DESIGNING *for humans

Growth in Research and Usability Careers

Wrapping up 2007 and looking ahead to the future, a fitting article from U.S. News & World Report on growth career areas includes Usability/User Experience Specialist amongst its "31 Careers with Bright Futures".  The article provides a basic description, salary information and a day in the life, that actually summarizes user research in medical product design relatively accurately in layman's terms:

"You work for a medical device manufacturer that wants to develop a next-generation surgery tool called a laparoscopic laser. You attend a meeting with the CEO and representatives from marketing and finance, who are all debating the product's rough parameters. While you make suggestions and raise questions, for the most part you're a listener. You leave the room with a list of musts, maybes, and questions about the prospective product.

Next, you read up on the current generation of laparoscopic lasers and then observe three surgeons who are using them. You ask questions and take notes about what they like and dislike about it, and how they suggest it should be improved.

You write a report summarizing what you've learned. Then, engineers develop a prototype of the product that comes closest to meeting both the company's and the surgeons' desires.

You recruit and observe surgeons to use the prototype, again asking questions. You make recommendations for changes in the laser. The final product ends up incorporating only some of what you had hoped for, but you still feel a sense of pride for having helped ensure that the new laser will be more effective and pleasurable to use."

And speaking of careers, several recent related job postings have appeared including:

• Sr. Human Factors Researcher at Insight (North Carolina)
• Human Factors Practitioner at Continuum (Massachusetts)
• Multiple usability positions with Autodesk (California)

Thanks to all the readers in 2007 and have a happy and safe new year.

LiveScribe - Paradigm Shifting User Research Technology?

I don't believe in "mission statements", but if Designing for Humans had one, it might be "to realize the application of emerging technologies in support of design research".  While I discuss various technologies, many are specialized or several years away from general applicability.  But I recently learned of the LiveScribe smartpen, and I can honestly say this is a technology that can have a valuable, near term impact for virtually all researchers.

The device is an electronic pen set to launch in the first quarter of 2008.  It has several features, but the one that stands out is called Paper Replay.  This feature:

"allows total recall... by simply tapping on your notes. When used to take notes during a discussion or lecture, the smartpen records the conversation and digitizes the handwriting, automatically synchronizing the ink and audio. By later tapping the ink, the user can replay the conversation from the exact moment the note was written. Notes and audio can also be uploaded to a PC where they can be replayed, saved, searched or sent."

In other words, the pen records audio in synch with your writing ,and indexes the audio with your writing.  As a result, subsequently tapping on a particular written note will play back the audio segment corresponding to the time when the note was written.  Still not clear? - then watch the comic-book style demo.

So what does this mean for design research?  Well, note-taking is a challenging skill, and typically we rely on a combination of hastily written notes and audio (or audio-video)recordings to document research.  The LiveScribe brings these two approaches together in an integrated way, potentially reducing equipment and streamlining workflow.

While the LiveScribe was not designed for user research applications, consider how it might be applied:

• During user interviews, the researcher can reference what he or she writes or sketches directly back to the interviewees words for clarity and idea expansion.
• In usability testing the facilitator can reference recorded comments directly back to a discussion guide document to quickly drill-down to supporting quotes.
• For ethnographic observations informant conversations and environmental sounds can be unobtrusively recorded while taking notes. 

The potential paradigm shift is moving from using handwritten notes and recordings as separate, complimentary tools to truly integrated ones.  Well, perhaps not paradigm shifting, but damn convenient.

Reality Check: I should caveat that I have not used this product yet directly and am basing my assumptions on what I have read, but expect a full review as soon as it becomes available.   Also the pen requires special gridded paper, for tracking purposes.  I also wouldn't expect the audio quality recorded on the pen to be of high caliber, which is pretty important.

With that all said, I wouldn't be surprised if the LiveScribe (or a similar product), become a part of the user researcher's tool belt, along with the camcorder, notepad, and granola bar.

IDSA District Conferences and Other Upcoming Events

• The IDSA site lists some dates for the upcoming regional conferences.  Note that many of these dates are still tentative and subject to change.  For example, the Northeast District conference is listed as April 18-20, but has already been moved up to April 4-6.  Also the conference themes/names and the links to the web sites may be leftover from last year or non-functional.  Your best bet is to contact the regional VP for your district (listed on the same page), to get the scoop.  We'll provide a more clear posting once things are locked-down.
• The web site for the 2008 Design and Emotion Conference (Hong Kong) is online.  "The International Conference on Design & Emotion is a forum where practitioners, researchers and industry meet and exchange knowledge and insights concerning the cross-disciplinary field of design and emotion."
• The web site for the 2008 Healthcare Systems Ergonomics and Patient Safety Conference (France).  "The first HEPS conference aimed at creating bridges among different disciplines (medicine and surgery, information technology, occupational psychology, clinical engineering and architecture, human factors and ergonomics) in order to share a strong interest in the promotion of human factors and ergonomics in healthcare and patient safety."

Ergonomics of Wheelchairs

...an interesting thread from Google Answers on design anthropometrics to accommodate people in wheelchairs.

Usability and Aesthetics

In a New York Time's Magazine* Consumed article, Rob Walker discusses the IDEA award winning HomeHero fire extinguisher.  The product is notable because unlike traditional fire extinguisher designs, the HomeHero is clearly designed to be attractive .  More than just an aesthetic issue, the argument is that making such a product visual appealing will influence owners to place it in a visible and presentable location - thereby improving access and speeding up time to use in a fire.  So there's an interesting concept on making products (at least or especially safety products) attractive to promote their accessibility and enhance user situational awareness.  [Incidentally, Walker points out that the IDEA judging is not based on direct experience with the actual products, but rather images and descriptions submitted by the entrants.]

On a related point, Walker mentions Don Norman's idea that "attractive things work better".  (Incidentally, this is frequently confused with the Aesthetic-Usability Effect where attractive things are perceived as easier to use.)  I bring this up because I imagine the HomeHero's simple, clean aesthetic is perceived as easier to use, but I doubt that its perceived to work better.  Rather, it may be the case that traditional fire extinguishers, while less attractive in a designer's aesthetic sense, have an industrial appearance that may more strongly communicate effectiveness to the consumer.  In other words when we discuss "attractive" or "aesthetic" qualities, we need to qualify what we mean in the appropriate context. 

*Incidentally - if you read one issue of the New York Times Magazine this year.  This should be it.  It's the "Annual Year in Ideas" - a summary of the most interesting and provocative inventions, theories, studies and concepts that emerged in 2007.  Everything from an airborne wind turbine to Radiohead's music pricing approach.  And the back-page listing of some of the year's strangest patents (e.g. a chewable toothbrush).

Eight Design Research Themes for 2008: Technologies and Methodologies

2007 has witnessed the continued maturity of user research practices in product design/development organizations. As this continues, we look to 2008 and key areas of growth and change in user research technologies and methodologies. What many of these themes have in common reflects a shift from how to conduct research, to how to manage all of the research findings and results – clearly a positive trend and a nice problem to have.   Stay tuned into 2008 as these themes are tracked in further detail.

Technologies

Even a casual reader of this web log will have observed the ever-growing options in data gathering technologies available for a variety of research applications. For 2008, the themes in technology are diverse – from high definition video to a new resource of anthropometric head measurements of the Chinese population. But the more compelling tools address needs in organizing and analyzing qualitative data:

1. High Definition (HD) Video- HD video cameras are rising in popularity while falling in price. Higher resolution video means larger file sizes and typically more time for video editing and file management. On the other hand, greater visual clarity can be extremely valuable for studying fine motor control tasks, small control/interface element usage and visually-rich environments. Surgical observation and consumer electronics usability are two applicable areas for HD video.

2. International Anthropometric References – Much of the reference anthropometric data used to guide designs is based on the body dimensions European and North American populations, limiting applicability and, ultimately fit, to a broader user population. The availability of three-dimensional scanning technology, while still time-consuming and expensive, is driving the inclusion of additional populations. Size China is a program to create the first-ever digital database of Chinese head and face shapes for helmets, sunglasses and surgical masks. Such resources will provide a richer starting point for guiding form and size in product designs, but of course are not a replacement for fit testing with real participants.

3. Qualitative Data Management Software – As research capabilities mature, organizations will deal with a new set of challenges around handling larger volumes of research data. Research teams will struggle with organizing, presenting and efficiently re-using findings across projects. With that “embarrassment of riches, there is a need for techniques and tools that support research data management. For example, QSR Internationals’s forthcoming NVivo 8 provides a structure for entering, tagging and querying various forms of multimedia, qualitative data across multiple projects. These types of tools will enable more effective collaboration amongst both localized and geographically distributed researchers, and can provide a centralized repository for observational data.
4. Qualitative Data Analysis Software – The value of well-conducted research is extremely limited if it is not easily organized for effective communication. It is especially challenging to organize, analyze and interpret qualitative data such as user interview transcripts and observational field notes. Following many years of adapting general purpose software and technology, we now have access to a variety of software and hardware tools to support planning, collection, analysis and sharing of research data. Several new technologies can support unstructured data analysis in various ways including searching speech via text and syntactically mapping information. For example, IBM’s Many Eyes application visualizes text in a tree-like branching structure to enable more efficient analysis and data mining.

 

Methodologies

Design research methods will continue to adapt for studying the wider range of user experiences, beyond the primary product. Frameworks and techniques for mapping out user touch points will assist research planning, which will become specialized to particular domains (e.g. medical vs. consumer). Threading across all of this is the need for guidelines for effective research communication and presentation:

5. Comparative Ethnography - While many organizations are using ethnographic observation to understand end-user perspectives and stimulate innovative thinking, such research is frequently focused on a limited set of tasks and users. But a growing trend is to use ethnographic methodology to identify differences between contexts. For example, in a study of automobile driving behavior, Bresslergroup’s research plan not only focused on the in-car driving experience, but studied related, non-driving activities. Observing how comparable tasks (e.g. planning a route, choosing music to enjoy) are conducted in disparate contexts (in this case, in car vs. in home) provides unique insights to inform creative solutions.

6. Service Design - Beyond the “total product lifecycle” approach, organizations will need to understand where they fit within the range of loosely tied user experiences beyond the product itself. For example, medical implant designers should expand user research beyond surgery to understand the touch points that potential patients, caregivers and healthcare providers utilize to make treatment decisions, prepare for surgery, and deal with recovery and beyond. The emerging discipline of service design provides a framework for understanding how multiple types of providers and users interact across the various products, interfaces and environments where interactions and decisions occur.

7. Domain-Specific Research Methods – Although research practices can vary among domains (e.g. medical, consumer, industrial), core methods remain consistent. But as research teams mature, there is a movement towards industry-specific user research and design techniques. For example, in appliance design, usability testing with high-fidelity simulations is frequently necessary to elicit reliable performance feedback from consumers. By contrast, healthcare professionals are typically more capable of responding to lower-fidelity prototypes, partly attributable to their professional problem-solving processes.

8. Presenting Design Research – Typically, product development organizations can effectively present and communicate their work and capabilities in design and engineering. But even when products are backed by quality user research, teams may struggle with effectively communicating its influence on product design. Similarly, organizations have difficulty evaluating the research capabilities of potential employees. The Industrial Designers Society of Americas (IDSA) is leading the way in developing guidelines for design research presentations, starting with the organization of design research portfolio workshop & review at the Northeast District conference this April in Philadelphia.

User Research Technologies Odds and Ends

It's getting close to the end of the year, so here's some "house cleaning" - specifically a half-dozen bite-sized items related to user research and design technology that have come up in recent months:

• I recently covered some of the trends in touch screen technology.  Now, Smashing Magazine just published an article on outstanding recent developments in the field of user experience design.  Definitely worth checking out to see the state of the art.
• Popular Science has a brief piece of what to look for when buying a digital camcorder.  This includes a breakdown of key features by price range and an interactive schematic of camcorder technology.
• Eye-Fi is selling a wireless memory card that streamlines the uploading process from digital cameras to computers via local wireless networks.  Besides the benefits to consumers, this is a convenient method for uploading large quantities of images when returning from field research, especially if multiple cameras/cards were used.
• Technology Review has an article about MIT's keyword search engine for audio recordings.  The software converts audio speech into searchable text.  When this technology becomes more reliable and affordable, I expect to see it applied to qualitative data analysis (e.g. interviews and ethnographic recordings).
• Find out about the upcoming Measuring Behavior (2008) conference.  The event will be in the Netherlands next August and "focuses on methods, techniques and tools in behavioral research in the widest sense, from behavioral ecology to neuroscience and from physiology to ergonomics."
• The cover story from the most recent Design News discusses the science of sports, and the latest bio-mechanical and physiological measurement tools (like where does Jerry Rice actually make hand contact when he catches a football).