Blammo!

It’d be fair to say Prototype is an ‘average’ game, having received 78% on metacritic (it’s sad that this counts as average, but that’s inflated review scores for you!). It does some things fantastically, and obviously has sold well enough for a sequel to be in development. So, what impressed me?

The Best of Prototype

Relatively early on in the game, the player gets the ability to glide, with subsequent upgrades increasing their potential mobility while in the air. The glide ability is successful in both appearing in-context of a superhero game, and allowing the player to navigate the game world quickly and reach destinations in an appropriate time. By giving the player great freedom of mobility, this reduces the time between the player’s missions, prevents the game feeling ‘sluggish’ and avoids issues with difficult navigation that have been found in many open-world games.

As an anti-hero, the protagonist of Prototype, Jim SomeGuy, has a habit of eating people. The ability to gain health by eating NPCs works in the context of the game, and ensures that the player is never ‘stuck’ without the ability to gain sufficient health to complete their mission, due to the prevalence of both enemies and civilians. As a method of healing the player, it is less dependent on suspension of disbelief than a shower of health packs, and more unique than the health regeneration seen in many modern games. However eating an NPC requires the player to stand still, often making it impossible to heal while being ganked by enemies – I’d query this design decision, since it significally heightens the game’s difficulty.

The Worst of Prototype

You wouldn't like him when he's angry

 As in many games, progress in missions gives you money to upgrade your abilities. However when upgrading the player’s abilities through the in-game menus, the upgrade structure is unclear, both in its UI and its execution. When abilities (such as the ‘overdrive’ ability) are dependent on other skills to be useful (i.e. it must be partnered with specific other powers), this is not indicated and allows the player to buy a potentially useless ability. When purchased, the execution of new abilities is taught through a description of what buttons to press, lacking crucial information on timing and context of successful activation.

A minor annoyance is the range of UI issues in the menu presented on start-up. Prior to loading the main menu, the game requires the player to press to continue past a pop-up dialogue – a needless delay. The menu also highlights ‘New Game’s as the first option, despite the use-case for ‘Load Game’ being a lot more common. The game knows if you have a saved game, and could highlight the appropriate option automatically. Minor annoyances like this are an easy fix, and should have been picked up during development.

Conclusion

Prototype has a huge amount of potential, and is undoubtedly fun to play. Compared to other open-world games I’ve played, it seems to have extensive variety and some unique game mechanics, such as eating people to disguise as them, which help to keep it compelling . However, a number of small issues with the UI let it down, and detract from the player experience. More extensive user testing, throughout the development process, would pick up these ‘quick-wins’, and could knock the game’s metacritic score into the 80s or above!

Related posts:

1. Usability Thoughts – Mass Effect
2. The importance of usability in Mobile Geolocation games.
3. Driver: San Francisco Usability Review (Part 1)

Agile is a software development philosophy which encompasses a number of ideals, most interestingly the idea of delivering working software over excessive documentation and planning. Distilled to it’s core essence, it divides project development into short (bi-weekly) ‘sprints’, where an agreed amount of prioritised software is constructed, tested and delivered.

Something like this...

Because of Agile’s emphasis on delivering working software as soon as possible, it gives plenty of opportunities to integrate user insight into the process, and user insight in turn gives a wide range of benefits to software development. In games, it can mean the difference between addictive game-play, or a dull experience.

So, how should user insight be integrated in order to create a successful game?

1. Gather user insight before you start.

Before the project begins, it is typical to have a ‘sprint zero’, to allow necessary preparation/evaluation of the problem to be performed. This is an ideal time to start on user research, since the cost of integrating any findings would be minimal

A variety of techniques could be used to understand users before production has begun.  Paper prototypes, or evaluating competitors products will give insight into what aspects of the game would be desirable, and which are unnecessary. Evaluating competitor’s games is practically free, and will prevent you from making the mistakes that they made!

2. Test at each sprint

Agile delivers working software at the end of each sprint. This gives an opportunity not possible in traditional (waterfall) software delivery – to test an element of your final product with real players. Ignoring the programmer-art graphics, or game-stopping bugs, the core game mechanics can be tested, and refined from a very early stage.

A technique often used to achieve this is ‘staggered sprints’.  This is the idea of running user testing in parallel with development, testing what was created in the last sprint, and feeding back refinements based on user testing during the next development sprint. This will give the team the ability to integrate the feedback from users consistently, and improve the next iteration. It will also settle arguments about features!

3. Release early and iterate

Starting with the proliferation of ‘patches’ for games, updating games is now easier than ever due to automated updating platforms such as the iOS App-store, or Xbox Live.  This means it is now possible to release a game at the earliest possible stage, and then iterate upon it to update it.

This technique has been used to enormous success with facebook games such as CityVille. By releasing a game early, either to beta testers, or the general public, and improving it based on player feedback, it allows you direct insight into what players want, what they don’t want, and prevents you wasting time on unpopular or unnecessary features.

Plus you start getting revenue from a very early stage – just look at Minecraft’s millions!

pictured: notch

4. Prioritise

A key aspect of Agile is the idea of prioritising the workload. Before each sprint, the most important features are decided upon, and only these are worked on. This means that each iteration will produce the ‘best’ version of the game possible at that stage, and any delays/cuts will only affect the least important aspects of the game.

The advantage of integrating user insight into the game development process, as outlined above, is that it can help inform this prioritisation, and ensure that the features being developed are the ones most critical to the players.

5. Evaluate

By far the most important aspect of developing games with agile is understanding what aspects are going well, and what needs revision. By working in short sprints with user insight as a ‘review process’, it is easy to judge what areas of the game are working, and which are not.

If this is contrasted to a closed development process, where the players do not see the game until it’s complete, it is often not possible to understand how features will be received, or whether the game is ‘fun’ until much too late! And if you do decide to make changes? It’ll be a lot more expensive at the end than if you’d caught it at the end of a two week sprint – this limits the rework you’d have to do.

In summary, developing games with an agile methodology produces better quality products, and at a faster pace. Integrating user insight into games development is not only possible with agile, but brings massive boosts to the quality of the final game.

Related posts:

1. UX needs an Agile environment
2. Why you should always video players when testing games
3. Understanding players through biometrics

Today I’ll be looking at the first 5 minutes of a successful social game, and highlighting which elements have made this game successful. In the future we’ll look at some games which have missed the point, and hence lost a large proportion of their customer base. From this, we can learn how to make an addictive social game.

The Game

The game we were originally going to study was intended to be Farmville, since Farmville is famously the ‘poster-child’ of social gaming success. However it wanted me to connect with my facebook account, and wouldn’t let me play without doing so. Game over!  (Presumably this is just an annoyance to me however, and hasn’t stopped the game’s success)

Instead, I looked at the ‘Top Grossing’ iPhone apps, and found ‘Smurf’s Village’. Like farmville, it’s a landforming game, where the player has to create a new village for the Smurfs, and look after their crops. Most importantly, it’s free, yet still a top-grossing app – clearly a sign of it’s continued success. (or was it all the work of this kid charging $1400 to their parents credit card) So, what happens in the first 5 minutes of Smurf’s Village?

The Experience

The first thing that happens when running the game is that it asks if I want to hook it up to facebook. This is a key business goal for the app developer, since it increases awareness of the game and is a key element to how social games work. Importantly for the user experience however, it is optional (unlike Farmville). I declined at this time:

Linking with facebook

After a very short introductory story, explaining why the Smurfs are moving, the game drops you straight into making a new village. With clear directions, the game tells me to click on the sign and lay a plot of land:

Planting a field

And with that, I get an immediate positive reaction “Quest complete”, and reinforcement of the lesson I just learnt:

Quest Complete

Now the same happens again with ‘growing blueberrys’, where an arrow clearly indicates what I need to do, and I’m given positive reinforcement having completed this task:

Planting berries...

And with that, a level up is gained:

Level up!

The game goes on, with the next level teaching you how to build a house, and crucially linking speeded up progress with using smurfberrys. Since smurfberries are the games in-app-purchase, and hence the primary method the developer makes money, this is an important link to make early on:

In app purchases

This earns me another level up. The game then goes on to repeat this to teach me how to build grass, before letting me play a mini-game to break up the monotony. If I were to continue playing beyond the first few minutes, the game would go on to ‘set me free’ and let me use the lesson’s I’ve learnt to continue to build the village unguided.

The Rules

So, what magic rules did we find that led to a successful first 5 minutes with this game?

1. Explain actions one at a time, let the player do them

• The game takes care to only show the player one action at a time, and first describes the task, before guiding them through performing the task themselves, to ensure that players know how to do it. The game then confirms the correct action has taken place after it has been completed, and tells the player what they did.
• By repeating the action numerous times, the game hence reinforces to the player how the action is achieved.

2. Reward the player for performing an action correctly

• When an action has been performed, there are multiple layers of success shown. Not only are there visible indications that the task has taken place, and the player is rewarded with both experience points and a ‘quest complete’ dialog, but the game also levels up the player’s village.
• Hence there is positive reinforcement that the correct action has taken place, causing the player to want to perform it again, much like Peggle’s Ode to Joy

3. Show the player the potential of what they can achieve

• By setting the game after the destruction of the original village, and allowing them to build a new one from the ground-up, this game highlights what can be done by the player if they were to continue playing.
• This message would potentially be reinforced by introducing the social element of the game, for it will be possible to see other player’s complete villages.

4. Let them take control

• After the tutorial period (admittedly longer than the 5 minutes I played for today), the game will hand over the reins to the player, having shown them what’s possible, and give the ability to create solutions in a manner of their own choosing.
• Although there will be continued goals to achieve, the method to achieve these goals becomes more free-form after the tutorial allowing the player to introduce creativity into their gameplay.

All these factors have been an important part of the continued success of this social game. Soon I will look at an alternative, unsuccessful, social game, and note what factors lead to its failure.

Related posts:

1. How to make an addictive strategy game
2. All Change – Apple’s new social gaming network
3. The usability of iPhone’s Game Center

As promoters of user insight in design, it’s therefore unfortunate that recording people secretly is unworkable in most real world situations. Much more importantly, as an aspect of scientific research, recording people in this manner is unethical. Today I’ll be considering why this is so, and look at how to do ethics correctly.

Ethics is an important element of user research, because scientific research without restraint can, and has, harmed people. Consider the experimentation that Dr Mengele performed on humans in concentration camps – his position was that it was serious work and furthering our knowledge scientific and biological knowledge for the benefit of humanity. So does the scientific merit justify these experiments? Consider also the research into Shock Therapy, as documented by Naomi  Klein – where subjects were subjected to seizure-inducing electric shocks, in order to ‘cure’ conditions such as bipolar disorder or catatonia. Subjects were often not in a position to give informed consent, which is an aspect of ethics we’ll be looking at.

It’s highly unlikely our research into user-insight will touch these morally-dubious boundaries, yet scientific research has since formalised many rules in order to prevent research becoming ethically wrong. Hence it’s important, when working directly with users, to be aware of ethical considerations.

So what ethical considerations do we need to follow when working with users?

Primarily there is the issue of informed consent. Consent is the idea of giving permission for research to take place, and the results be presented in a manner defined in the agreement. For consent to be informed, the participant has to have a clear understanding of the facts, implications and consequences of the research. Hence, we can see in the electroshock example given above that subjects, often in catatonic states, were unable to give their informed consent for being participants in research. As researchers, informed consent often has to be given before the research/observation begins, and again after to ensure that the participant is fully aware of what they are agreeing to.

We can see that informed consent becomes difficult to apply when working with special groups, such as children or people with certain disabilities. However it is these cases where the correct application of consent is particularly important, due to the vulnerability of the groups!

A second aspect of correct ethical procedure is allowing users to change their mind and leave during a study, without necessarily giving a reason. Although this has the potential to introduce a bias into the results (since your user group will be restricted to only willing participants), this has benefits in the validity of the data received – an unwilling and unhappy participant may intentionally disrupt an experiment.

Changing your mind...

As a part of this, the participant also has to have free choice over being involved in the experiment – it’s important to consider factors such as social pressure when understanding whether a user is truly free to participate.

Last of all, a guideline when working with real people is ‘Don’t be evil’. Google’s motto, though not always met by their actions, should be a guiding principle in all endeavours – the people you are working with are real people, and their wellbeing is morally more important than your research. Hence we can understand why the Stanford Prison Experiment, which looked into the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or a guard yet descended into abuse, was prematurely stopped.  Research should be terminated

Yes, even you Doctor Badman

This issue becomes less clear-cut in certain cases. What if your research would harm the participants, but make life better for millions of others? Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? Spock thought so. However, for usability experts, a good rule of thumb is to consider the experiment from the participant’s viewpoint, and only involve participants in ways you yourself would be happy to perform.

Related posts:

1. How presentation affects perception when working with users
2. Test with real users – not your team
3. Watching ‘average users’: Word

Typically people read the oldest tweets first, working up to the latest ones. The app is made to support this, retaining your ‘last read’ tweet, so you can read up from there.

Another feature of Twitter on the iPhone is, if you’ve been away a while, your timeline will be missing entries. You’ll see a tear, like in the picture below, and clicking this will download the missing tweets into your timeline.

Downloading missing tweets...

Now the usability issue here is small but incredibly annoying. When the tweets download, you’re presented with the latest ones first, and the oldest ones at the bottom. Completely the opposite to how people use the twitter app, reading the oldest ones first. Effectively this means scrolling down a list of potentially hundreds of tweets, looking for where you were before clicking the tear (which is not indicated).

The workaround I currently use is behaviour that would be spotted straight away, and fixed, by usability testing. To prevent being taken to the most recent tweet, the user has to ‘press’ the tear, but then scroll down to hide it from view, before taking a tentative peek up the timeline after 10 seconds or so to see if the act has been successful.

User testing would quickly identify this behaviour, and make it unnecessary by fixing the problem. Instead of showing you the most recent tweet when ‘filling in the blanks’ of the timeline, Twitter should take you to the oldest, hence not breaking the user’s flow, and aligning with how the rest of the app works.

Job done!

Related posts:

1. Usability Fail – Lotus Notes
2. Usability Fail – Monkey Island 2
3. Five essential iPhone apps for usability professionals

This inaccurate view is set to change, with the rise of in-house and independent usability and user experience labs, and the breadth of academic research increasing our understanding of user experience. Hence I’m planning a series of articles about my thoughts on selling UX to game companies, helping you to communicate why game companies should be thinking about UX with their games. New posts in this series will come under the category ‘Selling UX in Games’

Everyone else is doing it

So why should your company be interested in games usability and user experience? Well I’m glad you asked…

• Many top selling games have gone through user experience testing
• The companies who have tried it recognise the benefit, and go on to do it again. In fact, one developer said…
• “It adds 10% to the metacritic score”

So let’s look in more depth at some games that have been reaping the benefits of user experience testing. These popular games all found success through user experience testing, and can serve as helpful examples when communicating why your company should be looking into user experience.

oh... well, thats easy to understand

Halo 3

Bungie recognised the value of the player experience when developing their multi-million selling Halo 3, and hence used user experience testing to create a game that was consistently fun, ensuring the player was never confused or lost. As documented in Isbister’s book Game Usability Microsoft’s usability labs were brought on board to ensure that Halo 3 was fun throughout.

Each area was thoroughly tested with real users, using techniques such as video and ‘heatmapping’ to log where the choke points were, where people got lost or stuck, and where they died. This could then be used to easily find problems in the game, and fix these areas. Fixes are typically simple, either by signposting the way to go, altering the enemies or adding points of interest to draw players (like a sparking light to encourage players to look up). This technique could also be applied to multiplayer maps, to balance the game’s flow, and make the game fair.

The success of this technique in Halo 3 has been extended to Halo Reach, where telemetric data was gained from a long public beta testing period. This gave real player information on how to balance and improve the game, and will undoubtedly be a large factor in its success.

To read more about the Halo 3 user testing experience, see the coverage in Wired.

Split Second

Brighton based Black Rock Studios explored user experience testing in their successful racing games ‘Pure’ and ‘Split Second’.  With consultation from the usability lab Vertical Slice they tested over 100 players, getting new user’s experiences to fine tune aspects of the game, ensuring the pacing was correct, and that the game was delivering key ‘fun’ moments, which they denoted ‘woah moments’.

They built on this successful experience from Pure in developing Split Second, where they combined in house talent, who worked on testing users, with assistance from a local university, who performed an expert evaluation of the usability and user experience issues.

As documented by Graham McAllister, the developer believed that the process “added 10% to their metacritic score”. More information about how user experience testing helped Pure become a success can be found in the book Evaluating User Experience in Games.

Farmville

It’s not just the expensive AAA games which benefit from user testing.  Zynga’s Farmville is everyone’s favourite facebook success story, and has gone from 0 t o 63 million active users in just a few months. This success is largely down to logging the user behaviour, and using this data to improve the player experience.

The online nature of facebook games allow user testing in a way not possible for traditional console games. Metrics can be gathered while people play to log behaviours, such as discovering how long a player spends on each task, which tasks are repeated, and where players get bored and drop off (i.e. only 85% of people make it past the tutorial).

An iterative design process, where the game is evaluated and improved every few days allow Zynga to take advantage of these metrics, and try to improve player behaviour. For example, by running two competing versions of the tutorial, they can judge which one retains more players, and implement that version fully. Repeating this process over every aspect of the game helps make Farmville the addictive success it has become.

Farmville distilled

Conclusion

So, want to help your game be more like these top titles? They all have user testing in common, and have explored them in very different ways, including in house testing, and recording player metrics. It’s likely one of these models will be applicable to your company. These games are all well respected, and most companies want to replicate these success stories.

Not enough to help you convince your company that games usability and user experience is worth pursuing? In the next ‘Selling UX in games’, I’ll be looking at getting team members involved in the UX process.

Related posts:

1. Selling UX in Games – Get everyone involved
2. Games Usability Testing is not QA!
3. How to make an addictive social game

This post is in response to Jakob Nielsen’s update on Sharepoint, entitled ‘Does Sharepoint Destroy Intranet Design?’. For the last year I’ve been working closely with Sharepoint, and want to wade in to this discussion.

Are intranets all the same?

Nielsen’s update argues for Sharepoint as an effective base for an intranet. Counter to the argument that the standard Sharepoint toolset doesn’t allow much flexibility when designing, he presents four different intranets, all based on Sharepoint, as evidence.

The evidence Nielsen supplies for this conclusion, that Sharepoint still allows intranet design, seems… dubious. For example, he lists the different top navigation categories as evidence that the sites design is different. I would hesitate to define the designing of an intranet to be entirely about information architecture (the categories chosen for top level navigation), and would suggest that the ability to design a flexible intranet goes much deeper than this.

About this much deeper...

Sharepoint isn’t perfect

Having worked closely with Sharepoint for the last year, it’s obvious that the usability problems within Sharepoint are more important than its ability to define navigation categories.

For example, this is how you’d upload an image from your hard drive onto the page you are editing.

1. Click ‘edit page’. Wait for new page to load.
2. Click in the area, and click on image button.
3. New window comes up, click on ‘browse’.
4. New window comes up, Only shows 8 images at a time – verify the image you want isn’t already uploaded (through lots of slow page refreshes).
5. Decide to upload, click ‘upload’ (note that the directory you have been browsing is not the directory that it’ll upload too – instead it always uploads to the same directory. And has no tools to move the image to a new location, besides opening the directory in windows explorer to do it)
6. New window comes up, click browse, find the file, click upload.
7. Find the image in the thumbnail viewer (remember, only 8 images at a time) –
8. Click ok on every box that’s opened
9. Click on ‘check in’ to view page.

A tad unnecessary?

Similarly, small usability ‘mistakes’ seem to exist throughout Sharepoint.  For example, Sharepoint keeps old versions of the file or page you’re working on, in case you need to restore it. (note this doesn’t work on ‘web-parts’ – areas of the page which contain JavaScript or custom html). To remove these, which is a common requirement due to file size restrictions, you must:

1. Right click on a file, select ‘version history’.
2. Right click on an invidual version
3. Select  ‘delete version’
4. Accept confirmation box
5. Refresh the page
6. Go to 2

I often encounter files with hundreds of versions. This process takes hours.

So the solution to this is obvious and widely seen elsewhere (even in other areas of Sharepoint!). A row of tick boxes down the side of the list of versions, with ‘select all/none’ buttons. Then a ‘delete selected’ button. This would save hours on intranet maintenance, and seems like a massive oversight.

Conclusion

Although Nielsen’s argument that Sharepoint doesn’t prevent intranet customisation is legitimate, I feel Sharepoint has more pertinent usability issues that prevent it from being the perfect CMS to build an intranet upon.

Nielsen over-represents the amount of customisation possible – although you can change the navigation, and the pictures/layout, Microsoft impose definitive restrictions upon what can and cannot be done, often prevent usability issues from being fixed.

Instead, I suggest an open source CMS like Drupal would provide a better base for an intranet. By giving the administrator full control over the CMS’s inner workings, Drupal not only allows a wider range of customisation, and design to take place, but it also benefits from a plethora of user created modules which add almost any pre-generated functionality that can be imagined. As such, it not only allows the limited customisation that Sharepoint can, but gives the user the chance to fix usability problems through customisation, and extend the functionality in ways limited only by imagination.

Related posts:

1. iPad Usability Study
2. The user experience of Ticketmaster ruins Christmas
3. Usability Fail – Lotus Notes

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!

Related posts:

1. How to make an addictive social game
2. The usability of iPhone’s Game Center
3. Desperation & Disappointment: Social interaction in We Dare

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.

Related posts:

1. Test with real users – not your team
2. How to avoid ethical pitfalls when working with users
3. The user experience of Ticketmaster ruins Christmas

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:

1. 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…
2. …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.
3. 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).
4. 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…
5. …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.
6. 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…
7. …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>
8. …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.
9. 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:

1. Make the progression through survey design clearer, highlighting which step questions are added in
2. Also make it clear how far through the design process you are, and what steps remain
3. 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!
4. 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!
5. 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!
6. 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!

Related posts:

1. The user experience of Ticketmaster ruins Christmas
2. 7 aspects of successful usability questionnaires
3. Who are you?