But the exciting new technology comes with its own set of problems. One annoyance of the touch interaction is the constant grease that accumulates on the screen as the result of our fingers. Here is the difference after one evening of iPad use.

The fact that fingerprints tell a UI story is interesting, but may have negative impact on the security – for example, Android’s graphical password system, which requires that a set pattern be swiped in order to access the phone, is susceptible to hacking. Fingerprints residue may also raise potential health issues, as the germs can be transfered by sharing the device.

There is no simple solution to the problem. At least it’s good news for the microfiber cloth industry as they increase their sales of “iPad cleaning kits“! Are we going to see “cloth charms” next?

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.

Books:

• Joanna Lumsden (2008). Handbook of Research on User Interface Design and Evaluation for Mobile Technology.
• Matt Jones and Gary Marsden (2006). Mobile Interaction Design.
• Barbara Ballard (2007). Designing the Mobile User Experience.
• Dan Saffer (2008). Designing Gestural Interfaces: Touchscreens and Interactive Devices.

Magazines:

• Wired
• T3
• Interactions

Conferences:

• MobileHCI
• UPA
• SxSW Interactive
• CHI

LinkedIn groups:

• Mobile Phone Design
• Mobile User Experience
• Mobile User Experience Professionals
• Mobilists (Innovators in mobile industry)

Other resources:

• UXmatters
• Kicker Studio blog

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).

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.

1. Addressing customers’ real goals,
2. Developing a coherent personality, and
3. Engaging a mix of senses

To get started with Emotional Experience Design, Forrester suggests – among other things -investing in ethnographic research, extend personas to encapsulate higher-order needs, and gathering emotional feedback during evaluation and testing.

While this sounds reasonable, in reality most companies have not completed the groundwork needed to focus on emotional experiences. According to Forrester’s own Website Review Test, only 3% of the 1300 evaluated sites have passed – suggesting that the firms need to focus on providing good functional experiences first. In that respect, creating emotional experiences is like putting a skin on the body.

• In 2000 the developing countries accounted for around one-quarter of the world’s 700m or so mobile phones; by the beginning of 2009 their share had grown to three-quarters of a total which by then had risen to over 4 billion
• China is the world’s largest market for mobile telephony, with over 700m subscribers; India is adding the biggest number each month 15.6m in March 2009 alone; and Africa is the region with the fastest rate of subscriber growth
• A World Bank study showed that an increase of ten percentage points in mobile-phone adoption in a developing country increased growth in GDP per person by 0.8 percentage points
• In the developing countries new phone-based services, which go beyond voice calls and basic text messages, are becoming feasible because mobile phones are relatively widely available – data services such as mobile-phone-based agricultural advice, health care and money transfer could provide enormous economic and developmental benefits; these text-based services, though they fall short of full internet access, have the potential to unlock a range of social and economic benefits to users of even the most basic mobile phones
• Mobile broadband will become a global phenomenon – it will be the dominant form of broadband, surpassing fixed broadband in 2011, and with estimated 1.4 billion mobile-broadband subscribers by 2014

BayCHI jobs

The economic downturn has clearly impacted various professions and UX was no exception. It seems, however, that the worst time are behind us – at least judging by the UX jobs in the Valley. BayCHI provides its members with a weekly update of job openings. The chart shows the number of open jobs each week for the last year. After the low of less then 10 open jobs a week in April, we’re currently back at around 40. It looks like the UX job market is recovering – everyone polish their portfolios!

• More customers will be willing to purchase
• More customers will resist doing business with competitors
• More customers will recommend you

They have numbers to support this and convince the skeptics. Further, they point out three key elements of great user experiences:

1. Usefulness: Can users achieve their goals?
2. Usability: How easily can users achieve their goals?
3. Desirability: Does the site appeal to the users’ emotions?

Many companies still focus on the usability evaluation (#2), but ignore evaluating the usefulness of a product or service, let alone the desirability. Which begs the question: How does one evaluate the desirability of a product?