Rocket Surgery Made Easy

The Essence

I just finished reading Rocket Surgery Made Easy, from Steve Krug. This book is a practical book on how to start thinking about user testing and introducing it into a design process that doesn’t current perform testing (or as much as it should). I got this book to help me reflect on my current position at work and also some of the lessons learned from graduate school. It’s a book I recommend to start thinking again on getting user feedback and the pressures of designing in the “real world”.

Take-aways

There are a number of good design points to take away from this book, which I’ll quickly describe (if you get the book, you can get to the essence of these points too):
- Nothing is free from problems
- Testing and getting feedback is the only way to improve a design
- “A morning a sprint”: try to get as much feedback as possible in agile
- “Anybody is better than nobody” mentality
- Knowing who and what to test
- Always prepare your scenarios and every aspect of your test
- Get the team involved, and get action items the same day of testing
- Fix the big stuff first
- Try not to be so subtle: sometimes the best design is “in the face”
- The power of remote testing: handy when you can’t be in the same room

Critique Points…

There are a number of worthy items to take away from this book, but there’s also some points I want to mention to help draw out the nuances of this book:
- How do I test if the team has the “get it out the door” mentality?
If your organization or team has this type of mentality, they already are going to be resistant to putting their work in front of users, as it pretty much isn’t their concern any more. Trying to convince them to stay and try to improve the design means incurring more work, and possibly less profit.

- How do I get thick skin to fight against the above mentality?
There’s really not that much here in this book on this issue. There’s a couple mentions of that “your team and your stakeholders will find it interesting to watch and get involved in the process”. From what I’ve seen at my job so far, this is as far from the truth as possible. This is a cost that is seen as not justifiable, and as long as that is the mentality, there’ll have to be other “battles” to fight.

- What is the real purpose of user testing?
From my grad school experience, this is a fundamental question that we learn for the whole first year: why and what you test in your design. Do you want to test the experience, a part of the design, how people think of your design, etc. Knowing this is the essence of testing, and getting at the most fundamental question in the design process in regards to testing: what do you want to learn? I feel that only by doing design and the whole process can you end up learning how to answer this question, which makes a basis for your testing.

- What really is the role of the moderator?
From Krug’s perspective, he gives two different perspectives: a tour guide and a therapist. While these are meant to be metaphors for helping to keep people focused on their tasks and always talking, these terms imply there is a single destination to go. I think it’s a good thing during the testing if you get lead down a path that the user brings up, especially if it helps to spur new ideas for you and your team. But, like a therapist, this takes a judgment call on when to allow this.

- What really is at the foundation of user testing?
This book starts to tease out where the foundations of user testing really lie – from the deep desire to iterate on a desire and know what you want to learn. But there’s still another element that isn’t reflected on in this book, and it’s the power of human judgment (an essential double-edged sword of the design process). The ability to judge what to do, and how to do it, is a judgment call that is only refined through practice and years of experience.

- How do I advocate for testing and user feedback if I’m not “running” the show?
There’s really not that much here in this book if you’re in this situation (similar to my current position). This book is aimed more towards a person who wants to learn and has traction in their organization to advocate for testing and user feedback. The only recommendation I have is to keep trying to convince your organization that the only way to deliver better products is to stop designing for oneself and ask the people you are designing for their feedback as often as possible to avoid big fixes down the road.

Ultimately…

I’d recommend this book to you if you would like to start to get to know the essence of getting feedback from users if you have never done so before. It’s also really good at helping you see the need for testing, as it is a prime means of iterating on the design a team is working on. This book will also get your mind going, helping you to say “Why aren’t we doing this? It’s actually pretty easy and important”.

This book also gives a very good starting set and mentality for doing appropriate user testing. There are a few things, though, that it doesn’t help you with: helping your organization against the inertia of non-testing, helping to garner buy-in from the team of why you should be doing this to begin with, how to secure the means (financial, and people-related) to physically conduct the user testing, and helping to defend your results from scientific inquiry (or from skeptical members of the team). Since this is a layman’s book, it is great at getting you going – to help you get full merits of “scientific” testing, I’d recommend the book “Measuring the User Experience” by Kuniavsky. It’s bigger, but gives you more in-depth into the thinking of a designer that you’ll need to get the feedback and data you need to make your design better.

Overall, though, still a very good book, and a fun read. Because that’s important, too.

The New Type of Dance?

Even though I’m not at E3, I’ve still been keeping up through Google Reader on the latest and coolest action there. One of the things that has been getting my eyes and ears ready for some epic epicness is the new game coming out for the Connect from Harmonix. It’s called Dance Central, and I’m pretty excited (as you can already tell).

Coming from the perspective of a long-time DDR and ITG player (check out the link to DDRecall at the bottom page if you would like proof), I’m excited for the opportunity to be able to exercise to some good music, but to also get other parts of my body involved in the action. While there’s nothing wrong with playing all of the 10s, 11s, 12s, and 13s in the normal arcade setting, the play does end up getting a little boring by oneself and just playing to test one’s own skills. Being able to incorporate the other limbs (I’ve gotten to play ParaPara Paradise before and really thought that it was cool to get the arms and legs involved!) presents a great opportunity for fun, the chance to incorporate other people into the fun, and also a way for players and families to push themselves for exercise. I think exergaming is a great way to have fun, get into shape, and provide the basis for a healthier life, and I would love to help design these games, as I’ve lost 60 pounds playing DDR and ITG (in the groove if you’re unsure of this acronym). I also hope that there will be awesome DLC to continue keeping the game fresh, along with combining multiple players through XBOX Live (as I wouldn’t mind encouraging any other players out there to exercise!). Even having the ability to record one’s own routine and possibly incorporating homemade music into the mix may also bring about an opportunity to bring people together through dance, gaming, and exercise.

With the advent of another music game, I still have some reservations about how the gameplay will be like. From my experience, “easy” and “medium” are pretty good exercise routines, mapping pretty well to the music, but “hard” and “expert” really challenge the player and put much more moves/steps in the chart than what most people expect/can handle. With this in mind, I hope there is a lot of playtesting to make sure that all of the moves map well to the music and don’t place many arbitrary “things” into the mix just to make things hard. Examples of these are: making notes not match the music (see “Two Weeks”, Drums Expert, Rock Band), making the scroll rate multiples faster/slower than what the actual music is rated (see any of the Maxes, DDR), or assuming that all music placed into the game will be in 4/4 (that’s a common time signature – see any songs by Rush/Soundgarden in Rock Band to see that asymmetric time signatures don’t work so well). These are the biggest aspects of the game that I think pull the player out of the experience of having fun and exercise, forcing the player to concentrate on the game aspect of the game, rather than enjoying the music and becoming a part of the experience for the audience and other performers (granted, for the hardcore, this is what the experience they want, but as someone who can play the tough stuff, it irks me to no end). That’s the type of play I’m hoping for in this game, and you can find me at the end of this year most likely playing it. I look forward to it, and exergaming with you, the reader, if you are up for some epic music and exercise.

I would also love the opportunity to be able to playtest it, but that doesn’t seem to be likely any time in the future. In the meantime, I’ll keep exercising in the gym and in the arcade to keep my weight down and tone my body for the next costumes I am making :D .

Have a great one!

(images from joystiq and destructoid)

Wrapping Up Week 1

And so week 1 of the fall semester in IU HCI/d has come to a close. It was quite refreshing to get back to the grind of school again, and to also be able to interact with the people in my classes again. I’m taking 3 classes here: Capstone (a year-long personal project), Interaction Culture (I’ll also be blogging on the class’s blog as well), and HCI Theory. It should be a wonderful semester full of learning and growth. I’m also an Assistant Instructor for an introductory programming class in Python, and that should be interesting as well. I’ve already gotten most of the assignments done, which will be helpful when I get fully fledged into the design space of capstone.

Interaction Culture Snapshot

So what is it that we do in this class? Well, this week, although it was an opening, we first learned how to start thinking about critique and knowing how cultural and critical theory can help a designer not only grow, but be able to critique a design from a much higher-level of thinking. This will help to generate further insights about design, what the designer is designing, and how what is being design affects the system it is in. One example: we took a look at fancy (i.e. awesome) shoes, and we able to critique them. Here’s the shoe I was handed (along with a preview of what I’ll talk about next):





















Some of the thoughts I had about these shoes were: platform, 80s-style, thick shoelaces, amalgamation, combo of shiny and non shiny, entertaining, conversation starter, tread on the bottom goes onto the toes, hippy-like flowers, could see this as a DDR shoe, could be part of a set with a purse/satchel/manpurse, looks homemade, rich – the person hasa lot of money + DIY behaviors, the traditional tounge of a sneaker, some ankle supprt – the medium-high top, comfortable, yet warm, I wanna say disco, tight fit, not too many holes. Please feel free to add your two cents as well.

The goal of this exercise was to not only help open our eyes for critiquing purposes, but to also think the unthought and push this into the unknown.

HCI Theory Wrapup

During our first class with Erik, we were presented with the idea that this course will help us to find the metaphorical furniture of our brains and expose ourselves to these pieces. And by furniture, he means our own design ideas and biases. To first describe this, we did a quick exercise on how we work with other people: first, the goal is to draw a face with a friend, but each of you can only draw one line at a time. The face on the left (above) was the result of this process. The second face (right), was a result of taking the exact opposite approach in our heads to this design problem. It was pretty fun, and most of the class kept laughing while doing it. This was a fun exercise, which will help me keep liking the class, especially due to the high amount of reading involved. Images made with help of Ben

Capstone Fun

So, capstone finally started for our class, and I still have some questions as to how to approach or even get started with this giant project. So I am going to go and talk to some of my professors on this topic. It should be win – after all, the group I want to know more about and design for are cosplayers: these are the people who show their fandom by dressing up as their favorite anime and video game characters. There are few words to describe how excited I am about getting to know about this group, so I’ll save that for a future post. These will be under the category of “cosplay” here in the blog, so keep coming back for more.

Have fun! (^^)V

The Redbox Kiosk

When I went home this July, I was fortunate enough to stumble across something I could comment on for design purposes – the Redbox Kiosk. If you haven’t heard of this company, its basic premise is akin to Netflix – you can rent movies from this company for low prices. I won’t give the buisness spiel, but if you are curious, you can go on ahead and check them out at redbox.com.

The kiosk is very simple, and equipped with a touch screen interface for you to find the movies you want to rent. You swipe your credit card, and in a second, the movies you want are immediately given to you from this little slot on the side of the kiosk. Getting movies very quickly from this machine is awesome, and I give the people who designed this part of the interaction a thumbs-up.

Returning movies, on the other hand, I personally had trouble with. There’s a label on the side of the machine that says to return the video, you insert the video in the slot and the machine should take it. So I did that, and the machine wouldn’t do anything. And then I thought – “maybe I need to push it in for it to accept the video” – and then I tried that for a couple of minutes, and it didn’t work. Boy, was I not happy at all with this machine. Turns out, there’s a label on the other side of the machine that tells you to return the video by selecting return on the touch screen. And then I felt extremely embarrassed, as I was in front of a giant grocery store pushing and shoving at this machine, with people staring as I was in epic fail mode.

Hopefully other people don’t have this trouble, but I thought I would let you know of this trouble I had, and that this interaction should be simpler than having to tell the machine to be set into receive mode – I should be able to just return my movie into the slot, just like I have done before when I actually went to a real video store. Those were some good times…

Have fun in the real world!