User Experience

Ethnography as Design Provocation

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Going through the EPIC 2007 proceedings, I ran across this interesting paper entitled "Ethnography as Design Provocation" by Jacob Buur and Larisa Sitorus. The paper starts off my explaining how the use of ethnography in technology development has been limited to data collection, which led to isolate the researchers from design (which is R.J. Anderson's point) and a limit to the way practice and technology can evolve together (Paul Dourish's point). The authors advocate for another approach in which ethnography can "provoke new perspectives in a design organisation". They describe this stance through case studies of "design encounters" (i.e. workshops) showing how ethnography could be "shared material", "embodied in design" and a way to frame "user engagement". The conclusion they draw are also interesting:

" Firstly, to engage the potential of ethnography to provoke organisations to rethink their understandings of problems and solutions, the textual form may not be adequate. Neither are insight bullet points, as they submit to the logics of rational argumentation that hardly provokes questioning and engagement. Instead, we find it paramount to develop ways of engaging the organisation in sense-making through the use of visual and physical ethnographic material.

Secondly, the ethnographic theory building, though crucial to design, cannot progress independently of the prevailing conceptions of (work) practices ‘out there’ in the organisations – and these may not become clear to us until we confront the organisation with our material. Better sooner than later.

Thirdly, to move collaboration beyond requirements talk among the design team, organisation and participants, needs well-crafted ethnographic material to frame the encounters to focus on fundamental issues and perceptions."

Why do I blog this? interesting reflections about methodologies, a good follow-up to this other post.

Phone directory spot

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Spotted last week in Lausanne: A directory with no phones

Phone directories without any public phone booths. The last remnants of a technological past where phone in public spaces were in booths. The directories there are updated though. It's no longer of a phone booth but a "directory spot".

Defining "slanty design"

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Russell Beale use the term "slanty design" in a short article he wrote for Communications of the ACM recently.

"Slanty design is the term I've given to design that purposely reduces aspects of functionality or usability (...) Slanty design incorporates the broader message, making it difficult for users to do unwanted things, as well as easy to do wanted things. Designers need to design for user non-goals—the things users do not want to do or should not be able to do even if they want to. If usability is about making it easy for users to do what they must do, then we need to have anti-usability as well, making it difficult for them to do the things we may not want them to do. So slanty design reflects two subtly different characteristics: that we need to design for broader goals than individual users may identify, and that we need to incorporate anti-usability, as well as usability, into our systems. (...) Slanty designs result from five key design steps: - Identify user goals; - Identify user non-goals—the things users don't want to be able to do easily (such as deleting all their files); - Identify wider goals being pursued by other stakeholders, including where they conflict with individual goals; - Follow a user-centered design process to create a system with high usability for user goals and high anti-usability for user non-goals; and - Resolve the conflicts between wider issues and individual goals, and where the wider issues win out ensure that the design meets these needs. "

Why do I blog this? I find interesting this notion of "anti-usability" though cueing and preventing people form doing certain interactions.

Beale, R. (2007). Viewpoint: Slanty design, Communications of the ACM, 50 (1), pp. 21-24.

From telemetry in trace park to the usage of urban (digital) traces

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Augmenting amusement rides with telemetry is a paper about how wireless telemetry can be employed to enhance the experience of fairground and theme park. The idea is collect data (video, audio, heart-rate and acceleration) and stream them onto large public display through visualizations:

"The first (shown in Figure 12) presents the audience with a multipanel visualization of the data from the biometrical data monitor and the accelerometer. When using this visualization, video from the helmet camera is projected alongside on a separate screen, and audio is played over the Dana centre’s audio system. The purpose of this combination is to enable experts to talk the audience through some of the live data and the physiological experiences the participant is undergoing. (...) The second visualization presented to the audience is a non-expert visualization of the data (...) demonstrated how we can use telemetry to transform the act of riding an amusement ride into a theatrical event, extending the experience for riders while also enhancing its entertainment value for spectators. "

Nevertheless, the most interesting part is in the conclusion about why these data are worthwile:

"First, such data may allow the detailed analysis of the riding experience, enabling designers to understand at precisely which moments riders feel the most thrill and also how different people react to different rides, supporting the more systematic design of more thrilling rides. A second possibility is to design future rides that directly adapt to individual riders’ preferences or past history, for example tuning their movements in response to telemetry data, providing a more personalized riding experience than is currently possible. Third, this kind of telemetry system could be used as a marketing tool by enabling amusement rides to be reliably rated for the experience they deliver. The fourth and final possibility concerns extending the spectator experience to include ‘tele-riding’ through a more immersive presentation of the telemetry data such as a through a 3D simulation that could even be experienced by remote friends and family at a distance over the Internet."

Why do I blog this? my interest in people's behavior in space and place makes me wondering about all the "traces" one could leave and how they can be used, why they're relevant. This paper gives a good highlight about these reasons.

My interest is not in the theme park thing but rather in seeing the parallels between this experiment and the data generated in urban computing contexts. As I mentioned here, there are already different use of space/time representations of people in cities (make explicit phenomenon that are invisible, give users some feedback, create new services based on this information). So does this paper bring new elements to the table? In a sense yes, the last excerpt I quoted gives new type of usage for that matter. Let's dig more the analogy between the city and a theme park.

Walker, B., Schnädelbach, H., Egglestone, S.R., Clark, A., Orbach, T., Wright, M., Ng, K.H., Rodden, T., Benford, S. and French, A., “Augmenting Amusement Rides with Telemetry”, In Proceedings of ACE 2007, Salzburg, Austria.

Japan is the first market to see PCs shrink

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An interesting read in the SF Gate: this article about the decline of PC in Japan by Hiroko Tabuchi. Some excerpts I found pertinent:

"The PC's role in Japanese homes is diminishing, as its once-awesome monopoly on processing power is encroached by gadgets such as smart phones that act like pocket-size computers, advanced Internet-connected game consoles, and digital video recorders with terabytes of memory. (...) Japan's PC market is already shrinking, leading analysts to wonder whether Japan will become the first major market to see a decline in personal computer use some 25 years after it revolutionized household electronics — and whether this could be the picture of things to come in other countries. (...) The industry is responding in two other ways: reminding detractors that computers are still essential in linking the digital universe and releasing several laptops priced below $300 this holiday shopping season. (...) Recent desktop PCs look more like audiovisual equipment — or even colorful art objects — than computers. Sony Corp.'s desktop computers have folded up to become clocks, and its latest version even hangs on the wall."

The author explains that by two reasons. On the one hand the fact that PC have less added value than other devices: a bigger TV is more obviously relevant as a nice output system, a mobile phone allows mobile consumption. On the other hand, it's because "50 percent of Japanese send e-mail and browse the Internet from their mobile phones". A third reason is also that japanese do not really work at home.

Why do I blog this? lots of relevant stuff there, but one should be careful to draw parallels between japan and other countries. The mobile phone usage (and infrastructure) is SO different that the situation is not comparable.

Anyway, I also find interesting this idea that PC (as motors in the past) are now folded up in other devices (clocks, displays)... as if computation was meant to go "in the background", the added value lying in the services provided by the devices, not the machine itself.

Watch+RFID keyring

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Watch+RFID An RFID keyring attached to a watch. Usually serves to open doors. The owner told me that recently his watch ran out of energy, he kept wearing it because it was convenient to keep thr RFID keyring there.

The importance of the bracelet to hold other things than time. Appropriation and personalization of the watch

Definitely shows the interlinkage between physical artifact mediated by digitality.

Quick notes on Jan Chipchase's talk

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Watching Jan Chipchase's talk at Nokia Connection 2007 (see the podcast here), I tried to take some notes about the sort of questions Jan addresses related to the "material" he and his team collect:- find the lessons about why people are doing x and y? what motivations and apply it to other contexts - does results x and y apply to the consumption of digital content? or tangible media? mobile phone design? - what is the digital equivalent to x and y phenomena? - if you see that people use x and y objects (e.g. straps) what kind of services you can have with X and Y? - challenge people's opinions with baseline data - yield not facts but informed opinions

Why do I blog this? quick notes after listening to a podcast, what inspires me most in Jan's work is precisely how to go beyond the collection of "data" and what sort of questions one can address using them.

Digital input on the street

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I love these street-machines that allow you to print your pictures. The best part for me is the INPUT system, look at that machine spotted yesterday in Renens, Switzerland: Interface observed on the street #3

2 interesting things: - Such a great variety of input (I only miss the floppy disc reader). One can also wonder if there are other street machines which allows not only INPUT but also OUTPUT like... going to a vending machine with a USB key to download TV series, prOn, games, etc. - Think about the motivations for people to actually go there and use it, instead of uploading the pics to a webserver and waiting them to be shipped. A truly urban computing node?

Space and place consideration in the use of public WiFi

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Morning read in the train: Of Coffee Shops and Parking Lots: Considering Matters of Space and Place in the Use of Public Wi-Fi by Alena Sanusi & Leysia Palen. The paper reports an exploratory about how the understanding of space and place matters in accessing free and public WiFi. The emphasis is put on the terms that are employed by wifi seekers and how they reflect spatial notions of ownership, legitimacy and hospitality. The questions they deal with concern the following:

"Wi-Fi challenges us to reconsider space and place theoretically and practically because it offers another layer for possible interaction in spaces, yet its boundaries are not well-articulated. (...) Unlike architectural space, Wi-Fi boundaries are not visible, as they exist in the airwaves. Wi-Fi signals can be sensed with certain software applications, but they cannot be sensed with bodily sensations. Like the wind that makes itself visible through its effects on objects on which it blows, Wi-Fi’s presence can be sensed only by seeing its effects in that space where Wi- Fi is available. We do know something is different about a space, after all, when a bevy of laptops are flipped open at the coffee shop we’ve just entered. (...) Does the space of the wired coffee shop (and the extent of the owner ’s rights) end at the walls of the shop, or at the furthestmost reaches of the signal? Do the social expectations of what should appropriately be done in a coffee shop – buy a cup of coffee, especially when the customer is going to use free wireless service – extend to the walls, or to the parking lot, or to the edges of the signal? How (if at all) is the Wi-Fi user to interact with the signal beyond the bounds of the physical space of the coffee shop? Does the nature of Wi-Fi create a place whose boundaries do not coincide with the place of the coffee shop? Does Wi-Fi create a place whose behavioral expectations of the people there are not the same as those of the coffee shop where it originates? And if so, what are the rights of the owner of the Wi-Fi signal beyond the spatial boundaries of the coffee shop? "

An example I found particularly relevant present a mobile worker in the US who has no time to return to the office and need to send off an urgent email. She drives nearby a coffee shop that does not secure a WiFi network, use their ample parking lot and find an open connection. She sends off her email and takes this as an opportunity to look for incoming email. According to the authors, this scenario constructed from multiple anecdotal reports shows the following:

"This example shows how Wi-Fi connectivity creates new opportunities for interaction with some people and deliberate non-interaction with others. Through connectivity, the mobile worker may be seeking interaction with the email recipient, but it is doubtful that she is seeking interaction with the owner of the hub. (...) When Wi-Fi extends beyond the spatial bounds of walls, then, how are we to interact with it in those overflow spaces? (...) After all, according to conventional understandings of place-behaviors in parking lots, these lots have been designed to be freely used by anyone with a legitimate reason to be there. However, she may be a little uneasy about her right to be in that spot using the overflow Wi-Fi signal, even though it may be entirely unclear from whom she could seek permission, and even though it is unlikely that anyone would challenge her legitimacy as a guest. What we would like to point out here is how intimately our mobile worker ’s understandings of space-based ownership rights and place-based expectations of appropriate behavior and legitimacy are entwined in her experience of using the Wi-Fi signal. "

Why do I blog this? at first it looks like something a bit far from my own research, but as I started piling up material about infrastructures (as a vector for the near future laboratory), it seems that this study echoes with some discussions that happened here: the perception of infrastructure and the corresponding spatial behavior. Of course, there is a lot more to draw in this paper. Having received a Fonera recently I am curious to observe what's happening.

Sanusi, A. & Palen, L. (2007). Of Coffee Shops and Parking Lots: Considering Matters of Space and Place in the Use of Public Wi-Fi. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (online first).

Research potential of virtual worlds: what environment for what methodology?

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(Cross-posted at Terra Nova) Science Mag has an article entitled "The Scientific Research Potential of Virtual Worlds" by William Sims Bainbridge which gives a pretty good overview of how games such as MMO have a "great potential as sites for research in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, as well as in human-centered computer science.

Although the examples are well-known now, what is interesting in this article is the emphasis on the environment and methodological choices: which environment can be tight to what methodologies as described in the following excerpt:

"In terms of scientific research methodologies, one can do interviews and ethnographic research in both environments, but other methods would work better in one than the other. SL is especially well designed to mount formal experiments in social psychology or cognitive science, because the researcher can construct a facility comparable to a real-world laboratory and recruit research subjects. WoW may be better for nonintrusive statistical methodologies examining social networks and economic systems, because it naturally generates a vast trove of diverse but standardized data about social and economic interactions. Both allow users to create new software modules to extract data. (...) WoW is a very conducive environment for quantitative research because it encourages individuals to write "mod" or "add-on" programs, and scientists can use some existing software as research tools or write their own. These range all the way from very simple sequences of character behaviors constructed using macros built into the WoW user interface to long programs written in the Lua language. For example, one widely used program called Auctioneer analyzes prices on the WoW virtual item auction system, and CensusPlus tallies all the players currently online by several characteristics (...) Other fields of computer and information science that may use virtual worlds as laboratories include human/computer interaction (HCI), where "machinima" videos shot in virtual worlds may be used to develop prototypes of a wide range of systems and new methods of information visualization"

Although I am not a great fan of SL, it's very rare to see a discussion about the merits of certain platform to conduct X and Y type of research (also crossed with the disciplines). I'd be happy to know more about the use of other platforms; for example I've seen psychological studies about immersion using car games. What FPS and RTS can be useful for? What about mini-games? Is tangible interaction a good model for certain phenomena?

The article continues by addressing how different disciplines may find virtual worlds worthwhile to explore as research platforms (for example how political sciences may find the experimental method in small laboratory studies). The advantages the author points out ranges from the easiness to recruit participants, the availability of scripting and graphic tools, the motivation factor.

To some extent, the article has a great literature review of existing work (close to the Terra Nova community!) about this topic but I am a bit less optimistic than the author ("Virtual worlds may help unify some branches of the social sciences and give them greater scientific rigor. "). Anyhow, virtual environments at least emable people to talk about a common object and make comparisons.

From observation to design insights

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Having a glance at this Thoughtless Acts book that was standing on a shelf in my apartment, I ran across the last part about why documenting such practices is relevant. The book is a collection of different snapshots which captures the ordinary actions people unconsciously perform every day, avoiding wet surface on the pavement, putting one's coffee on a radiator, etc. So why is this important? Beyond the "such interactions can inspire design opportunities"

"Highlighting needs and problems worth solving: though: the world doesn't need a unique design solutions for every creative adaptation we see (that's the kind of stuff that ends up advertised in in-flight catalogs!). Rather we shiuld look for patterns of more universal needs. (...) Freeing us from existing paradigms through a focus on action: break through limitations imposed by existing solutions, force to focus on the actions that we are trying to solve through design (...) Revealing what is intuitive, helping us design appropriate cues: helps configure material elements and qualities into intuitively recognizable and understandable forms (affordaces). (...) observation can sharpen our awareness of how people respond to particular arrangements and elements. (...) Tuning us in the cultural patterns and meanings: observations help us become more sensitive to sociocultural habits and the meanings conveyed by particular design attributes. (...) Uncovering emotional experience (...) Harnessing tacit knowledge to inform the design process: by encouraging people to notice and document their habits, workarounds, unspoken rules, and cryptic signaling systems, we can work together to uncover the opportunities for improvements. (...) Inspiring more flexible and enduring solutions: many people nowadays are disenchanted by the obligation to design, produce, or purchase a plethora of short-lived, disposable, single-purpose, or single-use items and are interested in findings solutions that create more enduring values."

Why do I blog this? an interesting description of how designers might turn qualitative appraisal of daily life as "insights".

Spatial evolution in MMOs

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Closely related to my earlier post about the evolution of space in multi-user environments, Richard Bartle commented about a paper he wrote on that topic. The author's starting point is that there is less discussion about virtual worlds ARE than WHY people play them, and he claims that VW are places. He basically describes the evolution from text-based MUDs, to 2 1/2D (with isometric or first-person viewpoints) and 3D MMORPGs.

His paper revolves around the display format of virtual worlds, a characteristic Jake Song did not address in his speech at LIFT Seoul:

"Given, then, that virtual worlds should endeavour to approximate reality for their everyday workings, how can this be implemented? The real is at a distinct advantage over the virtual in that it works entirely in parallel. It can ray-trace every photon in the universe simultaneously, whereas even the best of today’s home computers have a hard time rendering a few shadows in real time. Virtual worlds therefore have to cut corners. As it happens, they have developed three ways to do this, which correspond to the three main display formats: (...) Contiguous Locations: Textual worlds represent space as a set of interlinked nodes. Each node represents an atomic location (commonly called a room), which generally conceptualises the smallest meaningful space into which a player’s character can fit. (...) A map for a textual world therefore consists of a network of rooms connected by a set of arrows that correspond to movement commands (...) the arrows on the map need not be bi-directional (...) nodes need not represent rooms of the same size (...) A location can link to itself (...) Tessellated Locations:r ender the world graphically as an array of tiles. The major advantages over a network of nodes in this respect are the constant scale and the implicit connection between the squares. (...) Using an isometric approach, height could now be shown; this meant that hills and mountains no longer had to be suggested by a change in a square’s background texture (...) introduce a degree of nodality back into the system. (...) Access was gained through particular wsquares flagged as being coincident. As an example, if on the main map you walked onto a square containing a staircase leading upwards, that would teleport you to a submap for the floor “above” where you were; (...) Continuous Locations: a location is instead a mere point in a 3D co-ordinate system (...) In a true 3D world, the representation finally goes from contiguous to continuous. Strictly speaking, however, because computers store information using discrete bits, even their “real numbers” are not actually continuous; nevertheless, the level of granularity is so fine that to players it feels continuous."

Why do I blog this? material for a paper about cross-media studies of location-awareness interface in a MUD, 3D space and pervasive gaming. The elements discussed by Bartle are interesting wrt the literature review about the evolution of space.

Bartle, R. (2007). Making Places. In Borries, Friedrich, Walz, Steffen P., Brinkmann, Ulrich, and Matthias Bottger (eds.), Space Time Play. Games, Architecture, and Urbanism. BirkhÔø?user: Basel / Berlin / Boston.

Bike services in Lyon

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Velo'v is a bicycle rental service run by the city of Lyon, France, in conjunction with the advertising company JCDecaux. Bikes can be borrowed at something like 350 stations such as the following one. Access is via both credit card and a subscription system (card purchased on-line or in some shops. Rentals last from few minutes to 24 hours. The system has now been also introduced in Paris (Veli'b) Velo'v signage

What is intriguing is to look at the flourishing birth of artifacts, services and event generated around this velo'v sytem. Some are developed by JC Decaux, like these ad-billboard augmented with information regarding the stations in the vicinity as well as the number of free bikes they have:

Velo'v signage

People interested in the density of bike station can have a glance at poster/ads in the cities (such as the one shown below) but using this google-map mash-up to locate the nearest bike station.

Density of Velo'v

And of course, the digital domain has also been invested with a "virtual" velov racing game designed last year and beamed on huge screen during a city festival.

Why do I blog this? some concrete examples to me of basic urban computing services; very pragmatic but it's interesting to follow their evolution. I bet JCDecaux have lots of ideas handy up its sleeve and it would be interesting to know more about it. There are lots of curious tracks to investigate, about (for example) the traces of interactions in the city. all the stats they collect can be employed of build applications of interest to the users but also to urban planners (+ to improve the service).

What does velo'v pattern would say about city usage? How to represent city usage through that? I haven't seen visulization so far but that would be great material to conduct interviews with bike users to understand how they "use the city". For example, I'd be interested in knowing how they model their path in the city and if they change their behavior based on certain information (+ how do they access these information'). Lots of stuff to discuss here.