SynapticNulship

One of the particularly good presentations at the UPA Boston 11th Annual User Experience Conference (#UPABOS12) was called “Design Studio” by designer Adam Connor.

The main points are:

• Why brainstorming is usually implemented wrong.
• How to properly generate ideas and consensus (the “design studio”).
  • Charrettes (are used by the design studio process).

Design

Going from many concepts to one good one

As a super condensed version of the presentation, the main aspect of the design process that concerns us here is how to go from lots of concepts to the best single concept.

At the beginning of a project, or perhaps when some major failure has happened, some companies might try to throw people into a room for a “brainstorm” session. But…

Why Brainstorms Fail

Google Image Search to the rescue

Brainstorm implementations commonly fail because they:

• Lack focus.
• Progress too quickly into group think.
• Fail to generate more ideas than from a single person.

What Brainstorms Are Supposed to Do

According to Connor, we really want to draw the line between divergent thinking and convergent thinking.

Divergent: Creativity gone wild. Generate tons of concepts, even bad ones.

Convergent: Refine, reduce, choose the best ideas. Get consensus amongst a group.

And the interface between those two halves is critique. And not just any critique, but a specific definition. It is not any mere feedback.

Connor gives a teaser of his separate critique talk on his website, but unfortunately not the whole thing. I found these webpages which describe approaches to structured design critique:

• The Fundamentals of Effective Design Critique
• How to run a design critique

Charrettes

So what the hell is a charrette? It’s basically a type of collaborative problem solving workshop used to generate designs or specific parts of a design. Apparently this is also used in architecture / urban planning (maybe it originated there?).

This is a new word to me, but I have used a similar process on my own for graphic design. When I was trained in graphic design, I was taught to generate lots of thumbnail sketches and then do a few iterations of narrowing down and refinement to evolve the best design.

How it works according to Connor is summarized here.

The basic pattern is: Sketch -> Present -> Critique.

Setup:

• Who: Cross functional, include stakeholders.
• 6-20 people
• Break up into balanced teams of 4-6

Starting info (generated beforehand):

• Personas
• Scenarios
• Business goals
• Design principles
• Tools needed: timer, paper, black markers, painter’s tape

Workshop process:

1. Quickly review everything like personas, scenarios
2. Teams
3. Review logistics of activity
4. Rules of critique
5. Each group gets a scenario and persona. Note only have to do the highest priority scenarios.
6. Sketch, present , critique. Quantity over quality for sketching.

There are three rounds total. The first round is for every individual in a group to come up with ideas for that group’s scenario. In round 2, individuals focus on a single solution. Note that stealing good ideas from each other is perfectly fine. In round 3, groups collaborate to define a single solution.

Why Use Design Studio?

• Expands ability to collect good ideas
• Builds a shared sense of ownership
• Builds shared understanding of problem space
• Can speed up design timeline
• Gives non designers a chance to. Sometimes the best idea doesn’t come from a designer.
• Understand ramifications that one aspect or job role has on the others.

This post lists tools and websites I learned about today at the UPA Boston 11th Annual User Experience Conference.

Tools for Mobile Prototyping and Usability Testing

Although I’m familiar with wearable computers, especially for the military, and have developed for PDAs back in the day, I am fairly new to the current popular commercial mobile platforms like Android and iOS. So here is a blast of links taken primarily from Vijay Hanumolu’s UPA presentation “Whirlwind Tour of Mobile Usability Testing Apps & Services.”

Responsive Design

Vijay (who works at Mobiquity) mentioned Responsive Design several times, which means crafting a website/app as a single source of content that can automatically display in many types of devices/screens. The term assumes HTML with CSS3, although I suppose there could be other technologies used/tested for the same goals. Here’s a website that lets you test responsive design.

Detailed Design

• Adobe Shadow (Chrome plugin)
  Inspect and preview web workflows on iOS and Android devices.
• Blueprint for iPad
  iOS UI Design app.
• AppCooker
  iOS mockups/prototypes app that uses the actual Apple UI. It can’t port to XCode yet (i.e. converting the mockup into the beginning of the working program) but they are supposedly working on a Mac application to do that.
• Nokia Flowella
  Prototypes/mockups (apparently just for Symbian)

And if it’s useful to see a static bitmap on [virtual] devices, there are these tools:

• Liveview
  Remote screen viewing application.
• Bjango Skala
  View Photoshop files on remote iOS devices.
• Responsinator
  Web tool that shows a webpage on screen sizes of different devices.
• Adobe Device Central templates (recently discontinued)

User Testing

• TestFlight
  iOS beta testing on the fly
• Apphance
  A bunch of buzzwords all combined together. Some kind of test tool for Android and iOS.

And these ones have hardware for collecting data off of the user:

• Tobii
  Professional eye tracking.
• Looxcie Cam
  Wearable camera. Not intended for usability testing, but could be used that way as a cheaper alternative.
• Mr. Tappy
  Mobile obvservation device.

Vijay also mentioned these general purpose crowd sourcing “micro labor” services that could potentially be used by UX / usability practitioners:

• CrowdFlower
• Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

UX Metrics

Meng Yang (IBM) gave a talk about UX metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

• How to choose the right UX metrics for your product
  Using the HEART (Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, Task success) framework.
• Task Success Rate
• The Single Ease Question (SEQ)
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• System Usability Scale (SUS)
• CogTool
  UI prototyping tool that automatically evaluates the design with a predictive human performance model (a “cognitive crash dummy”).
• visual.ly
  Infographic creation tool.

Other Links

• Designing for People Who Struggle with Reading and Attention
  Slides & transcript from a talk at the conference.
• Jonathan Abbett’s blog that covered some of the talks.
• Dana E. Chisnell, et al, “New Heuristics for Understanding Older Adults as Web Users.”
  Dana gave a talk about a simplified persona model, using Attitude, Aptitude, and Ability. This paper appears to describe the predecessor model.

I felt like building something physical on Saturday. Since I was going to be at a military fetish dance party later that night, I decided to make some chevron arm bands.

The goal was to have them stay on my bare upper arms. And illuminate.

glowing chevrons

Fortunately I just happened to have materials lying around to throw this together, namely:

• yellow EL (electroluminescent wire)
• EL wire battery pack (Light ‘N Wire Productions Pocket Pack Driver)
• transparent plastic sheet (clear PVC 0.005″ x 7.6″ x 11″)
• double sided velcro-like tape (purchased a long time ago at True Value)
• flexible wire (reused from old electronic devices)
• solder
• hot glue
• electrical tape

I batch-processed the build (so both armbands got built at the same time), roughly with these steps:

1. Bend EL wire into the chevron shapes (basically two chevrons, each made of two lines of wire)
2. Measure/cut velcro tape pieces
3. Measure/cut PVC rectangles
4. Cutting wires
5. Soldering/taping the EL wire shapes to copper wire and to the battery pack connector
6. Hotglue the EL wire shapes—and the beginning of the wire going to the battery pack—to the inside of the PVC rectangles.
7. Bend to fit my arm better
8. Hotglue a second set of PVC panels to the inside of the arm band, forming a sandwich around the EL wire. This was primarily just to protect my arm in case any of the conductors became exposed for some reason.

Note these photos were taken after the event, so the PVC is a bit wrinkled.

EL wire chevron armbands

EL wire chevron armbands (turned on)

Here are some low-information iPhone photos from within the club. I’m wearing the chevrons upside-down because it made wire routing easier to the battery pack.

Me wearing my glowing chevron armbands (left arm)

Me wearing my glowing chevron armbands (right arm)

Animal behavior scientists are teaming up with engineers to devise new kinds of research tools: mechatronic animal models.

Expectation?

Or you could just call them robots.

Robosquirrel

Robosquirrel was made as part of a collaboration between UC Davis, West Chester University, and San Diego State University.

Field-ready Robosquirrel

Is that a real squirrel?

Nope! Chuck Testa.

Nope! Chuck Testa.

That was a joke…Chuck Testa was not involved with this study. But given his talents, maybe he should be involved with ethology research robots.

Now you may be thinking, wait a minute…that’s just a taxidermy on a box. How is this a robot?

Well, it does have a moving part—the tail, which is mounted on a servomotor. It also has two controllable heaters—one in the body consisting of coiled Nichrome 80 resistance wire, and a cartridge heater in the tail. The device was also outfitted with data logging and a video camera.

Thermal (infrared) image of Robosquirrel.

They prototyped Robosquirrel in a laboratory with snakes. That worked, so they converted it into a fieldable robot, primarily by making it radio controllable and by enclosing the support electronics and power source in a portable fashion.

Fielded with support equipment.

Why Use a Robot?

Robots enable animal behavior experiments that couldn’t be done before. For example, how can you isolate and test individual animal signal components and the specific responses they elicit?

Robots have been used in other studies for animal communication and mate selection.

In this study, the robot allowed for individual signals in a predator-prey interaction to be isolated and tested. So, they were able to empirically test rattlesnake reactions to:

1. squirrel tail heating
2. squirrel tail heating and flagging

Tail “flagging” is as it sounds—moving the tail from side to side. Previous studies without robots found that California ground squirrels wave their tail in order to scare aware various types of snakes. But when it’s a rattlesnake, they add tail heat. If it’s a gopher snake, which cannot sense heat, the squirrel appropriately doesn’t bother heating its tail.

The robot requirements included being able to:

1. flag its tail at various rates
2. maintain a core body temperature
3. heat its tail precisely
4. heat its tail exclusively from body heat
5. look and smell like a squirrel (enough to fool a rattlesnake)

As for that ugly box under the robot, although suspicious to us humans, didn’t phase the snakes.

The Epic Battle Between Squirrels and Snakes

To digress for a moment…what is the deal with snakes and squirrels? Apparently, 34% of all California ground squirrel newborn babies (aka “pups”) are eaten by rattlesnakes.

I would think that rodents would be quite afraid of rattlesnakes. Especially since rattlesnakes are venomous. But…

If you remember at the end of the movie Batman Begins, Gordon warns Batman about escalation. Well, the squirrels escalated. An evolutionary arms race has resulted in venom resistant squirrels. But only the adults can survive the venom, not the babies. The adult squirrels have the option to defend their families against snake attacks.

Besides being venom resistant, the squirrels have a couple tricks, such as throwing dirt at snakes and the aforementioned flagging of tails.

What Did the Scientists Find?

The rattlesnakes, as expected, slithered away faster if Robosquirrel tail-flagged with heat. The snakes stuck around longer without the tail flagging.

Time to abandonment of snake ambush site versus presentation method.

However, although the data so far jives with previous theories, they have not yet obtained enough data for a statistically significant analysis.

But there is hope: now that they have iterated the robotics and methods several times, they are better prepared to conduct a larger study.

References

Joshi, S.S.; Johnson, R.; Rundus, A.; Clark, R.W.; Barbour, M.; Owings, D.H.; “Robotic Squirrel Models,” Robotics & Automation Magazine, IEEE,Volume: 18 , Issue: 4 , Dec 2011, pp. 59 – 68. DOI 10.1109/MRA.2011.942121