adding a friend) being handled differently on each system, which is ultimately detrimental to the player’s experience. Instead of playing the game, players have to spend too much time setting up accounts and adding the same friends from their other iPhone games.
The lack of a centrally imposed quality control means the implementation of these networks into games is rather haphazard. This can be seen with the free version of the iPhone ‘x-ray’ app, which emulates x-raying the player’s hand. The app has recently added Openfeint support, and so has achievements, leaderboards, a friend list, etc. These features don’t correlate with a single player, non-game. What sort of competition can a faux-x-ray have?
Achievement Unlocked: Found Keys
A closer inspection shows that the achievement points are all given for purchasing the paid version of the game. The social gaming network integration just serves to bribe the player with the chance to pay for points and inflate an artificial score (which can be compared to your friend’s score, see Farmville!).
What will Apple’s new system have to do
Apple’s system will have to improve the disjointed player experience that these systems currently give. To properly emulate the success, and ‘flow’ of the PS3 and Xbox’s networks, Apple should be aiming to entirely replace these competing systems.
The advantages of this would include:
- unifying all players under one system to ensure that friends can find each other, play against each other, without being spread across multiple systems
- The players only need to understand one workflow for each task (i.e. adding a friend), rather than learning the process for each system
- The player will only need to sign up once
- Achievement points earned in one game can be shared across all games, rather than just those on the same network, as currently.
Care would also have to be taken to enforce rules to ensure achievement points remain meaningful, by introducing a form of quality control to prevent poor apps from bribing people to download by handing out points cheaply.
When I ran user tests for an iPhone game last year, the openfeint login/sign up screens confused new users, who were just interested in playing the game. Apple will need to make the network invisible to uninterested parties, to prevent this. Perhaps this can link with their itunes ID, but the implementation of this is not obvious:- families often share an itunes ID across many devices
By introducing their own network, Apple have the opportunity to achieve a consistent, and hence improved, user experience when playing using the iPhone’s social gaming networks, and can only help things get better!
Watching ‘average users’: Word
It’s easy to forget how useful it is to watch less technical people use some common programs, and how helpful observation is as a tool to understand the ‘average’ user. I recently watched someone using MS Word (2003 I think), and it was…enlightening. They made a large number of ‘errors’ when using MS Word, but as we know as usability specialists, its not the the user that creates errors – the software does.
The task was relatively simple – design some worksheets, including textboxes, and pictures, and lay them out in an eye-pleasing manner. I’m sure there are many more appropriate packages to make this in than Word, but it was the user’s software of choice, due to familiarity, and the task shouldn’t be beyond MS Word. I observed, and let them lead the interaction, but advised when they asked for help (naughty I know, but it wasn’t a formal lab setting!)
The lab was busy that day anyway...
How my ‘less-technical user’ used Word:
I noted down (obviously away from the user) some of the more ‘interesting’ characteristics of how they used Word.
- Used the ‘cut’ function as a ‘delete’ (with no understanding of how it links to paste). Taken out of context from “cut and paste”, ‘cut’ would more likely imply removing or ending something, and so this mistake is understandable. Incidentally this method has some pluses. I still don’t know how to remove a table easily (not just the information within it), and cut seems to do this.
- No knowledge of the alignment tools, and so using spaces as a method to align text to the center or right. Obviously ran into problems when editing the text later, as changes would make the text run over the end of the line, ruining the formatting.
- Drew horizontal lines, across the page (i.e. a space to write in your own answer) with –‘s. Seems a pretty effective method, even though I’m sure Word has its own way of doing this. Is there a better way of doing it?
- Displayed difficulty moving images in Word. Is it right that you have to click on an image twice to move it? The first click just gives you resize options, which confused the user.
- Had difficulty with resizing objects. What happens if you make an image so big that it falls off the edge of the paper, and you cannot see the border to make it small again? I guess you could format picture, and manually change the size, but this is an entirely different method of resizing, and isn’t cognitively related to the standard way.
- Constant (constant!) rewriting of words, when word autocapitalised/auto formatted them in an undesired way (which was seemingly every autoformat). User had to delete the word, and re-write each time.
What could word do to improve?
This immediately throws up some questions about how Word was developed. It’s clear that the tools available, such as the alignment, or horizontal lines, are not making their functionality transparent to new users. It wasn’t clear to my user that they existed, or how they should be functioning. Obviously just having the icon on the toolbar isn’t enough, and this should be rethought.
This was also the case with image manipulation. The functions that the user needed do exist in Word (i.e. resizing, moving), but are modal in nature, and so are difficult to find, and don’t offer a consistent user experience to someone who is not familiar with Word’s nuances.
It’s also clear with auto format in particular that the system isn’t adapting to the user’s needs. The constant changes that Word was making to the user’s document, which were then undone each time only created a large degree of frustration in the user. The software should be learning how the user wants auto format to work, and adjust to their preference. In this user’s case, it was causing trouble, and should have turned itself off (or at least given the option)
What they need is some sort of helpful assistant
What should we learn from this?
It occurred to me that these issues were not unique to the user I watched since I encounter similar problems with Word. The difference is I’ve had enough familiarity to learn the workarounds, or solutions to these problems that Word throws at you. For example, it’s an unthinking reaction to press Ctrl+Z after Word incorrectly auto-formats things incorrectly. My user just hadn’t used the program for long enough to train that reaction, and so word’s error became more of a big deal.
Its important when considered usability to realise that users aren’t just like you. If you are in a position to make a difference with usability, it’s very likely you are not an ‘average user’, and as such its difficult to comprehend how ‘average users’ use software.
‘Average users’ are not stupid. They are your mum, and just don’t have the time, or effort to put into learning these workarounds, or making them second nature. The solution, rather than ‘educating’ users, is to make the programs better; make programmers understand who their users are, and how they use the programs. And make them program for the ‘average’ users, rather than the power users. And that is the point of usability.
A Terrible User Experience & how to fix it– Zoomerang.com
When running a website, its important to make sure that the user can achieve their goal with the minimal fuss. This is especially important if you are selling, or trying to sell, a commercial service. I recently had to use Zoomerang.com, a survey site, and had a few notes about the user experience. As you’ll remember, I don’t rant often…
I’m in the process of designing a GPS game, and am currently discovering the functional requirements for the project. As UX practitioners, we know that involving the user is of critical importance at this stage, hence we designed a questionnaire to establish peoples experience, and perception of GPS games, and what they’d like a GPS game to be like. (linked here)
When at university, our internet access goes through a proxy server, which blocks unsuitable content. For some reason, this includes surveymonkey.com, a site I’ve used a few times in the past to construct online surveys. Interestingly, the ‘site blocked’ dialogue said “for survey sites, try zoomerang.com”. However, when I search for some hardcore action, it never gives me alternate suggestions for that. Have I uncovered a conspiracy? Nonetheless, I followed the link.
And so I ended up on zoomerang.com. Being fair, there is one key advantage to zoomerang which immediately put me in a good mood. On surveymonkey, for a free account, you are limited to ten questions. On Zoomerang, you can ask 30 questions before you have to pay. This meant we didn’t have to redo, or concatenate our questions, and made me smile inside
Pictured: an inside smile
Problems with Zoomerang.com
This goodwill was shortlived, when I tried to use the site to implement my questionnaire. Heres why:
- The workflow isn’t clear when making a survey, and so I entirely missed the step where you add your questions. Clicking through the process actually caused me publish a blank questionnaire. Which wouldn’t be a problem, except…
- …You can’t edit an existing survey. Once its published, you cannot add/remove/change questions. Surveymonkey allows this. So I was stuck with my blank survey, and had to start again from scratch.
- Having figured out how to add questions, I got started, and selected “insert question”. It added a header, which then had to be changed to type question. I guessed that was because it was my first item, but no, it always defaults to inserting a header (odd, since you’d only need 1 per page, whereas you’d need multiple questions).
- So I finally got to add a question, and this is when the terribleness of the design struck me. I selected a question where a radio button would select from a number of answers, and typed in my list of 15 or so alternative answers into a rich text field. I hit submit, and … got an error, saying “answers can only be 1000 characters, including HTML”, and even worse…
- …It deleted the data I had entered in that field. All 15 answers. This is a critical failure of any system, since the data a user inputs should be considered sacred.
- There was no counter telling me how many characters I had entered, so I had to retry a few times. Eventually I realised that I could only enter 5 potential one word answers before it’d error that I was over 1000 characters. That had to be a mistake? I investigated further…
- …Looking at the HTML, it turned out that the rich text editor was writing rubbish html. At the start of each answer, it’d add needless style tags, often multiple times. Heres an example of the HTML it generated for my one word answer “complicated”
<p><span style=”font-family: Arial; color: #000000; font-size: small;”><span style=”font-family: Arial; color: #000000; font-size: small;”><span style=”font-family: Arial; color: #000000; font-size: small;”>Complicated</span></span></span></p> - …no wonder it was hitting the character limit after 4 or 5 words. I had to manually enter the html for all the possible answers, just so I could get round this.
- My last fault with zoomerang.com is just a suspicion. I look after my email accounts, and so have never received spam in my current primary address. After signing up for zoomerang last week, I received my first random spam email. Might just be a coincidence, but I didn’t sign up for anything else that week!
I had to call this guy to fix my survey
How to fix zoomerang.com
To improve their user experience, they should look at red-routing the goals the user needs to achieve:
- Make the progression through survey design clearer, highlighting which step questions are added in
- Also make it clear how far through the design process you are, and what steps remain
- Restrict what the user can do, so they cannot post a blank questionnaire. Its obvious if they are about to do this that they’ve made a mistake, tell them!
- Don’t make question types default to “header”. Surely users will only use this type once at most, whereas they’re going to have more than one question on the questionnaire. Make it default to that!
- Fix the WYSIWYG code generator, so that the user doesn’t have to manually code the answers in HTML. A lot of user’s would get stuck at this point!
- Don’t send me spam!
And what can you do, until these fixes are made? Use surveymonkey.com. Or, if you’ve found anything better, leave a comment and let me know!
The user experience of Ticketmaster ruins Christmas
I told you it was coming, and here it is – Ticketmaster’s design faults from a user centred perspective have annoyed me enough to blog on them. And then deliver the killing blow by suggesting how they could be improved. If you’d just let me buy those Paul McCartney Tickets, it wouldn’t have come to this!
No-one will simply be having a wonderful christmas time this year.
To demonstrate my point, let’s walk through two interactions. For each one, we will see how the user’s interaction with the website takes place, note any issues or redundancies in the process, and then suggest how they could be improved.
An ideal scenario:
In this first scenario, I’m buying tickets to see Brighton based singer songwriter Chris TT. Due to the fact that the tour has just been announced, and that he is nowhere near as popular as he should be, there are still tickets available. So I go to Ticketmaster’s website (.co.uk, not .com. It wont realise you’re looking in the wrong region).
Here are the steps involved in buying tickets
- Look for the artist I’m after – He’s not on the front page, so I’ll use search.
- Having searched, I’ve found Chris TT. I click his name.
- It presents me with a list of venues/dates. I scroll down to the one I want, and click “find tickets”.
- It then asks me to select how many tickets I want, and how much I want to pay. I make my selection, and click “find tickets”.
- It loads a captcha. I type in the words “brighton rock” and click “continue”
- It loads a loading screen. I wait.
- It loads up and tells me it found my ticket. It asks me if I want GB shipping, Northern Ireland Shipping, Republic of Ireland shipping, or to another country. I make my selection and press continue.
- It then asks me to log in, or register. I select register and continue…
- …. Onwards through the many address entry screens, until I’ve got my ticket
So what were the problems, and how could they be improved?
This was an ideal case scenario, and so we should expect the simplest and easiest interaction. There were still however a few problems:
- I had no idea whether the venues/dates were sold out. This should be indicated on the page when selecting the venue/date.
- I had no idea which ticket price ranges were sold out or in stock. This should be indicated on the page when selecting the ticket price range.
- The captcha comes before deciding whether I want to buy the tickets or not. It should come after I’ve decided I want to buy.
- I had to choose which region I wanted the tickets shipped to. Later I had to type in where I lived. Could the system not use this information to auto-calculate which shipping region applied to me?
A less than ideal scenario:
This is the real scenario, and my reason for writing this post. Paul McCartney tickets went on sale at 9am, and I was sat in front of a computer (kindly assisted by Anna Fuller) refreshing and waiting for the tickets to go on sale.
Here are the steps I followed:
- Look for the artist I’m after. He’s not on the front page, so I’ll use search
- Having searched, I find Paul McCartney. I click his name
- It presents me with a list of venues/dates. There is only one. I select it.
- It loads a page that says “these tickets have not gone on sale yet.”
- I press refresh
- Go to 4.
- Eventually, the event is open, and it asks me how many tickets I want to buy, and what do I want to pay. I select ‘2’ and the mid price range. I press “find tickets”
- A captcha comes up, I enter “glass onion”, and press continue
- It loads a loading screen. I wait.
- It tells me no tickets could be found, and suggests searching for ‘best available’.
- I press back 3 times
- It asks how many tickets I want, and how much I want to pay
- I select ‘2’ and ‘Best available’. I press ‘find tickets’
- A captcha comes up. I enter “john is better”, and press continue
- It loads a loading screen. I wait.
- It tells me no tickets could be found, and suggests searching for ‘best available’.
- I lose all hope of ever getting tickets, but press back 3 times, to see if any single tickets are available.
- It asks me how many tickets I want to buy, and how much I want to pay.
- I tell it “1” and “best available”. I press ‘find tickets’.
- A captcha comes up. I enter “paul is dead” and press continue.
- It loads a loading screen. I wait.
- It tells me no tickets could be found, and suggests searching for best available.
- I give up.
Sorry paul
So how could this process be improved?
- First of all steps 7-23 could have been avoided by a simple note saying ‘sold out’.
- In fact, since it looks like the event was sold out before it went on sale (due to presale I guess?), steps 3-23 could have been avoided by saying “sold out”.
- Since there was only one date, I should not have to select the date after selecting Paul McCartney. It should automatically load that date.
- Again, the captcha should come after having searched for tickets.
- The page should not let the user select price ranges that have no available tickets.
- After my first search failed, I shouldn’t have to press back three times to search again, I should be able to do it from the page I’ve landed on.
- Even better, if it fails to find your ticket selection, it should search ‘best available’ automatically.
- It should stop suggesting ‘search for best available’ if I’ve just searched for ‘best available’ and it’s found nothing.
Because the tickets are released at specified times, the website suffers a huge rush at these peak times. The fact that each page takes a few minutes to load does not make all the needless navigation the site makes you do easier. This stress is made worse by the site’s user experience issues, and buying tickets through Ticketmaster is a lot more frustrating than it needs to be.
I decided to phone the phone line instead. It gave me an automated ‘you will be placed in a queue’ message, and then went blank. No hold music, no ‘you are ninth in the queue’ message, nothing. I had no idea if I was still connected or if it was broken. After around 5 minutes waiting on this very expensive number, still with no noise at all, I gave up.
Bah Humbug!
Evaluating existing technologies, paper prototypes in action, Windows 7 and the disappointing user experience of my DVD player!
This week our HCI course featured an introduction to starting the design process by evaluating existing technologies, and the key advantages of this were made apparent when we started to build paper prototypes.
In an abstract sense, the advantages of evaluating existing technology is that aids redesign – you can see what elements turned out successful, and which did not. What this means in practise is that you can steal the best bits of the competition, and fix the bits that users complain about (and hence find raw user experience data on the internet). This is particularly pertinent with this week’s release of Windows 7.
Aside from multitouch (surely useless for most home users), two of the main ‘new’ features of Windows 7 are likely to be the result of evaluating existing technologies – mainly OSX.
The task bar now has persistent icons, so they don’t go away when you close the program. Programs that are closed have a slightly different visual effect applied to them on the task bar. OSX users will of course remember this from their own Dock.
Windows 7 Taskbar
Or is it this one?
Another borrowed feature is the new way show desktop works on Windows Seven. Hover over the bottom right hand corner of the screen, and it will look like this:
show desktop
As OSX users will know, this is the same as leopards’ exposé feature, which allows users to show all open windows, all application windows, or (as in windows 7) the desktop, by moving the mouse into the corner of the screen. When I used to work on Mac’s, I thought this was a great feature, and its no surprise why Microsoft borrowed it.
Both of these are examples of taking ideas that were either popular or productive, from a rival operating system, and integrating them into your own design.
Also this week is the launch of the first Microsoft Store. Again, they evaluated the existing user experience of an Apple store (sleek design, answers bar, the layout) and… nicked it. Great success!
This isn’t just Microsoft bashing by the way, its just relevant examples of evaluating existing ideas, and taking the good bits. Everyone knows that Apple nicked all its ideas from Xerox anyhow!
So, in the spirit of ‘evaluating existing ideas’, we have been involved in the design of a new system for the University. User Experience will be important here, for the feature we are designing is likely to be used by students in high stress situations. We had half an hour to paper prototype some ideas on how to build the system (which it quickly become apparent was not enough time). Then we swapped, and compared our own designs to those produced by other groups. My personal favourite design (by Hassan and James ) had emulated key features from eBay, particularly how they categorised entries by the status (i.e. on eBay, ‘items being bid for’, ‘items I’m watching’, ‘items sold’ appear on separate lists).
This practical exercise brought home the advantages of paper prototyping, and evaluating other designs. Paper prototyping had proved to be:
- Fast
- Useful for brainstorming ideas
- Able to be changed quickly
- Adequate at demonstrating the key features of a website
and evaluating existing designs had not only helped our group find a better solution than the one we’d implemented, but also had been a key part of James and Hassan’s design process.
My ‘design gripe’ this week was my DVD player. It has many problems, a few of which I’ll share here.
- If there is no DVD in the player, it displays ‘NULL’
- The ‘time played’ counter (the default on the front of the player while playing a DVD) only counts to an hour. Then it goes back to 0 minutes again.
- The sound volume of a DVD is roughly half that of the normal audio output of the TV (and this is with the player’s DVD volume settings set to max)
- If multiple camera angles are available on the DVD, the icon for it (a little film camera) appears on the TV screen always. Its quite distracting when watching a film, and cannot be turned off. Same for if you use the ‘zoom’ functionality.
From this, we can deduce the following points:
- User experience wasn’t a priority, as ‘Null’ would mean nothing to a non-geek audience
- The player is probably intentionally badly designed, to drive the user to a higher priced one (I assume the company make more expensive ones). This may be counter productive though, as I’d be unlikely to go for the same brand.
- You shouldn’t buy the second cheapest DVD player Argos sell. (I’d hate to see the functionality of the cheapest one)
my next dvd player
I’ve started reading Alan Cooper’s The Inmates are Running the Asylum, which diagnoses the problems with technology currently as a lack of understanding by the business of the need to separate programmers and designers. Programmers are great at thinking logically, and making tools they themselves could use effectively, however they need to be given clear goals and design models by people who are better placed to understand user needs, and that is where our role as designers come in. I have to say, it’s a lot more readable than the HCI textbook, and Alan Cooper has a great degree of insight into the subject. He recounts the following (rather old) joke, which is quite relevant to our field of user experience.
He shouts down “I’m lost, where am I?”.
The man replies “You are in an airplane, 100 feet above the ground”.
After hearing that, the pilot immediately flies off, and lands successfully without a problem.
“How did you do it?” he was later asked.
The pilot replies “Well, with an answer like that, I knew I must be at the Microsoft building, and I know my way back from there”.
As we can see, the answer was true, but not helpful. This is what we want to avoid as user experience architects.
I was going to feature here the terrible user experience of Ticketmaster’s website, but I think it’s so bad it could fill an entire blog post on its own. Expect this soon (especially since I’m bitter I didn’t get my Paul McCartney tickets)!
