Metaphors, Not Puns

Exhibit Tips

We first began class with some advice on our exhibit project. We should be looking at museums and brief our team about the experience. As we are doing so, we can see what works, what doesn’t, and add more tricks to our repertoire. In addition, we should be looking at the space and the types of interactions that occur in that space, and become inspired by that.

It’s Metaphor Time

Basically, a metaphor is a comparison of two different things, through which understanding is communicated through something else. There are three aspects of metaphors: the tenor: the thing one is trying to express; the vehicle: the thing one is comparing it to; the ground: what unites the previous two.

This type of language is pervasive in our language, and is used often in rhetoric as a way of ornamenting language. Very often, it is hard to say stuff without using metaphor. Metaphors are central to cognition – how we perceive and how we act – and our conceptual system is metaphorical. For example, the phrase argument as war: this phrase relies upon us realizing that fighting and violence is a central aspect of arguing. If we were to use this metaphor with dance instead, our whole concept of arguing would be fundamentally different. We have to try to make these metaphors in a balanced and aesthetc way.

Today’s pony to add is on pp5, the essenece of metaphor:

is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another – Lakoff

The authors give types of examples of metaphors to help make it easier to understand and classify them:

  • structural – one term as structural unit of another – time is money
  • orientational – gives direction, space or time or both
  • ontological – reification, abstraction becomes entity, personification
  • anthropomorphic – making something have humanlike qualities
  • conduit – the use of language as a vessel of understanding

The whole point as to why we’re looking at language is help direct understanding – this is the whole point to our video prototype and what we are trying to express in our exhibits. If we continue to work in our current practice, then we will always be choosing metaphors people will be interacting with. Examples of common metaphors are the desktop, and Apple’s Time Machine.

We also took a look at Bill Verplank’s way of working in interaction design. He gives us the intelligent system metahpor, the system as tool, the system as media, the system as a form of life, the system as a vehicle, and the system as fashion. He also describes this process as 4 stages: motivation, meaning, modes, and mappings. We then took a look at how metaphors are used in popular software programs (GarageBand).

Cultivate Counter

It’s now at 12.

Empathy in Action

Learning About Empathy

In class, we became engaged in learning about an aspect of the human condition which we can use to help in our design process. This is having empathy, an “understanding for an other or the user”, as McCarthy and Wright put it. This paper emphasizes the importance of feeling like another person, which is a contrast to what previous waves of HCI have dealt with (cognitive representations of users and their mental models)

The writers of this paper (McCarthy and Wright), give twi theories as to how to gain empathy. One is identification reenactment, which allows one to get access to the emotional state (this draws on the notion of recognizing and perceiving the emotion of another person). The other is the “intersubjective accomplishment and fusion of horizons”, meaning that empathy is a “shared thing”, where the designer and the user can integrate their reactions together continually to gain a perspective of the other.

In order to get to this state, we turn to the philosopher Bakhtin, who tells us about “aesthetic seeing”, which is a “valuational response” to what we are seeing and feeling from our senses. This, of course, is subjective, which is a polar opposite to traditional scientific research (which must have a testable, strict hypothesis, repeatable results, have an algorithmic process, and allowing for the “brute data” gained from the experiment to speak for the scientist). This then led to the question: can social sciences be modelled after physical sciences? This question has been looked at for a long time, but we are referred to 2 papers for further discussion: Kline’s Two Dogmas of Empiricism and Taylor’s Interpretation in the Sciences of Man.

Getting back to Bakhtin, we can also use his theories on dialogism as a means to structure our relationships as designers to others and to users. There is meant to be a dialogue, where both designer and user can attune to each other (like radios) in order to come together and meet as peers, rather than having a “power relationship”. The attuning may help both sides not have linguistic clashes with each other (smells like ethnography here) This power may end up having designers either just look at people and get data from them and then never be seen again. This is a major faux pas. This dialogism will also help to protect those who are being studied from being exploited commercially as well. In addition, when used correctly, it’ll also help to create an open-ended discussion between designer and user (or study-ee), rather than degenerating to the power a designer may have over people or an “assumed” relationship the two should be having.

This aesthetic seeing is completely affective and emotional, and has very little to do with the cognitive aspects that HCI has been doing in its history. Historically, the use of cognitive and mental model approaches have led designers to formalize and abstract the people whom we are designing for. These measures were taken in the form of quantifiable data (productivity, behavior, etc.). When one discards the importance of dealing with felt life and emotions, a big picture about the people whom we are designing for is lost, potentially leading to a sub-par experience for these people. This is selling them short.

Lastly, for the fans of word games, here’s an analogy for you to play around with that sums up this whole post empiricism: behavior :: aesthetic seeing (dialogic, empathic, creative, empathic, hermeneutic, value-positioned, subjective): experience.

My RE5 Experience




















Over Spring Break 2 weeks ago, I bought the new game for the 360 “Resident Evil 5″. I have played nearly every game in the series, and I was quite psyched to play this game. I even bought an additional controller so that I could play this on co-op, but my review/critique will be from the single player perspective. I am also a seasoned veteran of gaming (or at least people tell me I am), so please keep that in mind while reading my thoughts on the game. I also beat RE5 in 12 hours roughly over 3 days, which also shows how enthusiastic and excited about getting to play these series. Oh, and there’ll be spoilers here, so sorry about that.

Story

RE5 puts you in the role of Chris Redfield, who has to go to Africa because there are reports of activity from Umbrella and terrorism going on there. Through the story, you end up going through the villages of Africa, oil fields, caves, and an oil tanker (of all places). At the end, you find Wesker trying to take over the world, citing the typical “destroying the world and rebuilding it to make it beautiful again” rationale. This was a very big let down for me, as it shows the lack of writing put into this game. RE4 had roughly this much worth of story, but at least it was disguised all the way up to the final battle, which this giant letdown was revealed to you in a file.

Anyways, from my perspective, the stories of the previous RE games were very MUCH better. This was probably due to the emphasis on the action, which will be described later. In addition, the pacing of the story of this game in peaks and troughs, given to you in very tiny bits at either in the beginning, or right before the end of each subchapter. The only linking glue to these events (before discovering them yourself) was that you had to stay alive since there were so many people coming after yo, and you had to kill them.

Action

The action was very intense. From the very beginning, the designers set the action to 11 (see a previous to see the reference) in the very beginning, and never let it go down. There was action almost all the time, and very little time to take a breath. There were mostly opportunities to shoot every zombie coming after you, but very few opportunities for 1-on-1 encounters to use the knife to save ammo. One had to also collaborate with the computer to get special attacks on zombies, but a lot of the time, this couldn’t happen for me (see below). Also, I had to barely survive through the whole game, as there was only just enough ammo to survive, unlike RE4, where there was TOO much, even on professional. There were also just health pickups, as opposed to having TOO much health in RE4. This amount of developed action was always present, and definitely squashed any attempt at major storytelling here, and this makes me a little sad at the series. In addition, by allowing one to keep the upgraded guns between difficulties takes away the difficulty of Hard, thus making the game super-easy.

Interactions

One of the better improvements I have found to this game than when I played the demo was the explanations of the different control schemes. Type A is the best, as it mimics the play style of RE4, which is close to the original control schemes on the PlayStation and GameCube (how they should be, for SURVIVAL). The default control scheme for RE5 mimics FPS and action games, which makes sense in the sense of where the designers want to take the series, which is away from the original roots and story of the series.

The UI for the game is much better when one has a full screen, as opposed to a split (when I played it on the demo). I get peripheral vision and depth of field, which allows me to plan my moves on how to get through the areas. Many times I had to use this in order to figure a way out of the areas, as many times there were too many zombies (and I only played it on Normal!). Essentially, my eyes only shifted from the upper-right hand corner of the screen, where the map was, to the center of the screen, where Chris was, to allow me to defend myself and find where I should be going next. They even put a colored indicator to show you where to go (it took away from discovery of the world and after beating it, one has to stop looking at the map to get all of the achievements).

The sounds of the game were very lifelike, along with visuals, and were helpful in cuing me to save Sheva (or myself). I had to abuse the primary game mechanic of saving each other to keep myself alive, especially when I ran out of health pickups (patting each other on the back is quite handy, especially when one was just shot or speared!). The satisfying sound of the gun being played when the guns were upgraded was gone, too. This is another let down.

There were interactive sequences during this game as well, but they were only stuck in when it only seemed relevant, and also when there wasn’t one for a long time. I especially hate these type of cutscenes, mainly because they are fancy means of negative enforcement and have to be done multiple times over in order to move on (e.g. Krauser fight in RE4). This was still annoying, and only added more annoyance when the designers put this mechanic in at the most pivotal of scenes. I also don’t like these, as they go against the notion of what a cutscene is (a chance to recontrol pace and let me put the controller down for a sec, for example, amongst other purposes)

Overall

Overall, while I did enjoy the action at times, there were very many negative experiences. Sheva shot me just as often as she did the zombies. In addition, she ended up kicking me down to the dirt quite often, too, as I was trying to knife the zombies to save ammo. For many of the areas, I had to learn how to get by the huge amounts of zombies by first using the checkpoints, and then learning what I should do from my earlier deaths. This was ultimately frustrating, especially on the boss battles (for the ones that weren’t extremely obvious, which were only a couple). There was only one really fun boss battle, in which I got to use the aptly named (from ATHF) “quad laser”, which beamed down a laser from the heavens.

I also was let down, like mentioned earlier, by the poor story. The use of terrorism as a main story device is quite lame, and could be done much better. And also what they did to Wesker in terms of the story was also anticlimactic, as well. The lasting impression from this game was from the interminable lengths of the levels and fights. Whenever I was done with a fight, I would constantly ask if they were done throwing zombies or bosses at me. Sometimes I had to put down the controller for a respite. But the most annoying part was the final Wesker fight. As you can see from the image above, it took me over an hour to finish him off. There was no self-destruct sequence in which I had to kill him in a couple minutes. That’s just a failboat. I would still recommend this game to others, but there is just as much wrong, in my opinion, as there is right with this game. It’s just a generic action game, not a Resident Evil game. There’s also a LOT I left out here, but please feel free to comment if you want to hear more.

And for those who want to see the quad laser from ATHF, here’s an AOL video of it:

The Other Side of Usability Testing

Experiencing it Remotely

A couple weeks ago, I qualified to be a part of a remote usability test for a site which was undergoing a redesign. The interesting factor for me was that I was not the one giving the test, and I wasn’t in the same room as the facilitator of the test. It first began with having to go to a special site and downloading a player where I could see the facilitator’s screen over the internet. Once I could see the screen, we began the test.

We first did the formalities, and then got into the meat of the study (test). I first given wireframes in black and white of what they wanted the site to look like (some of which were well designed, and others, not as much), and I was asked to perform simple tasks with the wireframes. Whenever I wanted to scroll down or go to a different page, I had to ask for the facilitator to switch the screen, as I had no control. At first, I was tempted to stay with whatever the facilitator showed me, but sometimes I wanted and needed to see what was below the fold and on other pages that I had to ask. It got easier each time to ask for this help.

Once I was done with the wireframes, I was asked to do some more tasks with wireframes marked up by web and graphic designers. Like so many times I have heard before, what was preached was true. I was only able to give superficial feedback on the “prettier” wireframes until I told myself to start looking at the interactions behind the prettiness. Only then was I able to give effective feedback for the team. This is a classic case of having a real life experience augment what is taught in the classroom.

Here are a couple of other important observations from this experience:

  1. Phone Quality Matters – not only was this done over the internet, but I was able to talk to the facilitator over the phone during the test. The room in which the facilitator was talking from had many echoes in it, making it hard for me sometimes to understand her.
  2. High Speed Internet – without this, the usability test would have taken hours instead of 45 minutes. Thanks, technology!
  3. Preparation and what actually happens – it is almost never the case that a facilitator can be truly prepared for everything a participant will want to see. Sometimes, I couldn’t see something because it didn’t pertain to the test, or it wasn’t mocked up yet.
  4. Language – the black and white mockups contained formal language, as did the facilitator. I can’t remember the language of the web designed mockups, but I am pretty sure they were more colloquial in manner.

Have a story from a usability test you would like to put up? Please do!