This sketchy Axure widget library by Kevin Wick gets around the problem by giving your your prototypes a rough hand-drawn look.

You can see the full widget library here (You’ll need to install Scoder hand font for it to look right).

I’ve always liked this story about Betty Crocker and how General Mills took such care in designing the experience of making a cake. They’d been espousing speed and ease in the kitchen since 1931 with products like Bisquick, but this story originates from a cake mix they launched in 1952, almost 2 decades later.

To quote from Finding Betty Crocker by Susan Marks:

“At this time, the company was still refining their approach to marketing. While they sought to promote a quick and easy product that still retained a “fresh, ‘home-made’” quality, ‘the market was slow to mature’ (p. 168). The company called upon the market research of Dr. Burleigh Gardner and Dr. Ernet Dichter, both business psychologists:

‘The problem, according to psychologists, was eggs. Dichter, in particular, believed that powdered eggs, often used in cake mixes, should be left out, so women could add a few fresh eggs into the batter, giving them a sense of creative contribution.’

As a result, General Mills (who own Betty Crocker) altered their product, abandoning the powdered egg in their mixes. The requirement to add eggs at home was marketed as a benefit, conferring the quality of ‘home-made’ authenticity upon the box cake mix. (Whether using fresh eggs instead of powdered eggs actually enhanced taste was beside the point.)”

I like this story because it nicely sums up the progression in thinking from ‘just designing for ease and speed’ (old-school usability) to ‘designing an entire experience’ (new-school experience design).

Old-school Usability espouses the idea that user activities are onerous tasks that they want to get out of the way as soon as possible. While this is true in some cases, usability is now widely understood to be more of a hygiene factor – something that can cause dissatisfaction if missing, but its presence cannot take you beyond lack of dissatisfaction.

Image credit: Jonny Baker

By now you’re probably thinking “Yeah, I get it already – usability is just one of the components of good design”. So let’s move on to my second point. In the Betty Crocker example, the psychologists realized the customer wanted to play the role of a successful home-maker and cook. We could even go so far to argue that their customers may have felt societal pressures to perform this role well. The egg, therefore, becomes more than an ingredient, and more than just an extra pleasurable step. It becomes a prop, enabling the customer to play a social role. Goffman’s theory of Dramaturgy explains this to some extent. It’s worth reading about if you don’t have much background in Social Psychology or Sociology.

Now, I’m not saying that knowing a bit of sociology is going to make you into a great designer. However, it does give you a nice underpinning perspective for when you carry out field research.

Here’s a quick walkthrough the product:

Above you can see the wireframing/prototyping tool. It’s pretty much as you’d expect if you’ve ever used Axure, Protoshare or any of the other similar tools out there at the moment (there were at least 32 last time I checked).

When you view your prototype, you can view it with either a low-fi (hand sketched) or hi-fi skin. Above you can see the low-fi skin. All of the form fields are interactive.

And here’s the hi-fi skin.

You invite participants by sending them an email containing a unique URL. When they click through, they are taken to the page shown above. Pidoco° has a built in VOIP tool (much like Skype), or you can fall back on good old-fashionned telephones. Then you simply run the usability test over the web, much like you would in a face-to-face session. While you are interviewing them, the session is streamed to your web browser. Obviously it’s not going to feel as intimate and easy as a face-to-face test, but it’s far cheaper, particularly when you are testing people spread over large geographic distances.

This is the participant’s screen during a test. The narrow grey bar along the top is inserted over the prototype. The entire session is recorded in the same way as any other screen recording tool (e.g. jing, camtasia, etc), and it includes the VOIP audio. The footage is saved online for you, within your (secure) Pidoco° account area.

Bargain hunters among you may be thinking “I could do all of that using free tools instead of Pidoco!” – This is completely true. You could, for example, use yuuguu for the screensharing (free), hotgloo (still in free beta) for the prototyping and camstudio (free) for the screen recording. However, if you cobble together your own assortment of tools, you wont get the tightly integrated workflow process that Pidoco° offers. For example, on Pidoco°, moving from prototyping to a user test only requires one click. Plus, you can edit a live prototype during a user test, which is trivially easy. It’s these little details that promise to make Pidoco° different to the masses of other prototyping tools on the market today.

Disclosure: I received no incentive for this review (not even a cup of coffee). However, Pidoco° was one of the sponsors of UX Brighton Remote 360, an event I helped organize. UX Brighton is a free event, and sponsorship covers the cost of venue hire and refreshments for the attendees.

“The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have
plenty of messenger boys.” – Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer, British Post Office, 1878

“This telephone has too many shortcomings to be considered as a means of communication. The device is of inherently no value to us.” – Western Union internal memo, 1876

“Getting a new idea adopted, even when it has obvious advantages, is often very difficult.” – Rogers, 1962

Adoption of technology by end users is key to its success – even the most brilliant innovation is worth nothing if it doesn’t get used. Many technologies suffer from delays in achieving adoption. For example, voicemail was reported to have taken roughly 10 years to achieve widespread adoption [1], while the fax machine took roughly 50 years [2]. This shows that it is not just quality or usefulness that determines successful adoption: there are other factors at work.

Back in the late 1800s, the telephone met considerable resistance – people just didn’t get it. Bell actually tried to sell the patent to Western Union and to the British Post Office, but neither were in the slightest bit interested. The chief engineer at the British Post Office famously replied that they didn’t need it because “We have plenty of messenger boys.” [3]. This shortsightedness was the best thing that could have happened to Bell – today, the patent is regarded by some as one of the most profitable patents ever created [4].

Once Bell decided to start a telecoms business, the tricky business of adoption had to be dealt with. Bell knew that the benefits of the telephone were undeniable once experienced in the real world, or once you saw others like you experiencing it (aka observational learning). So, Bell Co. put telephones in hotel rooms for calling the front desk, in offices as a replacement to intercoms, and near lunch counters in diners and lunch rooms – “…that way, it reasoned, people who didn’t know how to use them would be likely to see people who did know how and in this way learn about the phone system.” [5]

By positioning telephones by lunch counters, Bell Co. are likely to have considered the public availability of the telephone usage, the highly concentrated flow of people past the telephone as they queued to buy their food, and the stage-like nature of this arrangement. They also indirectly chose a time for the interaction – lunch break, when many people have time to kill. Pretty clever when you think about it. Plus, the idea of replacing office intercoms with telephones was inspired. Intercoms were already used widely – by swapping in a telephone, this familiarized people with phones, using a known, comfortable context. Intercom-style usage is very limited (single point to single point, with no network), but it served well as a “foot in the door” to capture the attention of potential users.

What does all this mean for you – the designers of tomorrow’s products? Well, one thing’s for sure. Designing your product is only half the battle. If your product really is as disruptive as you think it is, you have to design a strategy for adoption.

References:
[1] Fancik, E., Rudman, S. E., Cooper, D., & Levine, S. (1991). Putting innovation to work: adoption strategies for multimedia communication systems Commun. ACM 34 (12), 52-63.
[2] O’Brien, L. (1989). Will the fax boom go bust? Telephony, 217(14), 38-46.
[3] Cosier, G., & Hughes, P. M. (2001). The Problem with Disruption. BT Technology, 19(4), 9.
[4] The Telephone Patent Follies on telecomhistory.org
[5] Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (2000). The Social Life of Information. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School; New York : McGraw-Hill.
Image credit: Early Bell telephone and terminal panel, 1877. The Science Museum

The Bell Co. telephone adoption story can be found in The Social Life of Information by John Seely-Brown and Paul Duguid. Many thanks to Aaron Cheang who reminded me of this story while we were chatting about Google Wave.

This is going to be something special. Abtests.com is created by Bokardo, Performable, and KISSmetrics. In their words: “Our goal is simple: to help people test their web sites/applications and share that knowledge with others, making everyone smarter in the process.”

The site uses a well considered and concise format for the articles, making it really easy to read. I think it’s still in Beta, but it looks almost ready to me. Follow @abtests to find out more.

This post is all about the importance setting accurate expectations. One of my friends, Ofer Deshe, often uses this clip when running UX training workshops. What a great way of summing it up!

If you lead your consumers to expect one thing but then give them a poorer substitute, they will be disappointed – angry even (but hopefully not machine-gun angry like Michael Douglas in Falling Down). Honesty is the best option. If your credit card application process takes 15 minutes to complete, then just tell them. Don’t say it takes 5. Lets look at a real world example. Geni.com is often cited as providing a great sign-up experience, but the example below example shows it in a different light.

Above you can see a screengrab from a recent geni.com email campaign. “Discover new relatives with Geni hot matches” – sounds pretty cool. Let’s see what happens when you click through.

After you’ve taken the trouble to log-in, you end up on this page. This is pretty tantalising – it’s possible that within a few seconds you’ll see entire new branches of your family tree, perhaps even new lines of ancestry. You’d be foolish not proceed by clicking on one of the “similar profile” links.

What’s this? Most of the information here seems redundant – but hang on, it’s mentioning words like “Pro”, “Special Offer” and “Try for free”. That doesn’t sound good. Let’s see what happens when we click “Try Geni Pro”

A collective scream of frustration “Argh! A credit card form! And it wants almost $100!”. Users are likely to feel manipulated and annoyed. The key point here is that users would have reacted differently if they were presented this information upfront – the problem lies in the order of presentation. With the right sales pitch, it could have come across as a great deal.

Pear Note records audio and/or video while you take your notes, so later you can find what was being said when you typed something. Wouldn’t it be great if this kind of functionality was added to Silveback or Morae?

Above is a screengrab from theacropolismuseum.gr, the site for the new Acropolis museum in Athens. It opened this year, and it’s turned out to be a very popular tourist attraction. With that in mind, it makes sense to book your tickets in advance. It’s not too hard to find this page (Hours & Ticketing), but the next step is to enter the ticket booking process. So, how do you do that? It’s almost like they’ve hidden the “Buy Tickets” call-to-action on purpose, as a nondescript link right at the bottom of the page. This is the online equivalent of designing a supermarket with the tills hidden in the stockroom – hardly the definition of good business sense.

Having clicked ‘Buy Tickets’, the user ends up here (above), which seems to be the first page of the booking process. The only thing we can see here is a text field. Where’s the rest of the stuff? Where’s the ‘next’ button? Where’s the steps-left indicator? It almost looks broken – as if the page hasn’t loaded properly. In fact, to proceed to the next step the user needs to enter a number into the text field, and then the next chunk of the form will suddenly be revealed. You can almost picture the user muttering to themselves – “Why on earth does this site have to work differently to the rest of the web?”

Having entered the number of tickets, this calendar widget appears (above). Today’s date is currently selected. What are you expected to do now? Once again, there is no clear call-to-action. In fact, you have to click any date in the future and it will reveal which times are available.

Phew! If the user’s got this far, they are probably getting the hang of this unconventional UI. They need to click on their desired timeslot to proceed, then they need to fill in their address, payment details and finally they reach a confirmation page, shown below.

Here’s the confirmation page. The user will expect this to be emailed to them – that’s normal practice, right? Not on this site. If they don’t save or print this page, they are going to have real trouble getting into the museum. This key instruction is written half-way down the page, but once again the designers have made the same mistake of providing a weak, easily missable call-to-action.

To sum up, I’m hoping that this example has given you a reminder about the crucial importance of strong calls-to-action. It’s obvious stuff really, but we all make schoolboy errors from time to time.

Even if your recruitment agency are trying their best, it’s sad reality that there’s diminishing returns in weeding out end users who fib. They can’t really hire in Columbo to investigate every user. And if, during the sessions, the research facilitator starts to suspect the participant might be a dud, what can they do? It’s an awkward situation, especially if they their client watching from behind the two-way mirror. The researcher can continue the interview without pushing the issue, or they can deviate from the script and start cross-questioning the participant on their honesty, which will ruin the rapport, take time, and probably won’t be effective in any case.

In fact, a lot of liars can be screened out by writing a really good screener questionnaire. For example, here’s a decoy question that the Mozilla metrics team used in their recent Test Pilot survey.

The goal of the question above was to ascertain the experience level of a respondent, so the data could be segmented. To sift out the deluded novices and liars, the Mozilla Metrics team added a made-up acronym – JFW – on the rationale that anyone who ticks “full understanding” for this item and all the others can be flagged as a suspect respondent.

Don’t believe me on the JFW acronym? I asked the Moz Labs team, just to be sure:

It’s also fairly likely you will want to recruit participants who have used your product a certain number of times. If you ask them directly (”Have you used mysite.com at least 3 times in the past month?”), the respondent will easily guess what they are meant to say to “win” the research. So, you should always hide the qualifying answer among a number of decoy questions, or by asking open questions.

Another trick I’ve recently started using is placing a stern warning on the screener about honesty. For example, if you’re testing an ecommerce site, you can state that a substantial part of the interview will involve being signed in to the site and referring to their purchase history page. If they don’t have a history spanning over 3 months, tell them they will be turned away without payment. This does sound a bit harsh, but it works.

To sum up, you face a real risk if you rely on your recruitment agency to take care of the screener behind the scenes. When engaging with a new agency, ask them what they do to screen out liars, and always be certain to review the final questionnaire before it gets deployed.

Do you have any other screener tips? Add them in the comments!

Swap out Yu Wan Mei mandated “Fish Time” with Windows 7 and you’ve pretty much captured the spirit of Microsoft’s marketing strategy. Check out the screen grabs from their screener survey below. It’s nuts!

Gee, I wonder which of these boxes I’m meant to tick in order to get my free copy of Windows 7?

Question 6: would you like to receive junk mail? Er, what are my options?

This is by far the best bit – check out what they want to do to your children. To quote from the second paragraph: “I, on behalf of myself and my children [...] hereby grant [...] an unrestricted, absolute, universal, perpetual, irrevocable, non-royalty bearing, and transferable right and license [...] to use, copy, transmit, distribute, display, modify, perform, present, publish, transform, create works and derivative works, and otherwise promote or utilize my name, image, likeness, voice, words and [...] personal information, and those of my children [...] captured, photographed or otherwise recorded or memorialized in any manner [...] (including, without limitation, print, direct mail, online, mobile or wireless communications, radio or television broadcast, telecast or photograph), for any purpose whatsoever (including, without limitation [...] advertising [...]), and without any consideration or notice to or consent by me or any third party.”

So, how badly do you want a free copy of Windows 7? Badly enough to give Microsoft complete, unrestricted rights to photos and videos of your children so they can use them in their advertising without even notifying you? Seriously?

I cannot imagine why they thought it was a good idea to hide this critical information in the small print. Whatever happened to good, old fashioned up-front honesty?

Has anyone actually tried them all and created an über comparison table? Not as far as I can tell. Instead I’m sort of hoping for some kind of K-T event to kill of all of the weaker ones. Not sure how that would work, though. Any ideas?

Amendment: post has been repeatedly edited to include additional tools.

Sorry did I say children and adults? I meant children, adults and UI designers…

Using a feedreader and can’t see the video?

This was one of the clips shown in Nathan Shedroff & Chris Noessel’s talk on SciFi and UI design at Dconstruct’09. They’ve published the talk notes here [18MB PDF].

If you haven’t already seen it, you may also want to check out this Pixar short film on alien abductions and bad UI design.

Using a feedreader and can’t see the turtle video?

This video went viral a couple of years ago and has had about 12.5 million views, so you may have seen it before. When interviewed later, little Jonny admitted “I was just having nervous thoughts in my mind and thinking about turtles, I found a snapping turtle there that was really cool and I just wanted to blurt it all out.”. Ah, bless!

Also speaking last night was Gareth White, Director of Vertical Slice, a new Brighton-based gameplay research agency. Among other things, he talked about some of the differences between playability and usability. He showed a clip this hilarious Zero Punctuation video by Ben Croshaw, which highlights the importance of baseline usability in gameplay design. It’s well worth a watch if you haven’t seen it (contains lots of swearing). Fast forward to 2:20 if you’re in a hurry.

Using a feedreader and can’t see the Zero Punctuation video?

If you like that video, there’s loads more here.

Taken from Rapid Problem Solving with Post-it notes by David Straker (1997). Despite its age this book contains some really useful techniques for stakeholder workshops, such as group sorting activities, trees, and maps.

Please bear in mind this talk was written for a Barcamp audience – it’s intentionally terse and flame-baity.

Using a feedreader and can’t see the slides?

Firefox 3.5.1 Malware Warning Interstitial:

I really like the way the designers of Firefox have approached this problem – they’ve provided a strong emphasis on the non-catastrophic buttons, and they’ve shrunk the “ignore this warning” link so it’s barely even visible, tucking it away to the side so it’s highly unlikely to be clicked by mistake.

Chrome 2.0.1 Malware Warning Interstitial:

The designers of Chrome employ a technique normally used for Terms & Conditions. The user has to tick a checkbox, then click “proceed anyway”. This works just fine but it doesn’t have the elegant simplicity of the Firefox approach.

Safari 4.0.2 Malware Warning Interstitial:
Do you notice anything wrong with Safari’s implementation? A hurried user can easily click “Ignore warning” without realizing what they are doing. Being the biggest button on the page, it almost looks like the designers want users to click on it – the exact opposite to the approach used in Firefox. Even though “Go back” is highlighted as the default option, this a very weak effort to prevent users from getting their computers infected with malware.

So there you go. Three different browsers, three different approaches, and for once the Apple example is by far the worst .

Date: Tuesday 8th September, 6.30pm – 9pm
Location: iCrossing, Central Brighton, BN1 1ND
Price: Free, but you must book a ticket on stubmatic

“Gameplay Field Research and Designing for Kids”
By GiGi Demming, User Testing Manager at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.

“User Research and the Future of Gameplay Experience Design”
By Gareth White, Co-director of Vertical Slice and ex-Rockstar Games developer.

We may also have another mystery guest and possibly a demo, we’ll find out in the next few days.

After the talks, we’ll continue the conversation over a drink at The Black Lion (next door to the venue).

→ Book your place on stubmatic

Before you look at them, a word of warning: these heatmaps are entirely inconclusive and non-scientific. They are the result of a small handful of people trying out an Eye-Tracker in a noisy environment. The purpose of showing them here is to raise questions rather than answer them.

Clooney or Crook: which one do people prefer?

Judging from the heatmaps, which actor do you think was preferred by our 9 volunteers? Handsome Clooney or strange looking Crook? Actually, it’s a trick question. Eye-Tracking heatmaps only tell you where your participants fixate – they do not tell you what they are thinking. This has very important implications for when you use Eye-Tracking on your own sites. If you notice a hotspot (i.e. gaze fixations) on a certain area of a homepage, you don’t know whether this is because users are understanding it and lapping it up, or whether they are thinking “What the hell does that mean, I’d better read that again!” For this very reason, eye-tracking studies are normally paired with an analysis of the user’s behaviour and some form of retrospective think-aloud (in which the user tells the researcher what they were thinking during the test). This data is crucial in explaining what the heatmaps actually mean.

Michelangelo’s David

As you can see above, people almost always focus in on faces, breasts and genital areas. This is common knowledge and often exploited by advertisers, but what’s interesting is that it seems to have nothing to do with sexual orientation – in our little test, even the straightest male participant couldn’t help but cop a quick look at David’s manhood.

Cennydd Bowles: Tourdust

Moving on to something less frivolous, here’s a heatmap from Cennydd Bowles’s Tourdust. If you take a look at the live site, you’ll see that he’s employed a JavaScript progressive disclosure technique to hide/reveal the site’s faceted navigation system. While usefully compact, the risk with such an approach is that users might not notice the call-to-action. To counter this, he’s added an instruction on the right that reads “Click these to find what you’re looking for”. Judging from the heatmap above it seems to have been effective.

Guardian Jobs

Above you can see a heatmap of Guardian Jobs. There’s a hotspot at the top right-hand side, relating to an eye-catching orange rectangle that reads “Recruiters, post your jobs online”. It’s worth noting that this works because it’s the only such element on the page. Repeat this trick too many times, and you’d create visual clutter with too many brash elements vying for the user’s attention.

So, that’s all I’ve got for you today. Hopefully you found that interesting, even though it was inherently inconclusive. By the way, if you fancy getting an eye tracker of your own, you should start saving up now – Tobii Eye-Trackers weigh in at roughly $35,000 [PDF] for a high end model.

Many thanks to HFI, Bunnyfoot, iCrossing, Madgex and everyone who attended for making the event such a success!

→ View Rob’s presentation on slideshare

[Amendment 22-Aug-09: the sideshare embed code was removed from this page because it was causing problems]

It’s a really interesting space to work in right now, and I’ve arranged a special event on gameplay research for next month’s UX Brighton (8-Sept-09). The line-up includes GiGi Demming (User Testing Manager at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe), Graham McCalister (Director of Vertical Slice), and one or two other mystery guests (tbc). Tickets aren’t yet available, but they will be soon.

In the mean time, here’s a taster of the kind of research that people are doing in this space right now. Most of these images are cribbed (with permission) from a slide deck used in the “Game Metrics and Biometrics” panel at Future play 2009 (Nacke, Ambinder, Canossa, Mandryk, & Stach).

Heatmap showing player deaths

This heatmap is a visualisation of the locations where players tend to die on a level map (Ref: Tychsen & Canossa, 2008; Tychsen, 2008). This gives very useful pointers for how makes it easy to diagnose and fix areas of poor design where the player needs some kind of “boost” to get through. It’s all about balancing – players hate games to be too easy or too hard.

Flower of Death Information Visualisation

This visualisation from the game ‘Kane & Lynch: Fragile Alliance’ shows player role at time of death against the cause of death. It’s intended to be interactive so a doesn’t make much sense in a static image, but its purpose is allow a researcher to ascertain whether certain roles are weaker or stronger in certain scenarios. (Ref: Tychsen & Canossa, 2008; Tychsen, 2008).

A typical Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) unit

This is a typical Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) device. (Image credit: Shiori Saito). The amount of moisture on a person’s skin is a tacit, non-conscious indicator of their emotional state. This simple device measures the conductivity on a person’s hand. The trouble with GSR is that sweat builds up over time – so for example, it can erroneously show a high level of arousal during a boring cut scene that followed an exciting end-of-level shootout, simply because they player’s hands are still sweaty.

Comparing GSR for human-human gameplay against human-computer

This graph (ref: Mandryk, et al. 2006) shows the marked difference between scoring a goal against the computer (boring) versus scoring a goal against a friend (kick-ass exciting). This is probably quite useful when play testing users without think-aloud protocol, and aggregating the data for multiple participants.

A “full” biometric research lab set-up

An extensive set of kit is used in this picture: an eye tracker, screen recording software, facial expression recording via webcam, plus EEG/EMG and GSR devices (Ref: Nacke & Lindley, 2008). I don’t envy their research analysts who must have to crunch vast reams of data for each participant.

Example output from an EEG session

Crazy stuff isn’t it. The real challenge with EEG analysis is to take this data output and translate it into actionable findings that can be used to optimise the game design.

The jury is still out regarding biometrics – some gameplay researchers doubt the practical value, suggesting such tools have a big wow factor but can be expensive and time consuming to use. Although biometrics may not yet be proven as a core tool in gameplay research, it’s great that people are working on it. This is how new research methods are born.

Special thanks to Lennart Nacke et al for use of their images in this article. If you fancy reading more on the academic side of things, check out Lennart Nacke’s and Regan Mandryk’s research publications.