Inventing the Wheel

Often in strategy meetings, someone will say something like: "well, there is no need to reinvent the wheel"And the wheel will not get reinvented.

But the wheel is reinvented all the time, and for good reasons.Consider the wheels in your life: In your car, train, airplain, bikes, rollerblades, elevators, shopping cart, Blackberry, iPod...They all share the 'wheel' attribute - circular objects that spin to afford action.

But the context of use requires innovation and consideration of the object's other properties, such as materials, size, degree of freedom, etc.So reinventing the wheel does make sense sometimes, because you don't want your airline to be equipped with Flintstone’s era tires...

Being There

I am writing this entry while waiting - my son is getting a haircut.

I typically pretend to read the cars magazines they have here while listening to mundane conversations, but today my face is glued to the screen as I type.

This entry was composed on my Blackberry, you see.

So I got to think about 'Experience' vs. 'User experience', an old issue, similar to armchair travelers-bloggers, doers-dreamers?

"I like to watch." Being There, Directed by Hal Ashby.

A Universal Usability Matrix

In over two decades of practicing user interface architecture in one form or another, I sought to infuse some consistency and methods in measuring the success of new user interfaces, compared to those being replaced.

In recent years, standards such as NIST CISU-R (NISTIR 7432) provide much needed guidance in the areas of usability requirements and testing, but so far I find this approach very effective, especially when dealing with large, complex interfaces.

The universal usability matrix that I present here provides a method to estimate the impact of a current user interface on clients and end users, and how a new proposed interface compares. Replacing the typical anecdotal, qualitative assessments that a current UI is 'bad' or 'inefficient' or 'Not user friendly', the matrix affords:

1. Consistent, objective and quantitative evaluation of a current and new UI


2. Identification and prioritization of the most problematic tasks in the current UI from a usability perspective


3. Comparison of the effectiveness of new UI as early as wireframing phase


4. Quantitative support to demonstrate to stakeholders and customers improvement in the new UI, that typically translates to TCO such as reduced staff, reduced training time, higher productivity, etc.

The matrix typically includes 3 sections:

1. UI Load – An inventory of all interface elements the end-user encounters during interaction. Yes - Just count the windows, dialogs, buttons, pull-downs and other object the user sees, including labels. -- These impact the visual load and the cognitive processing effort required to digest the flow. The higher the count, the more complex the interface. When variations in the flow of the same task exist, (typical in a globally deployed software with a single localized/customized UI), count major variations, since UI loads will differ.


2. Task Priority – Based on frequency (Occurrence x repetition) and efficiency, higher ranking tasks are most critical. High priority tasks with a high UI Loads are the most critical


3. Task Impact – add context by reflecting the usability profile weight and the task priority.

An important aspect of the usability matrix is in its ability to provide context to different customers. Especially relevant to UI of enterprise software where very small and very large sites need to be supported, and when the software is deployed globally, and large variations in workflows and definitions exist:

Usability Profiles provide the context for the universal usability matrix. The profiles are used in evaluating the Task Impact score. Each task has an associated ‘cost’ in terms of the time it takes to complete one instance of the task (efficiency), the time it takes to perform the task repeatedly as required to process all students. (Productivity), and the associated usability profile. Profiles have properties and attributes that are most relevant to the project.

There is no limit to the number of profiles used, or to the number of properties associated with the profiles. However, I found it best to limit the number of profiles to those that reflect the most typical clients. The process of developing the matrix is most successful when practical. Too many profiles have diminished returns since typically most attention is focused on the extremes.

Here is a basic, and in my opinion generic and reusable template to develop a task priority score. I use Excel or a Filemaker database to document the actual interfaces:

1.
Property: Occurrence
Attributes: Annually, Monthly, Weekly, Daily
Attribute Weight: 1,2,3,4
Note: The higher the Occurrence, the higher to weight.

2.
Property: Repetition
Attributes: 1 to 10, 11-30, Over 30
Attribute Weight: 1,2,3
Note: Number of times the task is performed during Occurrence period. The higher the repetition, the higher to weight.To isolate Task Frequency use Occurrence X Repetition

3.
Property: Efficiency
Attributes: Less than 1 minute, 1 -2 minutes, 3-5 minutes, 5-10 minutes, 10-15 minutes, Over 15 minutes
Attribute Weight: 1,2,3,4,5,6
Note: Estimated time to perform a single task instance without exceptions. The lower the efficiency, the higher to weight.

4.
Property: Productivity
Attributes: = Efficiency x Repetition x Occurrence

5.
Property: Task Priority Score
Attributes: = Productivity

Finally, I am sure of that someone, somewhere may have developed a similar idea - I would love to know. Otherwise, feel free to use and extend this framework.

The Interface is the Message

I just got a Blackberry Curve yesterday. I've had a chance to play quite a bit with the iPhone and I find that the two devices offer distinctive, different and yet valid approaches to the user interface challenge.

While the Curve does much more than the iPhone and costs less, it does not support direct manipulation and rich data visualizations/transformations that the latter offers.

The user experience of these two devices is thus fundamentally different, and cannot be generically summarized as a form over function issue. Yet, as usual, it ends up being the CONTEXT of use that determines acceptable usability trade offs.

Direct manipulation is most effective when one can concentrate on the device with both hands and visual focus. It is less effective when one is involved is other activities like driving or excerscsing. So if the context of use IS the iPhone, direct manipulation makes sense.

Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message" comes to mind. The iPhone's user interface is the focus on attention, not the actual task that is expected from the device as a phone. This is a contradiction to good ui design that, at least in my mind, needs to be transparent to the user.

Whis entry is not a critiscisom of the iPhone. Realizing we are in an evolving world where a shift is taking place from hardware to software, to Human.

"Me Too!" Data

In his monthly coulmn 'Technically Speaking' (February 2007, American Libraries), Andrew Pace wrote:

“The lines between desktop and intranet, and extranet and internet, continue to blur…will libraries continue to be the hotspot for…finding?”

I hope so too, but it also appears that, to paraphrase Andrew, the lines between library and extranet and intranet continue to blur. As a result, the library may stop being a destination for discovery of particular physical items, as it blends into what is becoming an infinite, homogeneous body of bits (the haystack-sorry for using that again..:-).

Yet, a side effect to the development of search engines is a new situation where information WANTS to be found and the competition over screen real estate and ranking is getting sophisticated and fierce.

This, in my opinion, represents a real danger for making true discovery possible in the future. And here, I think is also the opportunity for the transformation of librarians and library science – guiding the development of search and discovery tools in a way that will make original discovery possible.

First posted on: Thursday, March 08, 2007

Complications When Out Of Context

It was this time in the transatlantic flight: I finished most of the food on the tray, breaking my promise to myself to avoid airline food... The little piece of cheese I actually hate, smiled at me from under the organized mess of plastic containers, carefully refolded napkins (to save space, don't you know...) and food leftovers. The temptation was hard to resist, the promising red glow of Cellophane under which hiding a soft yellow cheese I hoped to like this time!

In front of me set an older genteman whoes face I could not see, and I noriced, through the tiny space between the seats, that he was intensely reviewing his sophisticated looking soft cheese token.

I instantly lost interest in my cheese and focused on him and his cheese, trying to predict next steps. Clearly, I thought, this person does not fly often. Perhaps even, this is his first flight! So to him, everything is new, sophisticated looking and even frightening.

After a little while the man unwrapped the cellophane, but little did he know how complicated life can be: He was now turning between his fingers a round red piece of something. He turned it left, and right, up and down for a few long seconds.

Finally he just took a bit into the wax and immediately put the thing on his tray. I could not see his expression.

OK - So he did not figure out that in odrer to get to the cheese, one is supposed to pull on a string that's embedded in the layer of red wax, peel the wax and undress the hidden treasure - the soft yellow cheese. It is a bit of culinary striptease at 40K high in the sky, and I can not get this instance out of my mind, especially when thinking about interaction models and task design...

User's possible thought process:

1. What is this food? He assumes it IS food: Well...it was part of the meal, no ?!


2. Ask a fellow traveler? - perhaps too embarrassed, shy or mute.


3. Experiment! -- try out -- how bad can it be?! The risk is low.

Perhaps, complex, unfamiliar settings (being on an airplane for the first time + contact with unfamiliar food item) ignite some instinctive over-thinking that tends to lead to unexpected results. This is different then regular exploration, where the user IS in a mode of expecting the unexpected.Or, perhaps the person actually liked eating his cheese with the wax, but upon taking the first bite, decided to stick with his promise not to eat airline food...

Seek and You Shall Find

The faster a user can transition from typing a query into a search field to typing a number in a credit card field, the happier are both user (customer) and business.

Not surprisingly, “Seek and you shall find” has been the catchphrase of successful search engine vendors. This maxim encapsulates the main thrust of successful interaction within the commercial domain: task A (seek) directly leads to outcome B (find). This interaction model is vectorial—its directionality is governed by the wish to achieve the optimal outcome.

Based on the vectorial interaction model, successful commercial search engines eliminate the vast landscape of the Web by providing patrons with a 'relevant' result set, quickly — on the first results screen and often in the top record. The fact that these search engines simultaneously provide an entirely unusable result-set of hundreds of thousands of records further emphasizes the underlying goal of providing the single relevant match for the search.

Given a result-set of workable dimensions (e.g. 25 links), the user would have been likely to explore it, but the paradoxical combination of results presented by the commercial search engines does not offer the user real choices. Rather, it conditions the user to view the action of searching and its outcome as inseparable, providing an instantly gratifying experience packaged as a volitional choice process.

Different from the “Seek and you shall find” vectorial model, is a model of user-collection interaction characterized by the phrase “Seek so you can find”. Here, the relationship between task A (seek) and task B (find) is more reciprocal and dynamic. It suggests a spiral interaction model in which the outcome emerges as a synthesis enabled by the search process. Whereas the vectorial interaction model works well for commercial search engines, I believe that the spiral interaction model is more appropriate for the academic and scholarly domains.

Commercial search engines help users find a needle in a haystack—and this has never been easier. Google’s ability is amazing even to those who understand its underlying technology. Nonetheless, finding a needle in a haystack (vectorial model) is not, in fact, such a big deal when you have the right equipment—a magnet in the case of this analogy. Only the needle attaches to the magnet while the haystack becomes immaterial.

Most research and academic electronic collections, on the other hand, are serving patrons who are interested in finding a piece of hay in the haystack (spiral model). The magnet becomes useless; the key functions of assigning relevancy and ranking of information become dependent on human capacities such as critical evaluation, synthesis, and decision making.


First posed on: Thursday, September 14, 2006