Usability panda

Earlier today I ran a quick and dirty twitter poll to find out if people still use home pages or home tabs in their browsers. According to this totally unscientific research, people tend to:

• ignore default pages and just use the last saved session with open tabs (4 answers)
• use speed dial or frequently visited sites page (4 answers)
• use an empty page – about:blank (3 answers)
• use a defualt page – usually Goolgle or about:home (3 answers)
• personalize it e.g with a calendar (1 answer)
• don’t use it at all and rely on the bookmarks bar (1 answer)

But that’s coming from my Twitter network, so a pretty tech savvy and a rather biased sample. To get more info, I talked to sales people in the office as they are quite ‘normal’ compared to online geeks. The results, obviously, were quite different: they don’t change the default page, they use Google and if Google wasn’t there as a default they would set it up, they add there email or MSN or BBC News, etc. So nothing surprising.

There’s also a special type of people who like to use their speed dial for weird things. Fortunately, there aren’t that many of us.

To get a full picture, I also asked people from Opera and Mozilla about any stats they might have. Turns out that Opera doesn’t collect such data, which is a shame. I didn’t manage to get any Firefox data either, but I came across the results of the new tab research posted by Firefox Research Team. Not exactly what I was looking for, but still useful as they seem to be moving towards the Opera-like speed dial and it means that a) new tab behaviour will be relevant in this context, b) they will have stats.

So, what’s the conclusion then?

The reason I decided to quickly find out if there’s any research on the topic was a persona I was reviewing that had Zoo set as his home page (whaaa….?). My first reaction was: Oh dear, what a sad person. Second reaction was: Wait a minute! No one uses home pages anymore!

Well, turns out people do use them, but it’s not a “home page” anymore – now there are home tabs, speed dials and frequently visited sites panels. Suddenly Zoo on of those sounds quite likely (but still rather sad).

During the Design Practice module I spent some time researching tangible interfaces and products related to remote presence and emotion sharing. There was touch and feelings, and some of them aimed to be as touchy feely as possible. Below is a list of the most interesting, bizarre, or creepy ideas and prototypes I found.

Availabot

A little figure that represents the instant messenger status of a selected person. You plug it into your computer and you can see it moving when there’s a status change. Useful when you’ve been waiting for someone to come online, but pointless when majority of your friends are either online or invisible all the time. More info

Blossom

A flowery awareness system produced in pairs. As the paired flowers communicate via network you can give one to someone and then send “thoughts” to that person – when you touch your flower, the paired one lights up. Kinda cute, but I find fake flowers a bit sad. More info

Tree lamp

Multiperson version of blossom. Instead of flowers we have here a set of lamps connected with each other. It works basically the same, and as a bonus looks a bit more modern than fake flowers. More info [PDF]

6th Sense

This is a weird one. You mount it on a wall and place sensors around the flat of a person you want to stalk monitor stay in touch with. While active, 6th Sense monitors and responds to things like electricity, water flow, and movement. Too intrusive for my liking. More info [PDF]

Ceiling-based ambient display

This one doesn’t have an official name, but it is still good for stalkers / jealous partners. One part of the system is mounted on the ceiling and serves as a display in one flat, while the second part is installed under the floor in a different flat where it serves as a movement / position sensor. The person with the display can now track where in the flat that other person is and whether they invite others. Can’t decide what’s worse: this or the 6th sense. More info [PDF]

Aura

Another weird one, but perhaps could be seen as sweet and romantic (not). It’s a sleeping mask paired up with a music box. Yes, you’ve read that right. The sleeping mask reads sleep patterns of one person and then sends it to the music box, where they are transformed into tunes the other person can listen to. More info [PDF]

Wayve

This one is actually cool and comes from Microsoft’s research lab. It’s basically an iPad with limited functionality aimed at older adults: it allows sending pictures, hand writing, and short messages. It even has a built-in camera, so you can snap a picture of yourself and write the message on top of that. The paper is worth reading. More info

Huggy Pajama

Ah, my favourite – the creepiest of them all. It is a system that allows for long-distance communication between a parent and a child. The parent has a toy, and the child has a pajama. The pajama reacts to hugs, squeezes and “stroking movements” (oh dear) that are sent from the toy. I don’t think a parent-child relation is the best one for this kind of device… More info and a paper [PDF]

So, which one of those would you like to get for birthday?

Early in December I went to Brussels to eat loads of chocolate, drink even more (fruity) beer, and do touristy stuff. The latter required interactions with ticket machines – incredibly annoying creatures with rather fancy iPod-style controllers.

But before I describe the interface, I need to share my frustrations. First time in my life I was defeated by a ticket machine and it made me feel like an idiot.

Day 1
On the first day of our stay after walking for hours we decided to take the underground back to the hotel. We located a station, found a ticket machine, tried to buy a ticket… and failed. We tried a few times, found another machine, failed again. While the machines did allow to change the language to English, the instructions on the card reader were not only in French, but also abbreviated (so I’m not even sure it actually was French). As a result we had a nice, over an hour long walk through some dodgy-looking streets in a city we didn’t know. Not cool.

Day 2
On the next day we decided to give it another try. There were no ticket offices on any station we found, so there was no choice but to use a ticket machine again. The steps required to complete the task were simple: change language, select a ticket, insert a card, do something, enter the PIN… But the ‘Enter PIN’ message didn’t want to appear. There was something that looked like ‘insert card’, there was something that looked like ‘remove card’ (because the main screen said that the transaction was cancelled), and there was that weird partially abbreviated thing that made no sense. Was it ‘please wait’? Possibly. But waiting always led to a ‘remove card’-like looking message.

After a few painful minutes filled with inserting, removing, almost swearing, inserting, laughing nervously, removing, inserting, pressing the ‘Enter’ button on the keypad, groaning… the ‘Enter PIN’ appeared. I entered the PIN, got the tickets and realized that I bought wrong ones. Because the whole thing was so frustrating and there were so many cancelled transactions, I just stopped paying attention to what we were trying to buy. One day ticket instead of a 3 day ticket meant we would have to meet a ticket machine again.

Day 3
It turned out we needed to return to the ticket machine a few hours earlier than expected as it was a “one day ticket”, not a “24 hours ticket”. This time we decided to use a different ticket machine we accidentally noticed on a tram stop. The procedure looked as before: transaction cancelled, remove card, transaction cancelled, cancelled, cancelled, go away, go away, I won’t sell you anything, cancelled, cancelled, cancelled, I hate you. Not sure how I managed not to punch the damn thing. At this point a kind passer-by pointed out that I was using a wrong card and the machine didn’t accept VISA. This was the same card that worked a day earlier.

We decided to walk to the station with the machine that sold us a ticket before. As expected, it didn’t work at the first time. I decided to reproduce the steps from a previous successful purchase and after inserting, removing, groaning, inserting, removing, inserting, AAARRRGHHHH, pressing random keys… ‘Enter PIN’ appeared. I managed to please the machine much quicker this time – I learn fast. And I bought the right ticket so didn’t have to use those machines again. Yay!

And about half an hour later we found a ticket office.

But where’s the iPod?

Over here:

The iPod-style wheel works like, well, and iPod controller: turning it moves the selection on the menu up and down, and to select an option it has to be pressed. Pressed really REALLY hard, actually.

But even though it is an interesting concept, it requires more precision than, say, simple buttons with arrows or a touch-screen. It also requires more force than an iPod controller – one finger is not enough, it has to be held with more fingers and twisted. As I’m writing this with a right thumb and wrist suffering from RSI, the idea of using that wheel makes me squirm.

I’ve spent some time trying to find a case study or track any design justification behind this controller, but failed. Instead, I stumbled upon a Wikipedia article about Brussels Metro and found this gem:

“[T]he GO vending machines accept only coins and local (Proton and Bancontact) debit cards which makes the use of the MoBIB card less convenient”.

Does it mean that in all that rage I managed to trick the machine and bought a ticket with an unsupported VISA card? Twice?

When you don’t do any UX stuff at work, you need to find something for you or work on side projects – that’s what I’ve been told by my IAI mentor and that’s what I’ve been trying to do. So when I realized that IHFE was running an app competition I had no choice but accept the challenge. I didn’t expect to win and I was more interested in putting the theory into practice and learning about the app design the hard way. After all, it’s always better to make mistakes during a side project than during an actual one.

I’ve learned a few things:

• you can’t design things alone – bouncing your ideas off others helps to see things you would miss and stops idiotic ideas
• when designing for a particular platform, talk with a developer who knows it – you will know what’s feasible
• read design guidelines for that particular platform (to avoid embarrassment when talking to a developer)
• it’s not personal – if things are wrong with your app, they are wrong with your app; you’re not stupid, really, so keep sketching

…and I also won the competition (yay!). So here’s a bit about my app and how I got to the final design.

Posture analysis…?

First thing was the theme. The competition defined it as

a new mobile app that would be of value to ergonomists and human factors professionals

and if I didn’t work on my MSc project over the summer I’d probably have a hard time coming up with an idea. But I did some posture analysis and got bored while doing it. Don’t get me wrong, I find the idea amazing and love it, but if you had over a dozen of photos and had to click your way through an online posture risk calculator, you would fall asleep as well. So I decided to design a little app that would make the whole experience a little more fun.

Research

I’m more a researcher than a designer, so jumping into the design without spending too much time researching things first was a new thing and I feel bad about it. I did read a bit about posture analysis and I did some actual analysis over the summer, but I didn’t feel confident. But I didn’t have time to do proper research, so I just asked a question on the IEHF’s linkedin forum hoping that responses would be relevant. I decided to treat myself as a target audience, but wanted to make it useful for others as well.

Sketching here, sketching there

Most of my sketching was done in my head. Yes, I am aware that’s not a good thing. I put the initial idea on paper first, but most of refining was done while I was thinking about it and arguing with myself over some details.

By the time I got to updating my sketches, I had gone through 3 or 4 revisions in my head. And then I realized I didn’t know what I was doing.

While I did talk to an iPhone developer to learn what was possible and what wasn’t, I didn’t mention any UI designs before. After all, I’ve been using iPhones for a while now, of course I know how it all works. Well, wrong. Realizing I was breaking all possible guidelines wasn’t a nice thing. Realizing that a revised version was still wrong was even worse, so in the end I just sat down and read Apple’s HIG (not the whole thing though, just the part about iOS UI elements). As a result I had to change my designs, rethink some things and even change functionality to make things work. It was a painful and annoying process, but I learned a lot.

Tools

After sketching on paper I started “digitalizing” my sketches in OmniGraffle, and as a result spent half a night searching for stencils and procrastinating. And when a specific control was missing, I found myself wondering how I could change the design to use the controls I had instead of hunting for a right control. Worst possible approach.

After that I decided that stencils were too limiting and installed XCode. Installing a 10GB beast on a laptop with only 3GB of free space was challenging. I managed to do that, although I’m still not sure how. Prototyping with XCode was fun until I decided to add a ‘back’ button to a screen I was designing… I’m still using Snow Leopard for no particular reason so the latest version of XCode I could use was 3.6. And because of that I wasn’t able to simply add ‘back’ buttons in the UI builder. I needed to write some code, but I didn’t want to do that – the time was running out and besides I haven’t written a single line of code in the past 2 years. So I downloaded Balsamiq. Yes, I was desperate at this point.

But, but… What does it do?

So, the app. It would be good to finally explain what it actually does. In short: the app makes posture analysis fun and simple.

The main features include:

• a 3D model that can be manually manipulated to mirror the posture that’s being analysed
• a photo analysis – the killer feature and something I would love to have: an analyst takes a photo, draws a stick person on top of it to highlight where all the limbs are and the app automagically turns that into a 3D model that can be tweaked further
• it automatically calculates risk levels using a bunch of techniques (REBA and RULA as a default, OWAS and others could be added later)
• based on the model, the app automatically selects which technique’s results would be shown first (REBA for most of the postures, but RULA for sedentary positions).

And that’s it. Now it would be good to do some proper user research, test the prototypes, and develop the app. (Wishful thinking in progress.)

Currently I’m working on my MSc project and getting excited about all the user research I need to do. I’ve decided to briefly describe the whole project so I can post some updates later and share things I learn along the way.

The research I’m doing aims to investigate how people use touch-screen tablets in the office environment and what possible ergonomic issues could arise as a result.

So, why tablets? Why this particular topic?

Well, there are few reasons:

1. I have an iPad and I find it completely useless. I’ve started using it lately again for research purposes, but I still can’t see the point. It’s big, it’s clunky, the glassy screen can be irritating, the touch keyboard is driving me crazy… And yet others are using tablets for various reasons, more and more people are using them at work. Why? I’d like to understand that. (In the name of science I’m typing this on my iPad. I’m not enjoying it.)
2. I work for a media company and since I’m a part-time student I needed to find a topic somewhat relevant to my work to be able to justify the time off needed for research, and everyone knows publishers are crazy about tablets in general and iPads in particular. So I’d like to learn what kind of work related information people access on their tablets, where they access the information (Office vs. Home vs. Commute) and why they do it in the first place.
3. Last year I took a couple of ergonomics modules and found them both fascinating and enjoyable, and as a result I really wanted to do something ergonomics-related. So with points 1 and 2 in mind I decided to focus on ergonomic aspects of tablets, especially since offices seem to be unprepared for the new devices and from what I’ve seen so far, tablets encourage a bad posture and could potentially lead to health problems. And there are no tablet-specific health & safety regulations yet. The latest report covering the use of tablets in the office environment [PDF] was published in 2000 and is not really relevant.

Research – how and why?

I’ve recently finished interviewing people and taking photos of them using their tablets. Later I will be running and online survey based on the interview findings (taking advantage of being a part-time student here: I wouldn’t have enough time for a survey if I was doing the project over one summer). I am also going to analyse the posture on photos using REBA and focus on wrist angles while using the touch keyboard (looking at various screen orientations, typing techniques and a regular vs. a split keyboard). Sounds like fun! There will also be a more detailed health and safety regulations analysis, but it’s not as exciting (although it still IS exciting).

The only problem I’ve encountered so far is the lack of non-Apple tablets. Ambitiously, I wanted to focus on “touch-screen tablet devices” but after interviewing 11 people I have information about two tablets only: iPad and iPad2. I probably shouldn’t be surprised or disappointed, but I still am.

A colleague at work bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab today, so at least I have some keyboard measurements and photos, but no usage data. It looks like iPad, but is it really as nice? My interview participants tend to love their iPads – do owners of other tablets love their devices too? Do they use them for work? Do they use them in their offices? I don’t know and it bugs me a bit.

Oh well, hopefully my survey respondents won’t all be Apple’s fanboys. And in the meantime, if any of you use other tablets (Galaxy Tab, Motorola Xoom, Blackberry Playbook, some obscure thingy I’ve never heard of), do let me know, I may want to smile and offer you some home baked muffins.

Edit: If you use a tablet for work or know someone who does, please take my survey or forward the link.