I love your golf clubs and all, but this online club fitter app is giving me a complex. It appears that, according to your scale, I’m about the height of an average woman’s thigh. If I was 4’11″, I’d be at her ankle! What gives? Why is there even an image of a woman at all?

Sometimes, a simple form is better…

Thanks

Katie

PS: Can I have some free golf clubs?

Essentially, you click on the top panel to change what the colours represent, and you can click on a country to view more about it in the left hand bar. Perhaps the first and most interesting thing that one would want to do is change the colours of the countries so that they can get a view of all the different overarching data chunks. I would say that the first thing 90% of us would do is click on a country, as the top panel with different data points fades into the background. Certainly I barely noticed it, but it’s the portal to 8 different sets of data about the world.

Now, I clicked on a country first since that seemed like the most obvious thing. This zoomed into the country, and displayed this bar on the left hand side.

I immediately tried to play with the sliders, but they don’t slide! I’ve used data representation in this way before (lines with circles to indicate data points) and thought nothing of it (see the Personas in my portfolio). But have we come to assume that balls on lines are sliders? Without thinking, I had tried to move the little circles. How easily I see they are data points when I made them, but how easily I forget when it’s not my creation. Perhaps something to consider next time?

Now, the meat. I think it’s important that, as a user, I understand what an interface element will do. What’s going to happen when I click on a button or move a slider? Here’s where this interface really fails me.

(Click for a larger image)

There are three controls that didn’t feel connected to their outputs. To start, the control at the top controls what the colours represent, changing the meaning of the legend at the bottom. There are words at the top describing the action (“Color shows”) but they didn’t quite tie together what the colour changes meant. The second control that I didn’t quite understand was the slider at the bottom (the “Dynamic Legend”). Dragging the markers around on the bar changed the meaning of the legend colours (and the colours on the map itself). This seemed oddly coupled, and somewhat redundant. Why not just put the numbers on the slider and use the single, dynamic legend? Why have a controller for the legend that showed the same information (visually, rather than in numbers – arguably better)? Finally, there is a checkbox in the bottom right corner called “Neighbourhood View”. It changes the map view slightly, but most noticeably changes the data presented on the left hand side of the screen – oddly far away.

Anyway, neat that they were able to pull all of this information together, but I think maybe a bit of usability testing might improve this interface dramatically.

The Think Aloud method was originally developed for use in Psychology to – surprise! – learn about thought patterns. Originated in 1980 by Simon and Ericsson [1], the theory was a new way of thinking about psychology, recognizing that thought patterns were important and that behaviourism wasn’t necessarily the right path to truly understanding the human brain (ask me about behaviourism another time…). In any case, they proposed that verbal reports can be taken as valid data as long as they are reports of a certain level. Level 1 reports require the least amount of processing – information that is already stored in the brain as verbal code is simply vocalized. Level 2 reports require some processing – information stored in a different format (visual, spatial) is recoded and articulated as verbal code. Level 3 reports require generation of new material that does not already exist in the brain, such as explanations of actions. Of these three levels, only the first two can really be assumed to be valid reports of brain thought patterns thought to interfere to a limited and negligible degree.

What does this mean for usability?  Amy explained that perhaps the most distilled point that we can get from the psychological origin of our method is that we shouldn’t ask “Why?”. We should ask it afterwards if we want to really delve into the whys of our participants actions, but not during a Think Aloud task. We want the users to give us an honest and unfiltered stream of consciousness to better understand the mental models they are forming as they use our interfaces. We don’t want them to start analyzing what they’re doing, or giving us the first answer that seems plausible, or telling us what we want to hear.

There was a lot of confusion and some claims of “I ask Why, and it’s worked fine!”, but I think we should keep in mind that Think Aloud is really a method aimed at collecting a specific kind of data: mental models and thought processes. When we want to make sure that our understanding and view of the interface matches up with the user’s, we should use Think Aloud. When we want to see where a user becomes confused, or when the mental processing they have to accomplish in their head becomes overwhelming, we should use Think Aloud. However, when we want to gain an indepth understanding of how and why a user would use this interface, and how well it meets their specific process needs, we might not want to use Think Aloud – maybe consider contextual inquiry or one of the many other useful tools in a usability practitioner’s toolbox.

In either case, Amy’s talk made me think about two main lessons that often get lost in the day-to-day: 1) understanding the history and roots of a method can clarify how to really use it, and 2) pick the data you want, then the method – not vice-versa!

[1] Ericsson, K.A. and H.A. Simon, Verbal reports as data. Psychological Review, 1980. 87(3): p. 215-251.

Essentially, he believes that the manipulation of 3d data using 3d gestures is the future of the computer interface. Do I agree? I’m not sure.

Perhaps one of the more confusing aspects of this video is that it demonstrates some cool looking toy problems, but doesn’t really give me a sense for how this might be used in the real world. Certainly the real world, and much of our brains, operates in 3d. But the data and information that we most commonly manipulate isn’t really 3d. My papers and projects aren’t really in 3d. How would this system make the work I’ve been doing over the past few days (writing a paper) any easier? He used the interface to easily navigate through 3d data to pick out an image that looked interesting or exciting. This sounds great when you aren’t sure what you’re looking for, and what you’re looking for is visual. But a lot of what we do is text-based, and much of the time we know exactly what we’re looking for. A human searching for something visually is going to be much slower than a computer searching based on a search term. He says that the companies who need to wade through a lot of data would benefit from this as early adopters, but a lot of text or numerical data seems unwieldy.

On the other hand, I could see great uses in those fields where people actually do have 3d data. CAD drawings, physical design, architecture. Anything that we have forced into a 2d plane so that it could fit on a computer screen.

I think it’s an interesting idea, and Tom has wild aspirations for this technology. But ultimately, I think that assuming our world should be entirely 3d manipulatable is a bit of a jump. Perhaps much of what we do is 2d because we have been forced their by existing technology, but I’m not sold.

What made me think of this? Last night I was watching the NHL playoff game on CBC, and something was terribly amiss. For the first period the clock in the overlay was in a weird font, the borders weren’t lining up properly, and there was no power play indicator or timer! Is it sad that I can’t quite figure out if a team is on the power play without some kind of red timer at the top of my TV screen? Possibly. (Or possibly my team needs to have a more dominant power play, but that’s a different matter!) Either way, I don’t think I ever realized how much I have come to rely on that information display to help me understand and enjoy a hockey game.

So that, coupled with the terrible Reddit downtime yesterday, made me consider how reliant I am on some technologies, and how lost I’d be without them. Perhaps that’s one of the hallmarks of a good technology: no one notices how amazing it is until it stops working. Makes me wonder, does gmail go down every once in a while just to remind me how much I need it? Hmmm…

He also makes a point to talk about what is wrong with the mouse, in his mind. Specifically that to use a mouse you have to stop, find the mouse, grab the mouse, wiggle the mouse to move the cursor, find the cursor on the screen, and then move it. We still perform all of those actions now, but we are certainly far less aware of those actions (when’s the last time you noticed performing all of those steps?).

I also wonder – how seriously did people take him at that time? Did this all seem completely insane and far-fetched?

My question was: how can we, as designers, help people stay focused when they want/need to?

Some extremely interesting ideas came up in the ensuing discussion, and I wanted to highlight some of my favourite ones.

1. Big Brother(s)

I observed that people whose screens were visible to their group members didn’t spend so much time being distracted as those who had completely private screens. Is this because of the social pressure to stay on track? The group thought that a great way to mimic this would be to have our screens visible to other people in the workplace at any moment in time. It would probably be best if you could pick who would see your screen (since my boss looking at my screen might make me more stressed than anything else). I recall a study by McEwan and Greenberg (2005) in which they created a collaborative system that incorporated a video feed of the work spaces of each team member. An interesting system, but they found that people very often adjusted their viewing angles so that their screens were not visible. Would we be willing to let other people view our screens at any time?

2. Time Based Restrictions

The idea came up that we could put restrictions on the amount of time that we can spend in distraction areas (such as online, or on a certain website). I have a feeling that for those of us that are expert procrastinators, that would just drive us to distract ourselves elsewhere. But I have heard of many people that employ this system with their email accounts to help them manage the distraction that comes from the never-ending incoming stream of emails that many of us receive.
Perhaps we could also just block these distracting sites for good. I guess someone else had this idea, since there is a firefox plugin for it called LeechBlock, although you could probably just put it in a parental filter.

3. Tracking

Is distraction simply about awareness? I know from experience that sometimes a simple “wow you’ve been on there awhile…” can get me back on track. I guess we don’t always realize how long we’ve been distracting ourselves. Software that tracks time spent in different applications and on specific sites could give us some input into how long we’re spending and bring it into our awareness.

Anyone can do it

The key to PowerPoint prototyping (image from boxesandarrows.com)

PowerPoint is a product that almost all of us have on our computers. You can get started creating interactive prototypes without any fancy or expensive software. Prototyping with PowerPoint is simply a matter of creating slides for each screen your users see, and then creating links between screens to create interactivity. Clicking on links (which don’t need to be words, they can be images, and even transparent panels over other items) moves the users between screens. Voila, interactivity!

The learning curve on this isn’t very steep, since basically all you need to do is “right-click>Hyperlink” (I like this more comprehensive explanation on Boxes and Arrows).

Make it from anything

Scan your hand drawn wireframes, copy and paste your digital designs and diagrams, or just sketch using the built-in drawing tools.

Easy user testing

We used PowerPoint prototypes in a few of our SYDE design projects, and user testing on them couldn’t have been easier. Saving the files as .pps will mean that the PowerPoint can be opened on any computer, so we didn’t have to have users come to a specific lab. After testing, changes are simple, and can be easily made for iterative user centered design methods. The nice feature of “right-click>Last Viewed” means that you can easily get users back to a previous state.

You can try out one of the early prototypes that I used for school projects in their respective portfolio pages (Griot and Internal Protocol Training)

But what if the undo was the mistake itself?

That was me, 3 days ago. I’ve been working on some qualitative research analysis lately, using a tool called NVIVO. There was a lot of auto-formatting going on, and undo didn’t want to remove the auto-formatting – it wanted to remove my entire last piece of written material (not the last word or sentence either, but the WHOLE PARAGRAPH). Needless to say, I stopped using the undo function entirely when I realized I was spending more time re-typing paragraphs than actually coding my observations.

This story’s not all bad though. Today I received an email from NVIVO support! They saw my tweet, and wanted to know when undo was messing up. They also said that redo was in the pipeline as a feature request. I emailed them back with details, and a slightly scathing remark about how I would never have implemented an undo feature without a redo feature. I won, right?

Either way, I hope you never catch me putting undo into anything without a corresponding redo. If you do, tweet about it and hopefully I’ll email you back