Category Archives: HCI

What is usability in the age of UX? (pt 1)

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I am seriously considering applying for an internship with the well-known (at least in HCI circles) Nielsen/Norman group, I have read much of what both of Nielsen and Norman have to saw about usability, and Nielsen in particular is very anti web 2.0. Well more particularly web 2.0 for no reason. It must add value for your user. Don’t just “go 2 point oh” because it’s cool, but because it makes sense for your organization and especially for your users.

Because newer technologies are… get ready… newer they are untested and therefore best practices and usability standards have not yet been established. As an HCI consultant as well as a designer, what do I say to a client who wants to use some of these newer technologies?

It seems to me that most of us, including myself are technofetishists. Is that a word? I mean we are so enamored with the latest gadget, upgrade, iphone, ianything, graphics card, scripting language, platform independent language, open source environment, that we are totally willing to bend over backwards and accept things that make us do terrible things. Things that are terrible in terms of usability, the environment, and the rabid consumerism that is already so evident in the western world (and growing in other places too, don’t worry I won’t leave you out developing world and asia).

So usability in the age of UX, is it simply that we need to “focus on the user and all else will follow”? Do we need to a little more luddite?

To be continued

My 5 min Presentation on Serious Games

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Aaron’s Current Capstone Presentation – Google Doc or on SlideShare

So I had to finally present to my colleagues last night (as referenced by Dave RoedlRoyer’s post at the Interaction Culture Blog) and got some great feedback on several fronts. One interesting thing Sam Shoulders brought up was to compare educational TV to educational games. It may be interesting to take a look at the differences between production of let’s say any ol’ cartoon, like transformers, and say Dora the Explora (or are you supposed to spell explorere properly?). That may produce some interesting items.

Essentially what Dave was saying in his post is that all games are serious, and teach people something. The difference between a “serious game” and just a game is that it was designed with the intent to teach, and that was explicitly made part of the game. Keywords: intent, explicit. All games teach, although it may not be what people think.

Some people think violent video games teach people to be violent, making it into a causal relationship. Kid A plays GTA, GTA in turn causes that kid to be violent. Perhaps we can put it in terms of influence, or that it sends the message that certain things are OK. I don’t really know, but it’s pretty clear from the millions of people who have played very violent games like say Contra, Duke Nukem, or pretty much any of the early space games (space invaders, galaga et al) who haven’t become violent (yet?!) that there is more to this question.

What’s the take home message here? Everything we make as designers embed values, judgments, prejudice… in short we embed a piece of ourselves and our culture in everything we make.

What does this mean for us? My reaction to this is, Hey Aaron, be the best man you can be! So that when you make your next game that explicitly teaches, it will make the world a better place.

Technology=Innovation? A reaction to Ted Dziuba

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Ted's picture in Wired

“…there’s no real technology there. There’s no noteworthy computer-science problem being solved. The Ajax stuff is pre-written. You just have to go to the libraries and put it all together.
When Gmail came out — and Gmail is a pretty kick-ass product — it was like, “Ha! Ajax for dynamic web apps! We can use it for everything!” So now you have companies like Zoho, for example. Their sole goal is to take every desktop app that ever existed and reimplement it in Ajax with no added features or functionality. It irritates me as an engineer that companies with no engineering merit.” (Emphasis mine)

This quote is from Ted Dziuba, and came from Wired, and I read it first in Zoho Blog (via Scoble’s Tweetstream). Ted has BS in Computation Mathematics, and perhaps that is why I fundamentally disagree on this issue, here are the three issues I have with his analysis.

#1 By “No real technology” I think that Ted means that there is no innovation.–WRONG
#2 “There’s no noteworthy computer-science problem being solved”–RIGHT (maybe), but that’s not the point!
#3 Ted is an engineer, and he’s mad because “There’s no engineering Merit” in Zoho– RIGHT, but again not the point.

#1 One could take him to mean that liteally there is no technology there, but I sincerely doubt that is what he is saying, rather that there is nothing new, no innovation. The idea of a word processor or a spreadsheet has been around for at least as long as Ted has been alive, so it’s true that part of it isn’t new. Of course the idea of sending messages to someone, in the form of letters has been around for centuries, millenia in fact, but when we suddenly got to be able to do it online it was the killer app. IM then changed things again, but it was still essentially the same concept. We applied computer science to it. We reduced something to s set of rules, modeled those rules in a computer language and, presto, our world is forever changed (Well I’m sure there is more than just computer science at work here,but for the sake of room and simplicity). Real, seamless online collaboration with word processing and other productivity applications is an innovation, one that is already starting to change the way people work. We are in the early stages, there is no doubt, but I feel comfortable saying that this kind of collaboration will change the way we do think about work.

#2 If you choose to define computer science at the logical positivist/reductionist activities of creating computer languages and modeling different rule sets to create things, then you are right. There is no big problem, they didn’t create Ajax. I’m no coder, so I don’t know, I’m guessing they may not even be pushing Ajax to it’s limits, maybe there is no new code at all, just rearranging things in novel ways to create new applications. So essentially it’s true, from a CS perpective online collaborative word processing and it’s sister apps are not a noteworthy computer science problem, and by that definition most computer applications aren’t either unless they are pushing the language into places it hasn’t been before, combining rule sets in significantly new ways, or something else like that. Again, I’m no coder, so I don’t really have any examples at hand, and if I’m wrong I’d like to hear about it. No the problem Zoho is solving is essentially a social one, a human problem, a problem tackled by interaction designers. I blogged about designing for sociality, and in fact I used productivity software as my example. Zoho is starting to solve a great HCI problem, and I applaud them for it. So yes, Ted, you’re right, but you’ve missed the point IMO.

#3 This is pretty much the same thing, but with engineering as it’s focus. I assume Ted means computer engineering, which is essentially the applied branch of CS. I was kind of sketchy between CS & CE in #2, I haven’t thought about that too much, and I frankly don’t plan to in the near future. Again Ted you’ve missed the point. There are companies that get money and success through engineering, or scientific merit. I would say originally, Google was one of these (no longer though, IMO, but they do have very good CS & CE). A good technology business, one that will be successful is a blend of several things: CS, CE, Entrepreneurship, HCI & UX Design, believing in your idea  in your idea to the point of being one or more of the following: arrogance, stupidity, chauvinism.   I’m sure I left out a bunch of other things too.

So go sneer to yourself and your minions, and realize that excellence and innovation and good technology in this world comes form cross-disciplinary teams working together.  HCI people need CS, CE people need CS ideas, and the list can go on forever.

Last of all, thank you Ted for making me think about this, you’ve clarified and crystallized some of my views, and I welcome any corrections and discussion.

Liveblog of Informatics Colloquium

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Usual liveblog disclaimer: This is rough, and just my poor attempt to capture the colloquium as it was given.

Jeff Bardzell: Massively Amateur Creativity From Timelines and Libraries to Cyborg Sitcoms and Pencil Skirts.

Amateur Multimedia
What is it and why should we care about it? It’s HUGE! 65,000 videos posted EVERYDAY. Newgrounds has 500k flash objects. Numa Numa alone has been downloiaded 700 million times (BBC). SL has more virtual acreage is larger than Singapore

Jeff’s Interests in AMM

Reveal ways that tools shape message-making. That is creative software support is an input into culture.How amateur communities innovate on production practices. This suggests possible ways of looking at creativity

Dominant ideas of Creativity

The Science of creativity, cognition & creativity and NSF sponsored research. What is the model of creativity used in these studies? Study professionals, they are all experts, well defined roles. They practice processual creativity, which can be discovered via observation. They are “supported” by networks of other professionals and software.

Software embeds this model

Designed for a single user, it’s a set of tools experts use to achieve their preexisting visions. Powerful feature set, requires training. Lack their own content, users have to supply that. Basic features available for sharing and Check-in Check-out systems etc.

Three theorizations of creativity

Phychoology & Informatics
Poststructuralist-Author as disruptor making new clearings (in the heideggerian sense)
Technological Determinism- Medium is the message, all expression is mediated by technology

Despite the fact that these are all very different, they are broadly compatible.
They all talk about professionals, not fine artists, not romantic self-expression, creativity enmeshed in systems.
Thesis: Informatics mdel of creativity does not fit the empirical reality of one of it’s user bases.
We’re designing software tools that fail to support this kind of creativity
We’re missing opportunities

Primary Research: Systematic analysis of multimedia authoring tools, analysis of 100s of AMM artifacts, What are the relationships between the characteristics of production and influence within community. Analysis of criticism (blog poss and comments and revews) what is good and what is bad? How is technology represented. Interviews.

The usable is the message (how these applications are used)

Easy to use features get used the most. Features used the mose become the core constituents of visual languages. Visual languages constitute expression.
Analysis of tools: Nearly all had some process of creative activity, regardless of medium.
Technical mediums allow people to become proficient quickly in different art forms

Example Art element of creation:

From Scratch, From Primitives, From components (flash web services, dreamweaver server vehaviors etc)
Most people use prims because they are the most usable and require the least skill. Prims offer the higher self expression to production time ratio.
Low-production value compositing lends itself to absurdist commentary, not so much to serious or high art. Though there is some

Cicierega video—

The Discourse of AMM

The emergence of amateur theorization of AMM aesthetics
The most popular and successful works often innovate on a groups works
The historical trajectories of designers in AMM are all very similar, they progress across tools.

Video Montage— You gotta see it to believe some of this stuff

Machinima History

Progression: Starts with simple prims, native to the game.  Moves to smarter use of prims from both in and out of game.  Supplement prims with stuff made from scratch.  Games always always already have conent in there.  Juxtaposing different kinds of images makes meanings.

Emergent Apparatus: Fashion started as a hobby, progressed into an industry, established and stable fashion press, professionalism.

Evaluation

Agency: Informatics: individual, recognized expert, observable. AMM: Community, low-to medium skills quasi anaymous, not observable, but incredible trail of aertifacts, evolusion of visual language is massiv, undirected and intensely distributed

Social Context: Informatics: Social network is a support to individual creativity, distributed cognition. AMM: Individuals matter much less, Individual artifacts can foster the formation of cliques, community organized by general characteristics of the genre, not professions.

Role of Software Tools: Informatics: Tools modleed on the behavior of experts, tools support creative experts processes. AMM Usable features disproportionately, tools help produce a special kind of creative “expert” use of tools evolves over time at the level of the population.

Conclusions:
Unit of Analysis: Evolution of visual languages at least as important as individual cognition

Role of software: Usable compositing environments: replaces “expert system” as the core value of software in these communities.

Historicity: Informatics sequence School -> cert -> jobs -> participation. AMM: participate -> cert -> jobs

HCI/Ludology

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So back to the topic of games, I’ve posted a few times on this… but games are important: we spend more money on online games than music.  Gaming is the #1 online activity.

HCI, or Human-Computer Interaction, studies technology with very different methodological and philosophical bent than Computer Science or it’s many sister sciences, that of phenomenology.  This embodied approach to computing and it’s concomitant commitment to human-centered design and usability is badly needed in most end-user systems.

Currently game designers and developers tend to be, like CS, in the positivist/reductionist way of thinking.  While this can be helpful we need more than that. It’s also pretty clear to me that many games fail, or are less successful, because of usability issues, and I’m not a huge fan of many of the game UIs out there.  For example: ,I’m an avid gamer, and I was bewildered by the WoW interface when I started playing.  I hate to think of a gamer n00bie trying to grapple with WoW.

The study of games, or Ludology (the fashionable Latinate title it goes by now) is in my mind a subset of HCI.  It seems clear to me that video games are a human-computer interaction.  Do I need to back that up anymore?  If so I need to do some more thinking on that issue.

Building on my post from yesterday I think that philosophy plays a significant role here, and of course both HCI and it’s subsets are still working on a coherent language of description and criticism.

At IU School of Informatics we have HCI/Design and HCI/Security (and HCI/Music?), so I think we ought to think about HCI/Ludology or to be a little more layperson friendly maybe HCI/Games.

There has been talk for years that this could be a possibility, and I want it to happen, we could have another first in the US.  First School of Informatics in the US, first PhD program in Ludology, or at least HCI/Ludology right?