Posts Tagged usability
eBook User Experience (and why I know so little about it)
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, UX-Driven Company on March 30th, 2011
Catalyst Group, who published a comparative usability study of eReaders in 2009, knows a lot more about eBook user experience than I do.
Tomorrow I’ll be participating in a panel discussion for Digital Book World called Reader Experience and eBooks: What UX Experts can Teach Digital Publishers. (A free webcast!) One of the points I’ll be making is that eBooks are only a part of the digital publishing landscape, even a fairly minor one up until now. On balance, web publishing has been a far more important source of digital revenue for Wiley, and also is generally perceived as the area in which to evolve whole new product lines and revenue streams away from the print business. This seems to be changing as the eBook technologies and web technologies are converging, but still web publishing gets the lion’s share of investment in the sort of customer experience work that I do. In fact, those of us with technologically focused jobs in the publishing business are practically mandated to break apart the very concept of the book. It is an informal mantra around here that we don’t just want to put the book online, we want to create a value added service, get deeper into the customer’s workflow. It comes up on every project. We are not in the book business anymore, we are in a broader content and services business. It is the status quo way to talk about digital if you are a person of ambition in the book business.
The User Experience of Organic Chemistry – Part 2: NMR Spectroscopy
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on March 7th, 2011
Go out and grab a coffee when the NMR guy is refilling the liquid helium, unless you are willing to risk quick freezing of body parts or catching shrapnel from a surprise tank explosion. (image source: Dephologisticated)
Most of an organic chemist’s physical work appears to the naked eye as an interchangeable set of clear liquids and white powders (that is to say, if they are lucky enough in the lab not to produce brown sludge.) This is because atoms, even entire molecules, are too small to be seen through the lens of a microscope, so chemists must deduce their shape and structure indirectly. This is achieved with a variety of instrumentation and analytical techniques, most of which output data in the raw form of spectra, wavy lines that with a little experience can be used to paint a high-resolution image of the unseen. Because atoms and molecules, even gigantic ones such as a protein or enzyme, are smaller than a wavelength of light, they appear under even the most powerful electron microscopes as a nothing more than a fuzzy blob. Because it’s not part of our human perception, interpreting spectral data is a difficult challenge that chemists face every day starting when they are undergraduates. Operating the obscure equipment, and the hardware and software interfaces that this entails, is its own sort of challenge.
There are several types of spectroscopy, which is a broad concept that describes any kind of radiation of energy as it passes through a given material. Mass spectroscopy or Infrared spectroscopy is widely used in organic chemistry, but is mostly good for identifying mixtures. For instance, a winemaker might use one of these techniques to understand levels of eugenol in their chardonnay and therefore determine how long to toast their French oak barrels (eugenol is a compound from oak which gives the clove-like aroma and flavor to wine). Ultimately the Mass and IR techniques are too low in resolution to do what most organic chemists really need to do, which is to confirm if the thing you think you made in the lab is what it is supposed to be. Step in, NMR. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, the work horse tool of the organic chemist, and therefore the only one I’ll get into much detail with here. It is said that if the NMR machine is shut down for some reason, then the organic chemist goes home for the day. (So in my world I guess that makes it a bit like a Starbucks.)
Proofiness and User Research, A Book Review
Posted by Todd Toler in Reviews, User & Design Research on January 14th, 2011
Proofiness is the mathematical version of "truthiness." It lurks in business, politics, media, and yes - user research.
If Charles Seife’s Proofiness has a lasting contribution to offer those in the fields of user experience, design, or even business, it will be in the elegant branding of its own subjectivist epistemology. This, in itself, is no small victory. It involves taking a complex debate on the origin of knowledge and in a single catchy word, turning it into a meme. Picture a future where somebody whips out a clever piece of marketing research in a design or business meeting, something with lots of correlations and a confident sounding sample. Maybe there is a scientific looking visualization, like a scatterplot diagram with one of those Jackson Pollack splatters of microscopic pinpoints, something that screams data was collected here. Its presenter starts speaking with the cajoling air of someone trying to impress the truth, with a capital ‘T,’ upon their audience. And then suddenly, the attendees stand in protest and accuse their tormenter, in unison, of proofiness.
Then try to grasp what a profound departure that is from today’s climate of info digestion, where almost nothing is spit back if it smells and tastes like it was cooked up from numbers. Jakob Nielsen, the founding father of pragmatism in HCI research, has condemned number fetishism in our field periodically since he came to prominence in the early 1990s – most exasperatingly in this 2004 post, The Risk of Quantitative Studies. He writes, “…most statistical research is less credible than qualitative studies. Design research is not like medical science.” In a 2009 post, five years later, little has changed. He writes, “People still pay far more attention to questionable quantitative studies than they do to simpler qualitative studies that have much greater validity.”
Anti-pattern: Dead Zones
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Visual Design on September 10th, 2009
The Independent Film Channel's home page used to be one big "Dead Zone" before they redesigned it.
Ad placements are, by definition, dead zones. These are specific, predictable sections of a website’s screen real-estate that are subconsciously tuned out by the user as unrelated to the page’s main content and functionality. But designers unintentionally create dead zones of their own all the time. A classic and well understood example of a dead zone is “right-rail” blindness. Content and features below an ad – such as in the right-hand column of a typical two or three column layout – are tuned out as ads on the assumption that everything from an ad down is also an ad. According to Nick Gould, CEO of the design and research firm Catalyst Group, the evidence of this phenomenon goes well beyond the anecdotal. “There is no question that right-rail blindness is a phenomenon we’ve observed in both eye-tracking and usability testing. This is of course mainly due to the ingrained expectation that ads live there.” And it’s not just a matter of positioning elements in a layout. The manner in which a page element itself is designed can greatly amplify or lessen the dead zone effect, in the worse case scenario unintentionally deactivating important content areas and features from the user’s attention. Often this comes from trying so hard to make an element “pop” visually, that the reverse effect occurs. “The dead zone effect is obviously exacerbated if elements below ads are ad-like in their design,” Gould says. ”Furthermore, promotional elements that have standard ad dimensions and contain images are frequently mistaken for ads.” Read the rest of this entry »
Validity and Think-Aloud Protocols
Posted by Todd Toler in User & Design Research on August 5th, 2009
First adapted from the work of experimental psychologists – most notably, Ericsson and Simon’s landmark 1993 work Protocol Analysis, – think-aloud protocols are the de-facto standard for usability research in both the lab and field settings. If you’ve seen or given a usability test before then you know what this is, it’s when the moderator tells the respondent to use a website or other application and then says “Hey, tell me what you are thinking.” Jakob Nielsen and other HCI researchers were quick to trump the merits of this technique for uncovering usability problems with sample sizes as small as four people. Why is the technique so effective? The technique’s validity stems largely from the fact that it’s a direct measure of what’s happening in a subject’s short-term memory. Other examples of direct measures of human cognition are hard to find… in fact, the two others that are primarily used are response tests (e.g. reaction time indicators) and MRI brain scans! So to have a direct measure that is cheap and easy to administer and also provides qualitative insights into the user experience is powerful indeed. But if the interview is poorly moderated, or descends into a Q & A session between moderator and respondent, then this validity flies out the window. So let’s look at the issue more closely.
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