Last year, during a project with Nokia and the EPFL Media and Design Lab, we “mapped” the structures of the “digital world” as represented in mobile devices (cell phones, iphones, ipods, portable consoles). The point was to graphically represent the information architecture so that we could understand how it evolves over time in different devices. Francesco Cara, design strategist at Nokia is talking about it in his LIFT08 presentation.

Anyhow, I was in charge of looking at mobile entertainment devices (such as the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP, among others) because one my research them is about the exploration of portable technologies to understand the implications in terms of mobility and new interactions. The underlying idea, consists in analysing the usage of the technologies to determine opportunities and constraints for design.

This type of quick graph is interesting at it represent different information architecture strategies (menus globally speaking) and to so in a quick glance how Nintendo simplifies interfaces with a limited depth unlike the PSP. This graph was a first step before other more evolved representations mostly focused on cell phones that I can’t show here (non disclosable yet).

Interesting discussion yesterday at the game studio around the holding of the wiimote. Surely one the topic that emerged from the usability tests of wii games we conducted, especially with people who’ve NEVER touch a video game console. The first picture represents the regular wiimote holding scheme whereas the two other shows how a novice user held it when playing different mini-games.

Some of the issues the tests raised: How do we design applications for the B button in the previous cases? What about the 1 and 2? Can we use them in the interaction? Should the A-button be important so that the thumb or the second finger? Is the “plus” button the right one to break scenes? What about the cross? What’s the role of the direction cross with these two ways of holding the wiimote?

Recently working on a project about gestural interfaces and the user experience of the Nintendo Wii, I had my share of discussions about sampling in user experience research and the role of exceptions. Quantitative researchers often drawn nice curves with cute statistical distributions with “means” and quantiles. The type of things I’ve done in my PhD research, measuring X and Z (satisfaction to a certain project, number of messages typed on a phone, number of time someone pressed a certain button, etc.). In the end, you get this sort of graph represented below with anonymized dots which eventually represents how normal humans did certain things.

In general, quant research (the sort I’ve done in the past yes) compares different “conditions”: you have two sorts of interfaces, each group of users test one of the interface and you compare the number of time a certain group did certain things on the interface they had. Say, the number of time they pressed on the button called “OK”. Applying different statistical techniques (like variance analysis is the distribution is normal in the statistical sense, checking variances and if you’re in trouble then you always employ “non-parametric tests”). This is robust no kidding, I don’t criticize that kind of method. However, what I am wondering about is when this sort of methodology is solely applied to design research.

And it leads me to the discussion I had the other day with a colleague about the importance of exceptions, dots which are not close to the means, the weird outliers, peeps who do not fall in the distribution like that weird circle on the upper right-hand corner on the boxplot below:

Depending on your mood, the research methodology and your colleagues’ attitude, there is a wide spectrum of reaction ranging from “WTF, that person screwing my distribution?” to “OK this is an extreme user, he/she is special, let’s have a look more closely”. And then, of course, because you’re a smarty pant and you ALSO have qualitative data you see what the person SAID or DID (or whatever other types of data sources you have). Then the real thing starts: who are the extreme users? how extreme are they? what makes them extreme? are there other data source which attest that they are “exceptions”. And obviously this leads you to the question the norm (the mean).

To some extent, that’s the story of why I slowly moved from quant research to a mix of descriptive quantitative and qualitative research in user experience projects. I started getting interested in the role of exceptions, especially with regards to their importance in design. Why exceptions are important in design? Perhaps because they might show peculiar behavior and routine which can announce futures norms or trends (and then inspire new products, features and services) but also to show that the notion of a “normal user” or “mean user” is difficult to grasp as diversity exist and is important. Surely a very relevant near future laboratory spin.

An interesting example of an extreme user was this deaf guy I saw the other day at the train station, walking and gesticulating in front of his video cell-phone. If you map the use of video-communication on cell-phone you get a very low usage of the feature in general but that guy would be an exception.

Having the Euro soccer cup in Switzerland (and Austria) is interesting as lots of people are cruising around on the streets. Hence, lots of interesting practices or signs of people’s practices occurs. Some excerpts from the last few days:

Paper notes at a street corner to give friends an update about the new whereabouts (it says “We’re at café pessoa, 30 meters ahead in Dassier [street]”:

The hospitality of some places however reach certain limits, as “tents are not umbrella” sign attest from the need to buy an umbrella when it rains instead of staying around:

The inherent contradictions of signs in a city not very well-accustomed to helps its tourists (Geneva):

BUT, a fruitful attempt to help soccer-fans takes the form of a pavement map; nicely employed in the picture below. The elegant map-on-the-ground solution is efficient for people who walk and ride bike, as it gives information in context and also allows congregation around the signs to find the stadium:

And, of course, when it comes to computer-based real-time street information, failure and glitches are never very far:

The presence of other cultures, and their intricate relationships with their host country. In this case it’s Spain and Switzerland: some only put their spanish flag but most of the flag we see are grouped with both a swiss and spanish flag (you can replace Spain with Portugal, Italy, Turkey and France in the sentence before):

Why do I blog this? what a nice context to observe cultural issues and whatever can be related to human behavior regarding mobility and techniques/technologies/organizational solutions for recurring problems.

Spotted in CDG airport yesterday in France, this Nintendo DS and its lovely book-like affordance which make the user taking the same posture as when perusing a book. The dual-display device offers an interesting affordance for book reading. And, researchers have found how such setting is relevant to improve the reading experience: it has indeed been found that users of dual-display ebook readers benefits from local navigation and applicability to multi-document interactions when using two displays.

Ears are an important part of our body and consumer electronics is often adapted to them through various process. But sometimes, the aging of technologies make them fall apart and people need to fix the device they have. When it comes to intimate products such as headphones, people look for easy-and-soft solution so that it’s still adapted to the ears.

Cotton and the mandatory duct-tape can be of good help here as shown by this headset found during a home visit for a field study few days ago. A fix that will not age, gentle anyway. Again an interesting example of people’s creativity in repairing their own gear.

In the last issue of ACM interactions, Richard Seymour has this good piece entitled “Optimistic futurism” in which he articulates an interesting vision of design+foresight.

After discussing how a wave of relevant innovation stopped around the 70s (”what the hell happened to the future”) people realized that the future dystopia represented in pop-culture may happen (although people though it couldn’t possibly happen): “shrinking ozone layers, global warming, airplanes into buildings, rising fuel costs etc.” The good point of the articles comes when Seymour states that “It’s something we all need to see” (visualize the future!) and the role of designers in this, as in this excerpt:

“Designers cannot be, by definition, pessimists. It just doesn’t go with the job. We’re supposed to be defining the future, aren’t we?
(…)
There’s nothing on the planet that can’t be made just that bit better (rather than just that bit different). But before you do it, you need to have an idea of where you want all this to go eventually, a vision of the future, with a set of stepping stones to let you get from the now into the future in an effective and efficient way. “
(…)
that’s what we should be doing: leading the way by visualizing and articulating achievable futures that get us out of this hole.

I’m pretty sure the folks at Apple don’t call themselves optimistic futurists, but that’s exactly what they are. My favorite Steve Jobs one-liner is: “It’s not the consumer’s job to know about the future; that’s my job.” And he’s absolutely right.

Jurassic corporations need to learn from the mammals. The secret of the “next big thing” isn’t lurking inside the consumer’s head, waiting to be liberated by some well-paid focus group. It’s inside the heads of the dreamers, the futurists, the utopians.”

Why do I blog this? some good thoughts here about the design+foresight issue and how both are connected through this notion “optimism”, which correspond to a direction given to the future.

Also, the “beyond-focus-groups” design stance is important as shown by the quote from Steve Jobs; I guess some people may mistake it with a “don’t pay attention to the user” but I don’t think it’s contradictory with having a user-centered approach by any means. It just reinforces the role of designers, who can him/herself base the work on informed opinions/educated guesses about people’s life/motivations/desires/needs through field observation.

Anyone interested in the relationship between technologies and contemporary cities followed the release of Grand Theft Auto IV. Tom Bramwell from Eurogamer recently interviewed Aaron Garbut from Rockstar. The following part sparked my interest:

“We never reproduce real world locations. We take interesting or representative elements and create something new from them. It’s about taking inspiration from real places and producing something that captures the essence of it. We’re trying to take our impression of New York and keep it as that, an impression, not a laboured reproduction. I think that gives it more flavour, more intensity and in an odd way makes it feel more real. I’ve seen it in other games that set out to rebuild a city street by street, not only do compromises get made that favour realism over fun but a lot of the life is lost and all that’s left is a hollow representation of a real place. I’d rather have the right vibe than an accurate roadmap.
(…)
The cities are never built specifically with missions in mind. We always build the cities first and fit the missions and stories into them. There are a few reasons for that. One of the main ones is practical and it’s more pronounced on a new engine. The basic rendering parts of an engine tend to come online a lot sooner. The mission designers need a scripting language, fairly evolved physics and vehicle handling, the weapon systems, AI etc before there is much they can play with. Whereas the artists have 3D software from day one and the game can start rendering that quickly so we can get on with building the city right from the start.

So we’ve always treated the cities like a real place. We build them, we pack them with interesting things and then we place the missions within them at a later date. Obviously once a mission is placed and working we will tweak the area to work better, but essentially the processes are fairly separate. That’s not to say there isn’t a deliberate intention to evoke emotional reaction as you say. It’s just that if there is one it’s happening during the placement and pacing of the missions. I think having this massive environment available first gives a lot of opportunity to play with the missions and find what works best.“

(Excerpt from a GTA IV map)

Why do I blog this I find extremely interesting to see the spatial thinking behind the level design of GTA IV as described here. There are good parallels to draw between the game designers and urbanists as both of them have to build/transform an “environment” where “things will happen”, filled with various sorts of agencies. The approach level designer take, as described by Garbut, is of course different. More specifically the purpose is not make a city efficient but instead about how to engage players in fun and free interactions. That said, I am sure that there are relevant ideas to pick up.

Recently, I’ve been involved in a research project about game controllers, comparing different peripheral (gestural or not). This led me to investigate the evolution of game controller over time, a topic already addressed by others.

For instance, Damien Lopez made this insightful mapping (.pdf) for both consoles and portable systems:

Lopez describes this map as a “a collection of small multiples of game controllers of the main gaming systems from the past 25 years (..,) normalized, and the hands are all approximately the same size as each other, and thus the controllers all to scale“. His point was “to show the progression of controller design throughout the last quarter-century. With the introduction of the Nintendo Entertainment System, no more number pads were used on game controllers from that point on“.

On Sock Master, there is also a tree-based representation that tries to connect all the current console controllers with their predecessors. What is interesting here is the notion of diachronic evolution as well as the connection between different “families”.

Why do I blog this? working on the user experience of game controller for different research projects, this kind of representation are important as they map the existing peripherals as well as show how the possibilities evolved over time. It’s overall interesting to note the relative stability in both portable and console shapes but the increasing complexity of controllers. Although sticks remains stable, the number of buttons increases. It would interesting to see how the user experience evolved over time too and see how it’s related with the interface. I need to dig more these graphics and draw some implications about what that means.

Still gathering stuff about “failed futures” for a project, I ran across this interview of Matt Jones by Adaptive Path peeps that is very insightful. Some excerpts I found relevant for my project:

“RF: You’ve mentioned the danger of “lost futures,” based on the success of a given device. One model becomes wildly popular, and other, more interesting ways of looking at the problem get cast aside… or at least ignored when they could be doing the most good.

MJ: Exactly - the gravity well of the iPhone is going to be hard for anyone developing innovative UIs to escape for the next few years. In hardware, you’re subject to the determinism of sourcing components.

RF: Our friends the cognitive anthropologists have warned us about the implications of subscribing to the wrong cognitive artifacts…

MJ: So everyone for the last 2/3 years has been offered the same touchscreen components more or less by a few suppliers. And we all (more or less) have similar dimensions we can work within in a touch UI.

RF: So thinking in hardware becomes even more constrained?

MJ: To an extent. UIs will not be so diverse in the next few years… inside a BigDeviceCo you’re going to find it hard to justify the investment in the out-there stuff (as always). But there’s still innovation a plenty to come, its just that for the next few years it’ll be all 16:9 touchscreens, I guess. And then… hopefully someone will Wii on their parade and breakthrough with something as different as the iPhone was to the existing crop of smartphones. That’s my hope anyway. And I think it might be in the area of physical/gestural interfaces, matched with ambient/visualisation tech to give us more natural ‘Everyware‘.“

Why do I blog this? I am trying to collect material about what Jones calls “lost future” (in design+foresight), I quite like his stance here, not only about the example discussed (that 16:9 touchscreen device coming from Cupertino) but, rather, its possible consequence: how it eclipses other innovation. There are different consequences of failed futures, some are about traps like in this examples; others are about perpetuation of wrong ideas.

Cell phone booster/repeater solution seems to be a trendy path lately, as shown by this NYT article which presents devices such as femtocell to extend mobile phone service coverage indoors, especially where access would otherwise be limited or unavailable.

What I find interesting here is less the technology than the reasons why these solutions are brought forward (or at least the one mentioned/promoted by companies designing these solutions). Excerpt from the article:

““Because more and more people are not taking landline telephones anymore, adding a signal booster is becoming much more popular,” said Richard Holtz, president of Infinisys in Daytona Beach, Fla. His firm plans the placement of cellular boosters in high-rise buildings, dorms and offices.

“People are expecting perfect coverage everywhere,” Mr. Holtz said, pointing out that being indoors or outdoors can make a big difference in call quality.
(…)
Many things get in the way of wireless signals. Trees and intervening buildings can degrade the signal from the cell tower, while brick walls and wallboard supports can block them completely. Sometimes many obstacles will conspire to create a “dead zone” of dropped and missed calls.
(…)
Of course, boosters require you to shell out your own money to improve a service you are already paying for. Pestering your carrier to upgrade its network is a cheaper — but slower — approach.”

Why do I blog this? I’d be curious to know more about the real expectations of people but the seamless coverage might be a need. In our field studies, it’s generally the case that people ASSUME wireless coverage (or perfect positioning through LBS) but then realize there are some discrepancies. It’s then interesting to see both human and technical solutions to this problem. Technical solutions are boosters and repeaters described in this article whereas human solutions are behavioral adjustments (like sending an SMS instead of calling when you only have 2 bars on the signal reception display).

“Everyday Engineering: What Engineers See” is a nice little booklet by Andrew Burroughs from IDEO. A bit in the same vein of “Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design” by Jane Fulton Suri, is about all these small things and details that I sometimes blog about: observations about the world, the complexity of assemblage, failures, cracks, misuses, etc. All these small details matter as they tell us about “the thought process behind designed things”.

Compared to Thoughtless Acts, that book is more about the way to see the world in the engineer’s eyes but it’s definitely of interest for anyone interested in design or user experience research.

In addition, this collection of pictures is an invitation to be more “inquisitive” about our environments. As I sometimes try to do with picture I annotate here, the point is rather to ask questions concerning why things are like this or that. And as the author says, it allows to become “better observers”:

“Perhaps we discover a point of failure that is completely counterintuitive, as when corrosion aggressively attacks the most protected part of a steel beam. And we can also see success, when things do go as planned and the end product proves to be a match for everything that is thrown at it. Regardless of whether we find inspiration or not, we owe it to ourselves and those around us to become better observers. Our environment is brimming over with information that can help us with our basic ability to navigate a course. The better we are able to refine our actions and our thoughts based on seeing what has gone before, the fewer mistakes we will make“

An interesting sidebar from an old issue of game developer (november 2007) called “usability research commandment” by Randy Pagulayan (Microsoft Game Studio user reasearch) deal with the relationship between user experience researchers and designers. Some excerpt that I find interesting and relevant beyond the game field:

“Be flexible, it is our job to try an account for as many sources of bias and influence when we run usability tests and collect data, but sometimes the ideal is simply not practical.
(…)
Users have opinions, but designers make the call. During your research and testing, users will always have opinions on things they do or don’t like. Your job isn’t to adhere to user whims - your job is to identify areas where user behavior is not consistent with the design’s vision. What you do from there will be context dependent.
(…)
Most developers aren’t interested in the classic “it depends” answer to something [very academic]. They also aren’t interested in inferential statistics, hypothesis testing, or the number of users you need for a valid test. When asked to do something or answer a question, do your research and testing, and give it your best shot. Don’t be afraid to have an informed opinion, even if your research wasn’t suitable for a scientific peer-reviewed journal.“

Why do I blog this? All of this rings a bell with my current practice. There’s even more to be quoted here but it’s certainly that last bit which caught my attention. Working with designers for a while, I certainly shared that sort of feeling about what sort of material I needed to bring to the table to help them. However, it does not mean that the result should be overstated. As Pagulayan says, “What you do from there will be context dependent”. Also see how Jan says about this notion of informed opinion and the risk of overstating:

“So why should anyone give your research the time of day? How to build credibility? For starters recognise and communicate the limits of (mostly qualitative) design research. We start out with opinions, and all things by the end of study we move onto having informed opinions or on rare occasions very informed opinions. Overstating the value of the research makes you a bullshitter.“

The need to put a “bell” arrow sticker to indicate the button position.

SK8 OBJECT 1.5 is a very interesting urban artifact designed by Melanie Iten and Gon Zifroni, commissioned by the city of Geneva. It’s actually a mix of a bench and a skateboard bank:

Why do I blog this? simply because I find that kind of project interesting and curious. Readers here know my interest in skateboarding practices and how I see skateboarders as an interesting target group to foresee the future of urban behavior. In this case, what I find relevant is the fact that it’s not the skaters who are innovative but urban designers. Beyond the shape and the affordance of the object that I like, the implications are very interesting here in the sense that the object can be used by different populations (BMX+rollers+skaters AND regular pedestrians). Of course, it can be employed by these different population at the same time, showing the urban tensions of urban furnitures.

I also find intriguing how it looks like a mix between a skatepark artefact and something more… urban, less artificial like the assumption that if you build a skatepark, people will go there.