Talking it Out

So after another week in capstone, I don’t have too much to report on from a standpoint of grabbing more materials, but I was able to talk at great length with many different people about what I would like to do for my capstone, which has helped me to get to move forward, even though I felt like I lost a lot of steam this past week.

Results from Talking

My peers in the HCI/d program were extremely helpful in helping me to look at different aspects and far reaching-ness of the totality of cosplay and self-expression. I was suggested to maybe look at how people dress their avatars and try to make sense of how that maps to real life clothing. Some suggested to just take a look at what people are wearing and see what aspects of their personality are found in their expression of their clothes. I was also asked to see how the DIY culture can be found in cosplay and maybe discover something in that realm. I plan also looking into exemplars like the gap app for the iphone which help one to see what they will dress like with certain clothes on.

A repeating concept that was suggested was to look into how people form their own identities through their clothing and their actions, and I’ll be definitely looking into that. I was also referred to more websites and groups online who practice modding their own clothes, and I would like to see how those actions help to create whom the person is. I’ll also take a look at spyn, and the history of quilting as well to see how the story is embedded within each of our clothes. I was also reminded that some cosplayers like to have many different costumes, and to see why and how people choose the different costumes they choose to make and wear.

BUT…

This past week I also got in touch with some of my friends who are actually cosplayers. They are extremely good people and are quite willing to talk to me about cosplaying. So, I starting talking to them about how it was to dress in costume and then go to cons, and I found out something extremely interesting: while in costume, the cosplayer feels the need to be sociable, but is quite intimidated when around certain spectators at the con. This is the start I needed, and now feel the need to start researching and designing!

Protip: talking to actual people whom you care for in your design will help you substantially.

So, a Mini Elevator Pitch

Here’s a crack at it:

Cosplayers are a group of people who like to dress up in their favorite gaming and anime characters’ costumes. One of the places they go to express their love of anime and gaming is cons (conventions). While there, they feel the need to be sociable to the spectators and other participants, but there is a reluctance to talk and reach out to other people at the con. What I would like to do for my capstone is to take a look at the process of cosplay, the con life, and to see if there is a way to help vocalize this love to others who share the love of anime and gaming.

In order to do this, I plan on researching the self, costuming, the process of cosplay, the con life, and how the con changes the “game”. In order to do this, I plan on taking an ethnomethodological approach to studying the cosplayer and the con, by utilizing ethnographic observations, contextual inquiries, participatory design, focus groups, and experience sampling. Ideally, I would like to be able to go to a con to try out my tool to help vocalize the cosplayer, but if not, I’ll at least try and get a holistic view of their world through interviews and such.

I would like to attempt to make my submission eligible for the student research competition at CHI, hoping to represent the human-centeredness and practical approaches our program has to offer.

Pictures from School

Sorry for not writing in a while – in my next post I’ll reveal why I haven’t been writing. But in the mean time, I have finally found a good way to post and share pictures here, so I’ll let you take a look at the past year in HCI at IU, and what it looks like. Have fun looking, and if you like what you see, please feel free to contact me or leave comments.

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.

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!