Happy Holidays!

We are signing off for the holidays -- have a wonderfully festive break, and we see you in 2009!

Bridging the academic-industrial barrier

Recently, we have been lucky enough to collaborate on a project with Kevin Bailey and Neal Cowan from Design 1st, a product design consulting firm. During one of our project meetings, the discussion briefly turned to the potential for using varying types of vibration to indicate different kinds of alerts on a physical device.

‘Haptic’ research by Professor Karon MacLean at the University of British Columbia directly addresses this topic. Having taken Dr. MacLean’s course on physical user interface design during my graduate studies, I didn’t hesitate to step up onto the soap box to share my knowledge of Karon’s research in general and on haptic icons in particular.

Encouraged by Neal and Kevin's interest, I emailed them links to Karon’s website and publications. But links and web pages were not enough: Kevin set up a teleconference in order to learn from the expert herself. Since then, the three of them have spoken over the phone about the potential for implementing haptic feedback solutions. Come January, Design 1st’s hardware units incorporating Karon’s haptic icons concept will be operational and will hopefully convince the client of the necessity for variety in silent alerting in their product.

This chain of events was exciting for a number of reasons; the first being the potential for haptics to make interaction with technology a richer and more effective experience. I left academia for industry because much of the exciting Human-Computer Interaction research I see so often gets put aside without industrial follow-through. There is not only a lag, but a block, in bringing new UX innovations and technologies from research to development. Typically, compelling academic research is put on the shelf after publication--as the researchers move onto their next project--without any push from academia to get it out into the market. At the same time, there is no real pull from industry to capitalize on innovative results coming from academia.

However, this experience provided potential for Karon’s haptic icon research to make that leap sooner rather than later. The lesson here is that we can do our part by acting as a link between academia and industry to bring people and ideas together and make things happen.

The dialog that has been created between these three talented innovators has real potential to break the academic-industrial barrier, and this is fantastic news. Furthermore, it has provided us with inspiration to not only keep our eyes peeled for the next opportunity to bridge academic and industrial contacts, but also to continue to look for opportunities to bring research from academia into the work we do here at Macadamian.

"Who am I?": The importance of ecological validity

Usability testing is at its most effective when the people who participate in the user testing are ACTUAL users! This seems so simple that it's silly to talk about it. However, it's surprising how often this principle does not translate into real-life user testing.

For a research study to possess ecological validity, the methods, materials and setting of the study must approximate the real-life situation that is under investigation.[1]
At the far end of the spectrum, we know that asking employees to "pretend" to be customers while they complete the usability test is an ineffective (and risky) substitute for the real user. This type of quick-and-dirty usability testing can provide false results, and can involve a significant amount of time and money to be spent on a concept or an interaction design that simply doesn't work for the real user.

A less-noticeable type of user substitution happens more often, when one participant is asked to play multiple roles. This is common when there are multiple user groups and there is not enough time and money to test individuals from every single user group. So, one participant is asked to complete 2 or 3 tasks that are relevant to them personally, and then they are given tasks for other user groups. Here are some examples: "Suppose you are a manager. What would you do now?" or "You are a truck driver, and you are looking for a map. Please show me where you would find that." In the latter instance, one participant said, "Well, I was looking over here, but then I remembered that I am a truck driver. I had forgotten." Hearing these comments is evidence you are asking the user to role-play, which will leave you with unreliable data regarding user behaviour and user needs with respect to your absent user group.

In a recent round of user testing, I was able to use actual material that the user group sees on a daily basis. The research was for a stock photography site, and the user groups were designers and researchers who spend their time on stock photograph sites, looking for specific photos. These individuals receive “creative briefs” from clients which are basic descriptions of the type of photo they want, and other supplementary information (such as other photos that approximate what they want, or a tagline if the assignment is an ad). A frequent user task involves sorting through various photos from stock sites to find ones they think fit the requirements. When testing with this user group, I was able to use these “creative briefs” in the user tasks – it was a task that this group of users performs on a daily basis, so their search behaviour and their interaction with the test system is almost identical to their real life scenarios ensuring results with a high-degree of validity.

This high degree of ecological validity is mostly applicable to traditional usability testing. When conducting walkthroughs with a prototype or testing conceptual ideas, there are often no “real-life” tasks since the product does not exist yet. But the more the proposed tasks resemble “real-life tasks” for “real-life users”, the more reliable the results that fuel the creation of a more usable and useful product

[1] Brewer, M. (2000). Research Design and Issues of Validity. In Reis, H. and Judd, C. (eds) Handbook of Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Usability... South of the Border

Did you know that the American government has a site dedicated to promoting usability and user-centered design for government websites?

Here is it: http://www.usability.gov/


While it is a high-level overview of the implementation of the User-Centered Design process, it still provides a lot of helpful resources for government webmasters (and non-government ones too, as it is a site that is open to the public).

They have included a visual diagram that maps out the process: http://www.usability.gov/process.html. The diagram displays more of a waterfall methodology than an agile or iterative process, but hey -- it's a step in the right direction!

Incidentally, it falls under the purview of the Department of Health and Human Services. I suppose this simply confirms our belief that user-centered design IS good for you.

The People Have Spoken

For the third year in a row, Macadamian has won the title of "Top 10 Employers", as voted by its employees. The third annual Emloyee Choice Awards were handed out this morning, and Macadamian was amongst the ten highest ranked employers in the National Capital.

Nice work, everyone!!

Why Context is Important

I’ve read many articles on contextual advertising and behavioural marketing. It seems that the marketing folks are catching on to what we have known for years – understanding people’s behaviours and the context in which they use a service or product is much more predictive of outcomes than knowing their demographics or psychographic profile.

In the context of the aforementioned article, marketers are finding that they are much more successful with their online advertising for mini-vans when they target web users who have used the keyword in their online search. This tells the marketer that they are interested in minivans and that they are likely looking for a new vehicle now. It turns out that this is more important to know than whether the user is a male, age 25-34 with 2 kids and a house in the suburbs. While those demographic characteristics may describe the population of mini-van owners, they don’t accurately predict who will purchase mini-vans in the current time period. What behavioural marketing is doing is not only displaying ads in context (of someone looking for the product) but altering the content based on individual consumer behaviour.

Similarly, with web design, it is more important to know what users are doing on the site (frequent tasks) and why they have come to the site for that particular visit than what their demographic characteristics are. Organizations spend a lot of money on research to understand who their users are. But without knowing why those users come to the site and what they are trying to accomplish on the site at that particular moment a marketer may end up annoying a new customer with advertising for a product that they recently purchased or missing the opportunity to market to a customer who is ready to purchase.

In the same fashion, government services websites might need to know whether users are coming to the site to find information or complete a transaction (request for service) or both. If both, how will they complete their tasks – will they start to complete a form and then go search for more information on a topic before returning to complete the form? What questions might they need answered before they feel comfortable submitting a form? These are the kinds of questions and issues that arise when considering user behaviours and the context in which different behaviors occur. It is this type of contextual information that will help the site designers determine if an automatic save should be implemented to allow users to leave a partially completed form and return to it later or if a direct link to FAQs should be available from the electronic form page.

While demographics and user opinions are useful for describing the characteristics of the user population, they won’t provide effective design guidance as will observing user behaviours and the context for those behaviours.

Welcome to the UX Files!

You won’t find foreboding music or ill-fated, misunderstood characters here (okay, maybe some of us are a bit misunderstood), but this IS the place we hope you will discover the truth about your users, their user experience and maybe even something about your own product.

We, at Macadamian Usability, are true believers in our discipline and this blog seeks to convert the skeptics of user experience design. Our team will discuss, explore and illuminate (WOW we’ll try, anyway) all aspects of UX design including ethnography, usability testing, UI and interaction design, prototyping, visual design and more.

So please, go ahead and read, comment, disagree or agree… but remember… the truth is right here!

Lorraine Chapman
Manager, User Experience Team