attendance was looking good

The day was bookended by presentations from Eric Reiss, and Rory Sutherland. Both speakers were charismatic and good choices as the key speakers of the day. Reiss’s talk, on ‘Web Dogma’, introduced a high level overview to some of the key concepts of the day – advocating the idea of ‘user driven design’ at every stage of a project, and introducing his list of 10 basic rules for web communication. These rules aim to separate best practices from technology and fashion, and hence avoid the fate of the Dogme95 movement which inspired their creation. Although possibly too ‘high-level’ for a UX specific conference, Eric Reiss’s presentation was fun, full of character, and engaging, since he treated his presentation as an independent being imbued with a personality of it’s own (more on this later!). Eric Reiss’s full list of rules for web design have been widely adopted across the net, and can be seen here: Web Dogma.

Rory Sutherland’s talk ‘Of Clouds and Clocks’ was a fun ending to the day, and expanded the day’s discussions beyond the realm of just user experience. Sutherland based his talk around Karl Popper’s idea that most things are either clocks, and hence act predictably and mechanically, or clouds, which are much more complex systems and hence less easy to adjust. Popper said that the worst mistakes are made by people treating clouds like clocks (such as terrorists attempting to fix society with a bomb), and Sutherland points out that this applies to traditional interpretations of business. Instead of focusing on grand actions to change business, it is instead the accumulation of small actions, and an oblique approach to fixing a problem, that often proves successful. Sutherland’s infectious humour and personality shone through his presentation, and he provided an inspiring ‘wake up’ rally at the end of a long day! Rory Sutherland’s TED talk can be seen here

Other highlights of the day included Harry Brignull’s talk on the evil tricks designers use to control of your actions. Brignull has started to document these on his very interesting darkpatterns.org website, and used his talk to propose a code of ethics to help combat these tricks.

Graham McAllister presented some of Vertical Slice’s methods of biometrics research within games, which I’ve written about before. His talk seemed well received by the crowd, and gave an interesting example of the application of UX principles outside of websites.

Jeroen Van Goel, of Johnny Holland Magazine gave a fun presentation of the personality inherent in products, such as his washing machine, and how we as UX designers need to consider the personality of websites as we make them. By learning from the established field of branding, we can overcome the constraints set by design patterns and simple usability testing, to create ‘likeable’ products.

My own washing machine has seen unimaginable horrors...

Bunnyfoot’s Jon Dodd showed us how the teachings of advertising guru David Ogilvy still apply in the 21st century. His insights, revolutionary in the world of advertising, including using metrics, a/b testing, and talking to customers, and are all key aspects of creating successful user experiences. Dodd’s talk has inspired me to re-read Ogilvy’s classic “On Advertising”. Dodd also recommended Ogilvy’s ,“Theory and Practise of selling the Aga Cooker”.

Further talks, from James Page, Sabrina Mach, Claire Rowland and Julian Hirst, covered a diverse range of topics, from the nature of creativity, to the introduction of UCD into the methodology’s used in large businesses, to the advantages of remote user testing.

UX Brighton proved that the Brighton UX community can fill a conference venue, and put on a day of interesting and relevant talks. It was especially interesting playing ‘spot the twitterer’, as I spotted many people I’ve been twitter stalking for the first time. I’m sure after the success of 2010, the organisers will be looking to put on a UXBrighton 2011, and I’m already looking forward to the discussion of next year’s hot topics!

Related posts:

1. multi.player Conference Review – Social Interaction, Bartle and Orcs!
2. “Playing to win?” @ multi.player conference
3. UX Updates: What’s going on (Writing Workshop, Flash Games and a Conference!)

We’ll be looking at what biometric research is, how it can be applied to games research, and the problems that became apparent with this method.

What is biometric research?

Biometrics are traditionally an automated way of recognising, or recording, peoples physiological data, or characteristics. To apply this to video-games readings were taken by Vertical Slice by hooking players up  to machines which record their heart rate, brainwaves, or galvanic skin response (…how sweaty their skin is, presumably).  It’s proposed that there is some correlation between how their bodies react, and how the player is feeling – such as how a player’s heart will beat faster while fighting Gunther Hermann’s Skull Gun or scoring a tetris.

Pejman Mirza-Babaei has been investigating how this can be applied to games research. Working with Vertical Slice, he is interested in measuring the player experience – how to know when players are having fun, or becoming frustrated, and so has been performing studies to see the feasibility of measuring this with biometric data. By having players play either Haze, or Modern Warfare 2, while hooked up to this machine, maybe it’s possible to gain a greater insight into the player’s thoughts, and how they feel when playing.

And in a non obtrusive way...

What did biometric research show?

When playing the games, the player’s heart rate and GSR ratings (that sweatiness rating) were recorded along with a video of the player, and of their screen.  What was found from the biometric readings, at the simplest level, was when the player’s heart rate went up. The researcher would then conduct an interview after the gaming session, and ask why the heart rate went up at those points, for the player to justify the measurements.

We saw examples of these spikes when the player enjoyed, or was frustrated by, a task (such as using a machine gun, or getting stuck looking for a vehicle), and were given the player’s justifications for feeling like this.

The most obvious advantage of this method is that it allows a more natural environment to be created for the player. Since biometrics doesn’t require distracting the player by asking them to perform a  think-aloud, or by interrupting their game by asking questions and yet still having a degree of insight into how they are feeling, a more natural game play experience can be achieved, without stopping useful data from being gathered.

Problems with biometric research on games

However, some limitations on the application of this technology became obvious through the presentation. Biometric data (in its current form) doesn’t give any insight into why the player’s heart rate has spiked, just that it has. This problem is exacerbated by the single range of readings it can give – there is no way to distinguish between stress and happiness (or any other reasons a heart rate can spike).

such as exciting vehicles

Because of this, biometric readings have to be justified by another method, to give some understanding as to why the heart rate spikes at certain moments. Traditional UX methods, such as a post-test interview, are therefore needed in addition to biometric readings. However this reintroduces traditional UX problems. A player may not be able to accurately remember why they felt excited at a certain moment, and as pointed out by Sam Nixon, may simply justify their opinion by what they see on screen.

For example, the player may explain a heart rate spike caused by audio cues as being caused by the enemy visible on screen when the clip is shown later, missing the real reason for their excitement.

Conclusion

So biometric readings alone cannot tell us what a player is thinking. Hence they cannot (currently) be a replacement for traditional UX methods.

What biometric readings can do, is aid the application of current UX methodologies. When combined with tools such as think aloud, or interviews, they can add weight to the findings. For a think aloud, it can tell you which parts of the game particularly affected the player, and hence what comments to pay attention too. Similarly with interviews, biometric research can pinpoint the areas that the player should be asked about. When used in combination with typical UX tools, biometric research can be justified and have some understanding applied to its findings.

There is amazing potential in the application of biometric data to games. Currently, the ‘AI director’ in Left For Dead controls the game based on how the player is doing – giving less zombies to fight if the player is doing poorly, or making the game harder, and giving the player some nasty surprises, if they are doing well. Imagine if a system like this could take biometric data into account, and change the game experience based on how the player was feeling. Vertical Slice have begun to show us the potential of this technology, and I feel we’re at the start of an exciting journey.

Related posts:

1. “Playing to win?” @ multi.player conference
2. 5 predictions for Games UX in 2011
3. The 5 secrets to happy players with Agile Games Development

The UXBrighton event was presented in a new format as a series of short talks, from Harry Brignull’s tips on time stamping notes, to Danny Hope’s templates for understanding user roles. Also interesting was a talk on using google analytics, although the length of the talk meant that topic could only be skimmed, dissapointing as I’m an analytics fan. The most interesting idea presented was iCrossing’s presentation on “The iCrossing Connected Brand index: how to measure a brand’s effectiveness online”, given by Ifraz Mughal.

Expert Evaluation

As I’ve mentioned before an expert evaluation is a useful tool for getting an insight into potential usability and user experience issues on a website, or game, with limited resources. Although it can never replace running tests with real users, it can provide a quick approximation, and help highlight the biggest issues.

The ‘method’ for an expert evaluation is simple. Get an expert to look at the site, or game, and tell the client what they think. Job done.

My expert eye tells me you need smarter users

However an expert evaluation can only ever be subjective, and this is it’s biggest weakness. A client can look at your page full of recommendations, and dismiss it as the opinion of one person. There’s no easy way to see progress with changes, and a comparison with other sites can only ever be abstract.

Quantifying an Expert Evaluation

iCrossing’s solution is to quantify their expert evaluation. As part of their ‘Connected Brand Index’ idea, they rate their clients sites (and competitors), on UX-centric areas such as “usefulness”, “usability” and “desirability”.

A traditional expert evaluation would give a qualitative rating, and give examples to back this up, i.e. “Poor – little emphasis, and diffused call to actions”. Instead iCrossing will give the site a score, on a scale of -2 to 2 (2 being very good). This of course can be backed up with examples in a more in depth report.

after the first few pages, the report can just be pictures of kittens. No-one reads that far.

The advantages:

There are numerous reasons why a client would prefer a scored ‘rating’, rather than comments.

• A ‘score’ makes it easy to benchmark, and compare your own scores against competitors. By dividing the expert evaluation into separate topics, and scoring each, a finely grained comparison can be made, and communicated
• Similarly, a score makes it easy for a client to see progress. If they scored -1 before hiring you, and 1 after, your work can be justified (as long as no-one questions who is doing the scoring!)
• Because this produces a concrete score, clients will be able to handle and communicate the data. Graphs can be made, which wouldn’t be possible for subjective comments. These can be invaluable for justifying and communicating with managers and project sponsors, who do not need to see the details, just get a high-level overview.
• This expert evaluation can be encompassed as one aspect of a larger ‘score’ given to websites, or games. This is the idea behind iCrossing’s connected brands index.

Conclusions:

There is an argument this can be seen as a bit of a scam. Giving arbitrary numbers to your opinions doesn’t make them any less subjective. This method of presenting the data could be misleading if presented incorrectly, and the client should be made aware of the method behind the score system. This could become an issue when running comparative studies before and after your work, since you’d be biased towards giving the site a better score after you’ve worked on it.

The point of this method is to aid communication with the client, and give them data in a format that is useful to them. As I discussed in the review of Selling Usability, management and non-technical people would typically much rather see pretty graphs, and statistics, than a list of comments. This method helps manage client expectations, and gives them what they want.

To make the method more valid, it would be useful to perform a study to ensure the method is sound. Perhaps get a wide range of experts to independently rate a wide range of websites on this scale, and note the correlations between the scores. It’d be first step in countering complaints that this method is still inherently subjective, and help make an art into a science.

Related posts:

1. Conducting an Expert Review
2. How to present a UX Report
3. The Likert scale – Or “How I learnt to stop worrying, and ‘strongly enjoy’ the bomb”.

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.

Related posts:

1. Effective UI by the EffectiveUI team – Book Review
2. Game Usability: Advancing the Player Experience Book Review
3. Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug – Book Review

a paper mockup of the T1000

 This week in HCCS, we’ve been learning about the process making of paper mockups (mostly scissors and sticky back plastic!), and the advantages (quick, manages user’s expectations, gives the opportunity to hide in a box and pretend to be a robot).

This has been supplemented by the (rather dull) course text book by Dix ‘Human Computer Interaction’. Dix tells us about the ways to input information into a human (sight, touch, sound, smell etc. ), how it’s stored (sensory input, short and long term memory – needs more ram!), and our limitations (we can only remember around 7 chunks at a time – a factor in Tetris’s success!). When amazon can be bothered to deliver it, I’ve ordered Alan Cooper’s (The Inmates are Running the Asylum), which should be a more interesting read.

 The design complaint I contributed this week was Amazon’s log in link being “Sign in to get personalised recommendations” (with the sign in link being on the personalized recommendations text).

a design mistake?

As documented in Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think most users will ‘scan’ a page rather than read the full text, looking for buttons or links which do the task they are looking for. As someone looking to sign in, my ‘scan’ would reject this link as a) ‘Sign In’ isn’t the link and b) You’d assume the link would take you to personalised recommendations, not the sign in page. However, as we discussed in class, Amazon do a lot of A&B testing (running two versions of the page concurrently with slight differences, to see which ones get the most successful ‘goal completion’ rate). Therefore we have to imagine that this has been a conscious choice by amazon, either because more people are looking for personalized recommendations that to log in, or because it increases customer’s awareness of this feature.

 We’ve been given the task of logging our experiences with technology through a day, and considering them from a design point of view. That’s what you lucky people are in for now! (hold on tight, its ranty!)

 Waking up:

Alarm Clock – Hit snooze (big button on top, good design feature). Turned it off by turning the radio on and off. Design fail – I imagine there’s an ‘official’ way to turn the alarm off, but in ten years of use, I’ve never found it.

design success - you wont fall asleep with this alarm clock near you!

iPhone – ran out of battery last night, and I left the plug of the charger at my parents, so has to charge off USB. Plugged it into my work laptop to charge, but the USB only charges when the laptop is open (not in standby!) Design fail – annoying that I have to have the laptop open to charge my phone.

 TV – is quite old, and turns on to the analogue channels, rather than the scart input. We have cable, so it only ever uses scart. I guess it should auto detect whether theres analogue or scart data being fed in, and select which to show automatically. Design fail - It doesn’t though.

Employment fun:

Laptop – Backlights failed on the screen, so have to take it into work to get it replaced. Replacement has no battery life, so won’t survive unplugged. Design fail – Laptops too frail for my clumsy ways.

 Successfully got to my desk with the new laptop, and charged my phone with no design issues!

 IP Phone – I don’t understand it. It says I have a missed call, but no details of when/who/what. Red light is lit up on handset, I cant recall whether its always been like that. Later in the day it tells me I have a voicemail, with a flashing envelope icon. I lift up the receiver, and press the button next to the flashing icon. Nothing happens. I try again with the receiver down, the phone beeps at me. I lift up the receiver, and try other things. The button marked messages does it. It asks for a pin. I have no idea, but am logged into the phone, so it should know its me already, right? Eventually find my registration email with a voicemail pin. Successfully retrieve voicemail. Design fail – too many to count.

 Coffee machine – I’ve worked this out now, but it took a short amount of observation when I joined. Its next to a pile of cups. Do you need to put the cup in the machine before selecting the drink? If so, where? (turns out, for all of you who are worrying, that it doesn’t need any cups, it automatically gives you one) Design fail – Not clear how to load/use initially.

 Home time:

 Sky+ – I’m not particularly familiar with Sky+, so it’s a learning experience… Design fail – Everytime you return to the TV guide, it goes to the start of the list!

 Book – papercut! Ow! Design fail – paper should be replaced with some sort of foam.

 What a busy day!

My impressions of the UX Brighton event

The Remote User Research – A 360˚ View event was in the Old Music Library, which although lacking in heating and lighting, does have a lot more scary art than most venues. Free beer was generously supplied by the sponsors, which starts the night off on a good foot. The topic of the evening was performing remote usability testing, with talks given by Feralabs, Ethnolabs, Pidoco, and Flow.

The first three talks were presentations of technology the companies had developed. Ethnolabs have produced an API which collects data on specifically tagged topics from feeds such as twitter, social network sites and email correspondents, which can then be used to correlate user experiences. The example they used to demonstrate this was people’s impressions of a new digital camera. Although their API technology seemed functional, I was under whelmed by their product – although the piecemeal opinions of users aren’t useless, I think that without specific tasks to try to achieve, or interview questions being asked, it’d be hard to achieve any standardized conclusions from the data.  Also I’d question what incentives would be offered to the user’s to bother to tweet their opinions – surely without an incentive causing every user to tweet, the data retrieved will be rather biased to the polarized views (“I hate this!”).

The second talk was by pidoco, and was about their collaborative wireframing tool. The technology here did impress me, and I can see the use in immediately being able to adjust and present new wireframes to a client remotely (the system also logged voice, so longer suggestions could be reviewed later). The artistic style of the wireframes imitated pencil sketches, rather than the precise lines you’d get in omnigraffle, which is also helpful in managing client’s expectations. I know before I’ve presented wireframes that look precise, and the client has spent along time reviewing minor items like the text within it. Pidoco’s tools’ emphasis on a rough sketch aesthetic would help manage situations like this!

The last two talks were slightly linked – a presentation of a remote data logging tool by Feralabs, which gives users tasks to complete and logs their precise experience in doing this, and a report by Flow on their experiences using this tool. The tool seemed effective, logging the user’s navigation, mouse clicks, and asking them questions after, and Flow’s review was interesting, and sold the idea to me. I would defiantly consider using a logging technology like this in performing certain kinds of usability testing. In the heated Q&A session after, it was discussed at length that this should be used in conjunction, and not instead of face to face interviews, for it was agreed that remote usability studies cannot log or reproduce every element of a close personal study, you fail to see the emotions and reactions of the participant involved, and it’s harder to adapt the test to study interesting emerging behaviour variants. However, it is cheaper, and I know the business side of most organisations will like the sound of that!

Related posts:

1. Evaluating existing technologies, paper prototypes in action, Windows 7 and the disappointing user experience of my DVD player!
2. The User Experience of waiting for the bus
3. Remote Research – Book Review