End of term

I have really enjoyed the HCI course this term, learning a lot of the fundamentals about usability and user experience relating to technology. One of the most important things I learnt was to always be observant, keep looking out for examples of good and bad usability, in order that you can learn from the developments that have been previously made. I also learnt the great importance of understanding how others use technology, as there is a huge range of abilities and experience amongst the users of many of the technologies I myself use on a day-to-day basis. I hope that I can continue to learn more like this during the remainder of my time studying HCCS.

Huffdufer signup form

One thing that has always caused me much bemusement is signup forms - what do they want? Recently I found a new style of signup form:


From huffduffer.com/signup

I personally really like the natural language style - it's human without being too chummy (á la Innocent). People say it's bad because it makes people think, but that's only because it is different, no necessarily because it is flawed. Maybe this will become the new standard.

Further discussion on this can be found here.

Expert reviews

As part of our assessment, the class will be carrying out a usability evaluation of a video game for a large game production company. As we had only a very limited window in which to test the game, instead of recruiting random testers from the target audience and carrying out user testing in that way, we carried out an expert review by playing the game oursleves. In a group of 3 we had 2 hours to play the game, and have had to decide on the most effective way to approach this.

First, we were placed in a group that consisted of gamers, myself playing mostly strategy, music and platform games and the others playing more sports, racing and FPS games (classic gender distinction?). We had three main ways to divide up our playing time:

• one person could play for 90 minutes and the others watch
• will probaby come across less issues, plus only have experience of one type of person
• as longer play time can explore the game further, plus observers may notice things player doesn't
• each plays in turn while the other two watch
• the views of the second and third players will be affected by what they have already seen
• each can see the recurring issues
• each plays in turn with the other two absent
• less time spent playing the game
  
• less pressure than with others watching, each comes to the games fresh with no bias

As you can see, each of them have their own benefits and flaws, but in the end we decided to go with the third option. We felt that removing the bias of seeing the games before and being influenced by the actions and recations of others would not produce the best results.

The result of our testing session was a video of each tester playing the game, simultaneously displaying the on screen action and two points of view of the player. This will be analysed by each team member and we will then collate our results to produce a report for the compnay and a presentation to give to several people involved in the game's production. It will be interesting for me to see how the other groups in the class approached their testing and whether they reach similar conclusions.

Usability and user experience

I very much appreciated Graham’s description of the difference between “usability” and “user experience”. At this stage it’s the type of thing that should seem quite obvious but it’s often overlooked when looking at HCI as a whole. From looking around, some definitions I have found are:

The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.

- UsabilityNet, the ISO 9241-11 standard

Usability means that the people who use the product can do so quickly and easily to accomplish their own tasks.

- Janice Redish and Joseph Dumas, A Practical Guide to Usability Testing

After all, usability really just means that making sure that something works well: that a person of average (or even below average) ability and experience can use the thing - whether it's a Web site, a fighter jet, or a revolving door - for its intended purpose without getting hopelessly frustrated.

- Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think

Or as one person has put it - good usability is when someone turns to their friends and says “look at this, it’s awesome!”.

I would say that good usability is when the target user is able to complete their task to their satisfaction i.e. quickly, simply, with as little pain as possible.

Regarding user experience, Don Norman puts it very well:

In reality a product is all about the experience. It is about discovery, purchase, anticipation, opening the package, the very first usage. It is also about continued usage, learning, the need for assistance, updating, maintenance, supplies, and eventual renewal in the form of disposal or exchange.

I would say that this is more intangible that usability, which can be more easily measured. User experience is about how people feel about the product, whether they have a good time using it or not.

Both are obviously important to consider in design and development, and I feel that the distinction between the two should be more clear to those involved.

A Day in the Life

It is often a good idea, when examining the overall use of technology, to step back and take a look at how you use technology over the course of a day. So I tried to make a note of every piece of technology I interacted with over the course of an average day...

07:30 - Wake up and hit snooze on my iPhone alarm. Several times. I've always been slightly confused as to why it is easier to turn the alarm off (slide bar as when answering a call) then it is to hit snooze (touch a button in the middle of the screen - hard to do with your eyes shut so you can't feel the relative position of the button as in an unfamiliar), and therefore I frequently oversleep. I also resent that I can't change the length of snooze - it's stuck at 9 minutes, but I'd like 5 - so a way of simply changing this would be great. Maybe it's time for me to get a purpose built alarm clock? Check my emails, Twitter and BBC News before I get up.

07:45 - Turn on the grill to make toast. I've ranted endlessly about the frustrations of my oven - symbols rubbed off, no tactile way to position the knobs, well below eye level so can't tell position from standing position, and generally non-sensical. Head to the shower while grill heats up.

08:00 - Back to kitchen, turn on radio while tidy up and make toast. I love my digital radio, as it's very simple to use - only 10 buttons, but the labels make it self-explanatory without forcing you to read the user manual. Meanwhile, I know down the pile of kitchen appliance menus I have stuck to the extractor fan.

08:25 - Drive to work. My car is lovely and ancient, with very little in the way of scary computer stuff inside - it seems a lot more mechanical. My only frustration is the radio, which has seven buttons (five are radio presets) and a knob for on/off, volume, and click tuning. You can only alter the radio station by clicking this knob, which will then scan upwards until it finds the next station. Not really a problem in Brighton, but when I visit London it takes about 30 minutes to find 106.8 through the thousands of pirate stations. Forget the radio for the morning and plug my iPod into the fm transmitter device.

09:00 - Arrive at work and swipe my ID card to get into the building. Sometimes I wish I could have an RFID tag in my watch, as am always forgetting my badge - no pockets to put it in.

09:05 - Fill up my water bottle with a ridiculous water dispenser. Five buttons - one to get water, two which seems to signify cold (but look identical and don't seem to do anything when pressed), two which signify hot, one with a plus which increases the temperature of hot water, the other just selects hot water when on default cold dispensing mode. Will never understand this thing.

09:10 - Switch on work Windows computer and wait 10 or so minutes for it to boot up and log in. Open Lotus Notes (the bane of my life), a piece of terribly designed email/calendar/to-do/contact management software. My company has been talking of replacing it with Outlook for over a decade, but has not yet gotten around to it. Spend the rest of my day wrestling with XP, IE, Word etc.

12:30 - Head to lunch and pay by credit card in the canteen. I don't understand that you can visit 10 shops in one day and each will have a different card payment system - so often I have no idea where to put my card, which way up, how to effectively disguise my PIN from evil-doers watching me... Watch some news on TV in the canteen, though not totally sure what's going on as the sound is turned off and I'm not that good at sign language.

14:00 - Have a phone call with colleagues around the world. The telephone system (Cisco phones using VOIP) at work are actually quite enjoyable to use, as you feel clever when it works. We also have a Webex screen sharing program at work so we can all collaborate on a document - not quite as simple to use.
16:20 - Have to use yet another part of the company intranet which requires a 30 minutes "training course" before I can use it - and afterwards I feel even less in the know than before. I use so many systems each day, each with COMPLETELY different login systems and interfaces and conventions.

18:15 - Arrive home after drive from work. Heating is not on so have to examine the boiler to see why it's so cold. The pilot light is out, and as there is no manual and I know nothing about boilers, have to go online to try and find out what to do. For something which is quite important, they make it really (physically) inaccessible and hard to understand what to do, even setting the timer takes forever with the fiddly little dial.

18:45 - Cook some dinner on the hob and in the microwave. This is a piece of equipment which is again, simple to a fault. A dial which I only figured out what it was after two years, and three buttons for various functions. I only ever use one - to add 30 seconds to the cooking time - and just press this to get to my required time. Sure there's meant to be a better way, but that would involve reading the 2cm thick user manual.

19:35 - Check my email on my MacBook Pro. I love my Mac. Turn on the TV connected to my Mac Mini which is used as a media centre, which I can control remotely using my laptop. Could go on for hours about my love for Apple, but will save that for another time.

20:00 - Friend comes over and we play Wii games. As someone who isn't a conventional gamer, I love the child-like simplicity of the Wii, in how it's so easy to figure out yourself how it works. It probably helps that as a Mac user I'm not constantly afraid that I will break the system, as most of my less technically inclined friends seem to be.

22:15 - Have to print out some documents to send to my bank. My printer is another tool which I probably only use about 5% of the functionality of as it tries too hard to be simple. Printing and scanning are fine for the time being.

22:30 - Head to bed, checking my email and Twitter and setting the alarm clock on my iPhone before going totally lo-fi and opening my paper book - no Kindle for me just yet...

I'm sure there are lots of other pieces of technology which I forgot to include as I simply don't regard them as "technology" - such as taps, light switches, automatic doors. And of course each thing I interacted with has many different elements e.g. the car has heating, lights, ignition, doors, radio etc., that I couldn't comment on them all even if I was aware of them all. It was still very interesting to analyse what things regularly annoy me, and which I've just now started to phase out.

Stuck in the box

It's interesting to think about how we take for granted the fact that we can only use our computers through the means of peripheral devices - mice, keyboards, laptop touchpads... for most people, that's about it. But the recent release of Apple's Magic Mouse and Microsoft's Windows 7 has shown that the people behind two of the world's biggest brands are actually thinking "outside the box" with regards to how people can interact with their technology.

The Magic Mouse takes the concept of a MacBook touchpad and applies it to a separate device which would in place of a conventional mouse. It enables the user to move their fingers about the surface of the mouse to manipulate the cursor on screen. While not a huge leap forward, it's certainly innovative, even if it does look very uncomfortable to use - I'll just have to try it out for myself!

The big selling point of Windows 7 has been its multi-touch interface - that you are able to use all of your digits to manipulate what happens on your screen. They do neglect to mention that the prohibitively high price of a touch screen puts this feature out of the reach of most household users. Also, the fact that you will have to keep your arms in an unnatural position for prolonged periods of time makes it seem to me that this feature was desinged more for marketing purposes rather than actual practicality, breaking many of Jakob Nielsen's usability heuristics.

Another type of screen that most people interact with daily is their TV set. Ashley Highfield from Microsoft spoke recently about how quite soon the way we relate to our TV will change dramatically. We will no longer have to program the shows that we want to record, as the "smart" televisions of the future will be able to judge our moods and monitor our viewing habits to know what our favourite shows are. As TV programmes and films (and even radio and music) are becoming more "on-demand" with the use of facilities such as BBC's iPlayer, the way in which we use the TV overall will have to change in response to this. This will be the death of the TV remote control - and not too soon I say. I haven't used one in years, relying on my laptop or iPhone to control all my viewing through a MacMini media centre.

And hey, if royalty can't cope with changing the TV channel, what hope have the rest of us got?

So glad I have an iPod...

From Signal vs. Noise