03Jul / 2011

Designing Speech User Interfaces – James Lewis

I stumbled on UXPod Episode 61 by Gerry Gaffney — Speech user interfaces: an interview with James Lewis. Although the topic is talking entirely about interactive voice response systems, I found a few pretty good arguments about human cognition, memory span and menu design, which I think are applicable to web and mobile app design as well.

Designing an auditory menu is, by nature, very different from designing a visual one. It is difficult for a user to listen through a long list of menu, memorize the choices, and pick the most appropriate one. Using auditory menu is more mentally taxing than s visual one.

One intriguing part in this interview is that when James mentioned the work of Patrick Commarford, who conducted [an experiment to see if a broad menu with many options but very little depth would work better, worse or equal to an auditory menu structure that had fewer options per level but more levels. And the thing that he did that turned out to be especially valuable was he measured the memory span of all his participants.]

I’m wondering, then, if the conditions of using the IVR systems are similar to mobile computing. For instance, user is usually in a very distracting and dynamic environment while using a mobile device, sometimes with very little time to spare. Under such condition, will the user become less capable of memorizing the menu structure/application flow, just like dealing with voice menu? And if that’s the case, will it be better to design a mobile app with broad-and-shallow menu, versus a narrow-and-deep one?

There’s a conventional wisdom of 7+/-2, the number of items an average human being can keep track of in the working memory, based on a very old research by George Miller in 1958. That’s more than 50 years ago. Things had changed a lot, including economy, technology and tool (the Internet, computer), education, living condition, how our mind works, etc.

Can we memorize more items now? Can our memory benefit from the rich visual effects in the smart phone platform? I don’t know the answer, but it’d be interesting to ask other mobile app experts for their opinions on that.

James Lewis is an experienced human factors engineer with IBM for thirty years. This episode of the podcast is a follow-up on James book: Practical Speech User Interface Design. Link to the podcast episode with transcript is: http://www.infodesign.com.au/uxpod/speechui

Patrick Commarford‘s publication about wide-and-deep menus:
http://www.vuidesign.net/usability-on-wide-and-deep-menus.htm
http://www.vocalabs.com/newsletter/how-design-phone-menu

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23Jun / 2011

Location Icons – Which One Makes Sense to You?

Many smartphone apps are using built-in GPS in the device to track user’s location as part of their features. Naturally, when designing the user interface of such apps, designers has to communicate the location awareness using icons and visual controls. However, there seems no one universally agreed upon pictogram to convey such idea, so many designers come up with their own design for that. After a bit of research, I found 4 commonly used pictograms that are being used by various location aware apps on iPhone.

A. Rifle Sight — looks like a metaphor related to rifle shooting. I’m guessing that it is originated from the North American with tradition of hunting wild animals.

B. The “Google” Tag — my first impression of the tag is from Google Maps. To me, this icon indicates a tag of a place, rather than an accurate coordination.

C. A Pointer — seems originated from the map “Pointer to North” orientation marker. Now it is the official GPS icon on the iOS status bar. The icon is suitable for showing the active/inactive state of the GPS feature.

D. Pin — also used by Google Maps, especially the iOS native version of Maps. A pin is a metaphor that is more commonly seen in our daily lives – pinning something on a cork-board, or putting a pin on a map. However, Some apps also use the “fastening something in a specific location” metaphor for the toggle button that keeps an auto-hide object on screen (disabling auto-hide). For example, some desktop apps for MS Windows has such UI. Use with caution and don’t confuse your users.

My Take

If I have a project that utilizes the GPS, my preference for the UI elements would be C (Pointer, indicating the state) and D (Pin, pin-pointing a coordination on map) depending on the situation and the usage.

A potential follow-up with this idea is to set up an online usability tests with the pictograms. If you are interested in doing so and would like to use my visuals, please feel free to contact me.

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20Jun / 2011

Tokyo iOS Meetup

Last Saturday I attended a meetup in Shinjuku from the Tokyo iOS Developer group. The organizer is Matthew Gillingham, and the group consists of experienced iOS engineers, designers and entrepreneurs.

In the first hour of the meetup, Matt gave a presentation to share the technical information he got from WWDC, briefing to us a bunch of new capabilities and possibilities with the upcoming version of the iOS. We then go on had some discussions regarding these new features and the future of iOS business. Here are some topics that I had discussed with the group.

iCloud and mobile Internet service — with the new iCloud and data storage/syncing over the web, will it introduces more trouble to mobile Internet service? I’m an E-Mobile user and is already suffering slow data transfer rate and occasional disconnection in places. With the promised push syncing with iCloud, I can only imagine more difficulties using the existing networks. Not sure about the U.S., but the mobile Internet over the cel-phone network in Japan aren’t very speedy to begin with, and the situation is probably going to be much worsened after the introduction of iCloud.

NFC and mobile payment — While Google and it’s developers are actively exploring the possibilities of mobile payment with the NFC technology, the next iOS doesn’t seem to deal with that issue. While we see third party solutions like Square who are trying to tackle the mobile payment demand, it’s a natural move for Apple to integrate the NFC and provide a smooth experience in the near future.

By the way, I recently notice increasing traffic to my previous mobile payment posts (http://www.calvin-c.com/blog/tag/mobile-payment/). Perhaps more people are interested in the topic now?

Prototyping, how designer and engineer communicate — surprisingly, this question seems to amaze everybody. I got answers like paper sketch and wireframing, PowerPoint for interactive presentation etc. A lot of “talking” is required as it’s the only effective way for designer to express the interaction between controls and views.

Yet, the way of “talking” is also tricky. Designer and engineer must have a common language in, for instance, describing the rich transitions of views and screen objects. Core Animation, Core Image, Open GL, UIKit, video buffer…these are hard-to-digest stuff designed for engineers but not the designers. So here’s a potential project to create an open-source dictionary of these under-the-hood technologies in layman terms for “normal people”.

I told the group about the recent prototyping app Prototypes, and they seem to be very interested about it.

The next XCode will hopefully coming with a “storyboarding” feature. Not a lot of people are talking about it at the moment, but I really hope that it’ll be as easy to use as the Prototypes app.

However I’ve learned about Flurry, the user interaction logging and tracking service that can be useful for usability testing of apps. It’s works like Google Analytics which programmer can include a lightweight library and tracking code into your beta or production app, and your interaction will be send to the Flurry server for later research and analysis.

Money — App Annie is the only service I know that can track and keep you some idea about the app market. However, what I’m looking for is a more powerful market research tool that can show number of downloads, estimated revenue, etc.

Some folks I’ve met at the event

Matthew Gillingham (http://www.twitter.com/gillygize) the organizer of the iOS Tokyo Meetup and a seasoned iOS developer specialized in gaming, but he actually seems to know just about everything iOS.
Peter Mac Innes (www.fluid.jp)
Frederic Nouel (papanouel.com, 3rdkind-inc.com) from France
Richie Nguyen (3psports.jp) who’d lived in Hong Kong for a few years
Danielle Kelly (newmediaeye.com) a creative director and editor who’s interested in user experience
Anthony
John, engineer working for Nomura
Gary, entrepreneur and the “idea guy” who’s interesting in financial app for iPad

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16Jun / 2011

“User Experience” – English/Chinese/Japanese UX Vocab

User Experience, often abbreviated as UX, is about how a person feels about using a product or service.

日本語：「ユーザエクスペリエンス」— pronouncing “YUZAEKUSUBERIENSU” is a Katakana conversion of the foreign word “User Experience”. The word, by itself, is just a straight phonetic representation, has no literal meaning in Japanese.「ユーザの体験」is a better translation which combines the foreign word 「ユーザ」(user) and Japanese Kanji「体験」(experience). Most Japanese can understand the foreign word「ユーザ」, while I have never heard them using the word 「使用者」（しようしゃ）.

中文：「使用者體驗／使用者經驗」— 兩者皆有人用，但我個人認為「體驗」比「經驗」合適。「經驗」聽起來好像在指透過長時間作同一行為而得到的經歷，是客觀和被動的結果，例如「工作經驗」「人生經驗」。而「體驗」比較有感情和人性化，透過自身從使用產品或服務的過程當中獲得的主觀感覺和感受，較符合英文 “User Experience” 的原意。

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14Jun / 2011

Bill Verplank’s Opening Keynote and Visual Thinking

I really like this opening keynote speech given by Bill Verplank at Interaction 2011.

He is a visual thinker, who can visualize and organize his thought while thinking about it, and then sketching the ideas out on paper as he speaks. Of course, he must have been studying and talking about these human factor topics for hundreds of times, with a lot of practice to perfection.

I believe that my mind also work with visual better than textual, conceptual ways. Of course, with years of practice, it isn’t a huge problem to write a blog post or jot down notes in point form, but I find more natural to record my ideas in sketchnotes and mindmaps, encapsulating keywords into shapes and illustrations.

people are not born to read. You can see new born babies or toddlers doodling happily with crayon and paint, and getting stimulated by sound and pictures. It’s not until we get older, before or after we realize our own conscious and grow capable of understanding abstract ideas, then we are taught to use language and symbol to represent these concepts.

For instance, you often see kids having trouble to understand what it means by 1+1 in mathematical formula. But they can easily grasp the idea once you add context and story, like:

“It is afternoon tea time now. Mommy gives you one cookie. And then, mommy gives you another cookie. Now how many cookies do you have?”

And the kids are very likely to understand the concept right away.

Another idea: what represent nothingness? Shouldn’t it be “nothing” itself? Yet, we created the symbol “0″ to represent the concept of nothingness, and even extend it to non-existing concepts like decimal places and [a number]/0 (divid by zero).

Coming back to Usability and User Experience, both with a big “U”. It’s only a concept, yet everybody in the field (or rather, originated from other fields) is trying to define it in one’s own ways with own structures and metaphors. There are systems with visual, textual, story, persona, example, best practice,…etc etc. But Usability is, after all, an expression of how general people interact with your system/systems. Practitioners’ opinions and generalizations are heavily depended on one’s language, culture, experience and personal perspectives.

I’m not saying that we should abandon all systems and definitions and just follow your heart. It is still very critical to study from other practitioners’ studies and researches to know how other people think. Then from that point, I’ll try not to be obsessed with any one of them, and use my own way to conceptualize and visualize the term “Usability” and “UX” in the sea of my mind.

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Designing Speech User Interfaces – James Lewis

Location Icons – Which One Makes Sense to You?

Tokyo iOS Meetup

“User Experience” – English/Chinese/Japanese UX Vocab

Bill Verplank’s Opening Keynote and Visual Thinking

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