14 May 2012

New SIGCHI Community: Research-Practice Interaction

A small group of people, mostly participants in this past week’s annual “CHI” (Computer-Human Interaction) conference, have formed a community to promote the exchange of information between research and practice in the fields involved with making computer systems and web sites better suited for use by the people who use them. This community exists under the auspices of the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM’s) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI), and we call it Research-Practice Interaction. Our mission is as follows:

The Research-Practice Interaction community is a bridge between research and practice in HCI, including all flavors thereof (user experience, usability, interaction design, information architecture, etc.etc.). We aim to promote the exchange of information between researchers and practitioners, such that research and its results are more accessible to practitioners and that practitioner information needs are conveyed to researchers.

This community arises from the work that several of us have been doing in this area over the last few years, in SIGCHI and elsewhere. We are concerned when we hear practitioners say that the CHI conference is not relevant to them, when we know that it offers rich opportunities for cross-fertilization and has much content that would clearly be relevant if it were easier to digest. We are concerned when we read research papers that use valid research methods but unrealistic examples or situations, when we know that using realistic examples would make them more relevant to practice and more solid as useful research.

At CHI2010 we held a workshop on this topic (see the recap). (Similar workshops were held at the 2010 Information Architecture Summit and the 2011 conference of the Usability Professionals Association.) We concluded that the research and practice communities are what they are, for reasons that support their internal needs; and rather than beating our heads against the walls trying to change them, we who have (or want to have) some understanding of both communities need to build bridges and information conduits between them.

Hence the SIGCHI Research-Practice Interaction Community.

ACM members can join the community as a full member. Nonmembers can sign up for a free acm.org account and join the community as an affiliate, to receive updates and information.

If you care about the flow of information between research and practice in the field of interaction between people and technology, join us in helping make it better!

posted by Elizabeth at 07:05 1 Comment

11 May 2012

We Are All Stakeholders

Can you think of anyone whose life is not affected by government information and communications technology? Anyone at all?

Even in the farthest reaches of the remotest areas, even when a population is completely isolated from the outside world, people’s lives are affected by the policies and procedures of the government that administers the area in which they live, and no doubt those of some other governments as well. And virtually all* governments carry out their procedures with the support of information and communications technologies (ICTs).

The usability of government systems affects us all. All 6.8 billion of us.

Usability is the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction that a system or product provides to the people who use it. Even if we never use any government systems ourselves — even if we never visit a government website to pay a parking ticket or obtain retirement/pension information — we feel the effects of the usability of the systems that our governments at all levels use to conduct their business. Effectiveness and efficiency (two sides of the usability triangle) are major factors in the productivity of both civil servants and military personnel. Satisfaction (the other side of the triangle) is more important for encouraging citizens to use online methods to interact and communicate with government, but it also plays a role in fostering morale and therefore productivity of government employees. If you like your job, you are likely to be better at it.

Some may say that politics enters into the question of government system usability; I say it does not. We may disagree about what we want government to do, but I think we can all agree that we want it to be more cost effective.

In the usability of government systems, we are all stakeholders.

* Do you know of a government that doesn’t use ICT at all? Please let me know! If you could do this via a comment to this post, that would be even more awesome, and greatly appreciated.

posted by Elizabeth at 02:05 Leave a comment

2 December 2011

Usability in Government Systems — A Forthcoming Book

Just before US Thanksgiving of 2011, my co-editor and I delivered to our publisher the manuscript of a new book on usability in government systems. Two and a half years after Dianne Murray suggested doing a book and we chose the topic — and six weeks after I began the most intensive period of work in my life (on the book) — we completed the manuscript and sent it off. And so was born Usability in Government Systems: User Experience Design for Citizens and Public Servants.

Image of book coverHere are some highlights, adapted and slightly modified from the book’s introduction:

Bookstores abound with offerings on “usability” and “user experience” (2,352 and 293 search results, respectively, on Amazon.com as of this writing). The number doubles for “government contracting” (4,275 results) and jumps by almost 50 times for “government systems” (106,957 — again, as of this writing). This book, however, is unique. A search on “usability and government” does find 89 titles — books on e-government that mention usability as a success factor; government publications that offer usability information related to a single domain, such as web design or aviation cockpit displays; conference proceedings that include academic research papers on usability in e-government. But not one of these titles covers the topic broadly or focuses on it exclusively.

Yet countless citizens worldwide use government web sites and other systems to obtain information from their government and to do business with it. Tremendous numbers of government employees conduct their nation’s business via desktop computer and intranet sites. It is impossible to say exactly how many people will use a government system themselves during their lifetimes, but it is a safe bet that these systems will touch everyone’s life in some way.

But how usable are these systems? How consistent and predictable are the web sites for those who have to navigate the maze of government information and online services? How well do internal applications support the productivity of  government employees? Functionality apart, how well do government systems actually serve the citizenry?

The United States Government is the largest consumer of information technology in the world. In the summer of 2011 the White House reported that the government had a shocking number — more than 24, 000 — of different web sites. President Obama announced the Campaign to Cut Waste, whose charter includes finding ways of presenting the public with Web-based information and services that are better connected and more consistently presented.

Other governments have had similar concerns. In March of 2004 the United Kingdom launched DirectGov to consolidate access to much of its national government information for citizens, and in January of 2007 it announced a decision to eliminate almost 60% of the 951 sites it had at the time. As of this writing, the United Nations has issued two reports on e-government, and the Association for Computing Machinery has held several annual conferences on e-government, in whose 2011 conference Dianne and I participated (along with our colleague Scott Robertson, who wrote the foreword to the book).

Almost every national government in the world has at least one public web site, and we would be surprised to learn of a government that didn’t have computers, at least in its national offices.

And yet no book exists that addresses usability in government systems. Until now.

This is the first book that concentrates on the role of usability in government systems. It covers designing government systems to provide effectiveness, efficiency, and a pleasant and satisfying experience to the people who use them, whether they are interacting with their government from the outside or working for the government on the inside.

The book’s 24 chapters, each written by one or more experts in the topic, cover topics as varied as open government, plain language, accessibility, biometrics, service design, internal vs. public-facing systems, and cross-cultural issues, as well as integrating usability and user-centered design activities into the government procurement process. It speaks to three audiences:

  • government and contractor professionals responsible for government system projects, who know they need to improve usability and want information on how to make that happen
  • usability and UX professionals looking to work in government systems and needing information about the constraints of that environment
  • policymakers and legislators who are in a position to influence government procurement processes to make it easier to achieve usability

The book takes an international perspective and includes many case studies from government systems around the world.

Usability in Government Systems: User Experience Design for Citizens and Public Servants can help increase government cost effectiveness, operational efficiency, and public engagement. It will be published by Morgan Kaufmann Press in May of 2012. It can be preordered from Amazon here. (I’d greatly appreciate it if you’d use this link, as the royalties are not high and this gives me a small commission as well.)

Update: The book is now shipping, and it’s available on Kindle.

posted by Elizabeth at 04:12 Tagged , , | 3 Comments

21 July 2011

Chromostereopsis in UX Design: A blog entry for comments

I’ve just written an article on Chromostereopsis in UX Design, which you’ll find elsewhere on this site. I posted it as a regular web page (in my “Writings” section) because I felt its length and depth were too much for a blog post. So I’ve created this blog post to provide a place for comments.

I look forward to hearing what you have to say!

posted by Elizabeth Buie at 12:07 Tagged , , , , , | 8 Comments

12 July 2011

My Comment to the White House on Federal Websites

Today at 4pm EDT (I’m writing this about 5-6 hours earlier) the White House will have a live chat on improving Federal websites. I plan to be there.

I put in a comment via the form at whitehouse.gov. Here’s essentially* what I said:

The problem is not so much the number of Federal domains (although I agree that it’s probably too large), but the wide variation in information archecture and navigation for similar types of content. I’d like to see some standardization in information structure and navigation for overlapping content, and (even more importantly) in user-centered design processes.

I plan to “tune in” to the live chat this afternoon.

*I say “essentially” because I copied my comment to the clipboard before submitting it, planning to paste it here… but then I absentmindedly copied something else there while logging into my blog. So I had to re-create my comment from memory. Some of the words differ, but the sense is the same.

posted by Elizabeth Buie at 10:07 Leave a comment

9 February 2011

Mobile boarding pass: Not for me, thanks

United Airlines mobile boarding passYesterday I used a mobile boarding pass for the first time. United Airlines’ checkin didn’t make me choose between mobile and paper, so I chose both — it wasn’t a risk to try mobile because I would have the paper as a backup, just in case.

I clicked “Mobile” and had it sent to my phone via email. I then retrieved the email on my phone and tapped the link. The boarding pass opened just fine in the phone’s browser (see image at right).

The mobile boarding pass worked without a hitch. After saying he hadn’t done one before, the TSA agent led me to the machine, and I put my iPhone to the scanner. I probably held it there too long because I was expecting the scanner to beep, but he told me to remove the phone, and then he said “You pass!”

Using the mobile pass to board was even more straightforward. United’s gate agent was clearly used to them, and everything went smoothly.

So why is it not for me? Well, consider what I had to do to use it:

  1. Get my phone out of my pocketbook or pocket, wherever I’ve been keeping it. This is more trouble than getting out a piece of paper, because my phone is in a case with a high coefficient of friction and does not slide smoothly. (I do this to help prevent a thief from lightfingering it.)
  2. Wake up the phone.
  3. Enter my security passcode.
  4. If the browser is not the current app (e.g., if I’ve been checking my email), bring it to the front.
  5. Ensure that the screen doesn’t go blank before I have to scan the code, or I’ll have to do steps 2 & 3 again.

For me, it’s just more trouble than it’s worth. It’s cool and all that, but there are too many steps. I can tuck the paper pass into my passport (which I use for ID whenever I travel, even domestically) and it’s always right there in front.

Paper is very lightweight. It doesn’t need to be awakened or given a security code. I can check my email without sending it to the background. I can keep it in the same place and bring it out whenever it’s needed, without worrying about what else I might need it for. And I can even write things on it if I need to.

I’ll use mobile again if I am someplace where I can’t print the boarding pass. But when I can use paper, I will.

Do you use mobile boarding passes? What do you think of them?

posted by Elizabeth Buie at 08:02 8 Comments

8 October 2010

A Seminar and a Panelist Statement

I recently participated in a Dagstuhl seminar called “Demarcating User eXperience”. This 2.5-day workshop brought together 30 UX researchers and practitioners into an Eighteenth-Century manor house cum computer science conference center, just outside a tiny German village, to define the boundaries of the field of UX and begin writing a white paper about it. The seminar’s organizers described the problem this way:

The concept of user experience (UX) is widely used but understood in many different ways. The multidisciplinary nature of UX has provoked several definitions and perspectives to UX, each approaching the concept from a different viewpoint.

UX is seen as a holistic concept covering all aspects of experiencing a phenomenon, but we are facing the point where UX has become a concept too broad to be useful in practice. Practitioners have difficulties to understand the concept and to improve UX in their work, and researchers rather use some other term to make their research scope clear.

So our job was to “demarcate” UX.

Most of the group was from academia, so I set myself the goal of keeping some level of focus on practitioners’ needs, to maintain a balance. Each participant had to prepare a poster to present at the beginning of the seminar; mine is at http://www.luminanze.com/writings/DagstuhlPosterBuie.pdf (note: PDF). My main point was this:

UX already has a thriving practitioner community.
We must address their needs.

After the introductions were complete, we spent the next few days discussing UX — what it is, how it’s measured, how long it lasts, how to design for it — until finally our time ran out. (We could have gone on a lot longer, I suspect.) Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one urging that we consider design, and we ended up adding to the outline of the white paper a section on design for user experience.

At the end, we talked about next steps, in particular how we could publicize the seminar’s results. Among other things, we decided to submit a panel proposal to the CHI2011 conference. Jofish Kaye agreed to recruit the panelists and prepare the proposal; and two days ago when I asked him how it was going — surprise! — he added me to the panelists. This meant I had to write a position statement.

Now, I’m pretty good at writing short, pithy comments, such as tweets and Facebook statuses. A statement of two paragraphs, however, was much more daunting. But I managed, and here’s what I wrote:

“User experience” abounds and thrives in the practitioner community. Events and organizations identify themselves with the “UX” label — from “UX Magazine” (http://uxmag.com), to Adaptive Path’s “UX Week” conference (http://www.uxweek.com), to the various “UX Book Clubs” (http://uxbookclub.org), to the titles of numerous practitioner books. Nowhere is the label more evident than on Twitter: People and organizations use “ux” in their handles (@lynneux, @uxmike, @inspire_ux, @ux_jobs, @uxfactory, @ux_dc, etc. etc.), in content-related hashtags (#ux, #uxdesignjobs), and even in social hashtags related to the community (#uxsters, #uxlovelies, #uxboots). Even the Usability Professionals Association titles its magazine “User Experience”.

As practitioners, we generally agree that we are not designing experiences per se; “UX design” is just shorthand for designing for experience. We do lack a rigorous definition for “user experience” (we often refer to “DTDT” — “defining the damn thing” — to express the difficulty of agreeing on it), but I suspect we don’t actually need one. To design for experience, we don’t have to decide whether “experience” is immediate (e.g., three seconds) or it lasts from anticipation through memory of use; we need only recognize that it occurs throughout these phases and consider them all as we design. To create products that give users experiences along the lines of what we have in mind, we conduct user research and employ other time-honored as well as innovative design and evaluation techniques. We treat user experience as a focus in everything we do in our practice (see http://explainux.com), and most of us are passionate about giving our users good experiences. Academic research can help by paying attention to the issues of practice and by making sure we know when it has discovered something that can make us more effective in realizing these goals.

Unfortunately, space limitations meant that only a very small part of each panelist’s statement made it into the submitted proposal. I think the proposal turned out well, though, and I’m optimistic that the panel will happen. Stay tuned.

(I will write more about the seminar in a later post. For now you can see our photos on Flickr.)

posted by Elizabeth Buie at 10:10 Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

6 June 2010

ATAC’s new in-bus displays: A step forward, but more is needed

Rome’s public transportation system, known as ATAC (Azienda Tranvie ed Autobus del Comune di Roma), continues to improve in the 20+ years since my first visit to this wonderful city. For example, some of the bus stops now have signs indicating when the next bus is expected to arrive (see the article in L’Occhio – in Italian). You can get info on your mobile phone about the routes and times, including when the next bus is expected (http://www.atacmobile.it). Some of the buses even have displays inside them that show information about the route.

Unfortunately, it seems that no one thought much about what information ATAC passengers would need and how they would use it.

The buses have two displays. One is at the front, with the line number and final destination scrolling across it (see image at right). About six inches high, this sign spans the aisle and is visible and legible from everywhere in the bus.

Problem is, it tells passengers something they already know. Once you get on the bus, you know which one it is and which direction it’s headed. Instead, what you need to know when you’re on the bus is how soon you will reach your stop.

But wait — there’s good news. These buses do list the next few stops. This information appears on a monitor in the middle of the bus. Unfortunately, there’s also bad news — the monitor’s screen is occupied mostly with advertising, which makes the names of the stops illegible from any reasonable distance. (See photo below, from mobytv.it.)

ATAC's display of the next few stops on Rome's metrebuses.

I suppose the advertising pays for the monitor and the information display — and in this sense it’s valuable — but it shouldn’t make the actual information hard to read. The obvious solution would be to replace the line/destination on the large dot-matrix display at the front with the name of the next stop. I’ve seen other bus systems do this, and it works very well.

I commend ATAC for their efforts to improve customer service by using IT to provide more information, and I’m not necessarily suggesting that they get rid of the mid-bus monitors,. They do, however, need to make the information legible to the majority of passengers.

posted by Elizabeth Buie at 11:06 3 Comments

30 January 2010

Music: Does Listening Enhance or Hinder Creative Work?

I’ve read many comments from other user experience folks about listening to music while they work. Most of them express the same as I experience: I can listen to music while I am designing or constructing a site or prototype, but it interferes with my ability to write. For me this is true even for instrumental music, but it is even more true for music that has words.

I have long suspected that it may be a brain hemispheres thing.

For most people (essentially all right-handed people and the majority of left-handers), language is primarily in the left brain. According to an article in the July 2009 Scientific American:

The left hemisphere of the human brain controls language, arguably our greatest mental attribute. It also controls the remarkable dexterity of the human right hand. The right hemisphere is dominant in the control of, among other things, our sense of how objects interrelate in space.

Thus, writing and designing tend to use different parts of the brain.

So how does music fit in?

Well… Until I started doing the research for this post, I had the impression that music is processed primarily in the right brain, and I was thinking that it thus competed with a left-brain activity (writing) and complemented a right-brain activity (designing). This idea is supported by various sources, such as the Encyclopedia of Psychology, which states: “While the left-brain hemisphere performs functions involving logic and language more efficiently, the right-brain hemisphere is more adept in the areas of music, art, and spatial relations.”

But it turns out that things are not that simple, and that piece from the Encyclopedia of Psychology is nine years old. I came across a lot of contradictory research findings, exemplified by the following:

But the kicker is Daniel Levitin’s work, as described in his book “This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of an Obsession”:

Contrary to the old, simplistic notion that art and music are processed in the right hemisphere of our brains, with language and mathematics in the left, recent findings from my laboratory and those of my colleagues are showing us that music is distributed throughout the brain. … Music listening, performance, and composition engage nearly every area of the brain that we have so far identified.”

So why do so many of us designers find it difficult to listen to music while we write but helpful while we design? The answer is apparently not as simple as I had imagined.

Oh well, there goes a nice hypothesis. (At least I know better than to call it a theory. :-) But here comes a potential research project.

And oh, btw — I would never say that “mathematics” is in the left brain. Having a graduate degree in mathematics, I know all too well that it depends on what kind of mathematics. I would place computation primarily in the left brain, but would suggest that geometry, abstract algebra, and possibly number theory are solidly in the right brain. (I remember that after struggling with multivariate calculus — as left-brained an activity as ever there was — I felt a great sense of relief to get into abstract algebra and find it so fascinating I couldn’t wait to get back to the dorm to do the homework. But most of my classmates didn’t see it that way.)

posted by Elizabeth at 06:01 Tagged , , | 2 Comments

8 October 2009

When Alphabetical Order Is Not Logical

Every so often, the question comes up among interaction designers and usability professionals regarding whether alphabetical order is a logical order. (See, for example, the February 2009 discussion on the Interaction Design list.) We’ve all seen numerous lists that appear in alphabetical order (and in which it makes sense): country, state, surname, street name, auto manufacturer. We’ve also seen many that do not: month, day of week, browser history, File menu.

Alphabetical order is NOT a logical order. It may be the best order for a group of choices — i.e., it may be logical to use alphabetical order — but that does not make the order itself a “logical” order. It is only a predictable way of ordering a set that has no intrinsic logical order.

Don’t get me wrong; predictable is good. And sometimes — e.g., in the situations mentioned above — alphabetical order is the most predictable order.

But sometimes it is not, and yesterday I ran across a perfect example. Consider the figure at right. This is a list of car sizes in the preferences area of a travel application. Does the list look logical to you? I can never remember whether “economy” is smaller than “compact” or vice versa; and what in the world is “special”? I submit that size is the logical order for a choice of sizes (duh!).

Similarly, sequence is the logical order for a choice of months or days of the week. (Would you suggest putting April first? I didn’t think so.)

The objective is to choose an order that helps people find the option they seek and (if they aren’t sure) to help them identify the right option. Ordering the car size list by size would do both.

Are you listening, Carlson Wagonlit?

posted by Elizabeth at 07:10 Tagged , , | 7 Comments