UX nerd

As designers, we always concern ourselves with graceful product life cycles, re-use, recycling… anything that can deliver us form the trendiness-issued pile of garbage that we don’t want to leave as our footprint. I know I do, you can read about it here, or go for this article by the director of the London Design Museum, that says it much better. We live under one belief: however obsolete, broken, passé you think something is, it holds the seed of something new. This is the Ying-Yang of design.

A long time ago I attended a workshop with Alan Dix that applied this principle to leverage ancient (failed) wisdom for design inspiration: how to produce a good idea out of a bad idea. How does it work? You can have a look at the example Tomaso, Ting, Maria, Valentina and I worked on. Continue reading ‘Ying-Yang Design’

One of the toughest recurrent moments in my job is the “qualitative research moment”. The moment when I have to convince someone to do some in-depth user study with a few participants to produce a list of qualitative results and derive design recommendations. Whether I suggest observing users or interviewing them, the moment I stray outside A/B testing there it comes… the disbelieving look™, like I needed three degrees to become a fortune teller :S

I want to write a full post about prototype fidelity and testing methods later, and some (approximate) guidelines about when to do which thing… so I’ll try to keep digression to a minimum ;) Now, without further ado… my humble best attempt at explaining why qualitative research can be objective, reliable and produce useful insights about how users experience systems and products (and take that look off your face already, I can see it in my crystal ball and I’m not liking it ;) Continue reading ‘Qualitative research’

I want to write today about measuring subjective qualities. I’m going to talk about “comfort”, but it applies to lots of other things: “easeness of use”, “satisfaction”, “goodness”, whatever you can think of that can’t be measured on a scale (i.e. scales: °C, meters, number of errors).

I’m working on a project that involves some ergonomics, more specifically it requires or would benefit from the label “comfortable”. Like we always do, we designed a test, collected participants, drafted consent forms, prepared the facilities… and then… the unexpected. To my embarrassment, we had to repeat our whole biomechanics experiment because we had gathered our results in a manner that didn’t afford any meaningful analysis. This is the brave account of what went wrong and how we solved it, which I send into the world hoping that at least one less designer will stumble against this cheeky stone ;)

Continue reading ‘Comfort-o-meter: how to measure the subjective’

This post is the second part in the series: the clock. As I mentioned before, I had this lecture with Bert Bongers where he introduced the concept of device parsing, which he came up with (if I’m not mistaken). There, together with Dominika, Maria and Valentina, I did the parsing of a clock.  In this second part, I would like to explain what device parsing is about, illustrating the explanation with our own experience parsing the clock in the image on the left.

Continue reading ‘The book, the clock and the toaster. Part II’

Some time ago, I had a lecture by Bert Bongers on the use of sensors and actuators to enhance interfaces. Besides discussing the different existing sensors and actuators and their usual and unusual applications, he introduced the concept of device parsing and mentioned some topics from The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman. And, in the end, we got to work during one week redesigning a toaster and building a prototype that could be used as a proof of concept and eventually to run user tests. So, this is what this post is about:

• The book, or part I: The Design of Everyday Things
• The clock, part II: an intro to device parsing, and the parsing of a clock as example
• The toaster, part III: our redesign of the toaster, using a different combination of sensors and actuators, following Norman’s principles

(I’ll leave talking especifically about sensors/actuators for some other day, I have a rather ambicious project on them, but it’ll have to wait until I finish with the emoticons and the pagination :)

So, today: the book.

Continue reading ‘The book, the clock and the toaster. Part I’

I’m now in the middle of a project to find out how the use of emoticons in IM conversations relates to the use of actual facial expressions and, together with my colleagues, I have to set up an experiment. We have this plan about how we’re going to do it:  we have interesting literature about the subject, we have a nice and original experiment design, we’ve found the technology we need to carry it out and we’ve almost figured out who we want as participants. But at the end of out to-do list for today “# of participants” is still there, sporting a devilish wink >;-) So, how is sample size chosen when doing an experiment?

Continue reading ‘The choice of sample size in an experiment’