K-I-S-S, my ass

Does the "Keep It Simple, Stupid" principle have it wrong?

Could be, according to Don Norman, who's been cited numerous times here. His recent article, Simplicity Is Highly Overrated, seems to argue that the K-I-S-S principle should be replaced by something like the K-I-S-B-M-S-I-L-C-E-S-T-I-F-B-A-M-P-D-S Principle:

"Keep It Simple But Make Sure It Looks Complicated Enough So That I'll Feel Better About My Purchasing Decision, Stupid"

The point he wishes to emphasize (located in the addendum) is that "people are not willing to pay for a system that looks simpler, because it looks less capable." In other words, systems that look more complicated seem capable of doing more, which positively effects the desire to purchase.

Josh Porter offers a great summary and commentary in Simplicity: The Ultimate Sophistication. Here's an excerpt:

"When users don't understand the advantages of each feature, such as when a user is buying her first digital camera, they are much more likely to avoid making a trade-off by choosing the feature-laden product . . . When users choose a feature-laden product, they may not be exhibiting a desire for complexity. Instead, users are anxious about predicting their future needs. Norman states it plainly: 'the truth is, simplicity does not sell'."

For UCD practitioners, these could be interpreted as "fightin' words" that run contrary to the principles that guide our profession.

What strikes me, though, is that neither Norman (in his essay) nor Porter (in his commentary) explicitly takes into account the age factor, which will kick in very soon when the aging boomers predominate the purchasing market.

Given the advances of the last few decades, the coming generation of seniors is probably less likely to be intimidated by new technologies. But to what degree will this be offset the various degenerations that inherently accompany aging (cognitive processing, decision-making, motor skills, peripheral vision, etc.)? Does the visibility of extra controls, or an overall high-tech look, carry any weight at all when it comes to forking over their hard-earned retirement allowances?

For these users, simplicity may indeed sell.

I think of my parents (both in their upper 60s), who, when shopping for a new appliance or gizmo, repeat the phrase "All I want to be able to do is . . ." an awful lot and are turned off by anything that they perceive as being beyond their ability to operate. What's more, they have very little motivation to learn, especially if "all I want to do is (watch TV, wash clothes, whatever)." Are they really unique to the coming generation of seniors?

To his great credit, Norman wants only for his essay to be understood, and the addendum does a good job of clarifying his intended point. However, sweeping statements such as those made in the essay cannot be fully understood until all relevant issues are included. In this respect, my humble opinion is that Norman has come up short.

Scott Adams nails it once again

My fellow practitioners will appreciate today's Dilbert:

Usability and human-centered design on 60 Minutes

The Jan 28 episode of 60 Minutes featured a segment called "Get Me The Geeks!" -- on the surface, it documents how the deluge of technology into our daily lives has made us addicted to highly complicated gadgets and products. They're so complicated that we can't set them up by ourselves and can't fix them when they crash, break, or otherwise don't work as they should.

Look a little deeper, though, and you'll see confirmation that increased focus on usability and simplicity in design is necessary now more than ever before -- and that there's no indication that the need is going away any time soon.

Dr. Donald Norman (author of The Design of Everyday Things, an oft-referenced work in our field) is featured prominently in the piece, offering the following insights:

• ("When people call up geeks to come and fix something or install it, a lot of them seem very apologetic for not being able to do it. Should they be apologetic?" ) "Absolutely not. No, it's not their fault. It's the damned designers of this stuff who have no understanding of real people, everyday people."
  
  
• (on own his inability to install an HDTV) "Someone complained to me, ‘You'd need a degree, an engineering degree from MIT, to work this damn thing,’" Norman says. "Well, I have an engineering degree from MIT. And I couldn't work it."
  
  
• (on a not-too-distant future where appliances run the house) "So what's really gonna happen in 10 years is, all these things are getting smart," says Norman. "The kitchen appliances will talk to each other. Can you imagine, you go to the refrigerator and it says, ‘No. I've been talking to your scale – that's not on your diet?"

From the mouths of babes

Not about usability per se, but it cuts to the quick of what's required when providing or designing something that's to be used by others . . .

From an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe, written by a middle school student seeking better alternatives for keeping kids off the streets:

You should always ask middle and high school kids what they think they
need, instead of only listening to grown ups tell you what they think we
need.

Deja-vu all over again

Happy New Year to all.

I came across a couple of articles recently that touched on a theme I experienced in previous professional life --

• In Sale must end: should discount methods be cleared off HCI's shelves? (2002), Cockton & Woolrich assert that discount usability methods (heuristic evaluation, cognitive walkthrough, etc.) produce results that are so error-prone as to be unreliable and of little value. Consequently, they run the risk of undercutting the validity of traditional full testing and the damaging the usability field as a whole.
  
  
• In the Nov 14 '06 edition of Brain Sparks, Jared Spool asserts that the execution of the most recent World Usability Day draws attention to the wrong aspects of the usability profession (from a business perspective), and that it could wind up doing the field as much harm as good.

If I read both articles correctly (and my apologies to the authors if I haven't), the concern centers on the viability of the usability practitioner within the design process and the prestige of the profession within the business enterprise.

For the first 10 or so years of my professional life, I was an in-house corporate video professional. Back then (circa 1990), the buzz was that the use of video was going to explode within the communications departments of corporate America -- perhaps not to the point of full-fledged TV studios in every headquarters, but at minimum a group of professionals taking advantage of the "democratization" that the medium was experiencing.

At the same time, a number of influential people in the field worried about the possible downsides: If more and more companies had the ability to create their own programs, where did that leave the seasoned "professionals" of the day? Would select instances of a more visible and expanded role within the business be worth the risk of more and more examples of sub-standard quality -- a "dumbing-down" that would ultimately cause more harm than good?

As an active member of the predominant trade group of the day, I was very friendly with video pros on both ends of the spectrum -- heads of entire video departments in large-scale businesses, as well as "one-person shops" who were trying to produce enough product to justify their jobs. Equal amounts of fantastic work and absolute crap were produced on both ends of the spectrum. And the video revolution kept on going -- accessibility to equipment, resources and distribution expanded to the point where now you don't need any formal education or professional experience to become a video "star."

In the end, of course, the key was the ability to provide, and prove, value to the business. If the business wasn't getting adequate value for the effort, its use of video was scaled back or eliminated altogether. When I think back on most of the projects I was responsible for in those early days, I honestly wonder what my employers were thinking when they decided to jump on the video bandwagon. On the other hand, for those who were able to derive tangible value from the effort, it didn't matter what was going on in the video world at large.

I can't help but think that HCI/usability is at the same point in its development and acceptance. It's not so much of a crossroads, where the field will take one direction or another. Rather, it could be seen as a widening of the same single road forward. Providing value keeps us near the center line, where moving forward is easiest, and allows the road to accommodate more travellers. Inevitably, some who join the journey will cling to the shoulder, using means, methods and approaches that are risky. Some of those will fall by the wayside, while others will wind up providing even more momentum for moving forward.

To take this automotive analogy one final nauseating step further, my guess is that business is beginning to see enough tangible benefit to what we're doing that use of discount methods and uncertainties over self-promotion are really very minor bumps in the road. As with any facet of business, the measure of value that HCI/usability provides will be the determinant of its fate.

Label, baby!

A central tenet of user centered design (UCD) is that the people who create a product -- content experts, technical experts, marketing, management and other stakeholders -- are not actual users of the product. Each has biases (both positive and negative) that are brought to the table and are inherent in the input and feedback that they provide. Armed with credentials in the UCD/HCI/usability field, part of my job is to hammer that concept home as much as possible.

So it's particularly humbling when my own biases are put on display.

One of my current projects is a new version of an online learning management system (LMS) that allows instructors to offer exams, training session, or a combination of the two to their students. Once once of these modules has been created, it can be scheduled according to preferred parameters and made available to be taken by students in the class.

In the programs current version, the interface has two views -- Instructor and Student. On the student side, these modules labeled Assignments. On the instructor side, they are labeled Scheduled Items. Part of the challenge of the new program version was to come up with a single label, to be used in both views, that best encompasses all three types of modules.

"Common sense" -- always dangerous in this line of work -- told me that Assignments was the best choice (i.e., a task or duty created by one person for completion by another), but debate within development and stakeholder meetings was spirited. Ordinarily, this would be a perfect opportunity for a card sorting exercise -- instead, I was asked to sit in on several design feedback conference calls with customers and try to glean consensus, which was not productive. Assignments did not have strong support, nor did Scheduled Items. One participant lobbied hard for Activities, which made everyone on our end of the phone roll their eyes.

With no way of gauging accurate preference or consensus over the phone, I decided to create an online survey and solicit input from my non-professional contact list. After providing some basic context information, I posed the following question:

In your opinion, which one of the following labels best describes the three types of modules outlined above?

• Assignments
• Tasks
• Exercises
• Projects
• Activities
• Other (Please Specify):

40 invitations to take the survey were sent out, with 20 people responding. The results:

• Assignments - 2
• Tasks - 1
• Exercises - 2
• Projects - 6
• Activities - 7
• Other - 2

Needless to say, this was eye-opening on several fronts. Project stakeholders started gaining an appreciation for the actual science behind UCD, understanding that conversations taking place in a conference call does not make for a foundation for good design decision-making.

For me personally, it was a huge and much-needed reality check. I am expected to be the in-house expert on such things, but when push comes to shove, the biases I bring to design can be just as potentially damaging as those of a "non-expert." Only by clearly defining and identifying the needs, challenges and preferences of actual users can information be effectively used by stakeholders to guide critical information design decisions.

Here's the pitch . . . and it's a bit outside

Career counselors and placement services emphasize the importance of the "elevator pitch" -- the 30-second introduction of who you are and what you do for a living that is used in networking and interview situations.

I have never been able to perfect this concept, even when I held positions that people seemed to grasp right off the bat (video producer, web producer, editor). It's become even more challenging since I entered the field of "Human Factors in Information Design." It takes me more than 30 seconds to inadequately "pitch" the concept of Human Factors, and another 30 to "pitch" Information Design (again inadequately).

friends and relatives continually ask, "So tell me again what it is you do?" My uncle Tom seemed to grasp the concept to a certain degree when he said, "So what you mean is you got a master's in 'user-friendly,' right?" From the layperson's view, he's not far off, but of course it's more than that.

So until I can an adequate "pitch" down (and for anyone who's stumbled here wondering what the hell I'm talking about), I'll analogize, courtesy of Hollywood . . .

Anyone who's seen Big (1988), starring Tom Hanks, probably remembers the "I don't get it" scene -- Hanks is a 13-year old who's made a wish to be "big" and wakes up the next day in the body of a 30-year old. Through a series of misadventures, he is named Vice-President of Product Development at a major toy company. A couple of rival execs are in a conference room, pitching their concept for a bulky robot toy to the company owner, using every bit of marketing and analytical data they can get to justify its development. Hanks tries playing with it with no success, then raises his hand and says,

"I don't get it . . . this is a building that turns into a robot, right? . . .
well what's fun about that?"

The rival hands him a graph showing increased demand and market share for robot toys, to which Hanks replies, "I still don't get it." (Here's a link to a clip of the scene -- you'll come across the scene about halfway through the clip.)

In reality, it's the rival execs that don't get it. All of their data may have supported the toy's concept, but they never consulted the users -- the kids that would be playing with it -- to see if they "got it."

The online revolution is still a recent development, and web sites and software have a notorious history of being designed by committee. Tech developers, marketing people, graphic designers, support staff, and upper management all have a vision for what would make for a good and useful product, and the result is often an attempt to satisfy all of these stakeholder groups. What gets ignored is contact with the user -- making sure that the design does not get in the way of being able to do the work people need to do, and uncovering all potential issues early in the design process so that money and resources are not wasted further down the product development line.

So that's what we're charged with -- being a "user advocate," if you will, who uses research and testing techniques to (a) mitigate early design and development costs for computer-based information products, and (b) help ensure a satisfactory user experience.

Not quite the Jonathan Papelbon fastball I'd like, but at this point I'll settle for not having Steve Blass disease.

Worth a thousand words?

Not quite a month into the new position, and already I'm being thrust head first into a number of facets of HFID. Among the projects I've been called in for varying degrees of consult, design and/or recommendation:

• Review and recommendation for an e-commerce environment
• Redesign of a content player
• Redesign of an LMS (learning management system)
• "Usability test" (really a series of user design feedback sessions) of a sub-site

Of these, the content player project provides my first opportunity for using the blog to hopefully gain some insight into an HF issue:

Most computer users are familiar with the many banks of icons featured in browsers and software applications, such as the following from Microsoft Word:

The power of good iconic representation is that it provides an instant visual cue for the functionality that it represents. Even someone not well-versed in Word should be able to determine that the second icon from the left represents Open a File, or that the second from the right represents Print. These are examples of icons with a good semantic distance (closeness between the image depicted in the icon and the function it is intended to represent).

The content player in question exists as part of an software package that helps instructors teach students how to use different software applications. By launching the player, students can view descriptions and demonstrations of tasks that aim to help them learn to use the application more easily.

Among its design features, the player has a bank of icons similar to that of MS Word. In offering design recommendations, I have to be able to provide some user-based rationale for either (a) keeping one or all of the icons as they are or (b) recommending alternatives.

So I put it to you, the readers . . .

What type of action does each of these icons represent?

Feel free to email me or post a comment directly to this blog entry. I'll reveal the answers in the next entry, as well as what readers have to say about them.

As always, my sincerest thanks in advance for your assistance.

The Musical Journey Shuffle, Part 2

In Part 1, I posed a question I pondered while doing some product development research for a recent client:

When listening to music, creating iPod playlists or compiling music CD's, are people more inclined to the "shuffle mode" (random generation of songs in a collection, creating a new listening experience each time) or to the "musical journey" (purposeful ordering of music in a way that is meaningful to the listener)?

I generated an online survey, sent it off to 30 people (with instructions to pass it on, if possible) and collected data over a bit more than a week. The questions attempted to gauge preferences across several different measures (musical tastes, listening habits, musical collections, etc.) that I hoped would provide some insight on the question posed above.

The results:

• A strong majority identify themselves as having "eclectic" musical tastes (rather than being limited to only a few genres), and as listening to a variety of radio stations (rather than sticking to one or two stations on the dial).
  
• A strong majority say they enjoy having many different genres of music in a single playlist/CD, rather than listening to a single genre at a time. When creating a playlist or CD, they say they prefer to include many different genres of music, rather than sticking to a single genre.
  
• A strong majority say they like to be surprised by the next song in a playlist, rather than knowing what comes next. However, about half say that they intentionally randomize songs and genres in playlists/CDs, while the other half say that they carefully order their music in a way that makes sense to them.
  
• Similarly, about half of respondents believe that the songs in their playlists/CDs follow a natural progression, while the other half compile playlists with little regard to order.
  
• A majority of respondents say that they don't like being "jarred" when a slow song is followed by a fast up tempo one (or vice versa); however, about the same number say that are indifferent to having a song be radically different from the one preceding or following it.
  
• Finally, a strong majority of iPod users surveyed (4 to 1) say they listen in shuffle mode more than 50% of the time, with half of those indicating that they listen in shuffle mode 80-100% of the time. However, while most couldn't venture a guess about the habits of family and friends, those that did estimated that family and friends listen in shuffle mode less than 50% of the time.

The first two bullet points weren't at all surprising -- it's almost expected that people consider themselves as having broad musical tastes and having listening habits that support them. Such data would seem to set the table for a preference toward "shuffle mode."

However, the next three bullets would seem to indicate that there is no clear cut preference for either practice. Even the iPod usage data in the last bullet is confounding -- it's almost as if users think that "shuffle mode" is a cool functionality that only they know how to use.

One conjecture was touched on in Part 1 -- that people do indeed take time to create "musical journeys," but mostly when they have a specific task or reason for doing so (to create a workout mix, mood music for a function, etc.). Otherwise, the explosion of iPod usage has made random generation of music from entire collections the favored choice for recreational, "non-task" listening.

Whatever the interpretation, it would seem that future developers of online music experience and delivery systems would do well to allow their users to do both, rather than emphasizing one over the other.

My sincerest thanks to all who participated.

The Musical Journey Shuffle, Part 1

In another life, I spent some time making money as a club deejay. Many factors contributed to my short stay in the field -- short money, bad hours, and overall lack of talent, among others. One in particular stands out, however -- it was pointed out more than once, by more experienced deejays, that I wasn't very good at creating the "musical journey."

According to this concept, you start from a musical Point A to a Point B, with each song feeding from and building on each other in a seamless flow of melody, rhythm and tempo. So, for example, Point A would be the unobtrusive music played as patrons arrived at the club, began ordering the first round, and scanned the club for new faces. The goal would be to take everyone steadily along for the ride to Point B, when the dance floor was in full swing, the waitstaff couldn't keep up with the drink orders, and the music ruled the room.

The musical journey is also prevelent in the way people made mix CDs and, now, make playlists -- aerobics instructors are notorious for this, starting the music at "warm up" and building a steady seamless journey up to "total impact," then down to "cool down." (Runners do this too.) I recently burned a CD that went from Lounge to Soul to Blues to Bluegrass to Folk/Pop to Classic Rock, all within 24 songs. (And the result wasn't bad -- my old DJ cohorts would be proud.) Listening to songs in a pre-programmed, "natural" order would appear to be the result of humans' innate urge to interpret and make sense of all experience.

What, then, to make of the popularity of "shuffle" mode?

"The Serendipity Shuffle," by Leong, Vetere, and Howard (2005), suggests that listening to familar songs in the context of "shuffle" mode helps facilitate serendipity (an instance of making fortunate discoveries by chance or accident). In effect, they say, shuffle mode creates a random event never before experienced by the user, allowing him/her to make new discoveries and unexpected connections to memory, sensation, emotion and environment in a way that is personally meaningful. While cautioning that such experiences cannot be determined solely through design, they maintain that a deeper understanding of serendipity and an emphasis on facilitating it through design will broaden the parameters for determining what constitutes a rich and satisfying user experience.

While doing some product development research for a recent client, I came across a lot of literature indicating that the future of online music delivery and experience will lie in the ability to help customers make more personally meaningful experiences through music -- which presumably would take on the dynamic of the musical journey rather than the shuffle mode.

While I would assume none of us prefers one over the other all of the time, I'm wondering which is the more viable concept that designers should be focusing on. Does our innate urge to create sense of the chaos tip the scales in favor of the musical journey? Or has shuffle mode so infiltrated our conciousness that randomness is now the preferred choice?

I'm planning on conducting a little informal survey of friends and family, iPod users all, to see what their opinions are. Results (whenever I can get them collected and analyzed) will be forthcoming in "Part 2."