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The Principles of Design Research
design, usability
November 08, 2003, 10:18 PM
Last Thursday, Dan posted a nice meta-summary of user research techniques.
The principles he describes are all embodied in HCI's most prominent user research method, Contextual Inquiry (CI). Basically, CIs are ethnographic observations combined with impromptu interviews, wherein the researcher watches the user work and asks questions to get at the purposes behind the behaviors, similar to the way an apprentice would work with a master craftsman. I've conducted a number of CIs since I came here, and I've found them to be incredibly valuable for data collection regardless of the overarching design methodology you plan to employ (i.e., you can benefit from doing CIs even if you aren't going through a full-blown Contextual Design process).
But back to Dan's post. I'll second the recommendation that it's best to work in pairs, especially if you are observing a task that might involve lots of interesting things happening at once, for instance, if multiple users are interacting with each other. I'll also second the prohibition on using video or audio recordings to capture the data (no matter who might tell you otherwise). Although it may seem like a good idea to have an exact recording of the inquiry on file for later reference, in practice it just unnecessarily complicates matters. If it isn't outright prohibited by the participant's organization due to security concerns, then at the very least it will make your participant feel less comfortable and thus may change their behavior, it may make it harder to recruit participants, and it may cause your participant to feel you are impinging on their hospitality, no matter how many promises you make that you won't share the data with anyone else. Chances are, you'll just pop the tape in a file cabinet after the interview and never take it out again anyway. Finally, note taking forces you to be more involved in the inquiry; you can't just sit back and zone out with the knowledge that the camera will catch everything (which is tempting because, let's face it, watching your participant spell check their document isn't exactly like seeing The Matrix Revolutions).
What Dan doesn't cover is preparing a set of focus questions before the inquiry. Running out to collect data without having a clear idea what you're looking for is likely to cause you to waste your time on the first few inquiries. Once you start to look, you'll be surprised how much data is out there in even the most routine tasks; you won't be able to capture the right data if you don't have some kind of filter in place. Deciding on that filter beforehand is critical if you want your research to effectively guide your design.
Navigation Assistance for the Elderly
design
November 05, 2003, 10:39 PM
Yesterday, we presented our final designs for the third assignment in VIID; a socially-aware robotic walker for the elderly (you might recall my first assignment, a scheduling application, and my second, an interface for keeping in touch with friends, from earlier posts). Our charge was to take an existing product (a prototype for a robotics-enhanced walker to aid the elderly with navigation tasks) and redesign its interface to better fulfill its user's needs. I worked with Irina Shklovski, a PhD student in HCI, and Yuan-Chou Chung, an industrial designer in the Interaction Design program.
After doing some analysis of the potential markets for such a product, we chose to target elderly Alzheimer's patients as our user group. We conducted a wide range of user research (warning: ginormous 7.6MB PDF file), but this time, I insisted on distilling it into a persona for our target user, as well as a visionary scenario for communicating the final design. I think this helped immensely with conveying how our solution would really behave in the life of a typical user. You can see if you agree by reading the scenario and then viewing our design presentation (the presentation is best viewed by continually "playing" every time it stops, usually from selecting "play" from the right-click menu, but you can also use the controls at the top to skip around). If you just can't get enough, you can also check out a data sheet on some of the walker's behavior.
This presentation speaks for itself a little better than the previous two did, I believe, so I won't belabor it here. As far as lessons learned goes, if I had it to do over again, I'd spend less time arguing over design details and trying to get every last essential feature into the prototype, and more time testing and refining the design based on feedback. I've also learned that I need to refine my skills with low-fidelity prototyping and testing. However, this project did give me a good feel for how the user-centered design process really applies to a more classic interface design problem. I'm looking forward to trying out this newfound knowledge on the capstone project course next semester.
Special thanks to my group members, Irina and Chung, for an excellent job. In particular, thanks to Irina for her help in culling design principles from the human factors and psychology research, and thanks to Chung for an absolutely amazing job with putting together the final prototype and presentations.
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Weblog Home Page Design Idea
design, internet
November 05, 2003, 04:51 PM
Mark Pilgrim has an interesting redesign of his own weblog's home page that he posted recently. I'm not sure if I agree with the page as it stands, but it's given me a few ideas for roBlog that maybe I'll try to flesh out and implement when (if) I get a chance. I'm interested in trying out some design solutions for roBlog that get away from the standard "linear news" format and move more towards visualizing it as a personal knowledge management system.
Posted by Andyed on November 05, 2003 at 11:55 PM
Cross-platform DHTML RSS loading at the name link and rendering to a not-very-usable DHTML view. But, if the code comes in handy to play, be my guest.
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Logos
aesthetics, personal
November 04, 2003, 08:05 PM
A couple evenings ago, I put together this design to serve, henceforth, as my personal logo:
The design was inspired partly by Raymond's proposed hacker emblem and partly from some playing around with pennies I did a couple months ago in the MHCI labs, then was refined by the usual iterative process. I'm quite pleased with the result, and so far the other people I've shown it to seem to be as well.
The image makes a good logo for the usual reasons; it's simple and reasonably aesthetically pleasing, it has very few colors so it's cheap to print and display, it looks good at both large and small scales, and thus it's effective in a variety of mediums such as a web image, a t-shirt or coffee mug print, a watermark, etc. But in addition to all this, it has a number of semantic meanings as well.
The meaning becomes more clear when you think of the design as made up of four intersecting gliders. As I said earlier, the concepts behind the glider pattern (simple, effective design) resonate with me, and having the "hacker" theme run through the design is not unattractive either. The intersection of three elements provides a visual metaphor to my own professional persona, which is recently very much an intersection of the hard-nosed, problem-solving engineer, the rigorous, data-oriented scientist, and the creative, holistic designer. The logo also conveys a sense of rotation, cycles, and eternal motion, concepts that I identify strongly with. Finally, the single red dot (the color of passion) provides a subtle break in the otherwise perfect regularity of the design; a visual metaphor for my own philosophy on understanding and accepting the workings of society while still clinging to slight, but true, nonconformity.
The design alone doesn't communicate all this, I realize. But after much thought I decided this isn't such a big problem. After all, it makes for a good conversation starter.
I plan to integrate this logo with these web pages just as soon as I get enough of a breather to devote sufficient time to it.
Email Rob:
A Deep Foundation of Disciplines
design, philosophy, teaching & learning
November 02, 2003, 01:56 PM
Last week, Dan posted about his Graduate Design Seminar class (as is his wont on peaceful a fall evening), specifically covering the nature of arts and the nature of products. I recommend reading them if you haven't already.
While reflecting on the profound ideas plainly put in Dan's point-by-point, notebook-ish style, I started to consider the role of philosophy in education. Dick Buchanan, who by all accounts is a man of amazing intellect and profundity of thought, seems to have crafted this class to give the design graduate students a solid foundation in how their discipline fits into the intellectual frameworks of society.
This got me thinking again about the role of higher education and what distinguishes a university education from a trade school education. Perhaps part of the preparation for becoming a skilled professional involves understanding the philosophical underpinnings of your discipline and how it fits in with the rest of society, both intellectually, historically and culturally; it's not enough to just learn the skills to get by. And if these underpinnings are still poorly understood, perhaps because your discipline is young, then you should at least be aware of the open issues and what the current level of understanding is. Many programs ignore this aspect of education; I was never taught the foundations of computing in this fashion, for instance. Yet perhaps learning these truths before practicing your trade is premature anyway, since you won't have the experience to connect them up with to make them meaningful to you. More thinking is necessary, obviously.
I've been half-trying to avoid reading Dan's posts about Design Seminar recently, although not because they aren't good. Every time I do, I feel like a penniless, hungry child looking in a bakery window; I can see the wondrous pastries and smell their delectable smells, but I'm helplessly tormented by the knowledge that I'll never get a taste. Kerry says I should stay here at CMU an extra semester next fall just to take Design Seminar. I'm tempted, sorely tempted...
Posted by Dan on November 02, 2003 at 07:29 PM
Interestingly, in that same day when he talked about the nature of arts and products, Dick also talked about what distinguishes a trade school from a university, and it was just as you said: a trade school teaches by having you imitate a master craftsman, while a university teaches you principles (and procedures). When you are good enough at those principles (as demonstrated in your thesis paper and project), you are called a "Master" (as in Master of Science).
Another thing, according to Dick, that is different is the mastery of themes: being able to connect one idea in one area to another idea in another area. This is what Seminar is really all about, both as a subject and as a form. He takes disparate disciplines: library science, semiotics, education theory, philosophy, etc. and use them to map out world views that pertain to design.
And yes, I know my blog style is plain. But it's the only way I know how to accurately capture the material I'm learning. Since I post usually on the day or day after I'm actually in class, there's not a lot of time for style or reflection. if I spent more time crafting my entries, I'd probably never do them. Or do much fewer.
Posted by Rob on November 04, 2003 at 11:16 PM
This is one of the reasons I'm so envious of your seminar experience; Dick's approach to learning and philosophy is very much in line with my own beliefs. I would agree that mastery (dare I say "wisdom"?) involves connecting together ideas from several disciplines and seeing the patterns that arise in quite disparate areas of inquiry.
I didn't mean the "plain" comment as a criticism and apologise if it came across as such. It was just meant as an observation; I actually enjoy your style of writing quite a bit, as well as the content itself.
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