Theories and Practice of Interactive Media

1. Theories and Practice of Interactive Media 10 November 2003 Kathy E. Gill

2. Agenda • Book reports due • Interactivity, Community and “Play” • Celeste Combs – interactivity and online communities • Effective interfaces

3. Community: Introduction • What does the word mean to you? • What characterizes “effective” communities?

4. Community defined (1/2) • 1.a. A group of people living in the same locality and under the same government. b. The district or locality in which such a group lives. • 2. A group of people having common interests: the scientific community; the international business community. • 3.a. Similarity or identify: a community of interests. b. Sharing, participation and fellowship.

5. Community defined (2/2) • 4. Society as a whole; the public. • 5. Ecology. a. A group of plants and animals living and interacting with one another in a specific region under relatively similar environmental conditions. b. The region occupied by a group of interacting organisms. • From the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Third Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1992.

6. Community defined (3/3) • “A comprehensive description of the needs of a population that is defined, or defines itself, as a community, and the resources that exist within that community, carried out with the active involvement of the community itself, for the purpose of developing an action plan or other means of improving the quality of life in the community”.  (Hawtin, 1994, p5).

7. Characteristics (1/3) • Historically tied to the idea of place. • Other characteristics associated with community include • a "sense of belonging“ • a body of shared values • a system of social organization • interdependency

8. Characteristics (2/3) • Neutral ground – people are approachable; give-and-take is expected • No class structure - an opportunity to interact apart from social class, rank and roles that divide rather than connect people • Conversation is the main activity and is valued in its own right • Accessible and accommodating • Comprised of  “regulars” who set a tone of conviviality and provide an infectious style of interaction

9. Characteristics (3/3) • A low profile place • A playful mood, where joy and acceptance reign • A home-away-from-home where people are regenerated, restored and experience “the freedom to be” • Provides the habit of association, necessary for the organization of society • Helps people keep in tune with the social world around them • Attributes of a Great Good Place - Ray Oldenburg, http://www.seniornet.org/php/default.php?PageID=6251

10. Why study community? • Cooley (1983) : all normal humans have a natural affinity for community • Communication is the structural process that makes or breaks community • Both words stem from same Latin root word, communis, which means common

11. Virtual community • “… social aggregations that emerge from the [Internet] when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace” Rheingold, 1993

12. Good or bad? • New communication technologies can both • draw people together into cohesive communities of interest and • isolate them as they retreat into tribalism

13. Communities need cooperation • Individuals must believe it is likely to meet again in the future • Individuals must be able to identify one another • Individuals need information about how someone has behaved in the past • From The Evolution of Cooperation

14. Facilitating technologies • Internet Relay Chat (IRC) • Usenet • MOOs and MUDs • Wikis • Blogs

15. Online network benefits to organizations (1/3) • Creates an early warning system • Attunes everyone in the network to each other's needs – more people will know who knows what and will know it faster. Thus knowledge gets to those who can act on it expeditiously

16. Online network benefits to organizations (2/3) • Multiplies intellectual capital by the power of social capital, reducing social friction and encouraging social cohesion. • An ongoing, shared social space connects people and builds relationships across boundaries of geography or discipline

17. Online network benefits to organizations (3/3) • Provides an ongoing context for knowledge exchange that can be far more effective than memoranda • Attracts and retains the best employees by providing access to social capital that is only available within the organization. • How Online Social Networks Benefit Organizations, http://www.rheingold.com/Associates/onlinenetworks.html

18. Break

19. “An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.” Raskin, The Humane Interface (6) Requires knowledge of how humans and machines operate The Humane Interface

20. The user should set the pace of the interaction Error avoidance, facilitated with “undo/redo” Accessible to the naïve, efficient for the expert Raskin’s Rules

21. Mistakes are the result of conscious deliberation Slips result from automatic behavior Types: capture, description, data-driven, associative activation, loss-of-activation and mode errors Errors are not mistakes!

22. Polite Illuminating Treat the user with respect Error messages

23. Minimize occurrence by understanding the causes of errors Make detection and recovery easier Change the attitude toward error from “stupid user” to “stupid design” Design for error

24. A challenge: • When you design an error-tolerant system, people come to rely on that system (it had best be reliable!) • Anti-lock brakes (ABS) • Blade guard on circular saw

25. To increase errors, add a little: • Social pressure • Time pressure • Economic pressure

26. Resultant design philosophy: • Put knowledge in the world (iow,make options visible) • Remember the three questions: • Where am I, where can I go, where have I been? • Design for errors

27. How to evaluate a design? • Heuristic evaluations, http://stats.bls.gov/ore/htm_papers/st960160.htm

28. Evaluating Designs • “Discount” methods don’t require users • Heuristic evaluation is the most informal method and involves having usability specialists judge whether each element follows established usability principles (the "heuristics").

29. Heuristic Evaluations • Developed by Jakob Nielsen • Helps find usability problems in the user interface • Small set (3-5) of evaluators examine the UI • Independently check for compliance with usability principles (“heuristics”) • Different evaluators will find different problems • Perform on working UI or on sketches

30. 10 Classic Heuristics • Visibility of system status • Match between system and the real world • User control and freedom • Consistency and standards • Error prevention

31. 10 Classic Heuristics, cont’d • Recognition rather than recall • Flexibility and efficiency of use • Aesthetic and minimalist design • Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors • Help and documentation

32. Example Problem Statement • Typographical mix of upper/lower case, bold, italic and fonts • Violates “Consistency and standards” (H4) • Slows users down • Probably wouldn’t be found by user testing • Fix: pick a single format for entire interface

33. Severity Ratings • Used to allocate resources to fix problems • Proxy for need for more usability efforts • Combination of • frequency • impact • persistence (one time or repeating) • Should be done independently by allevaluators, then aggregated/averaged

34. Severity Rating Scale 0 - not a usability problem 1 - cosmetic problem 2 - minor usability problem 3 - major usability problem; important to fix 4 - usability catastrophe; imperative to fix

35. Severity Ratings Example • [H-4 Consistency] [Severity 3] • The interface used the command "Save" on the first screen when saving the user's file, but used the command "Write File" on the second screen. Users may be confused by different terminology for the same function.

36. Debriefing • Conduct with evaluators, observers, and development team members • Discuss general characteristics of UI • Suggest potential improvements to address major usability problems • Development team rates how hard things are to fix • Make it a brainstorming session

37. Results of HE • Single evaluator achieves poor results • Only finds 35% of usability problems • Five evaluators find about 75% of usability problems (Nielsen) • Why not more evaluators? 10? 20? • Adding evaluators is expensive • Adding evaluators doesn’t increase the number of unique problems found

38. problems found benefits / cost Results of HE • Note: Controversial - one instance

39. Summary of HE • Heuristic evaluation is a “discount” method • Procedure • Evaluators go through the UI twice • Check to see if it complies with heuristics • Note where it doesn’t and note why • Follow-up • Combine the findings from 3 to 5 evaluators • Have evaluators independently rate severity • Discuss problems with design team • Ideally, alternate with user testing

40. Other forms of expert evaluation • Cognitive walkthrough uses a more explicitly detailed procedure to simulate a user's problem-solving process at each step through the dialogue, checking if the simulated user's goals and memory content can be assumed to lead to the next correct action.

41. Other forms … • Feature inspection lists sequences of features used to accomplish typical tasks, checks for long sequences, cumbersome steps, steps that would not be natural for users to try, and steps that require extensive knowledge/experience in order to assess a proposed feature set.

42. Other forms … • Consistency inspection has designers who represent multiple other projects inspect an interface to see whether it does things in the same way as their own designs. • Standards inspection has an expert on an interface standard inspect the interface for compliance.

43. Other forms … • Formal usability inspection combines individual and group inspections in a six-step procedure with strictly defined roles to with elements of both heuristic evaluation and a simplified form of cognitive walkthroughs.

44. Testing with users • Get users to carry out typical tasks without assistance • Observe what they do, ask for clarification • Get designers and stakeholders to observe (remotely) • Video the test to produce clips for management • Takes from 0.5 to 5 person days effort

45. Evaluation in a Usability Lab

46. Our problem • The web provides a unique opportunity for inexperienced information providers to create a whole new generation of difficult to use systems!

47. Resources • http://www.cyberwriter.com/TFM/2001/01-10.html • http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html