physigrams – modelling the device unplugged

Posted on October 22, 2017 by alan

Physigrams get their own micro-site!

See it now at at physicality.org/physigrams

Appropriate physical design can make the difference between an intuitively obvious device and one that is inscrutable. Physigrams are a way of modelling and analysing the interactive physical characteristics of devices from TV remotes to electric kettles, filling the gap between foam prototypes and code.

Sketches or CAD allow you to model the static physical form of the device, and this can be realised in moulded blue foam, 3D printing or cardboard mock-ups. Prototypes of the internal digital behaviour can be produced using tools such as Adobe Animate, proto.io or atomic or as hand-coded using standard web-design tools. The digital behaviour can also be modelled using industry standard techniques such as UML.

Physigrams allow you to model the ‘device unplugged’ – the pure physical interaction potential of the device: the ways you can interact with buttons, dials and knobs, how you can open, slide or twist movable elements. These physigrams can be attached to models of the digital behaviour to understand how well the physical and digital design compliment one another.

Physigrams were developed some years ago as part of the DEPtH project., a collaboration between product designers at Cardiff School of Art and Design and computer scientists at Lancaster University. Physigrams have been described in various papers over the years. However, with TouchIT ,our book on physicality and design (eventually!) reaching completion and due out next year, it felt that physigrams deserved a home of their own on the web.

The physigram micro-site, part of physicality.org includes descriptions of physical interaction properties, a complete key to the physigram notation, and many examples of physigrams in action from light switches, to complete control panels and novel devices.

Of academic communication: overload, homeostatsis and nostalgia

Posted on April 13, 2016 by alan

Revisiting on an old paper on early email use and reflecting on scholarly communication now.

About 30 years ago, I was at a meeting in London and heard a presentation about a study of early email use in Xerox and the Open University. At Xerox the use of email was already part of their normal culture, but it was still new at OU. I’d thought they had done a before and after study of one of the departments, but remembered clearly their conclusions: email acted in addition to other forms of communication (face to face, phone, paper), but did not substitute.

It was one of those pieces of work that I could recall, but didn’t have a reference too. Facebook to the rescue! I posted about it and in no time had a series of helpful suggestions including Gilbert Cockton who nailed it, finding the meeting, the “IEE Colloquium on Human Factors in Electronic Mail and Conferencing Systems” (3 Feb 1989) and the precise paper:

Fung , T. O’Shea , S. Bly. Electronic mail viewed as a communications catalyst. IEE Colloquium on Human Factors in Electronic Mail and Conferencing Systems, , pp.1/1–1/3. INSPEC: 3381096 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=197821

In some extraordinary investigative journalism, Gilbert also noted that the first author, Pat Fung, went on to fresh territory after retirement, qualifying as a scuba-diving instructor at the age of 75.

The details of the paper were not exactly as I remembered. Rather than a before and after study, it was a comparison of computing departments at Xerox (mature use of email) and OU’s (email less ingrained, but already well used). Maybe I had simply embroidered the memory over the years, or maybe they presented newer work at the colloquium, than was in the 3 page extended abstract. In those days this was common as researchers did not feel they needed to milk every last result in a formal ‘publication’. However, the conclusions were just as I remembered:

“An exciting finding is its indication that the use of sophisticated electronic communications media is not seen by users as replacing existing methods of communicating. On the contrary, the use of such media is seen as a way of establishing new interactions and collaboration whilst catalysing the role of more traditional methods of communication.”

As part of this process following various leads by other Facebook friends, I spent some time looking at early CSCW conference proceedings, some at Saul Greenburg’s early CSCW bibliography [1] and Ducheneaut and Watts (15 years on) review of email research [2] in the 2005 HCI special issue on ‘reinventing email’ [3] (both notably missing the Fung et al. paper). I downloaded and skimmed several early papers including Wendy McKay’s lovely early (1988) study [4] that exposed the wide variety of ways in which people used email over and above simple ‘communication’. So much to learn from this work when the field was still fresh,

This all led me to reflect both on the Fung et al. paper, the process of finding it, and the lessons for email and other ‘communication’ media today.

Communication for new purposes

A key finding was that “the use of such media is seen as a way of establishing new interactions and collaboration“. Of course, the authors and their subjects could not have envisaged current social media, but the finding if this paper was exactly an example of this. In 1989 if I had been trying to find a paper, I would have scoured my own filing cabinet and bookshelves, those of my colleagues, and perhaps asked people when I met them. Nowadays I pop the question into Facebook and within minutes the advice starts to appear, and not long after I have a scanned copy of the paper I was after.

Communication as a good thing

In the paper abstract, the authors say that an “exciting finding” of the paper is that “the use of sophisticated electronic communications media is not seen by users as replacing existing methods of communicating.” Within paper, this is phrased even more strongly:

“The majority of subjects (nineteen) also saw no likelihood of a decrease in personal interactions due to an increase in sophisticated technological communications support and many felt that such a shift in communication patterns would be undesirable.”

Effectively, email was seen as potentially damaging if it replaced other more human means of communication, and the good outcome of this report was that this did not appear to be happening (or strictly subjects believed it was not happening).

However, by the mid-1990s, papers discussing ’email overload’ started to appear [5].

I recall a morning radio discussion of email overload about ten years ago. The presenter asked someone else in the studio if they thought this was a problem. Quite un-ironically, they answered, “no, I only spend a couple of hours a day”. I have found my own pattern of email change when I switched from highly structured Eudora (with over 2000 email folders), to Gmail (mail is like a Facebook feed, if it isn’t on the first page it doesn’t exist). I was recently talking to another academic who explained that two years ago he had deliberately taken “email as stream” as a policy to control unmanageable volumes.

If only they had known …

Communication as substitute

While Fung et al.’s respondents reported that they did not foresee a reduction in other forms of non-electronic communication, in fact even in the paper the signs of this shift to digital are evident.

Here are the graphs of communication frequency for the Open University (30 people, more recent use of email) and Xerox (36 people, more established use) respectively.

( from Fung et al., 1989)

It is hard to draw exact comparisons as it appears there may have been a higher overall volume of communication at Xerox (because of email?). Certainly, at that point, face-to-face communication remains strong at Xerox, but it appears that not only the proportion, but total volume of non-digital non-face-to-face communications is lower than at OU. That is sub substitution has already happened.

Again, this is obvious nowadays, although the volume of electronic communications would have been untenable in paper (I’ve sometimes imagined printing out a day’s email and trying to cram it in a pigeon-hole), the volume of paper communications has diminished markedly. A report in 2013 for Royal Mail recorded 3-6% pa reduction in letters over recent years and projected a further 4% pa for the foreseeable future [6].

academic communication and national meetungs

However, this also made me think about the IEE Colloquium itself. Back in the late 1980s and 1990s it was common to attend small national or local meetings to meet with others and present work, often early stage, for discussion. In other fields this still happens, but in HCI it has all but disappeared. Maybe I have is a little nostalgia, but this does seem a real loss as it was a great way for new PhD students to present their work and meet with the leaders in their field. Of course, this can happen if you get your CHI paper accepted, but the barriers are higher, particularly for those in smaller and less well-resourced departments.

Some of this is because international travel is cheaper and faster, and so national meetings have reduced in importance – everyone goes to the big global (largely US) conferences. Many years ago research on day-to-day time use suggested that we have a travel ‘time budget’ reactively constant across counties and across different kinds of areas within the same country [7]. The same is clearly true of academic travel time; we have a certain budget and if we travel more internationally then we do correspondingly less nationally.

(from Zahavi, 1979)

However, I wonder if digital communication also had a part to play. I knew about the Fung et al. paper, even though it was not in the large reviews of CSCW and email, because I had been there. Indeed, the reason that the Fung et al.paper was not cited in relevant reviews would have been because it was in a small venue and only available as paper copy, and only if you know it existed. Indeed, it was presumably also below the digital radar until it was, I assume, scanned by IEE archivists and deposited in IEEE digital library.

However, despite the advantages of this easy access to one another and scholarly communication, I wonder if we have also lost something.

In the 1980s, physical presence and co-presence at an event was crucial for academic communication. Proceedings were paper and precious, I would at least skim read all of the proceedings of any event I had been to, even those of large conferences, because they were rare and because they were available. Reference lists at the end of my papers were shorter than now, but possibly more diverse and more in-depth, as compared to more directed ‘search for the relevant terms’ literature reviews of the digital age.

And looking back at some of those early papers, in days when publish-or-perish was not so extreme, when cardiac failure was not an occupational hazard for academics (except maybe due to the Cambridge sherry allowance), at the way this crucial piece of early research was not dressed up with an extra 6000 words of window dressing to make a ‘high impact’ publication, but simply shared. Were things more fun?

[1] Saul Greenberg (1991) “An annotated bibliography of computer supported cooperative work.” ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 23(3), pp. 29-62. July. Reprinted in Greenberg, S. ed. (1991) “Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Groupware”, pp. 359-413, Academic Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/126505.126508
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/52b4/d0bb76fcd628c00c71e0dfbf511505ae8a30.pdf

[2] Nicolas Ducheneaut and Leon A. Watts (2005). In search of coherence: a review of e-mail research. Hum.-Comput. Interact. 20, 1 (June 2005), 11-48. DOI= 10.1080/07370024.2005.9667360
http://www2.parc.com/csl/members/nicolas/documents/HCIJ-Coherence.pdf

[3] Steve Whittaker, Victoria Bellotti, and Paul Moody (2005). Introduction to this special issue on revisiting and reinventing e-mail. Hum.-Comput. Interact. 20, 1 (June 2005), 1-9.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07370024.2005.9667359

[4] Wendy E. Mackay. 1988. More than just a communication system: diversity in the use of electronic mail. In Proceedings of the 1988 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW ’88). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 344-353. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/62266.62293
https://www.lri.fr/~mackay/pdffiles/TOIS88.Diversity.pdf

[5] Steve Whittaker and Candace Sidner (1996). Email overload: exploring personal information management of email. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’96), Michael J. Tauber (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 276-283. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/238386.238530
https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~i385q/readings/Whittaker_Sidner-1996-Email.pdf

[6] The outlook for UK mail volumes to 2023. PwC prepared for Royal Mail Group, 15 July 2013
http://www.royalmailgroup.com/sites/default/files/ The%20outlook%20for%20UK%20mail%20volumes%20to%202023.pdf

[7] Yacov Zahavi (1979). The ‘UMOT’ Project. Prepared For U.S. Department Of Transportation Ministry Of Transport and Fed. Rep. Of Germany.
http://www.surveyarchive.org/Zahavi/UMOT_79.pdf

principles vs guidelines

Posted on March 31, 2016 by alan

I was recently asked to clarify the difference between usability principles and guidelines. Having written a page-full of answer, I thought it was worth popping on the blog.

As with many things the boundary between the two is not absolute … and also the term ‘guidelines’ tends to get used differently at different times!

However, as a general rule of thumb:

Principles tend to be very general and would apply pretty much across different technologies and systems.
Guidelines tend to be more specific to a device or system.

As an example of the latter, look at the iOS Human Interface Guidelines on “Adaptivity and Layout” It starts with a general principle:

“People generally want to use their favorite apps on all their devices and in multiple contexts”,

but then rapidly turns that into more mobile specific, and then iOS specific guidelines, talking first about different screen orientations, and then about specific iOS screen size classes.

I note that the definition on page 259 of Chapter 7 of the HCI textbook is slightly ambiguous. When it says that guidelines are less authoritative and more general in application, it means in comparison to standards … although I’d now add a few caveats for the latter too!

Basically in terms of ‘authority’, from low to high:

lowest	principles	agreed by community, but not mandated
	guidelines	proposed by manufacture, but rarely enforced
highest	standards	mandated by standards authority

In terms of general applicability, high to low:

highest	principles	very broad e.g. ‘observability’
	guidelines	more specific, but still allowing interpretation
lowest	standards	very tight

This ‘generality of application’ dimension is a little more complex as guidelines are often manufacturer specific so arguably less ‘generally applicable’ than standards, but the range of situations that standard apply to is usually much tighter.

On the whole the more specific the rules, the easier they are to apply. For example, the general principle of observability requires that the designer think about how it applies in each new application and situation. In contrast, a more specific rule that says, “always show the current editing state in the top right of the screen” is easy to apply, but tells you nothing about other aspects of system state.

Making the most of stakeholder interviews

Posted on August 29, 2015 by alan

Recently, I was asked for any tips or suggestions for stakeholder interviews. I realised it was going to be more than would fit in the response to an IM message!

I’ll assume that this is purely for requirements gathering. For participatory or co-design, many of the same things hold, but there would be additional activities.

Kinds of knowing

First remember:

what they know – Whether the cleaner of a public lavatory or the CEO of a multi-national, they have rich experience in their area. Respect even the most apparently trivial comments.
what they don’t know they know – Much of our knowledge is tacit, things they know in the sense that they apply in their day to day activities, but are not explicitly aware of knowing. Part of your job as interviewer is to bring this latent knowledge to the surface.
what they don’t know – You are there because you bring expertise and knowledge, most critically in what is possible; it is often hard for someone who has spent years in a job to see that it could be different.

People also find it easier to articulate ‘what’ compared with ‘why’ knowledge:

what – objects, things, and people involved in their job, also the actions they perform, but even the latter can be difficult if they are too familiar
why – the underlying criteria, motivations and values that underpin their everyday activities

Be concrete

Most of us think best when we have concrete examples or situations to draw on, even if we are using these to describe more abstract concepts.

in their natural situation – People often find it easier to remember things if they are in the place and amongst the tools where they normally do them.
show you what they do – Being in their workplace also makes it easy for them to show you what they do – see “case study: Pensions printout“, for an example of this, the pensions manager was only able to articulate how a computer listing was used when he could demonstrate using the card files in his office. Note this applies to physical things, and also digital ones (e.g. talking through files on computer desktop)
watch what they do – If circumstances allow directly observe – often people omit the most obvious things, either because they assume it is known, or because it is too familiar and hence tacit. In “Early lessons – It’s not all about technology“, the (1960s!) system analyst realised that it was the operators’ fear of getting their clothes dirty that was slowing down the printing machine; this was not because of anything any of the operators said, but what they were observed doing.
seek stories of past incidents – Humans are born story tellers (listen to a toddler). If asked to give abstract instructions or information we often struggle.
normal and exceptional stories – both are important. Often if asked about a process or procedure the interviewee will give the normative or official version of what they do. This may be because they don’t want to admit to unofficial methods, or maybe that they think of the task in normative terms even though they actually never do it that way. Ask for ‘war stories’ of unusual, exceptional or problematic situations.
technology probes or envisioned scenarios – Although it may be hard to envisage new situations, if potential futures are presented in an engaging and concrete manner, then we are much more able to see ourselves in them, maybe using a new system, and say “but no that wouldn’t work.” (see more at hcibook online! “technology probes“)

Estrangement

As noted the stakeholder’s tacit knowledge may be the most important. By seeking out or deliberately creating odd or unusual situations, we may be able to break out of this blindness to the normal.

ask about other people’s jobs – As well as asking a stakeholder about what they do, ask them about other people; they may notice things about others better then the other person does themselves.
strangers / new folk / outsiders – Seek out the new person, the temporary visitor from another site, or even the cleaner; all see the situation with fresh eyes.
technology probes or envisioned scenarios (again!) – As well as being able to say “but no that wouldn’t work”, we can sometimes say “but no that wouldn’t work, because …”
fantasy – When the aim is to establish requirements and gain understanding, there is no reason why an envisaged scenario need be realistic or even possible. Think SciFi and magic 🙂 For an extended example of this look at ‘Making Tea‘, which asked chemists to make tea as if it were a laboratory procedure!

Of course some of these, notably fantasy scenarios, may work better in some organisations than others!

Analyse

You need to make sense of all that interview data!

the big picture – Much of what you learn will be about what happens to individuals. You need to see how this all fits together (e.g. Checkland/ Soft System Methodology ‘Rich Picture’, or process diagrams). Dig beyond the surface to make sense of the underlying organisational goals … and how they may conflict with those of individuals or other organisations.
the details – Look for inconsistencies, gaps, etc. both within an individual’s own accounts and between different people’s viewpoints. This may highlight the differences between what people believe happens and what actually happens, or part of that uncovering the tacit
the deep values – As noted it is often hard for people to articulate the criteria and motivations that determine their actions. You could look for ‘why’ vocabulary in what they say or written documentation, or attempt to ‘reverse engineer’ process to find purposes. Unearthing values helps to uncover potential conflicts (above), but also is important when considering radical changes. New processes, methods or systems might completely change existing practices, but should still be consonant with the underlying drivers for those original practices. See work on transforming musicological archival practice in the InConcert project for an example.

If possible you may wish to present these back to those involved, even if people are unaware of certain things they do or think, once presented to them, the flood gates open! If your stakeholders are hard to interview, maybe because they are senior, or far away, or because you only have limited access, then if possible do some level of analysis mid-way so that you can adjust future interviews based on past ones.

Prioritise

Neither you nor your interviewees have unlimited time; you need to have a clear idea of the most important things to learn – whilst of course keeping an open ear for things that are unexpected!

If possible plan time for a second round of some or all the interviewees after you have had a chance to analyse the first round. This is especially important as you may not know what is important until this stage!

Privacy, respect and honesty

You may not have total freedom in who you see, what you ask or how it is reported, but in so far as is possible (and maybe refuse unless it is) respect the privacy and personhood of those with whom you interact.

This is partly about good professional practice, but also efficacy – if interviewees know that what they say will only be reported anonymously they are more likely to tell you about the unofficial as well as the official practices! If you need to argue for good practice, the latter argument may hold more sway than the former!

In your reporting, do try to make sure that any accounts you give of individuals are ones they would be happy to hear. There may be humorous or strange stories, but make sure you laugh with not at your subjects. Even if no one else recognises them, they may well recognise themselves.

Of course do ensure that you are totally honest before you start in explaining what will and will not be related to management, colleagues, external publication, etc. Depending on the circumstances, you may allow interviewees to redact parts of an interview transcript, and/or to review and approve parts of a report pertaining to them.

A week in Athens

Posted on December 18, 2014 by alan

Last week I visited Athens again to give keynote “Long-Term Engagement” at Usability And Accessibility Days 2014. The rest of the event was in Greek, so I got excused to wander across to see the exhibition of contemporary icons by Helena Krystalli in the adjoining room.

The talks included vignettes about Walking Wales, Tiree Tech Wave and other technology projects on Tiree, the InConcert musicology data project, and Talis software for learning analytics. the linking theme was the different time frames for engagement and key properties/heuristics at each level including ‘desire and disaster‘, matching cost–benefit, and ‘Micawber management’.

As well as the talk I got to see old friends in Athens, many of whom I’d not seen for five years since my last visit for the 2009 SIGCHI Greece event when I was talking about ‘Touching Technology‘. Despite the years it seemed like just yesterday when we’d last talked together.

Although there was some evidence of change (Angela who I stayed with now has two daughters instead of one), much was the same (George’s house is still waiting to get its central, hearing working).

However, when I was in the research office the day after the talk I decided that Athens definitely is in stasis when I am not there. We were sitting talking and I happened to look up at the board and saw writing there. It was a little obscure, and intriguing, but as I examined it I realised t was in fact my own handwriting, written there 5 years ago during a discussion in the same office.

To be fair there was some additional evidence of change beside Angela’s child; the new Acropolis Museum has opened, a wonderful building of glass and steel built to display the many treasures found by archaeologists, and most especially the whole of the upper floor laid out to recreate the frieze around the top of the Pantheon. There are some gaps, but much of the sculpture is either there, or, where the original is elsewhere, in plaster cast.

The plaster cast sections all say where they come from, except the vast majority simply say ‘BM’ … it took a few before this sunk in, the British Museum … the Elgin Marbles – too sore a point even to write the words in full. Indeed the whole museum is partly a statement to show just how much is in London not Athens, and also that Greece is now quite capable of preserving them.

It is a complex question undoubtedly much more would be missing, eroded or damaged if Elgin had not shipped them to Britain in the 19th century, and clearly not every work originating in a country should be returned … I imagine all the obelisks around Rome being sent back to Egypt! However, seeing the museum and vast proportion saying ‘BM’ brings home that this is not simply a small amount elsewhere, but a large proportion, and in many ways the ‘best bits’.

There is also something different about the iconic monuments of any nation: it is as if parts of the Tower of Pisa were in Germany or London Bridge in Arizona …

To take our minds off such heady matters Angela and her family took me swimming in a volcano. Christmas music playing in the background while bathing in water at 22° C.

more on disappearing scrollbars

Posted on December 22, 2012 by alan

I recently wrote about problems with a slightly too smart scroll bar, and Google periodically change something in Gmail which means you have to horizontally scroll the page to get hook of the vertical scroll bar.

I just came across another beautiful (read terrible) example today.

I was looking at the “Learning Curve“, a bogspot blog, so presumably using a blogspot theme option. On the right hand side was funky pull-out navigation (below left), but unfortunately, look what it does to the scroll bar (below right)!

This is an example of the ‘inaccessible scrollbar’ that I mention in “CSS considered harmful“, and I explain there the reason it arises.

The amazing thing is that this fails equally across all (MacOS) browsers: Safari, Firefox, Chrome, yet must be a standard blogspot feature.

One last vignette: as I looked at the above screen shots I realised that in fact there is a 1 pixel part of the scroll handle still visible to the left of the pull-out navigation. I went back to the web page and tried to select it … unfortunately, I guess to make a larger and easier to select the ‘hot area’, as you move your mouse towards the scroll bar, the pull-out pops out … so that the one pixel of scrollbar tantalises, but is unselectable 🙁

details matter: infinite scrolling and feature interaction

Posted on December 8, 2012 by alan

Many sites now dynamically add content to a page as you scroll down; this includes both Facebook and Twitter feeds, which add content as you get near the bottom. In many ways this is a good thing, if users have to click to get to another page, they often never bother¹. However there can be unfortunate side effects … sometimes making sites un-navigable on certain devices. There are particular problems on MacOS, due to the removal of scrollbar arrows, a usability disaster anyway, but confounded by feature interactions with other effects.

A recent example was when I visited the SimoleonSense blog in order to find an article corresponding to an image about human sensory illusions. The image had been shared in Facebook, and I found, when I tried to search for it, also widely pinned in Pinterst, but the Facebook shares only linked back to the image url and Pinterst to the overall site (why some artists hate Pintrest). However, I wanted to find the actual post on the site that mentioned the image.

Happily, the image url, http://www.simoleonsense.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/hacking-your-brain1.jpg, made it clear that it was a WordPress blog and the image had been uploaded in February 2009, so I edited the url to http://www.simoleonsense.com/2009/02/ and started to browse. The site is a basically a weekly digest and so the page returned was already long. I must have missed it on my first scan down, so I hit the bottom of the page, it dynamically added more content, and I continued to scroll. Before long the scrollbar handle looked very small, and the page very big and every time I tried to scroll up and down the page appeared to go crazy, randomly scrolling anywhere, but not where I wanted.

It took me a while to realise that the problem was that the scrollbar had been ‘enhanced’ by the website (using the WordPress infinite scroll plugin), which not only added infinite scrolling, but also ‘smart scrolling’, where a click on the scrollbar makes an animated jump to that location on the scrollbar. Now many early scrollbars worked in this way, and the ‘smart scroll’ options is inspired by the fact that Apple rediscovered this in iOS for touch screen interaction. The method gives rapid interaction, especially if the scrollbar is augmented by ‘tips’ on the scrollbar (see the jQuery smartscroll demo page).

Unfortunately, this is different from the Mac normal behaviour when you click above or below the handle on a scrollbar, which effectively does screen up/down. So, I was trying to navigate up/down the web page a screen at a time to find the relevant post, and not caring where I clicked above the scroll handle, hence the apparently random movements.

This was compounded by two things. The first is a slight bug in the scrolling extension which means that sometimes it doesn’t notice your mouse release and starts scrolling the page as you move your mouse around. This is a bug I’ve seen in scrolling systems for many years, not taking into account all the combinations of mouse down/up, enter/leave region etc., and is present even in Google maps.

The second compounding factor is that since MacOS got rid of the scrollbar arrows (why? Why? WHY?!!), this is now the only way to reliably do small up/down movements if you don’t have a scroll wheel mouse or similar.

Now, in fact, my Air has a trackpad and I think Apple assumes you will use this for scrolling, but I have single-finger ‘Tap to click’ turned off to prevent accidental selections, and (I assume due to a persistent bug) this turns off the two finger scrolling gesture as well (even though it is shown as on in the preferences), so no scrolling from the touchpad.

Since near the beginning of my career I have been fascinated by these fine design decisions and have written previously about scrollbars, buttons, etc. They are often overlooked as they form part of the backdrop to more significant applications and information. However, the very fact that they are the persistent backdrop of interaction makes their fluid usability crucial, like the many mundane services, buses, rubbish collection, etc., that make cities work, but are often unseen and unnoticed until they fail.

Also note that this failure was not due to any single feature or bug, but the way these work together what the telephony industry originally named ‘feature interaction‘, but common across all technological systems There is no easy fix, apart from (i) thinking of all possible scenarios (reach for your formal methods in HCI!) and (ii) testing across different devices. And certainly (Apple please listen!) if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Happily, I did manage to find the post in the end (I forget how, maybe random clicking) and it is “5 Ways To Hack Your Brain“. The individual post page has no dynamic additions, so is only two screens big on my display (phew), but still scrolled all over the place as I tried to select the page title to paste above!

To my mind, early web guidance, was always wrong about this as it usually suggested making pages fit a screen to improve download speed, whereas my feeling, when using a slow connection, was it was usually better to wait a little longer for one big screen (you were going to have to wait anyway!) and then be able to scroll up and down quickly.[back]

Death by design

Posted on October 12, 2012 by alan

Wonderful image and set of slides describing some of the reasons multitasking is a myth and how the interfaces we design may be literally killing people (during a mobile outage in Dubai cat accidents dropped by 20%).

Thanks to Ian Sommervile for sharing this on twitter.

Driven to distraction: Giles Colborne from cxpartners

“lost in hyperspace” – do we care?

Posted on September 27, 2012 by alan

I have rarely heard the phrase “lost in hyperspace” in the last 10 years, although it used to be a recurrent theme in hypertext and HCI literature. For some time this has bothered me. We don’t seem less lost, so maybe we are just more laid back about control, or maybe we are simply relinquishing it?

Recently Lisa Tweedie posted a Pintrest link on Facebook to Angela Morelli‘s dynamic infographic on water. This is a lovely vertically scrolling page showing how the majority of the water we use is indirectly consumed via the food we eat … especially if you are a meat eater (1 kilo beef = 15,400 litres of water!). The graphic was great, except it took me ages to actually get to it. In fact the first time I found a single large graphic produced by Angela as a download, it was only when I returned to it that I found the full dynamic info graphic.

Every time I go to Pintrest I feel like I’ve been dropped into a random part of Hampton Court Maze, so hard to find the actual source … this is why a lot of artists get annoyed at Pintrest! Now for Pintrest this is probably part of their design philosophy … after all they want people to stay on their site. What is amazing is that this kind of design is so acceptable to users … Facebook is slightly less random, but still it takes me ages to find pages I’ve liked, each time I start the search through my profile afresh.

In the early days of hypertext everyone used to talk about the “lost in hyperspace” problem … now we are more lost … but don’t care anymore. In the Mediaeval world you put your trust in your ‘betters’ lords, kings, and priests and assumed they knew best … now we put our trust in Pintrest and Facebook.

logo design competition – final days

Posted on August 24, 2012 by alan

The first entries are in for the logo design competition for the open HCI course I’m presenting in the autumn. Arunn @ Talis has posted them on the wall in the office. One is a very good cartoon style illustration, but I’m sure I don’t really look like that :-/

Final entries due by tomorrow midnight … and then Arunn is going to post them up for popular vote … and whichever gets most votes I end up wearing on a T-shirt at the HCI conference in a few weeks time. There are times when democracy just feels wrong!

Alan Dix

Tag Archives: usability