Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Happy Holidays!
We are signing off for the holidays -- have a wonderfully festive break, and we see you in 2009!
Monday, December 15, 2008
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.
‘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.
Monday, December 1, 2008
"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
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
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