Usability and learnability

Designing for usability vs. learnability ...

"The difference between usability and learnability is something that always sticks with me from Joel Spolsky's brilliant User Interface Design for Programmers. He makes the point that when people talk about software usability they quite are often referring to learnability, or how easy it is for a new user to learn how to use an interface. Confusing the two can be bad because learnability is not always the most important part of UI design.

Anyone that uses a command line interface knows how powerful it can be, and indeed for many tasks command lines are simply the best interface. It's rather like the difference between becoming fluent in a foreign language or gesticulating your way by. When holidaying in a country where you don't speak the native tongue, simply pointing to items in a shop or restaurant is much easier than learning the whole language - but if you live in a place for any length of time you will soon find it frustrating and much quicker to get what you want by speaking at least some of the lingo. This isn't to say that hand/mouse waving isn't still appropriate in many situations but just that learning how to communicate in the local language can make your life in Computerland run much more smoothly.

In software we would tend to regard a GUI as more usable than the command shells of power users. The GUI is easier to learn but it isn't necessarily the best tool for the job. A power user might learn keyboard shortcuts or change the file extensions of 100+ photos with a single shell command instead of clicking and renaming each individually with the mouse. Shortcuts like these are invaluable to anyone that uses a computer interface on a daily basis.

The above are common examples where there is a so called user-friendly and power user approach for the same task. However what tack do you take on designing an usable interface when the underlying process is inherently complex? The risk is you are either going to overcomplicate the interface, thus reducing the learnability, or annoy experienced users by making them jump through hoops around an overly simplistic GUI as they try to find advanced features that have been tucked away."    (Continued via The Bug-eyed Chronicles)    [Usability Resources]

The Savviness Paradox

Should we be designing for the savvy user? ...

“As users get more and more savvy on the web …”

This statement is thrown around a lot in web developer circles. And it make me cringe every time. It implies that an entire culture is capable of becoming savvier on the web simply because the web has existed for a longer period of time now than it did a year ago.

Here’s the truth. Users don’t get savvier unless the technology gets easier.

The fact is, most people don’t ever get past an intermediate level of, well, anything. It’s extremely rare that we become experts at using a particular web application, or the web in general. More and more people are able to use the web (at least somewhat) effectively now because web designers continually get better at making things work well, instead of relying on users to magically become “savvier”.

A brick-and-mortar analogy:

No one wants to have to become an expert grocery shopper. Because of this, we’re not becoming expert grocery shoppers. We have better things to do - better things to be experts on.

Instead, grocery stores are being redesigned left and right to make things easier. Signs are redesigned to be clearer. Merchandise is reorganized to make it easier to find. Store maps are redesigned to improve the flow from one type of product to the next. There’s a lot of science behind the design of a grocery store. They’re not getting more complex because we’ve become savvier grocery shoppers. They’re getting easier so that more people are encouraged to buy more and have a more enjoyable experience.

For some reason, when it comes to the web, lots of people seem to think users are getting savvier and can therefore handle more complicated interactions."    (Continued via rhjr.net)    [Usability Resources]

Thinking in the Right Terms: 7 Components for a Successful Web Site Redesign

Tips for redesigning websites ...

"Lately, we've had a flurry of clients contacting us about their latest redesign project, wanting to know what advice we can give them. We talk to them, discussing their team's needs and what is driving the redesign effort.

In many cases, we discover the team is thinking only in the short term. Of course, because they have immediate deadlines and resources to manage, they need to focus on what's happening right now. The short term, after all, is where we all live day-to-day.

We've spent the last five years studying teams involved in major redesign efforts. Some teams regularly produce innovative, user-satisfying enhancements to their sites. Other teams work hard, but their efforts result in expensive changes that, after all is said and done, don't really enhance the user's experience or help the business.

As we analyze the difference between these two types of teams, we've noticed a pattern: teams who focus on the long term are far more likely to create designs that really pay off for the organization. Short-term thinking gets the design done, but the team ends up doing it all over again months down the road. Long-term thinking deals with the inevitability of changes and turns the site in a living, breathing entity that grows with the organization's needs.

In our research, we've uncovered seven essential long-term components to reach a successful redesign project.

1. Make Sure You Have A Vision

We suggest clients look five or ten years into the future and ask the question, "What will using our site be like on that date? What experience will the user have?" Team members from the best organizations can answer this question. They have a consistent, clear idea what the user's experience will be like in the future. Having a clear vision lets the team chart a direction for their design, helping identify if any design idea is moving them closer to the vision or farther away.

It's critical the vision not focus on future technology but instead on future experience. What are the steps in today's process that makes things cumbersome or frustrating? How could the experience become more delightful?

One of our financial services clients constructed a vision where banking clients easily manage all their money and credit from a single screen, or can simply check their financial forecast from their mobile phone when, say, deciding if they can afford that new car, while simultaneously getting competitive quotes for insurances and car loans from their primary institution. While it would be impossible to do this with today's legacy infrastructure, it's possible to see something like this 10 years from now. The design team, using this vision, can then work in baby steps to getting as close to it today as the technology will allow. As the technology improves, they can get even closer."    (Continued via UIE)    [Usability Resources]

Success Stories

Discussing the book Designing Interactions ...

"Success is a difficult thing. What exactly does it mean? Rising to the top, or getting what you want? Having respect for your achievements? Whatever it means, it’s a regular expression in The Netherlands. You know, that funny place sometimes referred to as Holland, where, as they say goodbye, they wave and say, ‘Success!’ Now, I’ve seen it happen occasionally in other places, but never with the same degree of bitter humor or comical irony. Whatever it actually means, the Dutch seem to suggest, ‘Success… it’s a new thing.’

The Dutch are, historically, very good designers, seeing design as a facet of their culture. Like architecture, design is a public necessity and a purveyor of improvement (or ironic comments on improvement). So, when something becomes improved, like the design of an interface, it is a success, but it’s still only a stepping stone to the next improvement. This idea hints at the problem with success stories. They capture the moment very well, but lead to the feeling that you have reached the end of the improvement, when quite regularly it is the opposite–you have simply just stepped a little farther towards a relatively unknown goal.

Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge1 does an excellent job of revealing the people and the work behind many of the most important interactive products of our time and discussing their impact on the field of interaction design. The products with stories in this book have dead simple design approaches behind them and should give us pride as designers, knowing that the best things out there have come from a relatively painless approach. We should be honest, however. This isn’t the whole story, as most of these products come from the efforts of multiple people, from integrating the opinions of the general public, to copying other designs, and, in fact, almost always some combination of all these things.

While it’s a great read, this book might lead you to believe otherwise, slightly, as it is biased towards the perspectives and histories of a few ‘successful’ designers, and not the entire output of any given design culture, never mind the much larger international culture of interaction design. One of the central themes is summarized early on in the book saying that the core skills of design are synthesis, understanding people, and iterative prototyping. While most designers can agree that this statement is very insightful, especially coming from Stu Card, one of the computer science brains at Xerox Parc in the seventies, it doesn’t take into account simple influences like access to production lines, distribution, backing, and the aforementioned. In that light, the statement comes off like a sales pitch to gain access to things that are necessary, but only relevant when you are already part of the industrial complex."    (Continued via )    [Usability Resources]

Designing Interactions



Check-out more books at Usernomics.

Getting A Form's Structure Right

Creating a usable online application form ...

"In the modern family, where often both parents are working full-time and the children are involved in many after-school activities, people may only have a few minutes to spare on an important task during the day. And it’s the Internet that supposedly helps people achieve this. But do we, as designers and usability practitioners, always help them do it? I say, “No.”

Just the other day, a friend of mine came up to me and complained about the hassles of an online mortgage application that she went through a day before: "I go online, I find myself learning about the mortgage process. I begin to apply for it online and then I am suddenly encountering messages that are incomprehensible. It took me almost 3 hours! And I’m not even sure if I was successful at it!"

Ironically, we expect websites to help us learn. But poorly designed online financial application forms can discourage users from applying online. In fact, people may simply give up and decide to apply over the phone or at a local branch. "Yes! Traveling all the way to a branch would make things simpler," my friend added.

The usability industry is growing and moving forward day-by-day. But as usability practitioners, are we getting the basics right before moving ahead? I think not.

There are three people who determine success of an online application form: the usability practitioner, the designer, and the user (Image 1).

n this article, I will focus on the basic issues that a usability practitioner must address to create a usable online financial application form:

1. Affordance
2. Orientation
3. Chunking

Although I will concentrate on financial application forms, the principles outlined in this article could certainly be applicable outside the Financial Services industry."    (Continued via Boxes and Arrows)    [Usability Resources]

Usability Practitioners

Q&A: Jeanette Angell on Penguin's user-centred redesign

Redesigning the Penguin Group site for users ...

"Publishing brands Penguin and Dorling Kindersley, both part of the Penguin Group, recently completed a project to relaunch their websites and improve interaction and navigation for users.

The revamp was pretty far reaching - the team took a user-centred approach, with extensive usability testing and planning, and found new ways to think about marketing books via the site.

The group is also set to launch new sites to increase its engagement with customers - one is a youth-oriented site called spinebreakers.co.uk, which is employing teenagers in its development.

Here, Penguin and DK's online development manager Jeanette Angell speaks about the reasons behind the project and the techniques it used.

Can you run through the main aims of the relaunch?

The aims of relaunching dorlingkindersley.co.uk and penguin.co.uk were to improve the processes of finding, choosing and buying a book and to bring to the fore the inspirational content that we produce about our books. Additionally, we wanted to encourage more interaction between us and our readers.

The sites hadn’t had a significant redesign for a number of years, growing organically over that time.

Previously, our focus was on new publications but we wanted to make our long tail more visible. Our navigation and content, due to the organic growth, had become in need of some rationalisation.

Internally, we also wanted to establish an efficient system that could make our full catalogue easily accessible, demanding fewer resources, and enabling us to focus our time on creating inspirational tools and content for our readers.

At heart, our overall strategy was to focus on our readers’ needs and for them to be able to establish a relationship with us; our books, our authors and ultimately each other.

This required a shift in our thinking from being a company focused on ‘broadcast’ to one fully engaging with our readers."    (Continued via E-consultancy)    [Usability Resources]

Penguin Books

A Call to Arms for Interaction Designers

New standards needed for new displays and input devices ...

"If you are anything like me, you’ve at one point or another admired the hell out of the group of interaction designers who, back in the 1960s and 70s, pretty much came up with the modern set of interaction paradigms that we’ve used ever since. Guys like Larry Tesler (cut-and-paste), Doug Engelbart (selecting, point and click, windows), and Tim Mott (the desktop metaphor).

We have a similar opportunity in front of us now, to define the interaction paradigms for the next several decades (at least) in the form of defining gestural and touch interactions.

We need to not only figure out common gestures and how they could work across a variety of devices and environments, but also how to prototype and document those gestures. Now that the Wii and iPhone have introduced more physical interactions to the public at large, it’s time to step up and start making an effort to define and document a common set of movements and motions that could be used for initiating actions across a variety of platforms.

Work has been done already, of course. Robert Cravotta has done a good job with this overview in EDN magazine, and Bill Buxton has started an impressive list of new input devices and technologies. But we need to help create this shift in input devices, not just follow along behind the technology. And if we wait, well, we’ll simply find individual companies (Apple, Microsoft, Perceptive Pixel, etc. etc.) creating their own standards (as is being done now). And while this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, one can easily imagine having to remember a crazy amount of movements and gestures for common actions. (”Wait, to turn on the lights do I tap the wall, or wave a hand? Is this an iRoom or MS Rume?”) We’ll get a lot of ad hoc solutions–some of which will be great, some not so much. Standards and a pattern library would help."    (Continued via adaptive path)    [Usability Resources]

Does Web 2.0 make Copy and Content less Important?

The role of the writer in Web 2.0 ...

"Web 2.0" covers a lot of different areas, where site visitors get to contribute and/or interact on the site.

The content on some sites, like Flickr, LinkedIn and YouTube, is pretty much 100% user-generated. The site owners simply have to provide a framework and some instructions. Family sites like Kinzin use copy to sell and describe their service, but the bulk of the content is user-generated, and it is deliberately private. And, of course, forums, blogs, lists and the like have always been "Web 2.0."

(When you think about it, Web 2.0 has been with us from the beginning. The only difference now is that more and more companies are waking up to the benefits of interacting with their site visitors. And more and more tools and widgets are being created to facilitate that interaction.)

SO WHAT'S THE BIG OPPORTUNITY?
The opportunity is not simply to provide widgets that enable your site visitors to add comments and opinions or upload their own content.

The real opportunity is to engage your site visitors in a way that makes them feel part of your site community, and makes then want to come back time and time again.

When you open the doors and invite your readers to contribute, you're saying. "Hey, this can be your place too. Take part and come back often."

IF YOUR USERS GENERATE CONTENT, WHAT'S THE ROLE OF THE PROFESSIONAL WEB WRITER?
Is an online copywriter or Web writer any longer relevant for a site that generates a lot of its content through user contributions?

I think so. In fact, the job of the Web writer becomes even more challenging."    (Continued via Usability News)    [Usability Resources]

The Art of the Conceptual Prototype

Sorting out ideas with a conceptual prototype ...

"At Blink, we are sometimes hired to create a conceptual prototype for a product that is in the very early requirements stage. Usually, the product does not yet have internal funding for development and one goal of the prototype is to secure that funding. The prototype may also be shown to trusted customers to get their feedback on the concept.

Conceptual prototypes are often very interesting projects because the ideas are leading edge. But they also present some unique challenges compared to more traditional projects where we are designing for actual implementation.

The first challenge is that the idea for the system may only be a glimmer in somebody's eye. The usual questions we ask up-front in a project to help understand the purpose of the system may not yet have answers. The answers to key questions may be a flat "we don't know" or "it could be x, but it might be y."

As a result of this ambiguity, our discovery phase can turn into more of a treasure hunt, assembling and reconciling the scraps of information that are available. The resulting picture of the system is usually incomplete, with conflicts and missing pieces.

To help flesh out a vision of the system, we often put the information we do have into a mind map."    (Continued via Blink Interactive)    [Usability Resources]

Conceptual Prototype

10 Usability Testing Tips

Practical tips when doing usability testing ...

"Recently, a client asked us to put together a list of high level “dos” and “don’ts” for usability testing. It has taken us several years to get good at usability testing – so this list of tips is not meant to replace an expert facilitator, it’s simply meant to provide a bit more insight.

1. Remind the subject that you are not testing them, that you are testing the website.

2. Don’t lead. If the subject doesn’t understand a question, try to ask it differently without giving the answer away. This is particularly important when testing “labels” or the site’s navigation options.

3. Be friendly and approachable, to diffuse some of the anxiety and tension experienced by the subject, but don’t overdo it or you will end up swaying the results in the other direction. The goal is to neutralize the artificial setting.

4. If an answer to a question seems vague or if the subject seems unsure, take the opportunity to probe by asking follow up questions.

5. Ask subjects to “think outloud” when they are trying to execute a task.

6. Be patient. Silence is ok at first (for five to ten seconds), then ask the subject to “think out loud”."    (Continued via idfive's AttentionScan)    [Usability Resources]

iPhone-specific pages are a bad idea

Designing for the experience rather than the device ...

"Remember the old days when we were promised jetpacks, flying skateboards and the mobile web? Well we still haven’t got the Back to the Future gear but some would argue that devices like the iPhone do bring us closer to the internet, anywhere.

The iPhone gives you the best experience browsing the web on a mobile phone although contrarily to what some people seem to believe, that’s because it doesn’t need iPhone-specific pages to feel right. Apple did a terrific job at crafting a device that gives you the web (as it is today) in your hands. And that takes me to my main point: which is that designing pages exclusively for the iPhone is a dumb idea.
Dumb? But it’s the iPhone!

Here’s a hypothesis: Google launches their own mobile device, say, tomorrow - and it’s so beautiful you need to have it. In fact, it’s so amazing you’ll be throwing that iPhone out the window. Suddenly you get it, all those iPhone-crafted pages are suddenly useless, because they are built specifically with one device in mind.

... Design for the experience, not the device

A better idea is to design for an experience, not a specific device like the iPhone. Just like you design for desktop browsers by assessing constraints (like window size) and building an experience based on those constraints, why not do it for mobile devices in general? Truth is carefully crafted pages can actually display perfectly both on the desktop and the mobile web (iPhone or not)."    (Continued via Webreakstuff)    [Usability Resources]

iPhone

Coming to grips with the iPhone's design

Is one hand better than two?

"For years, smart-phone designers have built products around the premise that people should only have to use one hand to look up a contact, scroll through e-mail, or answer a call. Think of a business traveler rushing through an airport, trying to check voice mail while searching for the gate and recaffeinating.

But Apple, as it is wont to do, headed in the other direction with the iPhone. If you've got long, flexible fingers you can use the iPhone with one hand, but most of us have to use two to do just about anything on the iPhone's touch-screen interface, as shown in the demonstration videos produced by Apple.

The smart-phone industry is still very young, relatively speaking, so it's not like these design goals have been set in stone. But the iPhone is forcing the industry to rethink the one-handed method, if only because sacrificing that piece of design dogma has allowed Apple to make a breakthrough with the user interface on the iPhone, according to several consumer electronics design experts interviewed for this article.

"Right now, we are going through this phase where it's really open-ended," said Mark Rolston, senior vice president of creative for Frog Design. "Nobody's talking in the traditional vocabulary, they are all thinking about what we are trying to accomplish in terms of usage."

... "What has happened is that as the complexity of phones and the multidimensional capability of phones has increased, the ability to have an easy interface with them has become more challenging," said Bryce Rutter, co-founder and CEO of Metaphase Design Group.

While all designers bemoaned the lack of physical buttons, they also said Apple's touch-screen approach is a breakthrough in terms of how people interact with their phones.

You don't need a button to move the screen on an iPhone. You just move the screen, dragging your finger across it to scroll around or zoom in and out. "Touch introduces all sorts of compromises, but you can directly interact with the screen," Rolston said.

One of those compromises is the need to use two hands to properly operate an iPhone. "Some fundamental ergonomic principles come at the cost of really cool-looking design," Rutter said."    (Continued via CNET)    [Usability Resources]

Mobile Users Turned-Off by Advanced Features

Backlash against featureitis ...

"Mobile phone users aren't showing interest in advanced features such as accessing the internet or downloading and watching TV on their handset, according to new findings from Continental Research, which has been tracking the mobile market for the past 15 years. Data from their new report - which is to be released next month - show that the percentage of mobile users using advanced features has decreased in eight out of 11 activities tracked within the past 12 months.

Only the percentage of people sending photo messages and downloading games has increased.

Report author James Myring said: "For some time now mobile networks have aggressively promoted various advanced mobile services but this approach seems to be falling on deaf ears. The numbers performing these activities remains relatively low and consequently the Average Revenue Per User remains stubbornly static.

"Whilst technical issues are part of the explanation, much of the problem is that many mobile users are simply not interested. Mobile networks trying to push these advanced features in many cases are simply knocking against a locked door.

"We asked mobile users whether they agreed or disagreed with a number of statements about mobile phones. A large majority (68%) of mobile users agreed with the statement I would prefer a more basic mobile phone that was simple to use and affordable."    (Continued via Cellular News)    [Usability Resources]

12 Month Mobile Phone Activity

An Audience of One: Creating Products for Very Small Workgroups

Making the UX work for an individual user ...

"As creators of digital user experiences, we must transform complex workflows and tasks into useful applications. Experts have written much about the UX design process as it applies to broad audiences, industry-specific vertical markets, and large corporate user groups. However, as our evolving information economy continues to encourage greater and greater specialization of job roles, there is an increased need for customized applications—digital systems that only a select few people will ever use.

It’s now not only possible, but also economically feasible to produce customized digital products for smaller audiences. There are many UX practitioners—especially those within IT departments at small companies and government entities—who build applications for very small teams—even for audiences of one. And though the UX design process for the micro team or single user has many similarities to designing for larger user groups, it also has its own unique challenges. There might be a specific person or team your user interface must satisfy rather than a persona or user profile. So, no longer is your audience an abstraction, but a real person or team you must get to know and understand so well you can create a usable, elegant digital experience just for that audience of one.

Small Organizations, Big Requirements

As creators of digital user experiences, we must transform complex workflows and tasks into useful applications. Experts have written much about the UX design process as it applies to broad audiences, industry-specific vertical markets, and large corporate user groups. However, as our evolving information economy continues to encourage greater and greater specialization of job roles, there is an increased need for customized applications—digital systems that only a select few people will ever use.

It’s now not only possible, but also economically feasible to produce customized digital products for smaller audiences. There are many UX practitioners—especially those within IT departments at small companies and government entities—who build applications for very small teams—even for audiences of one. And though the UX design process for the micro team or single user has many similarities to designing for larger user groups, it also has its own unique challenges. There might be a specific person or team your user interface must satisfy rather than a persona or user profile. So, no longer is your audience an abstraction, but a real person or team you must get to know and understand so well you can create a usable, elegant digital experience just for that audience of one."    (Continued via UXmatters)    [Usability Resources]

Two-Sided Touch Screen

New UI possibilities with new display ...

"Researchers at Microsoft and Mitsubishi are developing a new touch-screen system that lets people type text, click hyperlinks, and navigate maps from both the front and back of a portable device. A semitransparent image of the fingers touching the back of the device is superimposed on the front so that users can see what they're touching.

Multitouch screens, popularized by gadgets such as PDAs and Apple's iPhone, are proving to be more versatile input devices than keypads. But the more people touch their screens, says Patrick Baudisch, a Microsoft researcher involved in the touch-screen project, the more content they cover up. "Touch has certain promise but certain problems," he says. "The smaller the touch screen gets, the bigger your fingers are in proportion ... Multitouch multiplies the promise and multiplies the problems. You can have a whole hand over your PDA screen, and that's a no go."

The current prototype, which illustrates a concept that the researchers call LucidTouch, is "hacked together" from existing products, says Daniel Wigdor, a researcher at Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab and a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. The team started with a seven-inch, commercial, single-input touch screen. To the back of the screen, they glued a touch pad capable of detecting multiple inputs. "This allowed us to have a screen on the front and a gesture pad [on the back] that could have multiple points," says Wigdor. "But what that didn't give us was the ability to see the hands." So, he says, the researchers added a boom with a Web camera to the back of the gadget.

The image from the Web camera and the touch information from the gesture pad are processed by software running on a desktop computer, to which the prototype is connected. The software subtracts the background from the image of the hands, Wigdor explains, and flips it around so that the superimposed image is in the same position as the user's hands. Additionally, pointers are added to the fingers so that a user can precisely select targets on the touch pad that might be smaller than her finger. In October, a paper describing the research will be presented at the User Interface Software and Technology symposium in Rhode Island."    (Continued via Technology Review)    [Usability Resources]

LucidTouch Display

The Question of Touchscreens

Touchscreens vs. No Touchscreens ...

"While mobile devices with touchscreens have been around for a long time, the launch of the iPhone has brought renewed focus on the debate about whether touchscreen-based user interfaces are an optimal solution for the mobile space. Of course, this isn’t an either/or debate: even the most ardent fan of touchscreens should realize that they’re wholly impractical on smaller screens, while personal preference plays a large role as well. Personally, I’m not a fan of touchscreens in most instances. I feel like they’re often poorly used as a shortcut by UI designers who see them as an excuse not to think things like menu structures through very well. But, I can still understand the attraction of a touchscreen for some people, as well as its value when implemented well.

Peter over at the S60 Browser Blog is firmly anti-touchscreen, saying they’re in most cases inferior to other input systems for computing devices.” He cites the lack of tactile feedback for text entry as the most significant disadvantage, and labels the iPhone’s attempts to overcome this as “hacks”. This is certainly an issue — another story today says that a study found the iPhone’s half as fast for text entry as devices with QWERTY keypads (though the study sounds a bit dubious). In addition to lack of tactile feedback, there are other physical limitations of touchscreen devices — such as how hard it is to use many of them with a single hand, whether because of form factor and size, or the need for a stylus.

I think the solution here for a platform provider like S60 is to support both touchscreens and non-touchscreens, but from a UI design perspective, that’s obviously difficult. It’s not impossible, though. The Sony Ericsson P900 I used a few years back did a somewhat decent job of combining a one-handed hardkey UI when its flip was closed with a touchscreen UI on a much bigger screen when the flip was open or removed; Nokia’s recent E90 Communicator, like its predecessors, has two fairly different interfaces (both S60 based)on its internal and external screens."    (Continued via MobHappy)    [Usability Resources]

Recognizing gestures: Interface design beyond point-and-click

The state of gesture interface design ...

"The most basic and simplest gesture is pointing, and it is an effective method for most people to communicate with each other, even in the presence of language barriers. However, pointing quickly fails as a way to communicate when the object or concept that a person is trying to convey is not in sight to point at. Taking gesture recognition beyond simple pointing greatly increases the type of information that two people can communicate with each other. Gesture communication is so natural and powerful that parents are increasingly using it to enable their babies to engage in direct, two-way communication with their care givers, through baby sign language, long before the babies can clearly speak (Reference 1).

The level of communication between users and their electronic devices has been largely limited to a pointing interface. To date, a few common extensions to the pointing interface exist. They include single- versus double-click or tap devices and devices that allow users to hold down a button while moving the pointing focus, such as mice, trackballs, and touchscreens. A user's ability to naturally communicate with a computing device through a gesture interface and a speech-recognition interface, such as a multitouch display or an optical-input system, is still largely an emerging capability. Consider the new and revolutionary mobile phone that relies on a touchscreen-driven user interface instead of physical buttons and uses a predictive engine that helps users with typing on the flat panel. This description could apply to Apple's iPhone, which the company launched in June, but it can also apply to the IBM Simon, which the company launched with Bell South in 1993, 14 years earlier than the iPhone. Differences exist between the two touch interfaces. For example, the newer units support multitouch gestures, such as “pinching” an image to size it and flicking the display to scroll the content. This article touches on the nature of how gesture interfaces are evolving and what they mean for future interfaces.

Much of the technology driving many of today's latest and innovative gesturelike interfaces is not exactly new: Most of these interfaces can trace their heritage in products or projects from the past few decades. According to Reference 2, multitouch panel interfaces have existed for at least 25 years, and that length of time is on par with the 30 years that elapsed between the invention of the mouse in 1965 and the mouse's reaching its tipping point as a ubiquitous pointing device, which happened with the release of Microsoft Windows 95. Improvements in the hardware for these types of interfaces enable designers to shrink and lower the cost of end systems. More important, however, these improved interfaces enable designers to leverage additional low-cost software-processing capacity to use it to better identify more contexts so they can better interpret what a user is trying to tell the system to do. In other words, most of the advances in emerging gesture interfaces will come not so much from new hardware as from more complex software algorithms that best use the strengths and compensate for the weaknesses of each type of input interface. Reference 3 provides a work-in-progress directory of sources for input technologies."    (Continued via EDN)    [Usability Resources]

Gesture Interface

August 2007 issue of JUS Usability Articles

August issue of Journal of Usability Studies has the following articles available for PDF downloads ...

* Surviving Our Success: Three Radical Recommendations
Author: Jared Spool
Download full article

Peer-reviewed Articles

* Making Usability Recommendations Useful and Usable
Authors: Rolf Molich, Robin Jeffries, Joseph Dumas
Abstract and practitioner's take away

* User Research of a Voting Machine: Preliminary Findings and Experiences
Authors: Menno de Jong, Joris van Hoof, Jordy Gosselt
Abstract and practitioner's take away

* Metaphor-Based Design of High-Throughput Screening Process Interfaces
Authors: David B. Kaber, Noa Segall, Rebecca S. Green
Abstract and practitioner's take away"    (Continued via JUS)    [Usability Resources]

Resolving Group Name Differences in a KJ Analysis

Using a KJ Analysis ...

"We’re big fans of the KJ Technique, a method that helps teams rank the important issues for a focus question, such as “What are the most important usability problems we need to fix in this version of the design?” or “Which user populations are most important to our business?”

In the method, teams brainstorm on potential answers to the focus question, group the answers, name each group, then vote on the group names that best answer the question. The method, in less than 45-minutes, allows teams to come to a democratic consensus on an answer, avoiding endless discussion for elements that turn out to be unimportant.

Our friend Cheryl recently decided to try the technique with her team and ran into a little confusion. Here’s what she wrote us:

After taking your “Making Sense of Usability Test and Field Study Data” webinar, I decided to try out the KJ Analysis with a team. I went t the UIE website and read the paper you published in May 2004. I ran a pilot with a group and ran into some problems.

I stumbled when it came to [the “Naming each group”] step and [the “Voting on the most important groups”] step in the technique. Folks had used different names for each of the groups of post-its. When I asked them to rank the groups, folks recorded their stars on their on group post-it — so a group may have had 9 stars, but it appeared as 3 stars on each of the three group post-its.

How do you resolve different names for groups? I’m a bit desperate — I need to figure things out by then end of the week. The “real” KJ process will occur early next week.

The problem Cheryl had is common for people trying this for the first time. The reason for these two steps is to work out the problems she encountered, so let me share some guidelines:

* When people are naming each group, they should be reading through the stickies and looking for a “theme”. The name will represent what they think the theme will be."    (Continued via UIE Brain Sparks)    [Usability Resources]

KJ Analysis Naming Each Group

The Application of Cognitive Psychology on Human Computer Interaction primarily in the GNOME Linux Desktop Environ

The role of cognitive psychology on user interface design ...

"The Gnome Desktop is a Graphical Environment for the Linux operating system. It is the graphical layer of the operating system that is presented to the user on the screen. The imminent introduction of a new interface in the release of Windows Vista means that Interface Design is currently being heavily promoted and scrutinised. Since 2002, the Gnome Desktop Project have started two sub-projects concerned with usability and interface design. This essay will attempt to outline areas in which developers have utilised cognitive psychology theory, areas in which it could be developed, and areas in which it has been misappropriated.

Information Architects mostly come from backgrounds related to cognitive psychology. Their focus is on understanding the user’s interactions with the computer, from mental categorisation to actually learning how to utilise computer programs. Gould and Boies (1983) propose that the user interface should be designed by psychologists, however, due to their being few people with the necessary repertoire of skills, this is unlikely. There is a lack of studies into the decision-making processes in interface design, possibly due to the fact that system development is so confidential. The reason why an “Open Source” Desktop environment was chosen, was the benefit of transparency in development, as all development information is freely available from the GNOME Community.

Interface design is a multi-faceted discipline, with many different cognitive applications. As the desktop interface is a graphical environment, visual perception becomes an important factor in the design. In a graphical environment, it is often visual cues that lead the user through the interface. However, Card et al (1984) suggest there is very little systematic understanding of the interaction between the display and the user’s ability to perform cognitive tasks.

Card, Pavel and Farrel (1984) suggest that windowing (the interface employed by Microsoft Windows ©, and also the GNOME Desktop) is more conducive to assisting human performance, as it also accesses to multiple sources of information, whilst allowing these sources to be combined. Windows are also good as reminders, as they function as “breadcrumb trails” in the identification of their content. Recently there has been a new feature added to GNOME, to enable a 3D Desktop. The main feature is that four sides of a 3D cube are used as Desktops, and the user can rotate the cube in order to work on any desktop concurrently. The evolved cognitive abilities of being able to navigate positionally and geographically are now put to use, something that was previously unexploited by a windowed interface."    (Continued via andylockran’s blog)    [Usability Resources]

The Changing Face of the User Interface

The progression of UI to present day ...

"A few days ago, after reading a TechCrunch article about Microsoft Tafiti, I played around with Tafti for a short time. It has a really cool and impressive interface. I don’t think Tafiti is something I’ll be using on a regular basis, but I think it's a good example of the direction that user interfaces will be going in the near future.

Based on my experience, hardcore techies often seem to be indifferent (at best) when it comes to the user interface. During the early to mid 90s, I remember the shift from DOS character-based applications to the graphical user interface (GUI). At the time, it seemed like the technical people preferred the character-based applications over the GUI. The techies’ argument was that Windows required too much overhead to run (it did) and that DesqView (or whatever favorite TSR utility) was a superior environment. But, users obviously embraced the richer environment of the GUI.

During that period, I remember some of the software companies seemed to make the shift to Windows/GUI very slowly. WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 were slow to change and ultimately released buggy Windows versions of their software. I think part of their failure in the marketplace was because they didn’t move quickly enough to improve their UI.

I think things are a little different now that we’re in the internet era; we have a legion of web designers with a specialized skill set that is a mixture of a good sense of aesthetics, art, usability and technology. With web applications, I don’t think we’ll see the huge shift in UI paradigms like we saw when we moved from character-based applications to the GUI, but I think we’re going to be seeing a new class (for lack of a better description) of web applications appear that are based on Adobe AIR, JavaFX, and Microsoft Silverlight. AJAX has gone a long was to making web applications more appealing to use, but the new tools for building rich internet applications are taking web UI far beyond the clunky realm of HTML, CSS and JavaScript."    (Continued via David Duey)    [Usability Resources]

Tafti

Design Is Rocket Science

A discussion and review of Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction ...

"I remember reading those Scientific American magazines when I was a kid. I liked them because the design of the magazine was funky, almost a 50’s image brought into the 80’s. It had a flair for interjecting human qualities, humor, lifestyle issues, even cosmetic thinking, in a way that no other ‘serious magazine’ really did. I, like so many other people, did not read it or even just look through it, for the amazing scientific breakthroughs that they reported, but because it was well designed. So, for me, it wasn’t a science magazine, it was good design, and that was rocket science.

“Rocket Science” is one of those expressions that conjures up a lot of thoughts, but mostly it means something is incredibly smart, basically breaching the impossible. Now, I find “The Impossible” breathtakingly exciting, the idea of something not being able to happen just somehow thrills me to bits. For example, it really makes me tick that it’s practically impossible to design a reasonably easy to use, or aesthetically interesting, computer interface. But, there are a thousand good suggestions on how to get started on such an endeavor this in this book.

Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction [1] is cunningly released at a time when acceptance of Interaction Design as a discipline is reaching a critical mass. The book precipitates a huge turn in the creation of interactive technologies toward the more research/creative or human-centric model, approaching the subject of this change from different angles and illuminating historical insights.

The concept that practical research leads the way to good design is a good thing, but Interaction Design misses an opportunity, in some ways, by highlighting so many decent designs from only a research or technology-driven perspective. I never really understood how the field of Human-Computer Interaction is scientific anyway, so I’m glad to see the subtitle, “Beyond Human-Computer Interaction,” on the book, meaning a move toward “design and creative” in the discipline from a focus on hard-nosed research. It always struck me as an art form, to design computer software, and not a viable practice for using measurements and methodologies. Call me biased, but I feel science does a lot of legwork in trying to justify itself in the design of computer interfaces. Whereas, most people understand that designing a screen interface requires a creative approach.

The book sheds light on this aspect of HCI being a creative endeavor, but stays within the realm of the research, or semi-scientific, approach. Even as a social science, the dominant belief HCI research as the most effective way to design interfaces leaves too little room for real creative design talent. This book serves as a sign of the times by reflecting on this outlook.

It’s not that research isn’t appreciated in the design world (especially the findings), but my position is that some results could be found through sheer design approaches. The majority of successful applied designs include the conceptual, aesthetic, and semantic as well as input from the research-based approaches in this book. In my mind, however, sometimes the results of the research can be talked out in a few good casual conversations with other designers about the technology, placement, and end users.

The book does highlight quite a few good approaches that I use as a practitioner, so it certainly covers the reality of doing interaction design. In fact, every possible ethno-social-human-factors method under the sun is in this book, and it would be impossible to integrate many of them, even partially, into a real world project. It’s an excellent reference book for the shelf, and I know that I’ll refer to it often, even if I can’t use every approach in my projects."    (Continued via Boxes and Arrows)    [Usability Resources]

Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction



Check-out more books at Usernomics.

Foundations of Interaction Design

Understanding the meaning of interaction design ...

"Somehow, products, services, and systems need to respond to stimuli created by human beings. Those responses, need to be meaningful, and clearly communicated and in many ways provoke a persuasive and semi-predictable response. They need to behave.

This basic definition of Interaction Design (IxD) illustrates the common threads between definitions crafted by esteemed designers Dan Saffer1 and Robert Reimann2 as well as the Interaction Design Association3.

It’s also important to note that Interaction Design is distinct from the other design disciplines. It’s not Information Architecture, Industrial Design or even User Experience Design. It also isn’t user interface design. Interaction design is not about form or even structure, but is more ephemeral– about why and when rather than about what and how.
For any design disciplines to advance, it needs to form what are known as foundations or elements. The creation of such semantics encourages:


* better communication amongst peers
* creation of a sense of aesthetic
* better education tools
* exploration


There are other reasons, but for now these seem sufficient for a discussion about foundations.
What Are Foundations?

“Foundations” first came to my attention while preparing for Masters of Industrial Design program at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. The program was built by Roweena Reed Kostellow based on her educational philosophy of foundations (as detailed in the book Elements of Design by Gail Greet Hannah).

To Kostellow there were six elements that made up the foundations of Industrial Design: line, luminance & color, space, volume, negative space, texture. Mixing and experimenting with these was at the heart of designing in the 3D form discipline. Students at Pratt explored these foundations in a year’s worth of studio classes. They would press boundaries and discuss relationships while critiquing abstract and real projects.

I’m not the only person ever to think about this issue though I propose that we think about it differently. Dan Saffer, for example, in his book, “Designing for Interactions”[5] has a great chapter on what he calls the Elements of Interaction Design: Time, Motion, Space, Appearance, Texture & Sound. Dan’s elements concentrate on what I would call the forms that carry interactions, but to me they are not the form of an interaction, except maybe time.

If there are indeed foundations of Interaction Design, they need to be abstracted from form completely and thus not have physical attributes at all."    (Continued via Boxes and Arrows)    [Usability Resources]

Using eyes and hands for Web surfing

Stanfords GUIDe project ...

"In a recent article, Computerworld reports that Stanford University computer scientists have developed a new way to interact with our computers. The EyePoint system uses both eye-tracking technology and keyboard hot keys to reduce our dependency on the mouse while surfing on Internet. The system is so intuitive to use that the lead researcher said that ’several users have reported that it often felt like the system was reading their mind.’ With this addition of keyboard interaction, eye tracking might become a standard computer interface within the next five years, at least according to the researchers.

EyePoint has been developed by the Human Computer Interface Group at Stanford University for its Gaze-enhanced User Interface Design (GUIDe) research project. Manu Kumar, a doctoral candidate in computer science, was the principal researcher for this project, but was advised by Terry Winograd, a professor of computer science. As you can see above, “to use EyePoint, the user simply looks at the target on the screen and presses a hotkey for the desired action - single click, double click, right click, mouse over, or start click-and-drag. EyePoint displays a magnified view of the region the user was looking at. The user looks at the target again in the magnified view and releases the hotkey.

The short Computerworld article gives additional explanations. “While looking at a screen, the user presses a hot key on the keyboard, magnifying the area being viewed. The user then looks at the link within the enlarged area and releases the hot key, thereby activating the link."    (Continued via ZDNet.com)    [Usability Resources]

EyePoint

But there's only so many ways to do something, right?

Designing unique Web pages ...

"We’re often victims of design piracy. Roughly once a week someone emails us with an anonymous tip that someone has ripped off our “UI look and feel” and is using it for their own site or their own app. It’s amazing what people and businesses think they can get away with.

We send the violators an email letting them know they can’t take our work, our words, our code, or our design. 98% of the time the violators respond favorably and take the design down or alter it sufficiently that it’s no longer recognizable as our design. 1% of the time it takes a few emails before they acquiesce. And 1% of the time it requires legal intervention.
A blank canvas

They usually apologize by saying they didn’t know it was wrong or that their hired design firm did it. But then sometimes they say “Come on, how many different ways are there to design a web page or a web app?” That infuriates me. The web browser is a blank canvas. A big empty box that can hold almost anything. Fill it with something original, something you can call your own.
Inspiration in time

Whenever I run into designer’s block or just need visual design inspiration I turn to the world of wrist watches. I’ve posted on this topic before, but it comes up again often so I figured I’d hit it again.
A tiny canvas with endless possibilities

A wrist watch is a tiny canvas with something to keep that canvas tied to your wrist. It’s just a couple inches round or square or triangular. It has a fixed, common purpose: Tell time. The rules of time are understood. 24 hours in a day, usually displayed as 12. Your brain can tell if it’s AM or PM."    (Continued via 37signals)    [Usability Resources]

Unique Watch Faces

The LEMtool: Integrating Emotion into the Design Process

Users evaluating their experiences ...

"Following its launch at the CHI Nederland conference in June, Monito Design and Internet, a Dutch usability specialist, is making its Layered Emotional Measurement tool, LEMtool, more widely available.

The LEMtool is based on the idea that since Web 2.0 has shifted the focus from information to experience, companies should also start looking into measuring the emotional impact of Web 2.0 experiences. The LEMtool, which was developed for use on a company's website, product or environment, will enable organisations to gain greater insight into the emotional experience of users, and incoporate the results into the design process.

According to Monito, the emotional experience is now the most important dimension of most user /computer interaction. In the past, designers focused on form and function. Later on, user experiences became an important focal point in creating user centered and usable products. Emotion now occupies that central focus. Not only is it important to provide users with great usability but it is important to create pleasurable and meaningful experiences while using a website, product or brand. By focusing only on usability it is harder to make the emotional connection which contributes to longer-lasting relationships with customers.

The LEMtool is web-based to allow users to evaluate their experiences with a website in their own setting."    (Continued via Usability News)    [Usability Resources]

MIT's 'clutter detector' could cut confusion

The effects of visual clutter has application to UI ...

"The danger of clutter--especially on a visual screen--is that it causes confusion that affects how well we perform tasks. To that end, visual clutter is a challenge for fighter pilots picking out a target, for people seeking important information in a user interface, and for web site and map designers, among others.

Now, a team of MIT scientists has identified a way to measure visual clutter. Their research, published Aug. 16 in the Journal of Vision, could lead to more user-friendly displays and maps, as well as tips for designers seeking to add an attention-grabbing element to a display.

"We lack a clear understanding of what clutter is, what features, attributes and factors are relevant, why it presents a problem and how to identify it," said Ruth Rosenholtz, principal research scientist in MIT's Department o