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.

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 .

Have a great one!

(images from joystiq and destructoid)

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 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!

Going to CHI

I went to the conference on Computer-Human Interaction in Boston, USA. The experience there was fantastic. I was able to see how not only how respected our program at IU is, but how the community at large welcomes each other to comment and critique each other’s work. I was also able to meet some wonderful people from the MIT media lab and Cornell, and was very excited to hear about their work and their PhD programs there. It helped to make the possibility of further education even more exciting and tempting. I also got to see the sights of Boston as well. Overall, it was a very exciting and expensive trip, but it was well worth the money and week off from school to go there (even if I had to wake up at 6AM every day to get to all of the festivities).

I will definitely plan on being at next year’s CHI. If you plan on being there, please write a comment here and I would be more than happy to discuss anything on design, technology, HCI, and what is currently going on.

The Capstone

For the past month here at IU, there have been some wonderful capstone presentations. A capstone is a yearlong project that every student gets to complete and then present their work in a public forum. This year, there have been projects on using technology to help the lives of the elderly, to creating new types of interactions, to using technology to help cyclists be seen by motorists. I’ll have to start this journey soon, and if you would like to see a topic, please feel free to suggest something, though I have a couple ideas of where I would like to start.

Keep it tuned here to see the latest in what is going on here!

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.

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.

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:

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!