Browsing the previous content of Vodafone’s receiver, I ran across this old article by Adam Greenfield about persona that struck me as relevant for current discussions about the role of persona/use cases in design (in the context of video game design).

The main point of the article is that use cases, designed to capture the important aspects of various users’ interaction with an innovation are often “cooked and artificial with no realistic appreciation of people’s complex desires and contexts. This is often true and spectacular. if you ever participated in a discussion of personas, you’ve certainly noticed how sterile and utilitarian use case are described.

Some excerpts I found relevant:

“When considering the social practices around any new technology, the uses foreseen by designers, manufacturers and retailers - and, inevitably, featured in the advertising and marketing campaigns around these technologies - are so much less interesting than what people actually wind up doing with them. (…) I call the gaps between the assumptions and the reality “fault lines”: places where emergent patterns of use expose incorrect assumptions on the part of the designers, imperfect models of the target audience on the part of marketers, and social realities that might otherwise have remained latent.
(…)
there is good business sense in attending carefully to these fault lines, for along such lines is where the truly useful products and services wait to be born.
(…)
A basic problem with use cases, and the entire product development mindset in which they are embedded, is that they generally fail to anticipate the larger social context inside which all technology exists.
“

Why do I blog this? What is interesting here is that Adam is not suggesting to scenarios and use cases but simply to make them more realistic and human. Very often, the use case are so neutral and instrumental that they fail to capture the complexity of people’s ambivalent needs and desires. And of course, design needs to take this into account so that the innovation “become part of the everyday pattern of use for the majority of users”.

It would be relevant to understand why the situation if often like this, why use cases are sometimes futile and utilitarian, why people avoid to consider weird situations like the one described by Adam: “in the US, Cingular Wireless offers a service called “Escape-a-Date,” which provides its subscribers an emergency exit from bad dates“. Is it because it’s politically incorrect or worse is this because of wrong assumptions about what uses could be?

The problem with tools such as personas and use cases is less about the process itself, and rather about the type of behavior promoted (or forgotten) in them. Also read what Steve Portigal wrote about personas and how they patronize users.

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?

“one of the diseases of this age is the multiplicity of books; they doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought forth into the world“

Barnaby Rich (1580-1617), writing in 1613.

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.

In the CatchBob! project, the location-based game I used for my PhD research, players often reported the encounter with other persons puzzled by the presence of running people with TabletPCs. The general reaction of passers-by seemed to range between ignoring the game to asking players about how to participate in trials. However, the physical environment is an overlap of lots of activities carried out by different groups and individuals, which can be conflicting. In one trial, two players tried to visit one of the campus library and the janitor forbid them to enter the building carrying out the game TabletPCs. This kind of phenomenon unfortunately undermines the engagement of players in the game, turning the experience into something less fun to achieve.

This problem has been investigated by researchers, as shown by this warning quote from one of the deliverable from the European iPerg project entitled “Designing Pervasive Games“:

“Pervasive games introduce an important problem: when a game is expanded, the bystanders do not always have the means to distinguish game events from the non-game events. However, regardless of whether they know or don’t know about the game, they perhaps should have a choice pertaining the mode of attendance, i.e., they should be given chance to play, or ignore the game and appreciate it as an art artefact, or view it as a morastatement. Otherwise, the game is can lead to ethical and practical problems.
(…)
Whether unaware or aware of an ongoing game, bystanders have no intention or opportunity to participate in it or at least no opportunity to do so. Here, we probably find the most challenging effects of social expansion. Socially unexpanded games are typically completely insulated from bystanders: they are not affected by the game (even if aware of it) and they have no influence over the game.“

Why do i blog this? The presence of bystanders in some pervasive games or ARG is interesting as it shows how the notion of “user” in ubiquitous computing is flawed. Unlike face-to-face (so to say) interactions with a desktop computer, ubicomp/pervasive computing/internet of things can lead to situations where people experience non-intentional participation in services/events they did not want to be engaged in.

If pervasive games can take this into account and not affect people’ life, other ubicomp applications can be less careful about it. What am I thinking about? perhaps applications which tracks individuals and propose them services without any consent form the user (to be tracked or to receive services s/he does not want to receive).

Random street encounter tonight in Geneva:

A manual for a flat-screen LCD television, obviously tossed out in a trash. Made me think about the value of manuals from technological devices. It can also be a manual on one the 3 languages (+english) of Switzerland. We have often get 3 of 4 manuals for each technological good that we buy.

The other day, looking at toys in a kid store, I ran across this robotic horse and my attention was instantly attracted by the missing left ear:

Why do I blog this? My interest towards the user experience of broken artifacts. This poor robotic pet has lost an important body part. But important for whom? Obviously it would not really change the robot itself (I don’t think there was any noise sensor in there) but what does that mean for the robot “user” (I put it into brackets because it’s difficult to define a stereotypical “user”). It made me think of the uncanny valley (as defined in Wikipedia: the emotional response of humans to robots and other non-human entities). How uncanny is uncanny? Would it repel kids? Would they find it curious? What would be the discourse around this?

Is it possible to take advantage of defunct parts of artifacts? Can design take this into account? I was wondering if there could be a sort of long-term design perspective in which you create objects with intended malfunctions (to foster specific user behavior).

[Last year, I wrote a paper for a workshop at a human-computer interaction conference about the user experience of video games, actually it briefly presents the work I am doing with game companies. The paper was not accepted and I thought it would be pertinent to leave it online anyway]

Introduction
Video game companies have now integrated the need to deploy user-centered design and evaluation methods to enhance players experiences. This has led them to hire cognitive psychology researchers, human-computer interface specialists, develop in-house usability labs or subcontract tests and research to companies or academic labs. Although, very often, methods has been directly translated form classic HCI and usability, this game experience analysis started to gain weights through publications. This situation acknowledges the importance of setting a proper method for user-centered game design, as opposed to the one applied for “productivity applications” or web services. The Microsoft Game User Research Group for example has been very productive on that line of research (see for example [5]) with detailed methods such as usability tests, Rapid Iterative Test and Evaluation [4] or consumer playtests [1]. Usability test is definitely the most common method currently given its relevance to identify interfaces flaws as well as factors that lower the fun to play through behavioral analysis.

That said, most of the methods deployed by the industry seem to rely heavily on quantitative and experimental paradigms inherited from the cognitive sciences tradition in human-computer interaction (see [2]). Studies are often conducted in corporate laboratory settings in which myriads of players come visit and spend hours playing new products. Survey, ratings, logfile analysis, brief interviews (and sometimes experimental studies) are employed to apprehend users’ experiences and implications for game or level designers are fed back into game development processes.

While these approaches proves to be fruitful (as reported by the aforementioned papers which describe some case studies), this situation only accounts for a limited portion of what HCI and user-centered design could bring to table in terms of game user research. Too often, the “almost-clinical” laboratory usability test is deployed without any further thoughts regarding how players might experience the product “in the wild”. For example, this kind of studies does not take into account how the activity of gaming is organized, and how the physical and social context can be important to support playful activities.

What we propose is to step back for a while and consider a complementary approach to gain a more holistic view of how a game product is experienced. To do so, we will describe two examples from our research carried out in partnership with a game studio.

Examples from field studies

Our first example depicted on Figure 1 shows the console of an informant: a Nintendo DS with a post-it that says “Flea market on Saturday” and an exclamation mark. The player of “Animal Crossing” indeed left this as a reminder that two days ahead, there would be a flea market in the digital environment. This is important in the context of that game because it will allow him to sell digital items to non-playable characters in the game.

This post-it is only an example among numerous uses of external resources to complement or help the gameplay. Player-created maps of digital environments xeroxed and exchanged in schools in the nineties is another example of such behavior. Magazines, books and digital environment maps are also prominent examples of that phenomenon, which eventually leads to business opportunities. Some video game editors indeed start publishing material (books, maps, cards) and try to connect it to the game design (by allowing secret game challenges through elements disseminated in comics for example).

Figure 2 shows another example that highlights the social character of play. This group of Japanese kids is participating the game experience, although there is only one child holding a portable console. The picture represented here is only one example of collective play along many that we encountered, both in mobile of fixed settings. They indicate that playing a video-game is much more than holding an input controller since participants (rather than “The Player”) have different roles ranging from giving advices, scanning the digital environment to find cues, discussing previous encounters with NPCs or controlling the game character.

Another intriguing results from a study about Animal Crossing on the Nintendo DS has revealed that some players share the game and the portable console with others. An adult described how he played with his kid asynchronously: he hides messages and objects in certain places and his son locates them, displace them and eventually hide others. The result of this is the creation of a circular form of game-play that emerged from the players’ shared practice of a single console.

Conclusion

Although this looks very basic and obvious, these three examples correspond to two ways to frame cognition and problem solving: “Distributed Cognition” [3] and “Situated Action” [6]. While the former stresses that cognition is distributed the objects, individuals, and tools in our environment, Situated Action emphasizes the interrelationship between problem solving and its context of performance, mostly social. The important lesson here is that problem solving, such as interacting with a video-game is not confined to the individual but is both influenced and permitted by external factors such as other partners (playing or not as we have seen) or artifacts such as paper, pens, post-its, guidebooks, etc. Whereas usability testing relates to more individual model of cognition, Situated Action or Distributed Cognition imply that exploring and describing the context of play is of crux importance to fully grasp the user experience of games. Employing ethnographic methodologies, as proposed by these two Cognitive Sciences frameworks, can fulfill such goal by focusing on a qualitative examination of human behavior. It is however important to highlight the fact that investigating how, where and with whom people play is not meant to replace more conventional test. Rather, one can see this as a complement to understand phenomenon such as the discontinuity of gaming or the use of external resources while playing.

One of the reasons why this approach can be valuable is that results drawn from ethnographic research of gaming can be relevant to find unarticulated opportunities. For example, by explicitly requiring the use of external resource or the possibility to have challenges designed for multiple players as shown in the Animal Crossing example we described.

In the end, what this article stressed is that playing video-games is a broad experience which can be influenced by lots of factors that could be documented. And this material is worthwhile to design a more holistic vision of a product.

References

[1] Davis, J., Steury, K., & Pagulayan, R. A survey method for assessing perceptions of a game: The consumer playtest in game design. Game Studies: the International Journal of Computer Game Research, 5(1) (2005).
[2] Fulton, B. (2002). Beyond Psychological Theory: Getting Data that Improve Games. Game Developer’s Conference 2002 Proceedings, San Jose CA, March 2002. Available at: http://www.gamasutra.com/gdc2002/features/fulton/fulton_01.htm
[3] Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild, MIT Press.
[4] Medlock, M. C., Wixon, D., Terrano, M., Romero, R., Fulton, B. (2002). Using the RITE Method to improve products: a definition and a case study. Usability Professionals Association, Orlando FL July (2002). Available at: http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/c/c/5cc406a0-0f87-4b94-bf80-dbc707db4fe1/mgsut_MWTRF02.doc.doc
[5] Pagulayan, R. J., Keeker, K., Wixon, D., Romero, R., & Fuller, T. User-centered design in games. In J. Jacko and A. Sears (Eds.), Handbook for Human-Computer Interaction in Interactive Systems, pp.883-906. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (2002).
[6] Suchman, L.A. (1987). Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge Press.

[Now it’s also interesting to add a short note about WHY the paper has not been accepted The first reviewer was unhappy by the fact that many ethnographies of game-playing have been published. Although this is entirely true in academia, it’s definitely not the case in the industry (where ethnography is seldom employed in playtests). And my mistake may have been that I frame the paper in an game industry perspective, using the literature about gaming usability. The second reviewer wanted a more extensive description of a field study and less a scratch-the-surface approach that I adopted. My problem of course is that it’s always difficult to describe results more deeply because most of the data are confidential… This is why I stayed at a general level]

(via)Read in Information Week:

“At an 11-store chain of Papa John’s restaurants in north Alabama, location data is being pushed directly to customers. Using an online-tracking system developed by startup TrackMyPizza, customers can watch online as their deliveries move street by street toward their doors. Drivers carry GPS-enabled handsets that feed location data to a TrackMyPizza server. There, the data is coupled with the customer’s phone number, providing location updates every 15 seconds.
(…)
Sound like technology overkill, just to know your pizza hasn’t gone astray? Rival Domino’s thinks consumers want more such information about their orders, and it’s doing a national rollout of a Web system that shows buyers when their pizzas have been prepared, cooked, then sent out the door. But it doesn’t offer location once the pizza leaves the store.
(…)
At Papa John’s, pizza tracking is delivering business benefits in its first two months by getting more people ordering online–a 100% jump in online ordering since the rollout, says Tom Van Landingham, the franchise operating partner. Online orders save phone-answering time, and Web customers spend about $2 more per order, since they can see the whole menu. About 18% of all delivery customers in the last 60 days have gone on the Web site to track their pizza. Van Landingham expects to begin using the tracking system to improve productivity behind the scenes, by plotting more efficient delivery routes, for instance. The service is only 2 months old, so it still needs to prove it’s more than a novelty. But the chain proved it can be done.“

Why do I blog this? The perspective of having people at home riveted to their computers, following the movement of their pizza mapped digitally makes me giggle. It looks like a weird version of Pacman where you don’t have any control on your little character. Perhaps there is something cultural that I am missing or maybe it’s the novelty who made people following their pizza on-line.

So, at first glance, this looks awkward and I am really curious to see if there are some user experience researcher already doing work on this kind of service. Beyond people’s motivation to track an artifact that may be in their stomach one hour later, it would be interesting to understand more what are the expectations towards the pizza’s location, the sort of happenstance people fear about this or even the reactions they would have if the pizza wandered around instead of taking a straight line to the consumer’s house. To some extent, this is a PERFECT tool to conduct psychological experiments!

Read the english translation of an interesting article about Experientia from “The Marker. The description of their design work process, by Jan-Christoph Zoels is interesting:

““We spend a lot of time thinking about future trends, about the enjoyment of the user, about his current AND future needs, about the obstacles to usability and how design can eliminate those. Usually, designers focus on their process of creation. We get out inspiration from the issues the end-user faces.”

We produce a prototype relatively quickly, to allow us to test and assess ideas, and to check on potential profitability. We’re very fast and interactive. This is unique in this market.”

Usually, the process of design starts with a thousand ideas drained and ends with the one product on the market. R&D departments or academia narrow down the one thousand ideas into a hundred business opportunities. Traditionally, they also eventually reduce them to five that then get developed and tested before one is put on the market. We believe that if you can prototype these ideas quickly and cheaply and test them with potential consumers, it will be much easier to make a decision on how to best move forward. Our added value is that we offer 60%-80% certainty that the final product will indeed sell, because it is already based on experience with the consumers.”“

The articles goes on with examples of their current projects (and insights they rely on for their projects in mobile services for instance).
Why do I blog this? pure curiosity towards others’ process.

In “Why Toys Shouldn’t Work “Like Magic”: Children’s Technology and the Values of Construction and Control “, Mark Gross and Michael Eisenberg describes the tension between “ease of use” and user empowerment” that is at stake in kids artifact design. Starting from an interesting quote from physicist and science writer
Jeremy Bernstein, they how the design of toys (and the incorporation of technology in objects) raises the same set of issue. Here’s the quote from Bernstein that I quite like:

“Most of us, myself included, are increasingly surrounded by objects that we use daily but whose workings are a total mystery to us. This thought struck me forcibly about a year ago. One day, for reasons I can no longer reconstruct, I was looking around my apartment when it suddenly occurred to me that it was full of objects I did not understand. A brief catalogue included my color television set, a battery-operated alarm watch, an electronic chess-playing machine, and a curious fountain pen that tells the time. Here I am, I thought, a scientist surrounded by domestic artifacts whose workings I don’t understand.

The whole discussion, exemplified by toy project is about how technology seems like magic when we do not understand how it works. The authors then argue for intelligibility of use.

Why do I blog this? this discussion is quite common in design as it deals with issues such as transparency and glass/black box model of technologies.

Mark D. Gross, Michael Eisenberg, “Why Toys Shouldn’t Work “Like Magic”: Children’s Technology and the Values of Construction and Control,” digitel, pp. 25-32, The First IEEE International Workshop on Digital Game and Intelligent Toy Enhanced Learning (DIGITEL’07), 2007

In a tiny street of Bern, Switzerland, I stumbled across that machine yesterday:

Why do I blog this? As it says in german, it’s a “weather station” with time, temperature, pression, etc. Beyond the interface that I find amazingly retro-like, I find intriguing to have this sort of device on the street. It’s actually an example of an ubiquitous computing device (so to say) that would make explicit invisible/implicit phenomena (such as temperature) to city dwellers. That machine is actually translating information about the state of the world to passers-by.

Of course, weather station comes from a long tradition (especially in Switzerland), with analog devices such as thermometers or manometers. Perhaps the oldest analog device would be the weathervane. I was thinking about this a sort of metaphor of information-pull device. Which is obviously opposed to information-push device (to which the ultimate stereotype would be the swiss cuckoo-clock as Frederic Kaplan stated in a talk I attended last week).

It’s only two metaphors for how information can flow from source to “users”: (a) Information Pull, where a user takes (or is given) the initiative to get it, (b) Information Push, where a supplier takes (or is given) the initiative to deliver it. It might be a bit limitative, what are the options in between? What can we learn from weathervane or cuckoo clock behavior? Is there any manual about designing cuckoo clock or weathervane?

Some random facts about how ebooks might be relevant for the Nintendo DS:

According to this press release:

“Darren Reid, author of the best selling Fantasy/Science Fictionfusion novel The Lord of Darkness and Shadow: The Chronicles of the Shadow Book One, today announces the release of a free ebooklibrary for Nintendo Wii, DS and Sony PS3. The free ebook librarycontains a collection of short stories, novels and novellas whichhave been optimized for use with the browsers in the Nintendo Wii and DS. “

An Francis Bonnin. It also seems that a french company is heading into that direction.

Notes from the person who described it:

“Actually reading the comic on my DS was a pleasent experience. With all of the display options, I had little-to-no trouble finding one that suited me. Everything worked as advertised, and I was enjoying an issue of The Books of Magic on my DS in no time. As expected, there’s a loss in “the experience,” due to the 256×192 resolution. Using anything that wasn’t the Dual Screen mode did not show enough of the page for me. Despite the limited screen space, text was legible, and the images appeared just as nicely as on the original pages.“

Further away, Toshiba released an interesting DS-like e-book, using the same affordance:

Why do I blog this? gathering some thoughts about the topic for a client project (not really a research project). As shown in this blogpost, some projects about using the DS as a way to convey textual content are starting off.

Some limits to have ebooks on the Nintendo DS:
- how to get the content: since Nintendo is less an less happy with homebrew developments/flash cards, what should be the best medium to convey texts? cartridges? download through the Internets/wifi?
- screen size and resolution are peculiar, what sort of content would be appropriate?
- the DS has incredible wifi capabilities (mostly in terms of practices and how people gather to play together), what would that mean for ebook applications? There might be great opportunities to design innovative applications based on ebook reading/educational applications.
- Same with annotation capabilities with the pen
- …

The last step of a neverending story (see previous episode here and when it all started). The tagline for this would be “how to kill a an unofficial route, a path that is formed in space by people making their own shortcuts“

July 2006:

February 2007:

January 2008:

(the last picture shows the sign that say “please take care of the lawn, don’t cross it please”)

Why do I blog this? this is one of the most interesting aspect of urban life, how people’s intents materialize (’desire lines’ as one of the comment on my Flickr picture says) and how this is prevented by others forces. In this case, it’s “to protect the lawn”, which is a quite intriguing reason.

In addition, other things to think about: what’s more efficient? the barriers or the warning sign? why isn’t there any other elephant path starting on the other side (where there is no sign)? is it because you just get out of the building and it’s acceptable to take a longer path?

What does handheld electronic game such as Parker Brother’s Split Second can teach us?

The curious box/enclosure? the super straight select-start-4-arrows buttons? the rockin’ analogic screen? the okay-for left-handed and okay for right-handed design? the symmetry of the system with sound on one part and display on the other?

Maybe it’s the whole experience or even the expectations back in the days, when playing with very near 3×15 red matrix was like being immersed in Tron. What impresses me now is the “one-device = one game/purpose” equation. The interface was so rough and basic that you could only play one sort of game. It was even crazier with Nintendo handheld a la Donkey Kong since part of the level design was DRAWN and PRINTED on the screen. Would there still be devices like this? Or only converged phones?

Very curiously, this sort of electronic games have always received a very low interest from both thinkers and academics. In the book “Electronic Plastic (see also here), the authors of that nice compendium state how “the recourse to supposedly primitive games leads us back to the creative source of the contemporary entertainment revolution” and that these game provide as much fun as recent Sony or Nintendo platforms.