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 just published version 2 of my Enactive Interface Perception essay over on Science 2.0.

It’s now called “Enactive Interface Perception and Affordances”.

Games are not just for fun anymore—and indeed “fun” is not a good enough description for the psychology of gameplay anyway. Designers are trying to “gamify” applications which traditionally were not game-like at all. And this isn’t limited to just the Serious Games movement that’s been around for several years. This is a type of design thinking that has spread from the gaming world and is now merging with the User Experience Design / Interaction Design world.

Beyond the hype and mistakes of gamification that might be going on right now, there does seem to be a design thinking emerging with the intention to increase engagement and motivation of products. I assume the business angle is that this of course can result in more users and keeping users longer.

Dustin DiTommaso, experience design director at Mad*Pow, presented “Beyond Gamification: Architecting Engagement Through Game Design” yesterday. As I already mentioned, he says how “fun” is not a good definition. His main psychological theory (at least for this presentation) is Self-Determination Theory (SDT). What follows are my notes based on DiTommaso’s presentation (hopefully I haven’t butchered it too much).

Games keep people in intrinsic motivation. There are three intrinsic motivation needs (these terms are directly from SDT):

1. Competence
2. Autonomy
3. Relatedness

Competence

This is about meaningful growth. Good games achieve a path to mastery. The user experiences increased skill over time. There are nested short-term achievable goals that lead to success of the overarching long-term goal.

The experience should be that of a challenge. If you’re familiar with Csíkszentmihályi’s Flow, it is similar (or perhaps exactly the same) as that.

As with most good interaction design, there has to be feedback. Specifically, there has to be:

1. Meaningful information
2. Recognition
3. Next steps

Action-Rules-Feedback loop

On the meaningful info item: Progress should be made visible. But, rewards have to be meaningful. Rewards for meaningless actions are not good in the long term—-users will hack (or “game”) the system if they get bored and/or detached.

Screenshot from Rockband 3 (developed by Harmonix)

DiTommaso says that you should strive for “juicy” feedback. For example, the interface for the popular video game series Rock Band is entirely “juicy” feedback. Visual Thesaurus is a good example of juicy feedback that is less flashy than Rock Band.

Failure should be allowed in a graceful manner if it provides an opportunity to learn and grow. This might sound weird for interaction design where usually you don’t want users to fail at all. Mad*Pow supposedly has done research to back this up.

Autonomy

The game belongs to the user. Choice, control, and personal preference lead to deep engagement and loyalty. There has to be the right feedback for the type of autonomy for a given user. Experience pathways can be designed “on rails” to limit or give the illusion of freedom.

To motivate sustained interest the game should provide opportunities for action. For example, on a ski mountain, there are literally multiple pathways, and multiple levels of difficulty.

Relatedness

This is about mutual dependence. We’re intrinsically motivated to seek meaningful connections with others.

A game should provide meaningful communities of interest. The users should somehow be able to value something in the game beyond the mechanics that run the system. The users should get recognition for actions that matter to them. And they should be able to inject their own goals. An example of a system that allows user-customizable goals is Mint.com.

It’s also worthwhile to think of non-human relatedness. Dialogues between user interface avatars and humans actually matter and affect motivation. They are a type of relationship. So scripts, text, tones, etc. are very important.

Conclusion

This is my rough interpretation of DiTommaso’s “Framework for Success” intended for designers and related professions.

1. Why gamify? Consider the users and the business cases.
2. Research the player profile(s) (perhaps game-oriented personas?). This research can and should inspire the design. What are the motivational drivers? Is it more about achievement or enjoyment? Is it more about structure or freedom? Is it more about control of others or connecting with others? Is it more about self interest or social interest?
3. Goals and objectives: What’s the Long Term Goal? What steps? Etc.
4. Skills and actions: consider what physical, mental, and social abilities are necessary. Can the skills be tracked and measured?
5. Look through the lenses of interest. The concept of “lenses of interest” comes from Jesse Schell. The list of lenses provided by DiTommaso are:
   • Competition types
   • Time pressure
   • Scarcity
   • Puzzles
   • Novelty
   • Levels
   • Social pressure/proof (the herd must be right)
   • Teamwork
   • Currency
   • Renewals and power-ups
6. Desired outcomes: What are the tangible and intangible rewards? What outcomes are triggered by user actions vs. schedules? How do users see and feel incremental success and failure on the way to the Ultimate Objective?
7. Play-test and polish: Platforms are never done. This isn’t really specific to gamification. I would say this is about the general shift from waterfall to iterative development methodologies (which I have used successfully in my own work). This can even extend out to the actual end users—they can be involved in the loop and even expect updates for improvement.

Image Credits:
1. Nightrob
2. Dustin DiTommaso / Mad*Pow
3. IGN
4. Mount Sunapee