For this year’s World Usability Day 2010 I will be giving a talk at the Michigan State University. The annual conference focuses on Mobile Communication this year. Here’s what I will be covering.
The Art of Mobile User Experience Research
Mobile UX research differs from Web based research in many ways, while retaining the basic principles. This talk highlights key aspects of mobile UX research and shows how it fits into the development process, business needs, and product strategy. The talk references specific examples of mobile research on award-winning consumer products.
The conference hosted more than 2300 scientists, behavioral psychologists, designers, and performance artists – all exploring ways computers and humans interact. For many, the trip lasted much longer then expected due to travel disruptions caused by volcanic ash clouds.
As always, attending CHI was a race against time: 100+ sessions in 10 parallel tracks, with dozens of SIGs (Special Interest Groups), exhibitions, demos, showcases, and courses packed in four full days. In addition, plentiful of social events, parties, and meetings were competing for attention. Picking the right sessions and events required careful planning – and luck!
Here are some of the interesting contributions from the conference.
A.J. Brush (Microsoft Research) and Junius Gunaratne (UC Irvine) presented “Newport: Enabling Sharing During Mobile Calls” – a collaborative application for sharing context (location) and content (photos and notes) during mobile phone calls. The system supports using a computer during a call to make it easier to share content from the phone or launch screen sharing, as well as make use of the broadband connection available through the computer. Because sharing is only available during the call, Newport addresses privacy concerns when sharing sensitive information like location. Newport bridges the capabilities of a mobile phone and desktop computer by leveraging their strengths.
Jeff Quinn and Tuan Tran from Sprint Nextel presented “Attractive Phones Don’t Have To Work Better: Independent Effects of Attractiveness, Effectiveness, and Efficiency on Perceived Usability”. In a large-scale usability evaluation with 106 participants, they investigated the interplay between attractiveness, effectiveness, and efficiency to determine whether attractiveness accounts for additional variance in usability ratings beyond that, which is explained by effectiveness and efficiency. They conclude that high attractiveness can compensate for ineffective and inefficient performance, leading people to perceive a phone to be highly usable despite obvious usability problems.
Chris Harrison along with Desney Tan and Dan Morris (all Microsoft Research) presented a very interesting contribution “Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface” for a packed audience. The technology appropriates the human body for acoustic transmission, allowing the skin to be used as an input surface. A wearable, bio-acoustic sensing array built into an armband provides an always available, naturally portable, and on-body finger input system. In an experimental evaluation with users the overall accuracy was as high as 90%. In addition, the system was enhanced with a pico-projector, allowing interactive elements to be rendered on the skin. Proof-of-concept examples included navigating hierarchical menus and dialing phone numbers using a numeric keypad on a user’s palm.
Yang Li and colleagues (University of Washington) introduced “FrameWire: A Tool for Automatically Extracting Interaction Logic from Paper Prototyping Tests”. FrameWire is a computer vision-based system that automatically extracts interaction flows from the video recording. The video recording can be an outcome of a paper prototype walkthrough or a user test with paper prototypes. The tool offers a structural view of the video recording that allows a designer or a stakeholder to easily distill and understand the design concept and user interaction behaviors. In addition, it can automatically generate an interactive HTML-based prototype that can be used for further evaluation or development.
Paul Hoover and colleagues from Microsoft presented “Augmented Reality, Surface Style” during the alt.chi session “Monsters Attack!” (alt.chi is a track for unusual, challenging, experimental, and thought-provoking work). In line with the session title, what Paul presented was – a monster. More specifically, a bent fiber optic grid enclosed in a toy monster that is used on Microsoft Surface. Because the Surface uses light for interaction, the user can interact with it through the eye of the monster represented by the fiber optic bundle.
In a related approach, Pat Baudisch and team (Hasso Plattner Institute) presented “Lumino: Tangible Blocks for Tabletop Computers Based on Glass Fiber Bundles”. Lumino is a system of building blocks that can be used to construct a three-dimensional structure on top of a diffuse illumination based tabletop computer. They present several examples, one of which is the Lumino construction kit that allows users to put together simple block constructions. The system automatically logs construction activities, checks the soundness of the hypothetical building, and informs the user about potential flaws and construction alternatives.
Florian Block and colleagues from the Lancaster University demonstrated “Touch-Display Keyboards: Transforming Keyboards into Interactive Surfaces”. The Touch-Display Keyboard (TDK) combines the physical-ergonomic qualities of the conventional keyboard with dynamic display and touch-sensing embedded in each key. The TDK effectively transforms the keyboard into an interactive surface that is seamlessly integrated with the interaction space of GUIs, extending graphical output, mouse interaction and three-state input to the keyboard.
Chris Harrison and Scott Hudson (Carnegie Mellon University) presented “Minput: Enabling Interaction on Small Mobile Devices with High-Precision, Low-Cost, Multipoint Optical Tracking”. Minput is a sensing and input method that enables intuitive and accurate interaction on very small devices – ones too small for practical touch screen use and with limited space to accommodate physical buttons. The entire device can be used as an input mechanism, instead of the screen, avoiding occlusion by fingers. The Minput prototype recognizes gestures such as flicking, twisting and motion. Example applications include hierarchical navigation interfaces (e.g. iPod-like audio player), scrolling and zooming (e.g. photo gallery or web browser), and conventional WIMP-like interfaces (e.g. mouse movements).
I attended User Research Friday 2010 a few weeks ago. It’s a casual half-day gathering of Bay Area user research experts who get together for advanced discussion, beverages, relaxed learning, and heavy socializing. Every other year, Nate Bolt from Bolt|Peters research firm lines up a handful of great local researchers to present their views on user research. In 2008, I presented “What Mobile Research Accomplishes in 15 Minutes”, but this time I was listening in the audience.
Brynn Evans was up first. She talked about social interaction design – “Interpreting human interactions as though they originated from a bunch of crazy space monkeys”. One of the cool things she showed was “Bodystorming” – play-acting in order to illustrate the many moving parts and influential factors of a social system. Brynn’s approach made me think about the importance of out-of-the-box thinking and innovating on research methods. More often than not, we’re compelled to stay within our comfort zone by relying on true and tested research approaches.
Rob Aseron, who I worked with while at Yahoo! and who is now heading up user research at Zynga (the company behind MafiaWars, FarmVille, and other ridiculously addictive social networking games), talked about creativity and design. More interestingly, he talked about creativity and design in lieu of clickability of web links. While it may sound strange to discuss creativity based on whether the blue link on a website is underlined or not (really, how much creativity does this require?), Rob’s talk pointed out an important fact: The role of user research is to understand the question precisely and come up with a creative approach to answer it in order to support the creativity of the designs. But sometimes, it’s just telling the product managers that links need to be underlined .
Then it was time for some real tangible stuff! Ed Langstroth of Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory talked about the role of user research in automotive industry. He contrasted the approaches of a German company (“Bob the Builder”) to his previous employer, Japanese Nissan (“Curious George”). Essentially, the approach of Bob the Builder is to first create the car based on internal knowledge – and then monitor, measure, and ask consumers how they like it. Curious George, on the other hand, spends a lot of time conducting upfront research before eventually building the car. Both approaches can be very costly in an industry with a product cycle time of 5 years. This really puts into perspective user research within software services industry!
Last but not least was Michal Migurski of Stamen who stood up in front of a room full of folks interested in user research and proclaimed “I’m here because Stamen Design doesn’t do user research, and I hope I can explain why we’ve made that choice in our work and continue to stand by it.” He went on to argue that user research is limiting and controlling and that it strives for predictable outcomes. The examples that he showed ranged from Google Buzz (“a total, unmitigated cluster f#$k”), Flickr, QR codes, Twitter visualizations, etc. The underlying message is that there’s no need for user research, if you have a caring, trusting relationship between the service and its users. I would argue that tapping into the relationships with consumers is user research, just at a different level.
Welcome to the second workshop on Mobile Internet User Experience in Amsterdam on September 2, 2008! This workshop is held in conjunction with the 10th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, MobileHCI 2008.
Internet access on mobile devices changes the way the Internet is used. In addition to accessing ordinary Internet content with mobile devices, mobilizing the Internet enables totally new kinds of Internet content and services. This workshop will discuss the mobile Internet from the end user perspective, identifying factors and solutions that would make Internet usage on a mobile device an enjoyable experience.
DIS2008, the ACM conference on “Designing Interactive Systems”, started today at the very south tip of Africa. It is a venue for serious reflection on the practice of designing interactive systems, exploring the aesthetic, social and cultural dimensions of new technologies. It is also the first DIS conference to be held outside the USA or Europe, and as such aims to challenge participants to reflect on designing interactive systems for users outside these established markets. This is especially relevant as these markets are fast becoming more lucrative and influential.
Co-located with the DIS conference is the “Design Indaba Expo“, the biggest design show in Africa.
with the end of this year’s mobilehci 2007 in singapore, the netherlands team officially took over the chairmanship for the next year’s 2008 edition of the mobilehci conference in amsterdam. as a co-chair for industrial case studies, i am pleased to invite researchers from the industry to start thinking about submitting their high-quality work to the industrial case studies track. the deadline for the submissions is 3 march 2008.
The MobileHCI conference series provides a forum for academics and practitioners to discuss the challenges, potential solutions and innovations towards effective interaction with mobile systems and services. The 2007 edition is held in Singapore, moving out of Europe for the first time in the conference history.
Along with the technical program, the conference features a great number of interesting workshops with topics such as users’ attachment, in-situ evaluation, mobile guides, mobile user experience, speech and audio, etc.
Most workshops still accept contributions, please check with the workshop organizers.
Now that the most important HCI conference is over, the question remains open about this year’s conference quality. Given that this was the 25th anniversary, the conference was disappointing. Over the last years I always managed to see a ‘wow’ presentation at CHI. Last year it was Adrian Cheok’s chickens: human-poultry interaction was really worth the overpriced fee. Not so this year. Unless one counts the Flickr slideshow that replaced the anniversary’s closing plenary speech as the ‘wow’ presentation.
Still, the conference did feature some highlights:
Gary Marsden‘s presentation on doing HCI in the developing world of South Africa, for which he received the social impact award. And justifiably so, since he and his students are doing a great job that gets little international recognition.
The user interface description language shootout, starring XUL (Mozilla) vs. XAML (Vertigo, a Microsoft affiliated company). The “celebrity deathmatch” proved to be interesting and entertaining, providing insights into possibilities and applications of XML based description languages for user interfaces.
Ben Shneiderman as Leonardo da Vinci (image) introducing the next year’s CHI2008 in Florence, Italy. Next stop: Europe!
Monday was the first day of the CHI conference, which takes place at the San Jose convention center. The 25th anniversary features 14 parallel tracks with technical program, special interest groups, interactivity, exhibitions and more. Check out the photos on Flickr.
For this year’s World Usability Day 2010 I will be giving a talk at the Michigan State University. The annual conference focuses on Mobile Communication this year. Here’s what I will be covering.
I attended 
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