Sept 24 - Cognition

Why do you need to understand human cognition in order to understand design?

If the purpose of design is to create useful, pleasurable and easily understood tools or artifacts then understanding how humans think is critical to achieving a good design. Until one understands how a tool or artifact is used (and how people think about using it), how it creates pleasure (and how people experience pleasure), and how people learn, one cannot successfully and intentionally design for these things.

What is neuroplasticity and how does this change the way we look at human cognition?

According to MedicineNet.com, neuroplasticity is "(t)he brain's ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Neuroplasticity allows the neurons ... to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment."

Human cognition, then, is ever adaptable to new environments and modes of thinking. For designers, this means we can use the past and the present as informing our design, but that we are not limited to the palette of existing solutions. Humans can learn, right down to the level of the brain's organizing structure, and a better design is something people can learn. Designers should take into account that human cognition changes over time and that introducing new things should reflect the understanding of a time of adaptation. Build solutions in the adoption of a tool to guide people along the learning curve to an expert understanding of its principles and functions.

Sept. 24 - User Assessment

1) When/why would you use HTA in designing user interface?

Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) is useful for simple linear or linear/recursive operations (and probably has its roots in the mathematical tool of Formal Decomposition). It is not useful for modeling operations that are subject to interruption, or to parallel or overlapping tasks. When applied to complex tasks, the notation becomes a burdensome mess of deeply nested and looping subtasks.

However, it is useful for getting a detailed look into the tasks and subtasks that serve to achieve a simple goal. It provides a broader perspective than focusing on the function of a specific tool; it is thorough and can reveal the paths and branches for achieving a simple goal across tools and the context in which the tool is used.

2) When/why would you use questionnaires or interview?

Questionnaires are useful for quickly and economically gathering data from a large number of literate users who are willing to voluntarily participate (constrained even more to those who have access to a computer and the internet if the questionnaire is administrated via the web. It is useful for polling user feelings and opinions about things with which they are already familiar and can could help identify the most valuable needs of a community that could be met by a tool.

Interviews serve a similar function as questionnaires, but it is possible for the interviewer to delve further and gather more qualitative information and context, or explore specific scenarios. Interviews go further than surveys at making users feel involved in creating the solution and, in this sense, are also valuable to the design process for the good will they can generate.

3) Do you have any experience either carrying out one of these assessment techniques or being a participant? If so, explain what happened.

One of the clients of the communications agency that I work came to us for help copy-editing their intranet Human Resources webpages. She wished that they would be more easily used by the 11,000 employees. On the call with the client, we learned that the scope of this project would be approximately 60% of the pages in their section of the intranet, or about 3000 documents. A sample of the writing to be fixed didn't help, either - we couldn't see anything obviously wrong with it. Some back-of-the envelope calculations suggested that diving into a full editorial effort would be well into the 6-figures and we still didn't have a clue what we'd be doing. 

I recommended having me down to their offices to  look at their site. After a couple hours of sitting with Jack, their college intern, it was clear that most of the problems weren't the writing but the tool and how it was used. The HR site had been born from the ashes of the HR kiosks installed in the plants in the early '90s and had grown with haphazard and inconsistent upgrades over the last 15 years. 

We hired a usability consultant to do a formal review of the site that involved indirect observation (analyzing the server and help center phone logs) and an expert usability review of the interface, key stakeholder interviews, direct observation of users performing essential tasks such as search, finding HR forms, and locating themselves on the org chart. The study revealed the primary uses of the site, the extreme challenges most individuals had orienting themselves and performing the essential tasks, and provided recommendations for the redevelopment of the site. The findings were sent through the organization and we were invited back to present the findings both to the IT department and to the senior leadership of the HR department. IT has decided to move to the Microsoft SharePoint platform and a global rebuild is in the works. Following this report, some of the key stakeholder communities are very aware of the need to design to the needs of the user.

Sept. 17 - User Requirements

Discuss your views on why user requirements may not be the main factor driving the development of new technologies.

I believe most new technologies have a perceived usefulness and the design team thinks that if they build something for themselves, something that they -  normal people that they are - would like, then it will work. However, budgets are tight, competition is high, time-to-market is a clock relentless ticking away the seconds during which time a competitor is gaining market share and shaving the edges of a nickel this quarter is seen as the best way to build "shareholder value". The user is somewhere in those intentions, design docs and project schedules but... if something has to get cut when time and money gets short (and it always done) it's the sticky problem of dealing with the end user.

What factors may be influential in motivating companies to apply more of the user centered approaches to the design of technologies?

If usability can demonstrably increase adoption of new technologies, confer a competitive advantage on the firm that does it best, and build brand loyalty, then companies would tend to be more inclined to do it. However, this requires a commitment from the corporate culture to driving for that kind of time and focus which costs a great deal of money from some very specialized people. It requires timelines that allows for prototyping, multiple iterations and challenging-to-organize usability tests with the target end users. This means the company must dedicate significant resources to R&D, and have a company-wide emphasis on innovation to support it. Few companies have the pockets deep enough and leaders who have sufficient vision to support this kind of approach. There will always be a niche for this kind of work and a market to support the high-end products that come from it; the rest will do knock-offs.

Sept. 10 - User Centric Design

Questions for reflection

1. Why is user-centered design important? Provide an example from your own experience where a design failed (or requires significant improvements) to consider user requirements. What recommendations would you make?

User centered design attempts to understand and involve user needs, desires, and intentions within the design process. 

The design exists to serve the activity. If the activity is driven by users to accomplish a user-defined objective, they need to be aware of the meaningful choices available to them. They must be able to understand the outcomes of their actions and form plans that allow them to use the tool to accomplish their objective. Ideally, accomplishing the objective is enjoyable and feels natural. The interface should feel like it supports their intentions, provides an understanding of how to proceed or retrace steps. Mastery of the skills to achieve the task should feel within their reach and they should be able to form reliable expectations of the outcomes. 

My chosen example of non-user-centric design is a graphical user interface, one that I face every day. Our office copier/printer has the human readable descriptor “Lighten/Darken” running counter to the operation of the copy darkness selector. The first several times an individual uses this function they inevitably select the opposite outcome of that which they desired. The darkness indicator is quite intuitive, indicating a relative darkness from “normal”. However, the title tends to be read first while navigating the GUI to find the function. This first interaction with the tool tends to order thoughts on its operation. Most often users get a failed outcome the first time they use this function and must stop and re-evaluate the tool’s operation to notice the reversed orientation of the tool from its descriptor.

My recommendation to fix this design is to reverse the orientation of either the title or the tool. That the firmware has not been flashed with a fix already cynically leads me to believe the design “flaw” was intentionally to consume more toner.

2. What are the interactive elements of a cellular phone? Why would you consider these elements interactive?

The interactive elements of a hypothetical cellular phone:

§         Form factor – size and shape that enable it to be used as a mobile device, access the keys with the thumb of one (either) hand; hear and speak into the device at the same time, read text only at an intimate distance

§         Microphone – voice commands, voice data

§         Buttons – key presses for data entry, volume, power

§         Incoming signals/data (call/message) that enable other users to influence the machine state

§         Speaker – enables the user to interact with the device (tones and other aural cues) as well as providing system access to aural menus and meaing-carrying tones (ringing, busy signal, etc.)

§         Screen – provides visual feedback and confirmation of many changes in device or accessed system states; incoming/outgoing messages, etc.

§         Firewire/SD cards/other jacks or sockets – uploading or viewing content – enables the user to interact with data-storage devices

§         Vibration – low-profile alerts

§         Orientation – some devices are adding accelerometers so the device may perceive changes in its orientation

§         Camera (video or still) – recognition software (i.e. bar-code activated content, face-recognition software) can enable the user to interface the device with certain types of visual information in the environment

 These elements are interactive because they present the choices of device operation to the user and they either require human action to toggle their function or indicate a change in the device or information carrying state that is being conveyed to the user.

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This blogspace is to be used for MT8314 Human Factors in Technology Design.