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Let’s Get Physical: UX Outside of Electronic Spaces

March 15, 2012 No Comments

Have you ever been baffled by a trash bin, frazzled by a restroom faucet, or juggled an armful of clothing in a small dressing room? You might think these seemingly mundane, utilitarian interactions would have been figured out by now; yet, it is surprising how basic tenets of usability are often disregarded in high-use public environments. Most of us in the field spend far more time interacting with these environments than many of the products we research and design, and we believe special consideration should be given to make these necessities as usable as possible.

So, why then do user experience designers seem less interested in improving these types of interactions? Perhaps along the way, user experience has become a synonym for the interactions that humans have with electronic products and services. However, we should view user experience as encompassing much more than that. Our tools, skills, and techniques can extend into assessing interactions in physical spaces. To have meaningful impact, we must overcome our electronic tunnel vision and begin to focus our sights on the bigger picture of user experience.

To put this philosophy into practice, we set out to conduct guerilla expert evaluations of some of the least glamorous environments in the physical world: street corners, public restrooms, and department store dressing rooms. We felt these locales exemplify typical and relatable user experiences not in the digital realm. As a result of this research, we emerged more assured that user experience professionals can tackle this kind of work. Additionally, we became more aware of how our skill set can be used to make any interaction, electronic or not, more effective, efficient, and satisfying.

Street Corner Trash Bins

The city of Chicago recently installed new trash bins downtown. The eco-friendly cans are designed to periodically compress the trash using a solar powered compactor. This seems a brilliant innovation as space is saved and an eco-friendly power source is promoted. Unfortunately, these trash cans ignore some common usability principles.

Poor Adherence to Standards and Familiar Cultural Constructs

Surprisingly, the trash cans simply don’t look like trash cans (see Figure 1). Lacking the familiar large opening, these hulking waste cabinets have a closed design with a pull handle; they look more like a mailbox or a Star Wars droid than a trash can. This distinct change in appearance, distant from the traditional metal trash bin, causes many to simply walk past, without recognizing the object’s function.

Trash cans with recycling symbol and slots to deposit bottle, paper, cans, and trash — Figure 1. The new solar-powered trash cans found in downtown Chicago don’t look familiar and require considerable force to open.

Context of Use Not Understood

When walking down streets, people need to throw away things acquired along the way: food wrappers, receipts, coffee cups. The old trash can design facilitated this with a wide opening that allowed users to toss in trash as they walked past. The new design not only forces people to stop, but also interact with the trash bin to discard their half-eaten Egg McMuffin. On crowded city streets, this only adds frustration as queues may form in front of the trash can.

Lack of Consideration for User Limitations

The new design also affects usage in other ways. First, opening the bin takes so much effort that sometimes a single person can’t do it alone. This could be a major problem for young, disabled, or older populations. Second, opening the can requires holding a potentially germ-ridden, often unidentifiably sticky handle, leaving people with a dirty hand and a negative reaction to the experience. Third, people carrying items with them have a limited ability to grasp the handle, making it harder to accomplish a task that was previously as easy as dropping an item into a bin.

How could the trash bin be eco-friendly and usable at the same time? If the solar compactor requires a closed design, one could take advantage of the familiar foot pedal operated model (see Figure 2). This design would allow someone to hold onto their shopping bags, while using their leg muscles to open the lid. Also, this design removes some of the perils of grabbing a mystery goo-covered handle.

Person using foot to open trash bin — Figure 2. A trash bin in Toronto uses a foot pedal model for opening the lid.

Public Restrooms

Public restrooms are bound to vary widely; yet, despite building codes, disabilities guidelines, and the expertise of architects, sometimes they do not serve our needs well. As a space that fulfills a human necessity, at the very least a restroom should allow people to complete their tasks as efficiently and hygienically as possible, but we observed several common issues.

Mismatch Between Typical User and Layout of Materials

Some restroom stalls have toilet paper dispensers positioned too low, high, or far to be usable for the average person. If the dispenser is too low, it forces people to reach blindly and tug toilet paper from the dispenser across a potential sea of germs. If the dispenser is too high or far, the person must balance precariously, at the risk of tumbling from the seat, to reach. These problems reduce comfort and cleanliness in an already uninviting situation.

Lack of Visibility of System Status

Many restroom utilities, such as toilets, faucets, and hand driers, rely on often frustrating motion-sensing activation mechanisms. There are benefits to such systems, including sanitation and conservation of materials; however, with no visibility of system status, people often find themselves failing to activate the utility. If it were clear that the hand drier was timed out between inputs, we could all avoid waving our hands fruitlessly.
These issues present easy fixes. The placement of toilet paper dispensers in stalls should reflect the average height of a male or female, and accommodate the needs of those with disabilities. Optimizing for all users can be as simple as adjusting the position by a few inches in either direction. Restroom faucets and hand driers could indicate when they are timed out and when they are awaiting input. Both of these changes would lead to a more predictable and less frustrating experience.

Department Store Dressing Rooms

Dressing rooms are spaces where one wants to feel at ease as much as possible. Most shoppers walk in with their personal belongings in addition to the items they wish to try on. Their goal is simply to determine if their selections fit so that they don’t leave the store with an unintentional belly shirt or flood pants. Yet, the design of many dressing rooms makes this difficult to accomplish.

Insufficient Resources to Accomplish Common Tasks

Many dressing rooms have only one or two clothing hooks from which to hang items. If it happens to be winter, one of these hooks is undoubtedly used for a coat. Any other available hooks are then used to delicately balance garments, hoping they do not fall onto the floor (see Figure 3). Once a person removes their own clothes, they are left juggling a pile of clothes, which impedes their ability to efficiently and satisfactorily accomplish the task of trying on the potential purchases.

Clothing hangs on dressing room hooks in a confusing way. — Figure 3. Fig3.jpg” width=”610″ height=”399″ /> Figure 3:

Lack of Visibility of Room Status

Doors to dressing rooms should have a visible lock indicator, but many do not. This omission adds doubt as to whether a room is occupied or available, causing people to bend over to look under the door and make sure no feet are present before barging in. Furthermore, there is often poor or no labeling of rooms. While less of a problem in smaller dressing areas, in larger stores, those who leave to show their outfit to a friend may return uncertain of which room was theirs.

These usability issues could be fixed with a few small changes. First, adding more hooks to each room can be done inexpensively and without a need for extra space. Another is to leave enough room between the hooks so that hangers don’t fight for space. Visible indicators of room status and a numbering or lettering system for each room can also aid people in identifying an open room or navigating back to the room they are using.

Where Do We Go from Here?

As UX professionals, we must shed our fixation on the usual range of interfaces and begin to see the bigger, holistic nature of user experience. We must be prepared to recognize processes outside of our usual scope of inquiry.

We notice usability issues everywhere we go, but we often ignore them because they exist in an uninteresting, or unflattering, physical space. We cannot ignore them for, as Jesse James Garrett posited, “The user experience mindset is an acquired condition for which there is no cure.” Yet, when it comes to the banal, we often assume these interactions are simply good enough, or fail to see beyond superficial improvements in utility. We must challenge our preconceptions about what constitutes “good enough” in the physical world—about what is simply useful, and what is truly usable.

In our brief exploration, we found numerous examples of experiences that frustrate, challenge, and confuse people. As user experience professionals, our charge seems clear: be an advocate for user experience research and design that will affect people in all aspects of life. No area is off-limits in this pursuit.

作为 UX 专业人员，我们不论何时何地都会关注可用性问题。Jesse James Garrett 断定“用户体验心态是后天习得且无法改变。”但是，对于日常琐事，我们经常假设现状已经足够好了，或者不能超越表面的功能改进。

我们都经历过不良设计决策带来的挫折感。以公共洗手间为例，从悬挂的手纸够不着，到水龙头的感应功能失灵，这些简单的现象都反映出改善用户体验的工作被普遍忽视了。通过在日常琐事（在城市垃圾箱里扔纸质咖啡杯，使用公共洗手间，或在试衣间内试穿衣服）中可发现的几个可用性示例，本文呼吁 UX 专业人员留意并改善基本人类体验的可用性，而不是仅仅关注最新最酷的设备。

The full article is available only in English.UX 전문가인 우리는 모든 곳에서 사용성 문제를 느끼게 됩니다. “사용자 경험 사고방식은 치료법이 없는 후천적으로 얻는 질병이다”라고 Jesse James Garrett이 말하였습니다. 하지만 평범한 경우에 우리는 종종 어떤 물건을 그저 단순히 좋다고 가정하거나 효용성의 표면적인 개선 사항 그 이상을 보지 못하기도 합니다.

우리 모두 공공 화장실과 같은 장소에서 열악한 디자인 의사결정에 대한 실망을 경험해 보았습니다. 바로 손이 닿지 않는 곳에 있는 화장지 걸이에서 우리의 존재를 절대 감지하지 못하는 것 같은 수도꼭지 센서까지 이러한 단순한 상호작용은 더욱 훌륭한 사용자 경험을 간과하는 고질적인 문제를 상징합니다. 매일 일상적인 일(도시의 쓰레기통에 종이 커피잔을 버리는 것, 공공 화장실을 사용하는 것, 탈의실에서 옷을 입어 보는 것 등)을 하면서 만날 수 있는 사용성 문제의 몇몇 예를 통해, 본 논문은 UX 전문가들에게 훌륭한 최신 기기만이 아니라 기본적인 인간 경험의 사용성에도 더욱 주목하고 그에 도전해달라는 요청을 하고자 합니다.

전체 기사는 영어로만 제공됩니다.Na qualidade de profissionais de experiência do usuário, percebemos problemas de usabilidade em todos os lugares em que vamos. Jesse James Garrett propôs “Esta atitude de pensar sempre na experiência do usuário é uma condição adquirida para a qual não há cura”. Mesmo assim, para as coisas banais geralmente presumimos que algumas são simplesmente boas o bastante, ou deixamos de ver além das melhorias superficiais na utilidade.

Todos nós passamos por frustrações com decisões ruins de projeto em locais como banheiros públicos. Desde distribuidores de papel higiênico que ficam fora do alcance, a sensores de torneiras que nunca parecem reconhecer a sua presença, essas simples interações simbolizam um problema mais endêmico de ignorar a experiência do usuário como um todo. Por meio de vários exemplos de problemas de usabilidade encontrados no dia a dia, como tarefas triviais (jogar um copo de café de papel na cesta de lixo da cidade, usar um banheiro público ou experimentar roupas no provador), este artigo tenta alertar os profissionais de experiência do usuário para que prestem atenção e desafiem a usabilidade de experiências básicas do ser humano, e não somente aquelas com os mais recentes e melhores dispositivos tecnológicos.

O artigo completo está disponível somente em inglês.我々はUX専門家であるために、どこに行ってもユーザビリティの問題が目についてしまう。ジェシー・ジェイムス・ガーレット (Jesse James Garrett) は「ユーザエクスペリエンスの考え方は、身についてしまった状態であり、治療のすべがない」と断定している。しかし、ありふれた日常のこととなると、UX専門家といえども、一部のことには単純にこれで十分としてしまい、実用性の表面的な改善以外には目を向けないことが多い。

公衆トイレのような場所に見られる不適切なデザインのためにイライラさせられることは誰もが経験している。トイレットペーパーホルダーが、手の届かないところに設置されていることもあれば、蛇口に付いたセンサーが手を検知してくれなかったりすることもある。これらの単純なインタラクションの事例は、より良いユーザエクスペリエンスの機会が見過ごされている固有の状況を象徴している。日々のありふれた作業（街角のゴミ箱にコーヒーカップを投げ入れるとか、公衆トイレを利用する、あるいは試着室を利用するなど）の中に見られるいくつかのユーザビリティの問題事例を通じて、この記事では、最新の先端的なテクノロジーだけでなく、基本的な生活体験の中にあるユーザビリティについてUX専門家の注目と挑戦を促している。

The full article is available only in English.Como profesionales especializados en UX, advertimos problemas de usabilidad donde sea que vamos. Jesse James Garrett afirmó que “La experiencia de usuario como estructura mental es una enfermedad adquirida para la cual no hay cura”. Sin embargo, cuando nos remitimos a lo banal, solemos dar por sentado que algunas cosas son de por sí lo suficientemente buenas, o no logramos ver más allá de hacer unas mejoras superficiales en su utilidad.

Todos hemos experimentado frustraciones a partir de malas decisiones de diseño en lugares como los baños públicos. Desde dispensadores de papel higiénico que están colocados fuera del alcance de la mano hasta sensores de grifos que jamás parecen reconocer nuestra presencia, estas interacciones simples simbolizan un problema endémico que se relaciona con el pasar por alto la experiencia de usuario global. Por medio de varios ejemplos de problemas de usabilidad que se encuentran en las tareas mundanas cotidianas (arrojar una taza de café descartable en el cesto de basura de la calle, usar un baño público o probarse ropa en el vestidor de una tienda), este artículo intenta instar a los profesionales de UX a prestar atención y cuestionar la usabilidad de las experiencias humanas básicas, no sólo de los aparatos más novedosos producidos con la tecnología más avanzada.

La versión completa de este artículo está sólo disponible en inglés.

Designing an Arabic User Interface: Methods and Techniques for Bridging Cultures

March 15, 2006 No Comments

In early 2003, Pathfinder Associates contracted with a large user interfaces in Arabic. The project was to create data gathering and logistics management applications for educational reform activities in an Arabian Gulf state of under a million people.

We would be responding to the unique challenge of creating a bilingual application for those local users, who themselves com- prised members of multiple cultures. Thus, we were not tasked with globalization, which assumes the creation of a base design that can be changed to meet the needs of multiple countries, nor with localization, the process of infusing a specific cultural context into a pre- viously internationalized product. Nevertheless, we would find ourselves addressing many of the issues relating to both of these activities.

The Arabic interfaces desired by the research firm had to be usable to workers with varying degrees of technical expertise who needed to complete time-sensitive tasks. These tasks included gathering data on the classes each student was taking, and then tracking exams through the phases of the testing process(such as distribution, grading, and recording) using barcode scanners. In one case, the application inter- face was to be implemented in both Arabic and English. Of key interest to stakeholders was obtaining reliable data and implementing a manageable national assessment process involving millions of exam documents and hundreds of schools.

Background

The first phase of the project began in August 2003 and called for the development of a user-focused, custom web application called “Enumeration” that would enable the research firm to efficiently collect a wealth of data on nearly 100,000 students, teachers, principals, and schools. This application would drive a new—and greatly expanded— process of gathering information about schools, teachers, and students in the Arabian Gulf state. The Enumeration application would be deployed in autumn 2003 for four weeks of data gathering. Users would work on location at schools on laptop computers.

The second phase of the project called for the development of an application called “Receipt Control” that needed to be usable for both Arabic and English speakers with varied education and experience levels. Receipt Control would be used to manage the distribution and tracking of exams in a standardized testing program administered over a four-week period in the spring at several hundred schools. The application would need to handle nine million exam and answer books.

Challenges

An immediate challenge was that the actual interface design would be done primarily by monolingual English speakers, plus a native Arab speaker on the user experience design (UXD) team who ended up playing the role of the team’s cultural expert. From the beginning, the entire group would have to become skilled in thinking in the particulars of Arabic, such as bidirectional reading flow (in Arabic, numbers are read from left to right and text from right to left) and script-like letter- forms. It was also necessary to gain an understanding of the cultural behaviors of the project stakeholders, as well as of the ultimate end-users.

Because of the sheer magnitude of the project, and the resultant need for vigilance in maintaining the efficiencies and interrelationships among all the teams involved, some of the predictable bottlenecks inherent in a development effort such as this were encountered. For example, our highly iterative design process, which traditionally relies on the use of low-fidelity wireframes and prototypes, was met with some skepticism from a few of the stakeholders who expected a more finished deliverable at each stage of development. In truth, we have often encountered this expectation in our own culture; in this context, it became a cultural as well as a methodological bridge to cross.

Managing a cross-cultural team working on two continents in significantly different time zones also called for creative strategizing. The American project team underestimated the difference in time conventions of another culture, such as work schedules and vacation periods. Also, our end client was unfortunately excluded from sufficient participation in the design review process because of the complexity of the relationships of the companies involved, as well as budget, time, and scheduling constraints. This was a journey of discovery for our team as well, as we found our own cultural assumptions challenged.

The design and delivery of the general user experience were the explicit expectations for the project. However, another project— equally complex—soon emerged. Pathfinder’s UXD team assumed the role of “cultural translators,” doing connection and liaison between two worlds. Researchers have proposed an elaborate strategy to bridge cultural differences in virtual software teams by creating multidimensional cultural “profiles” to be employed as a framework for team development; we largely proceeded more informally and directly.

Throughout the entire lifecycle of the projects, a relentless and unforgiving timeframe exacerbated the difficulties inherent in this complex project. This was compounded by the sheer number of people involved and the diversity of their skill sets, which drove many aspects of the business process. Involvement of so many people in so many different aspects of the project necessarily dictated a waterfall of decision-making. Obtaining consensus or agreement had to go through many levels of approval. Every change had a cascading effect on the other aspects of the project.

Two screens showing Arabic and English versions — Translation challenges in a data table. Arabic text reads right to left, but Arabic numbers read left to right. Icons flip completely. Fixed-width fonts must be tested carefully.

Solution: Process

We started with our highly visual, iterative UXD process because we’d had success with our methodology on previous projects. In particular, we felt that our Requirements Visualization process would overcome many communication and logistical barriers.

Initially, we built and delivered prototype screens to the research and data analysis firm to pitch the project. Based on these prototypes, a three-year project commitment was awarded to the firm, with Pathfinder commissioned to address the user-experience aspect of the application.

Our high-level process included the following steps: Wireframes were iterated with business, development, and linguistic experts at an early stage to resolve issues in information architecture. Next, click-through rapid prototypes were created and used to distill business logic details and nuances. We created a style guide to guide future design enhancement. We developed a translation strategy to anticipate the placement of text on the screens.

Soon, the task flows and wireframes our team created became the vehicle for fleshing out requirements and deliverables for business and technology teams. These became widely adopted and were the primary tools used across team functions and disciplines, bridging language gaps and skill differences. The development team, business analysts, and stakeholders negotiated priorities and scoping using these tools as well. Hence, our deliverables were woven into every project plan. The lesson learned from this experience was that our Requirements Visualization strategy was even more critical for cross-cultural projects.

Our user-centered approach was improved and refined over time. Example personas and Requirements Visualization became part of every project plan. Additionally, sessions of rapid prototyping that included UXD and lead business analysts in the Gulf state permitted user feedback to be implemented quickly in iterative mode.

Our user-experience design lead, a native Arabic speaker, served as our cultural “bridge” throughout the project, and provided essential skills and capabilities. In addition to linguistic fluency, her personal knowledge of the target school system provided domain expertise. She was sensitive to the unwritten subtleties of cultural differences and facilitated many of the project processes.

Two screens showing Arabic and English. Icons are reversed to work with the language direction. — Examples of the opening page for the Receipt Control application in Arabic and English. Notice the difference in the icons.

In execution, we predictably encountered a combination of wins and losses. The most critical absence we experienced was the lack of sufficient user data. Unfortunately, we were extremely constrained in our ability to employ user research, and there were few resources to consult for meaningful firsthand research. Field observations, interviews, and anthropology studies would have been very helpful to the process as well.

We would have preferred to conduct more extensive formal usability testing. The optimal amount of testing could not be conducted due to several constraints. First was budget, as time and travel across the globe are very expensive. Second, was our limited access to users, as many are employed only during the four-week enumeration and four-week testing period.

We had a single opportunity to gain feedback from a combination of stakeholders and end-users, but again, large-team dynamics and cultural differences dictated the format. We wanted to do individual testing, but that proposal was rejected, in part because the client team preferred to obtain respondent feedback in a group setting, much like a usability focus group.

Our work in many ways expanded upon the notion of culturability, or the merging of culture and usability. Reflecting on the development history of these multiple applications, we realized the importance of four components of the projects: translation, information architecture, visual design, and interface development.

Translation

Creating applications in a target language other than one’s native tongue is a daunting prospect; the vast differences, on many levels, between Arabic and English contributed to the challenges.

The correct expertise in key roles is of primary importance. Language proficiency without cultural knowledge is insufficient and complicates the translation process in many ways. Although this insight appears self-evident, it was crucial to our complex translation process, members for which were distributed among Texas and Illinois in the United States and Egypt and the Gulf state in the Middle East. These sensitivities range from an awareness of the nature of formal Arabic language to the contextual usage of words in the local dialect.

Information Architecture

The information architecture (IA) for these applications needed to be optimized for repeatable, efficient, task-based interactions. Additionally, we discovered the influence of the IA in guiding the processes that were taking place within the users’ physical environments or in facilitating goal-directed tasks. We strove to facilitate human performance in entering (and avoiding re-entering) large amounts of data in Arabic. Workers are time-constrained because the schools close at specific times each day. Workers had a range of technology experience, most toward the lower end. Additionally, we learned that in one specific user group (comprising workers foreign to the Gulf state), there was a hesitancy to ask for help. Thus, the interface would need to be very intuitive and lead the user easily from one step to the next. In Receipt Control, for example, the interactions of the application were optimized for linking documents and contextual data-finding to minimize errors in the data. Thus, physical process was modeled in the interaction.

In Enumeration, the IA dictated how the physical process was sequenced. Information was input in the following order: principals, teachers, and students. In this intentionally linear process, input fields were grayed out until the preceding steps had been completed—but all the necessary steps were visible. Over the duration of the projects, we refined our methods and reduced time and errors significantly. Initially, there were many contextual miscues resulting from the translator’s inability to select appropriate terms. Also, there are dialectical changes to local Arabic from formal Arabic. Some words simply don’t translate literally but must be described in alonger, more conceptual way. This is fine as an abstract notion, but potentially challenging if you have eighty pixels of width for a button. Arabic does not have the concept of acronyms, and many technical terms caused translation challenges.

Because one of the applications would be used by two sets of users that were mutually exclusive linguistically, we were required to design a flexible information structure that could be reversed, enabling one design to function for both right-to-left and left-to-right reading patterns. Page layouts had to take into account the wider and taller Arabic fonts. However, our interchangeable localized interfaces meant that there would be one set of code to manage. Using the same single interface page and source code, we changed the look and feel of the page based on the current language being displayed. Our application detects the current language being used and supplies the user with an appropriate interface based on their language needs using a single code base. For the Arabic interface, all fields shift to the right so that the fields appear to read from the right; users type from right-to-left; the text is in an Arabic font and the scrollbar appears on the left.

The user tasks addressed were not overly complex, but needed to be accomplished repetitively at high speed. So, fewer steps would result in greater efficiency. The IA solution was contextually sensitive, supplying activities on an as-needed basis. This minimized interruptions to the workflow. To lessen the burden of repetitive data entry, solutions were devised to synthesize data entries with a single click. By employing strategies such as these, we were able to make the transition from features to flow. Rather than assembling a patchwork of disparate functions, we were able to draw the applications and the end users into a closer, more satisfying relationship.

Prior to final completion, behavioral nota- tions were expressed in all wireframes to assist communications with developers. The actions of each button, click, and input field were thoroughly documented to avoid ambiguities and errors in the costly development stage.

Auditory Interface Design

We learned the importance of sensitivity to the physical environment. Strong visual and sound cues can be especially important in extending the interface off the screen and cutting through the chatter of different environments. The Receipt Control application required users to monitor data on test documents using a barcode scanner in conjunction with the web application. Using HTML and JavaScript, we created a barcode scanner interface that accepted an input stream from the handheld barcode scanner, validated the stream, broke it down into component pieces, and then displayed the data on screen in a dynamically growing table. After all codes were gathered from documents in a batch, the entire list of barcodes was submitted to the server for processing. This process benchmarked at thirty-five to forty barcodes per minute, or 2,100 to 2,400 per hour.

For users, Pathfinder had to find a way to respond to the user when a bad or duplicate barcode was scanned. Two different sounds were selected: As the barcodes were validated, workers heard a single error sound for a bad barcode and a double beep sound for a duplicate code. This auditory reinforcement let workers monitor their input without being distracted from their primary data-gathering tasks.

Help as Needed

Appropriate and timely exposure to help information allowed users to anticipate events, which built a sense of comfort and trust in the interface. We designed a floating moveable Post-it-type information popup using only code and markup. When the worker holds the mouse pointer over an icon, an information note pops up with directions on how to use the page. Moving the mouse off the note closes it. Clicking on the note makes it “stick” to the page; it can be moved around and set aside to provide direction while the user adds data to the page.

Visual design

The two applications were visually linked through the use of a custom-designed Arabesque pattern at the top. The two applications are distinct but feel related. Color combinations were refined over iterations to accommodate cultural preferences and the work environment. The resulting design resonated with the local users. By using traditional Arabic patterns as a linking element across applications, the visual language also captured the essence of the reform effort.

We employeda rigorous approach to visual systems. Icons were designed to draw attention to actions and transcend the reliance on language. We had to ensure that icons worked culturally, as they are read like text. Pictures are orientation-based; buttons are flipped in form, as well as language. Typography was a challenge. Compared to English, Arabic words occupy more space horizontally and are set, with the chosen typeface, four points larger than the English font. Letterforms change, depending on whether the glyph is at the beginning, middle, or end of a word, altering the rhythm of ascenders and descenders. Arabic fonts had to be bold to be legible.

Over time, the color choices were refined to higher-contrast colors and clear typographic hierarchies because of the environment in which the applications would be used, and the repetitive nature of the tasks. Our user feedback alerted us to an apparent cultural preference for stronger, brighter colors.

The primary result was the evolution of palette and contrast levels from Enumeration 1 to Receipt Control 1 to Enumeration 2. Less ornamentation, less texture, and fewer visual distractions reflected the realities of task-specific interactions.

Interface Development

Others’ research on the Arabization of GUIs prepared us somewhat for development issues and constraints, but in true pioneering fashion, we managed to come up with a few challenges of our own.

Due to the business requirements guiding the design and development, the applicationwas to be deployed in a browser, yet function as, and appear to be, a desktop application. This platform choice had a downstream effect on all aspects of the project. The applications were standardized for Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE). However, IE is coded in English, adding another layer of translation.

Additionally, programming was restricted to the use of HTML and JavaScript to maintain customizability and control of the application through future iterations. However, this choice meant that functionalities such as objects and system-level controls could not be used.

This had a consequent impact on coding. There was considerably more client-side coding, estimated at 10,000 lines for the twenty-five to thirty screens in Enumeration 2, which complicated other translation issues like page orientation.

As with interface and visual design, the building of the applications had to accommodate English-language development. We worked out most issues in English, and then transferred to Arabic. We set up a production system that allowed us to code using the English left-to-right direction and create a single interface that would work in both directions and both languages with only minor tweaks—two style sheets, one interface. Our process evolved to building the page backwards in English with images flipped. Then we would drop new images in after translation and tweak accordingly. This involved changing the direction of the page in HTML by adjusting coordinates and directional flow of text (left-to-right to right-to-left).

Our initial interface design used fixed-width Arabic fonts in input cells and tables. However, after reviewing the final interface and obtaining user feedback through testing, we found that the Arabic readers found the fixed-width fonts to be illegible. We performed a complete font study with our users and decided to use a more standard proportional Arabic font that gave us greater clarity and readability. These changes were made in the style sheets, providing us with an efficient change across the interface.

In the “school classes” page of the interface, individual students from a list of all students in a school get grouped together into academic classes. We employed dynamic drag and drop interactions with floating windows to speed the formation of these groups. Users are able to select more than one student and then click and drag these students to a holding area to form a group. This strategy made the interface three times faster than adding students to the holding area one by one.

Results

Pathfinder‘s UXD strategy enabled the design to work in the Arabic culture, yet be produced by a largely English-speaking team. The effectiveness of our solution enabled us to create design methodology conventions that could be re-used across cultures. Our deliverables were produced on-time and within budget. Additionally, we found we were able to leverage many of the design and development processes created for this project across a wide variety of clients and projects.

For the client, timely enumeration and exam tracking was achieved on a national scale. The applications are now going into a third year of use. Successive iterations of both applications with incremental improvements have proven the basic design to be solid.

We achieved these results for the end users:

Saved time in the data collection process by creating drag and drop functionality like a desktop application. This advanced interaction delivered the twin benefits of increased speed and a more enjoyable experience.
Used sounds to increase the efficiency and accuracy of tasks that had to be repeated thousands of times.
Created an information architecture that brought information to the users contextually when they needed it. Users were not compelled to “click and wait” for help text but were able to enjoy more efficient task completion.
Created an interface that connected with the local preferences for design and visual cues.
Created guided processes, increasing the speed and efficiency of high-volume, goal-oriented tasks.

During our interface design process, we created strategies that can be re-used for effective Arabic-English user-experience design and for other languages and cultures as well. The key points are as follows:

Ensure that you have a person who can function as a “cultural expert,” equally familiar with the home and target cultures.
Develop rapid prototypes and vet them with users early and often.
Have everyone on the design team develop a clear understanding of the target language structure, flow, and letterform variations.
Check to make sure technical terms and abstract concepts can be translated.
Have everyone on the team understand at least the basics of the cultural preferences for visual elements.
Keep a translation glossary.
A design team in situ can facilitate effective and timely communication.
If possible, design layout structures to flexibly accommodate both English and the target language.
Develop and test a production translation model.

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Additional reading

Badders, Leon, Komlodi, A. International User Interface Design Topics.
Definitions of globalization and localization (PDF)
Erumban, Abdul Azeez, de Jong, S. B. “Cross-country Differences in ICT Adoption: A
Consequence of Culture?” (2005) SOM Research School
Dafoulas, Georgios, Macaulay, L. “Investigating Cultural Differences in Virtual Software Teams.” Electronic Journal on Information Systems in Developing Countries. (January 2002)
Hofstede, Geert. Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. McGraw-Hill (London, New York 2005)
Barber, Wendy, Badre, A. “Culturability: The Merging of Culture and Usability” Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Human Factors and the Web (Basking Ridge, NJ, June 1998)
Portaneri, Franck, Amara, F. “Arabization of Graphical User Interfaces.” Published in International User Interfaces

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This article was reprinted from the DUX 2005 Proceedings by permission of AIGA, the professional association for design. DUX 2005 was the final World Usability Day session. Pathfinder Associates also presented a paper at the Chicago World Usability Day session.

Thanks to the designers and team members who worked on all the applications, ensuring the success of this project over two years. Special thanks to Bernhard Kappe, Matthew Nolker, Paul Dittmann, Shalom Sandalow, and Kevin P. Wojdak for their help on this submission.

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Educational Games: Ten Design Tips for Immersive Learning Experiences

November 10, 2013 No Comments

Games have become the go-to technology for creating engaging and educational experiences. They have popped up online, in schools, in museums, at large corporate events, and at conferences. User experience designers are now facing the challenge of designing optimal gaming experiences in all of these new contexts.

People playing a game around a table surface. — Figure 1. Our team plays the biomedical game on a large touch screen table.

A major pharmaceutical company tasked us with building a video game to teach attendees at an international psychiatry conference about the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. In case the complexity of the topic wasn’t enough, we also had to make the experience fun and engaging in a space filled with interesting exhibits, all competing for attention.

Our solution involved a series of short, interconnected games that took a new spin on both quiz- and action-style games (see Figure 1). Following the game’s success at the conference, we were inspired to share ten tips that we believe can help UX designers build blockbuster biomedical games.

1. Understand Your Constraints

Whether it’s gravity for hover vehicles or light speed for warp drive, understanding the constraints around your project is critical. Many designers feel that constraints make them more creative by defining the boundaries they can challenge.

Our team had many constraints to consider. Our platform was a large 8 x 2.5-foot touch table that comfortably accommodated six people playing at one time, two on each side and one at each end. This great crowd-drawing feature posed significant design challenges. Text and game elements had to be within view of each player (not on the other side of the table) and oriented right side up. Our solution was to use six individual docks for the trivia games and to split the table into two teams for action games (see Figure 2).

Diagrams showing the position of players around the table. — Figure 2. Our touch screen table could accommodate six players at a time, which encouraged collaborative interaction, but limited the visibility of game
elements.

Unlike Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed, our game was targeted primarily at non-gamers: highly educated doctors of the baby boom generation, who were not likely to be familiar with gaming conventions. Without the ability to use sound, we focused on intuitive swipe gestures and finely tuned visual metaphors to make the game simple but not belittling or trivial.

We also knew that we would have limited time and much competition to capture attendees’ attention in a conference setting. For this reason, we designed the experience to be both flashy and quick. Participants were given a branded card to log in that contained a booklet with more detailed explanations of trivia and action educational concepts. Finally, participant play time could not exceed five minutes.

2. Develop a Visual Language

Goombas and piranha plants are as iconic to Super Mario Bros as star gems and hypercubes are to Bejeweled. Developing a visual language for a game is key to creating a uniform and intuitive game experience. We chose a game look with high saturation, strong outlines, and smoothed geometry to simplify complex molecular shapes. We also took liberty with the size and shape of the binding molecules to make the game easier to play and to reinforce the lock-and-key mechanism (see Figure 3).

Two examples of visual language from science research and biomedical games — Figure 3. In this biomedical game, we used a simplified visual language to make complex objects like
protein receptors more iconic and easier to interact with.

Distilling complex biological content down into meaningful graphics, storyboards, and game levels was one of the most important, challenging, and time-consuming steps in the process. Luckily, we had several biomedical communicators on the team who acted as scientific consultants, artists, and game designers. Having these resources not only made our design process faster, but also made the player interactions and educational messaging more cohesive and accurate.

3. Balance Challenge with Skill

Avoid putting the boss fight at the beginning and let players get in touch with their inner chi. Flow, as Jonathan Haidt puts it in The Happiness Hypothesis, “is the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging, yet closely matched to one’s abilities.” Aim to create challenging, yet interesting and achievable goals that lead to an optimal level of engagement. In A Theory of Fun, Raph Koster says a game should always be giving the player new patterns to analyze and resolve.

To achieve this, it is essential to understand the knowledge and skill level of your audience. It is also important to give players the ability to select the level of challenge (easy, medium, or hard). Creating different game modes (beginner versus advanced), embedding easy and hard challenges into a single level, or introducing increasingly difficult challenges as levels progress enables all players to enjoy and learn. It also maximizes re-playability because the players can learn something new each time they play.

We designed our trivia game with three levels. Questions and mechanics increased in difficulty from simple true-false to more complex multiple choice as the user progressed through the levels. Our action game was also designed with three levels. The first level was a simple scenario in which players had to bind two molecules to a receptor. The second level was a more complex case in which players had to identify normal receptors, avoid abnormal ones, and interact with faster moving molecules. The third level tested the mastery of all of these skills. This type of problem solving, according to Dan Pink, is key to intrinsic motivation because it gives players “autonomy, mastery, and purpose.”

4. Make It Fun

Does fun, like the princess in the castle, seem to be just beyond reach? Well, button mashing won’t help! Challenges need to get harder and more surprising as players solve problems and learn new skills. This is because fun is created by uncertainty. Dancing just on the line between too hard and too easy is what leads to the “Aha! I got it!” moment, which motivates players to keep going. Neil Long has a great analogy: Good game design “is like a broken circle—make that break too big and the player won’t bridge the gap. Make it too small and it’s too easy, and the player gets bored.”

We added bonus ramps and combo cubes as surprising, non-biological elements, which proved to make the game more fun and kept attendees engaged (see Figure 4). We used points as well as color changes and pulsing glows of the game pieces and background to create an emotional connection and to reinforce good plays. We also showed players their final score, which was a combination of both individual and team efforts.

Visuals of the bonus ramp from the game — Figure 4. We added bonus ramps and combo cubes to our biomedical game as surprising non-biological elements.

5. Connect Learning to Prior Experiences

Learning is like a game of Tetris: if you have time and the right building blocks, assembling a complete row is easy. But if you don’t, you’re left with gaps and an ever-growing tower of misconnected pieces. Game designers need to make it easy for players to build new knowledge. You can do this by layering information piece by piece and by using a visual language based on the audiences’ tastes and prior knowledge.

We used iconic biomedical representations of neurons, synapses, and neurotransmitters, which would all resonate with the psychiatrists. We also used the well-known lock-and-key metaphor for molecular interactions—also understood by this audience. Because players were able to visit other parts of the booth before playing the game, we ensured that the colors and shapes of our key molecules were similar to materials displayed in the booth so that the connections between the different media were clear.

6. Replace Words with Actions

Although some of us are nostalgic for times gone by, we no longer live in the Wild West of text-based games like Oregon Trail. We found that when people play games today, they don’t read text; they want just to “figure it out.” Therefore, you should not rely on words to tell the story. Instead, use motion, interaction, and as Neil Long puts it, “Use mise-en-scene—the art of telling the story through the environment—to add detail to your narrative without being completely explicit.”

In our game, we used a visual map similar to a flowchart to prime the players on what game to expect. We then used a single speech bubble coupled with animated arrows to reinforce the message (see Figure 5). Minimizing text means there are fewer problems with text orientation, which was a unique challenge of the large four-sided table.

Screen showing a speech bubble saying submit answers to the center before time runs out. — Figure 5. We relied heavily on animated cues and scoring rather than text boxes to communicate
information in the game.

7. If They Do It, They Learn It

From reading urban planning manuals to playing SimCity, people enjoy learning in many different ways. Experts like Jim Gee and David Shaffer agree that games enhance learning through role-playing events—real or fantasy—that players can’t experience in their own lives.

We wanted psychiatrists to walk away with two key messages: that two different molecules need to bind a normal functioning receptor to start a neural impulse, and that in schizophrenia this receptor functions improperly. To communicate these ideas, we made the main actions in the game “flicking” the two different types of molecules toward the receptor and “flicking” the gray abnormal receptor off the membrane.

8. Maximize Collaboration

Think of the stereotype of the teenager playing video games alone in the basement. Now imagine that she invites a few friends over, or perhaps a few thousand. Today, social media and the Internet give people access to vast online communities of gamers, which is a great thing. As David Shaffer discusses in How Computer Games Help Children Learn, collaboration in gaming enables people to learn actively and at their own pace, creating a safe space to take risks and reciprocate actions.

We encouraged collaboration in our action-style game by making two teams, one on each side of the table (see Figure 6). Each team had to work together to “flick” molecules to receptors. This created a common goal and a visual focus, not to mention a sense of competition! Players verbally coached each other and reinforced key messages through their actions.

Closeup of hands playing on the interactive surface — Figure 6. We encouraged collaborative interaction by creating a team-based action game in which
players had to work together to win.

9. Plan for Cheaters

We’ve all been there: why play by the rules if you can win more points using less time and energy? Designers have to anticipate players who want to “game” the system. Otherwise, you risk educating your audience in tricks rather than key messages. In our true-false trivia game, we decided to trigger a time delay after three wrong answers to penalize people who answer randomly. In our action game, we made a circle appear around a molecule after being touched. A player was able to drag the molecule within but not outside this area, preventing him from simply dragging it to the receptor.

10. Measure Success

So what’s your score as a game designer? Evaluating your video game is critical to understanding your success and building better games in the future. And it’s pretty easy. Measuring player interactions can be completely automated and can be done through collecting answers to trivia questions and response times for in-game actions. These data can tell you how difficult players found the game and how much they learned, as well as help you communicate the effectiveness of the game to the stakeholders.

Wrapping Up

Game design is hard to do well. It is even harder when teaching a complex biomedical topic. We hope these practical tips gleaned from our game design experience will help UX designers build more engaging educational games while simultaneously expanding the popularity of games as highly effective, immersive learning experiences.从一款讲授复杂生物医学游戏的设计工作中，我们总结出十条实用技巧。更有挑战性的是，受众是不玩游戏的保健专业人士。

您如何创造既有趣又有教育意义的游戏？带着将测验类游戏和动作类游戏融合到一起的新想法，一个团队设计了一款游戏：在会议展览厅向大多数人为“非玩家”的受众讲授一个复杂的生物医学主题。学习这十条技巧，可以帮助 UX 设计师打造吸引人的游戏和沉浸式的学习体验。

文章全文为英文版복잡한 생물의학적 주제 교육을 위한 게임 디자인의 10가지의 실전 요령. 더 어려운 일은 독자가 게임을 하지 않는 의료 전문가라는 것이었습니다.

재미있을 뿐만 아니라 교육 효과도 있는 게임을 어떻게 만들까요? 새로운 스핀온 퀴즈와 액션 스타일 게임을 통해 팀은 컨퍼런스 전시장에서 “게임을 하지 않는” 층에게 복잡한 생물의학적 주제를 교육하기 위한 게임을 설계합니다. UX 디자이너가 블록버스터 게임을 구축하고 몰입형 학습 경험을 쌓도록 도와주는 10가지 요령에 대해 알아보십시오.

전체 기사는 영어로만 제공됩니다.Dez dicas práticas para o projeto de um jogo para ensinar um assunto biomédico complexo. Ainda mais desafiador, o público era de profissionais da saúde que não são usuários de jogos.

Como criar jogos que não são apenas divertidos, mas também educativos? Com uma nova reviravolta em jogos do estilo quiz e ação, uma equipe projeta um jogo para ensinar um assunto biomédico complexo para um público em sua maioria de “pessoas que não jogam” em uma sala de conferência. Aprenda dez dicas que podem ajudar desenvolvedores de experiência do usuário a criar jogos populares e experiências de aprendizagem de imersão.

O artigo completo está disponível somente em inglês.複雑な生物医学に関する内容を教えるゲームの設計から得た10の実用的ヒントを取り上げる。対象者がゲーマーではなく医療従事者であったため、課題はさらに厳しいものだった。

楽しむだけではなく、教育的なゲームを作り出す方法とは？クイズとアクション型のゲームに新たな創作を加え、チームは、大会の展示場で、ほとんど「ゲームをプレイしない」対象者に複雑な生物医学のトピックを教えるためのゲームをデザインした。UXデザイナーが、大ヒットするゲームと没入型学習体験をデザインするのに役立つ10のヒントを説明する。

原文は英語だけになりますLos juegos se han transformado en la tecnología preferida en la creación de experiencias educacionales y participativas. Han surgido en entornos online, en colegios, museos, grandes eventos corporativos, y en conferencias. Los diseñadores de experiencia de usuario están enfrentando el desafío de diseñar experiencias de juego óptimas para estos nuevos contextos.

Figura 1. Nuestro equipo juega un juego biomédico en una gran mesa con pantalla touch.

Una compañía farmacéutica de gran escala nos entregó la tarea de construir un videojuego para enseñarle a los asistentes de una conferencia internacional de Psiquiatría sobre la patofisiología de la esquizofrenia. En caso de que el tema no fuera lo suficientemente complejo, debíamos hacer que la experiencia fuera entretenida e inmersiva en un espacio que estaba lleno de exhibiciones interesantes, todas compitiendo por ser el centro de atención.

Nuestra solución involucró una serie de juegos cortos e interconectados que daban un nuevo punto de vista tanto en los juegos de preguntas y de acción (ver Figura 1). Luego del éxito del juego en la conferencia, nos inspiramos en 10 consejos que creemos pueden ayudar a las diseñadores de experiencia de usuario a construir exitosos juegos biomédicos.

1. Entender Tus Límites

Puede ser la gravedad para vehículos con el centro de gravedad elevado o velocidad de rayo para manejo de tracción, el entender los límites del proyecto es crítico. Muchos diseñadores sienten que los límites los hacen más creativos al saber cuáles son los límites que pueden desafiar.

Nuestro equipo tenía muchos límites a considerar. Nuestra plataforma era una gran mesa touch de 8 x 2,5 pies que acomodaba perfectamentea 6 personas jugando al mismo tiempo, dos en cada lado y uno en cada punta. El dibujo de este esquema significaba un desafío de diseño significativo. Los elementos de texto y de juego debían estar a la vista de cada jugador (no en el otro lado de la mesa) y con el lado correcto hacia arriba. Nuestra solución fue usar seis puertos individuales para los juegos de trivia y dividir la mesa en dos equipos para los juegos de acción (ver Figura 2).

: Figure 2. Nuestra mesa de pantalla touch podía acomodar a 6 jugadores al mismo tiempo, lo que los forzaba a interactuar colaborativamente, pero limitaba la visibilidad de los elementos del juego.
elements.

A diferencia de los juegos Call of Duty o Assassin’s Creed, nuestro juego estaba enfocado primariamente a no jugadores: médicos con alto nivel educacional nacidos en la generación de los baby boomers, que no estaban familiarizados con las convenciones tradicionales de los juegos. Sin la habilidad de usar el sonido, nos enfocamos en gestos de arrastre y en metáforas visuales para hacer el juego simple, pero sin menospreciarlo o hacerlo trivial.

También sabíamos que tendríamos tiempo limitado y mucha competencia para capturar la atención de los asistentes en un ambiente de conferencia. Por esta razón, diseñamos una experiencia que fuera rápida y llamativa. Finalmente, el tiempo de juego de los participantes no podía exceder los 5 minutos.

2. Desarrolla un Lenguaje Visual

Goombas y plantas piraña son tan icónicos para el juego Super Mario Bros como las estrellas de gema y los hipercubos del juego Bejeweled. Desarrollar un lenguaje visual es clave para crear una experiencia de juego uniforme e intuitiva. Escogimos un diseño de juego con una alta saturación, fuertes delineados, y una geometría suave para poder simplificar las complejas formas moleculares. También nos tomamos la libertad con el tamaño y la forma de las estructuras moleculares para hacer el juego fácil de jugar y reforzar el mecanismo de apertura y cierre (ver Figura 3).

: Figura 3. En este juego biomédico, usamos un lenguaje visual simplificado para crear objetos complejos como receptores de proteínas más icónicos y fáciles de interactuar.

Transformar el complejo contenido biológico en gráficos con significado, guiones gráficos, y niveles de juego fueron los pasos más importantes, desafiantes y desgastantes en el proceso. Para nuestra suerte, tenemos muchos interlocutores biomédicos en el equipo que actuaron como consultores científicos, artistas y diseñadores de juegos. El tener a estos recursos no solo hizo nuestro proceso de diseño más rápido, sino que las interacciones on los jugadores y el mensaje educativo más coherente y exacto.

3. Equilibrar Desafío con Habilidad

Evita ir a la pelea al principio y deja que los jugadores se encuentren con su yo interno. El flujo, como lo señala Jonathan Haidt en su libro The Happiness Hypothesis (La Hipótesis de la Felicidad), “es el estado de total inmersión en la tarea a la que una persona se enfrenta, relacionada a las habilidades de cada uno”. Apunta a crear metas desafiantes, interesantes y alcanzables que conduzcan a niveles óptimos de compromise. En el libro A Theory of Fun (Una Teoría de la Entretención) de Raph Koster se señala que un juego siempre debe dar al jugador nuevos patrones para analizar y resolver.

Para lograr esto es esencial entender el conocimiento y nivel de habilidad de la audiencia. También es importante darles a los jugadores la habilidad para seleccionar el nivel de desafío (fácil, de dificultad media o difícil). Crear diferentes modos de juego (principiante versus avanzado), incluir desafíos fáciles y difíciles en un solo nivel, o aumentar la dificultad de los desafíos en la medida que progresan los niveles permite que los jugadores aprendan y se entretengan. También maximiza las opciones de volver a jugar el juego puesto que los jugadores pueden aprender algo nuevo cada vez que juegan.

Diseñamos nuestro juego de trivia con tres niveles. En la medida que el usuario iba progresando en los niveles, las preguntas y la mecánica del juego aumentaba en dificultad desde simples verdaderos y falsos a opciones complejas con múltiples alternativas. Nuestro juego de acción también estaba diseñado en tres niveles. El primer nivel era un escenario simple en que los jugadores debían unir dos moléculas a un receptor. El segundo nivel era un caso más complejo en que los jugadores debían identificar receptores normales, evitar los anormales, e interactuar con moléculas moviéndose rápidamente. El tercer nivel probaba el dominio de todas las habilidades anteriores. Este tipo de solución de problemas, de acuerdo a Dan Pink, es clave para obtener motivación intrínseca pues da a los jugadores “autonomía, dominio, y propósito”.

4. Hacerlo Entretenido

¿Pareciera ser que la entretención, como la princesa en el castillo, está fuera de nuestro alcance? Bueno, ¡el hecho de solo apretar botones no ayudará! Los desafíos necesitan ser más difíciles y sorprendentes en la medida que los jugadores resuelven problemas y aprenden nuevas habilidades. Esto sucede porque la entretención se crea cuando hay incertidumbre. El moverse en la línea entre lo muy difícil y muy fácil es lo que lleva al momento “¡Ajá. Lo tengo!”, que motiva a los jugadores a seguir jugando. Neil Long tiene una gran analogía: Un buen diseño de juego “es como un círculo roto – si haces el agujero muy grande, el jugador no podrá pasar de lado a lado. Si lo haces muy pequeño y fácil, el jugador se aburre”.

Añadimos rampas con puntajes extra y combos de cubos como elementos sorpresivos, no biológicos, que hicieron del juego algo mucho más entretenido y mantuvieron a los jugadores entusiasmados (ver Figura 4). Usamos tanto puntos como cambios de color y destellos tanto en las piezas del juego como en los fondos, para crear conexiones emocionales y reforzar buenas jugadas. También le mostramos a los jugadores su puntaje final, como una combinación de los esfuerzos individuales y de equipo.

: Figura 4. Añadimos rampas con puntos extra y combos de cubos a nuestro juego biomédico como elementos sorpresivos no biológicos.

5. Conectar el Aprendizaje a Experiencias Previas

Aprender es como un juego de Tetris: si tienes tiempo y las piezas correctas, el formar una línea completa es fácil. Pero si no las tienes, te quedas con agujeros y una torre de piezas desconectadas que crece y crece. Los diseñadores de juegos necesitan que los jugadores creen conocimiento nuevo de manera fácil. Esto se puede hacer poniendo la información en capas, pieza por pieza y usando un lenguaje visual basado en los gustos de las audiencias y en su conocimiento previo.

Usamos representaciones biomédicas icónicas de las neuronas, sinapsis y neurotransmisores, que resonarían en los psiquiatras. También usamos la conocida metáfora de la llave y el candado para las interacciones moleculares – que era conocida por esta audiencia. Como los jugadores podían visitar otras partes del stand de la conferencia antes de jugar el juego, nos aseguramos que los colores y las formas de nuestras moléculas clave fueran similares a los materiales dispuestos en el stand de manera de que las conexiones entre los diferentes medios fueran claras.

6. Reemplaza Palabras con Acciones

A pesar de que algunos de nosotros somos nostálgicos de los tiempos pasados, ya no vivimos en la era de los juegos de texto del Viejo Oeste como Oregon Trail. La gente hoy juega a los juegos, no leen el texto; sólo quieren descubrirlo por ellos mismos. Es así como no debes confiar en las palabras para contar la historia. En su lugar, usa movimiento, interacción, como dice Neil Long, “Usa una puesta en escena –el arte de contar una historia a través del escenario- para dar detalles a la narrativa sin ser completamente explícito”.

En nuestro juego, usamos un mapa visual similar a un diagram de flujo para contarle a los jugadores sobre qué debían esperar del juego. Luego usamos burbujas de diálogo y fleches animadas para reforzar el mensaje (ver Figura 5). Minimizar texto implica menos problemas con la orientación del texto, lo cual fue un desafío único en una gran mesa de cuatro lados.

: Figura 5. Confiamos en animaciones y puntajes más que bloques de texto para comunicar información en el juego.

7. Si lo Hacen, lo Aprenden

Desde leer manuales de planeamiento urbano hasta jugar SimCity, la gente aprende de maneras muy distintas. Expertos como Jim Gee y David Shaffer concuerdan que los juegos refuerzan el aprendizaje a través del juego de roles –reales o de fantasía- que los jugadores no pueden experimentar en sus propias vidas.

Queríamos que los psiquiatras se fueran con dos mensajes clave: que dos moléculas diferentes necesitan unirse a un receptor functional normal para lanzar un impulso neuronal, y que en la esquizofrenia las funciones de este receptor no son normales. Para comunicar esas ideas, hicimos que las dos acciones principales del juego fueran arrastrar los dos tipos de moléculas al receptor y arrastrar el receptor gris anormal fuera de su membrana.

8. Maximizar Colaboración

Piensa en el estereotipo de una adolescente jugando videojuegos solo en un subterráneo. Ahora imagina que ella invita a unos pocos amigos a casa, o quizás a unos miles. Hoy, Internet y las redes sociales le dan a la gente acceso a grandes comunidades en línea de jugadores, lo que es una gran cosa. Como señala David Shaffer en su libro How Computer Games Help Children Learn (Cómo los juegos de computador le ayudan a los niños a aprender), la colaboración en los juegos ayuda a que las personas puedan aprender activamente y a su propio ritmo, creando un espacio seguro para tomar riesgos y realizar acciones recíprocas.

Estimulamos la colaboración en nuestro juego de acción a través de dos equipos, uno en cada lado de la mesa (ver Figura 6). Cada equipo debía trabajar junto para arrastrar las moléculas a los receptores. Esto creaba un objetivo común y un foco visual, además de un sentido de la competencia. Los jugadores se apoyaban mutuamente y reforzaban mensajes clave a través de sus acciones.

: Figura 6. Estimulamos la interacción colaborativa creando un juego de acción en que los jugadores debían trabajar en equipo para ganar.

9. Un Plan para los Tramposos

Todos hemos estado ahí: ¿Por qué debemos seguir las reglas si podemos ganar más puntos usando menos tiempo y energía? Los diseñadores se deben anticipar a los jugadores que quieren engañar al sistema. De lo contrario, se corre el riesgo en educar a la audiencia en trucos en vez de mensajes clave. En nuestra trivia de verdader-falso, decidimos aplicar una penalización de tiempo después de tres respuestas correctas para prevenir a quienes contestaban al azar. En nuestro juego de acción, hicimos que apareciera un círculo alrededor de la molécula una vez que la tocaban. Así un jugador podía arrastrar la molécula pero no fuera de su área, para evitar que la llevara directamente al receptor.

10. Mide el Éxito

¿Cuál es tu puntaje como diseñador de juego? Evaluar tu videojuego es crítico para entender el éxito y crear mejores juegos en el futuro. Y es bastante simple. Medir las interacciones de los jugadores puede estar completamente automatizado y puede hacerse a través de la recolección de las respuestas a las preguntas de la trivia y a los tiempos de respuesta en las acciones en el juego. Estos datos pueden contarte cuán difícil encontraron los jugadores el juego y cuánto aprendieron, así como ayudarte a comunicar la efectividad del juego a los públicos involucrados.

En Resumen

Es difícil hacer bien el diseño de un juego. Es aún más difícil cuando se debe enseñar sobre un tema biomédico complejo. Esperamos que estos consejos prácticos de nuestra experiencia de diseño de juegos le ayuda a los diseñadores de experiencia de usuario crear juegos educativos más comprometidos así como simultáneamente aumentar la popularidad de los juegos como experiencias de aprendizaje altamente efectivas e inmersivas.

Design Competitions Succeed in Spreading the Usability Message

March 15, 2007 No Comments

World Usability Day 2006 festivities were as varied as the number of social and professional cultures that celebrated the day. Some communities held mini-conferences for practitioners to network and share experiences. Others held outreach activities in museums and other public locales. One particularly effective way to participate is to design something that embodies good usability. Worldwide, students and industry professionals did just that.

The World Usability Day planning committees in Atlanta, Georgia, Chicago, Illinois, and the North Carolina Research Triangle area, as well as in Hyderabad, India, organized design competitions to identify existing systems that are poorly designed, or to design new systems that maximize usability. In keeping with the 2006 global theme, “Making Life Easy,” the focus areas for the competitions included entertainment, finance, tourism, relationships, and communication. Competitors worked in a variety of user-centered design disciplines, such as interaction design, industrial design, media design, communication design, and architecture.

Chicago

In Chicago, Shikha Desai and the World Usability Day planning committee designed a competition geared towards local students in user experience (UX) fields with special emphasis on four aspects of life—work, finance, entertainment, and relationships. Participants were given an opportunity to think about interesting usability issues and design topics outside of their normal academic curricula. Additionally, they were encouraged to perform user research, articulate the selected design problem in terms of user needs, and provide business justification for their ideas. Each of these skills is critical for students preparing for the work environment. Their submissions were evaluated for excellence in problem definition, innovation, and presentation.

Three awards were granted. The Gold prize went to John T. McGowan for “Auto-Call,” a teleconferencing application designed to overcome common user problems, most notably when users agree to join a conference call but then forget to dial in. Kelly Noah, the Silver winner, proposed “Finabler,” a web-based money management tool that, through an easy user interface, aggregates multiple accounts, encourages goal-setting, simplifies budget-tracking, and supports other key use cases. John McGowan received a great surprise on World Usability Day when he learned that he had also won the Bronze award for his warranty tracker submission.

The judges, all professors or professionals from the Chicago area (Aga Bojko of UserCentric, Ken Douros of Motorola, and Adam Steele of DePaul University) were eager to reward the Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners with $200, $100, and $50 American Express gift certificates. In addition, the winning submissions were displayed during the World Usability Day Chicago 2006 event. This offered the winners visibility and exposure to the nearly 250 User Experience managers and practitioners who attended that day. One of the submitters is even pursuing a patent for the competition submission.

Atlanta

As with the Chicago contest, the Atlanta-area UX community also highlighted the work of local students. Catherine Jamal, a usability engineer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, worked with the local Association for Computer Machinery Computer-human Interaction Special Interest Group (ACM-CHI) chapter to organize the second annual student scholarship competition. Submissions came from graduate students seeking to make a significant original contribution to either research or practice in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI).

The judges selected the work of Erika Shehan and Shivam Goyal, PhD candidates in Human-Centered Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Their focus was on “making the invisible visible” within the context of home networking systems. Their research revealed that in households where digital networking systems are installed, most residents don’t understand the inner workings of their own systems. Although users can see the equipment, its infrastructure and status are unknown to them, rendering configuration, upgrades, and troubleshooting virtually impossible. Erica and Shivam developed a prototype that visualized this “unseeable” information and used think-aloud techniques to evaluate it. Overall, their hypothesis was proven, although the acceptance rate for experts lagged behind novices. Erika and Shivam plan to iterate on their design in hopes of addressing the needs of both user types. As they pursue their doctorate degrees, Erika and Shivam will further their research in this area, and the shared $500 scholarship that they received will serve as encouragement for them to continue.

This yearly student competition has been a successful activity for the Atlanta usability community. Local professionals enjoy seeing the research in progress at the surrounding colleges and universities, while the student competitors appreciate the opportunity to present their work, as well as receive constructive feedback throughout the process.

North Carolina

In North Carolina’s Research Triangle, or the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, the TriUPA chapter hosted an “Interactionary.” Modeled after Scott Berkun’s original design sports competition which debuted at the CHI 2000 conference, TriUPA’s Interactionary brought together teams who tackled design solutions in real time while entertaining and educating the audience about their underlying design processes.

On World Usability Day, TriUPA ran two competitions, one for professionals and another for students. Professionals from GlaxoSmithKline and IBM and students from North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina fought to prove their design prowess. Each team had ten minutes to design a living room organizer for books, DVDs, and computer games which parents and small children with learning disabilities could use. A panel of experts from companies like IBM, Touch30, and Insight Product Development interacted with the competitors, thoroughly examining what they were doing, while the audience participated in the judging process as well. The winning teams hailed from GlaxoSmithKline and North Carolina State.

The GlaxoSmithKline team took the “divide and conquer” approach, splitting into smaller teams focused on user research and design. Their design addressed a specific use case: how to encourage young children to clean up after themselves. The proposed solution was both child-friendly and fun to use. Given the limited timeframe, the proposed solution didn’t address the entire problem space as articulated in the contest rules. However, this team compensated for this shortfall with their strong organization and user-centered processes. In fact, this was also the only team to invite an audience member to participate in the post-design usability evaluation.

The North Carolina State team also started off well, with excellent organization, teamwork, and time management. This team engaged the audience during the ideation stage, soliciting requirements and design ideas from the parents in attendance. Their design focused on the organization of the physical artifacts, incorporating color-coded shelves and a wheeled bin. Although the design did not account for all of the users’ needs, the proposed solution was pragmatic and implementable.

As Berkun describes on his website, an Interactionary is “an experiment in design education. The idea is to explode the process of design by forcing insane time constraints and asking teams of designers to work together in front of a live audience. From what we’ve seen, it forces the discussion of design process, teamwork, and organization, and asks important questions about how designers do what they do.” In the region deemed by the 2000 U.S. Census as the most educated in the country, with the highest number of PhDs per capita, it’s no surprise that TriUPA found a fun and educational way to spend World Usability Day.

Hyderabad

In Hyderabad, India, a different type of competition emerged. Instead of highlighting good design, the local usability practitioners protested poorly designed products. Kaladhar Bapu of UsabilityMatters.org (UMO) organized the “Boycott Bad Design” event to help raise awareness about the importance of usability in the Indian market.

In UMO’s estimation, “T here are about 30,000 unusable objects around us, not just in public places but everywhere else including our homes. In all it will take about five years of our precious lifetime to learn using these badly designed products, systems, and environments.” The objective of this competition was to remind the participants and audience how much they’ve come to accept or overlook these technological annoyances as part of life and to encourage them to step outside their complacency and take action.

The boycott yielded more than 300 entries exposing poor design in software installation programs, mixing jars, battery enclosures, bottle caps, mobile phones, matches, designer windows, gas cylinders, and emergency lights, among other things.

A jury of well-known user experience professionals selected the ten “worst” submissions and awarded a cash prize of Rs 3000 (approximately $65 USD) to Shashank Shekhar, Henrik Olsen, Komal Mangu, Bhanu Prakash, Saurabh Malhotra, Sudhir Bhosale, Yogish L Shettigar, Vijay Saradhi, Apurva Patel, and Srikar V. R. Akupatti . Where possible, their feedback will be documented and shared with the appropriate developers with hopes that future products will be improved .

Balancing this criticism of bad designs with a bit of levity, UMO also organized an International Cartoon Contest. With the theme “ Mobile Mishaps,” the competition drew hundreds of humorous submissions highlighting troublesome moments that users often experience while operating their mobile phones.

The jury evaluated each submission on criteria such as creativity, humor, visual communication, presentation, persuasiveness, originality, cleverness, relevance of content, and execution. Prizes were granted for first, second, and third place, and there were five special mention awards as well. Enrico Juqueira Ayres of Maranhao, Brazil won first place for his reminder about the dangers of driving while talking. The remaining award recipients were Milenko Kosanovic ( Serbia & Montenegro), Zygmunt Figura ( Poland), Emerson Carvalho De Souza ( Brazil), Manoj Chopra ( India), Yuriy Kosobukin ( Ukraine), Vivek Thakkar ( India), Muhammet Bakir ( Turkey), Heino Partanen ( Finland), S. Rama Narasimham ( India), and B. G. Gujjar ( India).

Although the five design competitions varied in implementation, they served similar purposes: each encouraged participants to examine closely some aspect of their daily lives in search of better, more user-centered experiences. Each championed design excellence, endorsed the tenets of good usability, and advocated good business sense. Each was a celebration of the user experience field and its practitioners.

Within a variety of contexts, competitions of this sort have been used successfully as a means of propagating the values of a given community. For instance, professionals in the fields of architecture, product design, and visual communication annually submit their work to an assembly of their peers hoping to prove that they embody the standards of their design discipline. The user experience field would benefit greatly by adopting this technique for advertising and advancing our body of knowledge. As a community, let’s embrace this model to further the work of our field.

Chatbots: Consider Using Them for Automating Research Study Participant Communication

December 30, 2018 No Comments

As practitioners, we solve problems and adapt to circumstances. Usually, we can use common tools and methods to solve the problems we are facing, but every once in a while we are faced with a challenge that requires us to think outside the box.

I was recently preparing to run a usability study on an Internet of things (IoT) product that was to be used in the home on a daily basis. In this study, participants would receive a prototype of the product in the mail and be required to perform a series of tasks each day at a certain point in their daily routine, for seven consecutive days, and then provide feedback about their experience immediately after. This was different from any usability study I had done in the past for a few reasons:

It was an unmoderated study that required performing tasks with a physical product instead of an interface.
I had no control over when the participant would perform the tasks each day.
The study was going to take place over several days, and participant feedback was to be collected each day.

With the constraints presented by this study, it became clear that typical methods of running an unmoderated study just were not going to cover all of the challenges presented by this study.

To successfully run this study, I needed a way to confirm that the tasks were being done by participants each day, but without a digital product to capture interactions, I needed to find a new method to record this. I also needed a way to send different surveys to participants each day of the study but needed to ensure it was sent for the correct day and only after they indicated they completed the daily tasks. I determined that the sending of surveys and recording the confirmation of the task completion would be best handled by an automated system.

With so many options for automated messaging services, I narrowed my search to systems that could do the following:

Send messages once triggered by the participant’s actions.
Be triggered over and over for several days without the messages getting mixed up.
Be simple and convenient for the participants to use as to not distract from the product they were testing.

Of all the methods researched, chatbots were found to be best because they operate based on triggers from a person, they allow for a conversation or flow of actions to take place, and they can repeat actions day after day.

Initial Study Planning

Before a chatbot can be built, a plan around how it should behave and what it would be used to accomplish needed to be established.

Being that this project was a usability study, an initial test plan was created that included all of the details from the goals of the study to how it would be run. A flow diagram of the daily participant tasks was crafted based on the intended use of the product (see Figure 1). Establishing this flow was critical to the study because it determined what actions would be required by the participant and what was considered successful completion of the tasks for the day. It was also critical for creating the chatbot because it led to identifying the moments where moderation by the system was needed to move the participant along, and indicated when the tasks were completed for the day so that could be communicated by the chatbot.

A diagram showing a series of user/participants actions/triggers that flow to system/chatbot responses. — Figure 1. The simulated product use flow created for this study based on the intended use of the product.

As part of the test plan, the method of communication with participants needed to be determined. A powerful benefit to working with chatbots is they can be placed into any type of messaging service. This provides the flexibility to use any communication platform that participants are already familiar with or that fits the use case of the product being tested.

The product tested in my study had a mobile application component that was excluded from the study. However, by using a chatbot and placing it in an SMS (short message service) messaging platform and including steps in the task flow that required them to interact via SMS, I was able to incorporate a mobile component to the study. Also, since SMS messaging is so widely used, participants had no issues performing this part of the daily task. Even though SMS messaging was used in this example, any messaging platform could utilize chatbots in a similar way.

Since this study was to run for seven days and have seven different surveys, it required a deep level of planning that led to developing a “schedule” for each day of the study that contained the following:

Steps for the Daily Participant Tasks: The series of actions the participant would perform for the day. These steps would be the same each day and were defined by the flow as previously described and shown in Figure 1. Repeating the same actions created a pattern where participants could easily learn what they needed to do and get into the habit of performing the steps.
Survey Questions: The questions that participants would be asked on each day of the study. Every day had a unique survey with specific questions. The surveys were created online and could be accessed via a web link.
Participant Trigger Phrases: The messages sent from participants via SMS that would trigger a specific bot flow. There were two messages for each day of the study: one to indicate the start of the tasks and one to indicate the completion of the tasks. Trigger phrases were limited to two words to remain simple and straightforward for the participant, reducing the amount of possible errors.
System Responses: The messages that would be sent to participants via SMS after each incoming trigger phrase was received. These were the responses used when configuring the chatbot dialog, and they were intended to guide the participant in what task to perform next. Response messages were the same each day, but each included the specific number of the day in the study as a way of providing reassurance that they were in the correct bot flow. Additionally, the final response message for a given day told the participants that they were done for the day so it was clear they had fulfilled the daily tasks.

Building the Chatbot

A variety of chatbot platforms are available today, all offering a wide range of capabilities. Choosing the best one depends on the specific needs of the project. Identifying criteria that fit the needs of the project helps to narrow the options when researching different platforms. The platform I chose to use for this study was based on my preference to have a very simple and visual UI so I could build quickly without a big learning curve. It also provided additional features that made it easy to integrate with an SMS number and view the message conversation history for created chatbots.

Chatbot Structure

Chatbot conversation paths are essentially flow diagrams; they can be anything from a single, linear path to a complex tree structure. Typically, with a complex chatbot flow, if you were to go down a conversation path and want to change the topic you were discussing, you could step back or even re-enter the flow from the beginning and choose a different path. However, doing this may lead to going down paths you have been down before and re-entering the same prompts multiple times to find the correct path.

While this may be acceptable for chat experiences, it poses risks for a situation where the goal is to avoid having the same message sent twice or responses being sent out of the intended order. When using this for a usability study, the most important thing is for the participant to not lose their place in the flow, or have the ability to accidentally travel down the wrong path because it could lead to them losing track of their location or receiving an incorrect survey.

For the chatbot in this study, I decided to go with a simple, independent conversation flow for each of the days of the study (see Figure 2), rather than combining them into one complex structure with seven different paths. I felt it was better to have the participant enter a new bot flow at the beginning of each day and exit at the end of the tasks for that day because it presented the lowest risk for the participant to end up on the wrong path.

Diagram showing a linear flow of the two task triggers and action sequences. — Figure 2. The chatbot dialog flow created for this study.

Flows and Triggers

Chatbot triggers are words or phrases that when received by a chatbot, instructs it to enter a specific dialog flow. Each individual flow is configured with a unique trigger word, so when that trigger word is received, the bot knows which to enter into. When using chatbots for a study, using triggers that are simple and based on tasks the participant is performing makes it easier for the participant to remember because it serves as a confirmation of the action.

For this study, a single chatbot conversation flow was built based on the daily task flow (see Figure 3) and was then replicated for each of the seven days of the study. Since the actions were to be the same each day, the response text for each day was changed to reflect the corresponding flow that it was in, and the corresponding survey links were added, as well. Despite being the same general flow, each were accessed independently because of the unique trigger words that were assigned. For example, the trigger word for the first day was “Day One” and triggered the chatbot to send responses specific to the first day of the study.

Linear flow for each day starting, for example, with the trigger "Day One" with a response for task instruction, then flowing to a "One Done" trigger with a response for the "Day 1 Survey." — Figure 3. Full set of chatbot flows for each of the seven days of the study with the unique trigger words included.

Connecting the Chatbot to a Messaging Service

The final step to begin using a chatbot is to connect it with a messaging platform. This is achieved by connecting a message platform that is compatible with the chatbot platform via API keys. Once connected, messages can then be sent, and chatbot messages can be received and responses returned.

The SMS messaging platform used in this project allowed for outbound messaging to mobile numbers, which was utilized to initiate the SMS messaging chain with participants starting with a welcome message. A welcome message such as this can serve two purposes—to get participants accustomed to using the message thread for interactions and to eliminate the risk of them messaging the wrong number.

Study Preparation

Once set up, a pilot study is the best way to test the chatbot conversation paths over an extended period of time and to ensure participants understand the required tasks and chatbot responses.

Even with a successful pilot study, it is helpful to have a plan for monitoring the interactions throughout the study such as the following:

Forward Incoming Messages: Some chatbot platforms support incoming messages received by the chatbot to be forwarded as notifications to other mobile numbers or even to Slack channels. Any time the chatbot receives a new message, a notification is sent allowing the messages to be monitored in real-time.
Monitor Messages Through the Chatbot Platform: Some chatbot platforms provide the ability to view full message conversations between a participant and the chatbot. Additional functionality such as being able to pause the chatbot responses and the option to type and send messages manually, may also be available. With these capabilities, the conversations can be monitored remotely, and any issues could be handled directly in the SMS message chain rather than contacting the participant through another channel and possibly interrupt their experience.

Providing Instruction for Participants

Since this was a remote study, participants needed to be provided with enough instruction for them to go through the study on their own. To do so, the product packages mailed to each participant contained instruction cards with detailed steps on how they were to complete the study. It also included a list of the different trigger words they needed to send via SMS each day and at what points in the flow of tasks to send them.

Ideal Applications

Some might consider the amount of preparation for this study to be excessive or off-task from a typical usability study, but I argue getting the response collection right was necessary to get the best results possible. With a simple way to send daily surveys, I was able to keep the participant focused on the tasks in the study and could ensure the correct surveys were sent at the ideal time. The simulated mobile interaction was also achieved thanks to this prep work, allowing participants to experience a more realistic scenario.

Being this took some effort to set up, this method may not be ideal for just any usability study. However, it is a very useful option in situations where the goal is to achieve the following:

Automation: In situations where there is a lot of back-and-forth messaging or sending of surveys, as in my case, this option works great because the chatbot can listen and send specific messages at the appropriate times. It is also great for repetitive scenarios, such as performing the same action each day for several days.
Minimal Contact with Participant: For situations where you cannot or do not want to have a person interacting with a participant, this is a great option to have the system handle the interaction. Also having the ability to intervene in the conversation is helpful if there is a chance the participant responses may be unpredictable and cannot be programmed into the chatbot flow.

Conclusion

In the end, all of the work that went into researching and setting up this chatbot interaction really paid off when it came time for the study. The task flow was simple, and participants picked up on the pattern right away. We had very little issues after the first day.

Planning out the study schedule ahead of time made it easy to build the chatbot dialog flows without missing any details. The instruction cards provided participants with all the information they needed, and all participants completed all of the required tasks and surveys. After the first few days of the study, I was able to step back and let the study run without needing to closely monitor the messaging.

The State of UX: Voices from South America

November 15, 2014 No Comments

Although IT and internet adoption are widespread and strong in Latin America, our field has been slow to develop and it has yet to catch real traction among businesses. As we will see, there are only a handful of countries with specialists fully dedicated to UX. In this article we will discuss the situation of different countries in the region with a focus on the particularly interesting case of Chile.

In preparing this article, I spoke with a few practitioners in the region in order to explore their different visions of how our field has grown, as well as the current state of the industry. We discussed what major organizational and cultural challenges our field is facing, and what we believe are the next steps for the solidification of UX in our region. I learned that each country has different sources of leadership for this growth and there is considerable disparity in the maturity of the field in particular countries.

Latin America is a vast territory over 6,000 miles from north to south that covers more than 20 distinct countries with more than 600 million people with a variety of climates and racial mixtures. We are not talking about a coherent and culturally cohesive entity, but a loosely associated region. Each country has its distinct currency, political system, and cultural norms. Language is a good example. Although most of the Latin American countries speak Spanish, the different types of Spanish spoken are as diverse as the kinds of English spoken throughout the world—think Australian versus Texan versus Scottish English. There are also countries that speak Portuguese, French, or English. This cultural diversity is matched by differences in the way people conduct business and—getting closer to our main topic—how business models or interaction styles cannot be adopted in a one-size-fits-all style. We will explore how different countries have adopted UX practices in different ways.

Where Things Stand

Despite being a small country with fewer than 18 million people, Chile holds one of the leading positions in UX in the region. In Chile, the major push for UX has come from practitioners who were able to gain traction in some government organizations, and others who created a series of specialized agencies. Chile’s UX community created a volunteer organization and put together very interesting conferences for six years in a row, filling large auditoriums with young designers and developers eager to get into the UX community. There is also an interesting startup scene of growing importance that has been receiving all types of backing. Many of these startup projects work in agile mode and have been quicker to incorporate some UX concepts and methods in their process.

Large and mid-sized organizations have been slower to incorporate UX specialists on their teams. Most companies are stuck with the vision that technology is a black box: a turnkey solution that is best left in the hands of engineers, independent of corporate strategies. The companies that have started to incorporate UX within their organization generally follow two paths: they integrate it into their technology or their marketing divisions.

As Jorge Barahona, owner at a design agency in Vina del Mar, explained it, “We can see progress in understanding and development within large companies regarding global UX concepts. However, they see it in fragments and not as adding value to the whole organization.”

He continues, “Companies are a long way from appreciating the true advantage of UX and understanding that better UX leads to less need for advertising, and this is (oddly enough) especially true in marketing and tech areas of these companies. Their marketing divisions are hostage to banners and ad agencies that don’t know further than campaigns and irruptive communication, and tech areas are hostage to software platforms.”

Barahona concedes that “There has been some growth within these companies to learn UX topics, but they are always covered from the side of usability and front end, not in terms of strategy or interaction design.”

Paulo Saavedra, UX head for a design agency in Santiago, says that UX roles are assigned low-level positions within organizations. “The field has become stronger in the last five years. Starting 2012 it has become a priority for large companies who have seen an opportunity in creating internal teams to focus on UX problems. But, he continues, “The downside is that there is no real value orientation with expert support. Rather, they create teams of junior professionals with no senior roles.”

Saavedra calls this “a low-cost solution for companies that limits the development of projects focused on users and takes on projects that reflect the interests of the company’s management instead. This is a frequent deviation when your UX team lacks experience and has lesser clout than areas such as marketing, communication, or e-commerce.”

In terms of education, the same practitioner community—known as AIChile, Information Architects of Chile—has developed a certificate diploma within a private university which has been designed and fully taught by these practitioners. And there are several other universities that offer either certificate or masters programs that incorporate some courses on either Information Architecture or Experience Design.

Argentina is another country with an interesting level of UX development. Santiago Bustelo, principal at a UX consultancy in Buenos Aires and IxDA Latin America Regional Coordinator, describes the situation: “From the beginning (worldwide) adoption of UX disciplines has always grown bottom-up, starting from individuals who are interested and committed to its practice. Practitioners have been the ones to take the role of evangelizers in their organizations, generating interest through their results.”

Bustelo clearly see a growing interest and maturity on the part of the practitioners in Argentina and cites the following examples as proof:

There are eight chapters of IxDA in the country.
The number of attendees and quality of presentations grows each year for UX events.
This year, they will host Interaction South America, a major international conference.

Another country that shows some signs of maturation is Brazil, where I spoke with Carolina Leslie, consultant in Sao Paulo, who said, “The field has already existed in Brazil for many years. What we have seen is the growing importance of the discipline. Fifteen to ten years ago only big agencies and companies had someone doing UX-related work and many of them didn’t even call themselves UXers.”

According to Leslie, “Online agencies (a big area in Brazil), financial services, e-commerce, and media groups are the traditional clients. Many of them have internal teams with dozens of people, and have established a culture that focuses on UX. Government has also invested quite a bit in the UX field. We have an accessibility law requiring all government websites to be accessible, which ended up helping the user experience of its web sites as well. That said, we still have a lot of ground to cover on the subject. Our tax return software, for instance, is in great need of a redesign.”

As regards education, Leslie admits, “I guess this is the part we have more work ahead. Over the last years I’ve seen many new courses regarding digital design and even some specializations focused on UX, but most of them are very practical; we are still in early days of research in the field.”

But on the plus side, she adds, “We have a new startup scene over here and, with it, a growing culture of design thinking and development of user experience work. We are seeing new investments coming from many kinds of digital entrepreneurs.”

In other Latin American countries, UX has had less traction. One would think that Mexico, with its size and strong business interaction with the U.S. would have a leading role in the region, however, UX is still in early stages there.

Luis Aceves, scholar and consultant in Monterrey, speaks of the slowly growing field in Mexico. “We are still in an emerging state. Despite this, there are a growing number of larger companies willing to invest in user centered design; however, small and medium-sized companies still don’t see the value in practicing UX methods and techniques to make sure their products will have a focus on the people. And even though a growing number of companies do so, their focus is at the interface level (mockups, wireframes, etc.), but not on user research activities (ethnography, usability testing.)”

In Ecuador, Wendy Vivero, UX designer at a tech firm in Guayaquil, describes an emerging market where there are still struggles to sell our services and explain to clients the value of what we do. “Not all clients are willing to invest in the additional costs that testing or user interviews involve. This does not keep us from conducting small usability tests and basic user research so we can at least know about their needs, experience, and desires. Many of our clients have already conducted marketing user research, and although not ideal, it still help us understand the situation.”

Vivero singles out e-commerce as the field that has best understood the value of UX investment on their bottom-line. “The most dynamic sector, or with the strongest intent in having a deeper understanding of their users and providing a good experience, is e-commerce, as the stakeholder is aware that their success is depending on it.”

It seems as though business people in the region need to pay closer attention to global organizations that are placing design at the center of their value. As Jaguar’s CEO recently declared: “If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.”

We are aware of activity in a few other countries—including an active community in Colombia, but were unable to reach those practitioners before deadline.

Challenges

The challenges for our practice vary with the development stage of each market. While some colleagues are still battling to open initial ground—making their clients and organizations aware that we even exist and are an important solution to their process—other markets have already acknowledged some interest in UX but still do not embrace it at a strategic level.

Santiago Bustelo says that it is hard to get organizations to move past their comfort zone. “Incorporating UX is not simple; it requires resources, modifications to an organization’s processes, and vision. The sector with the most agility in achieving this, and therefore the most advanced in this area, is the private sector.

“If only one company takes a step forward in certain market that is already advancement. And in a competitive context, this step forward will have great notoriety, particularly in mature markets where saturation in offers makes customers particularly sensitive to service quality. Traditional strategies for market reach have found, or are finding, a limit, and investment in UX is becoming a differentiator as the clearest way for reducing support costs and reducing churn.”

But there are also some broader cultural issues that make the Latin American market different than others where UX has made a stronger mark. If we talk about e-commerce for example, our region has not previously had a very strong history of catalog shopping, with transparent and easy return policies.

This is especially true in Chile where for a long time there has been a sense of distrust between merchants and customers: customers can be wary of receiving a defective product that would be burdensome to exchange if the purchase wasn’t made face-to-face. Likewise, merchants feared the customers would try to take advantage of the system if they made returns easy. Add to this some less-than-ideal mail services or expensive private couriers, and you will see strong limitations for e-commerce. Nevertheless, there is a growing customer base that is eager for access to better quality web services and stores, and a handful of merchants are adjusting to the times, though most are still missing sales by offering mediocre e-commerce stores, and not changing their service culture.

Carolina Leslie makes a good point about how problems can become opportunities. “The greatest problem, and also the biggest opportunity I see over here is showing the real value of UX. People kind of know that ’UX is good for you,’ but they don’t have solid numbers backing up this assumption. It is amazing to find that very few clients do have solid analytics of their situation, so that we can calculate the ROI of a project. This, in turns, makes it harder for user experience to become more strategic.”

Santiago Bustelo also talks about cultural barriers in Argentina: “We don’t have a strong service culture in either the public or private sectors, which could provide fertile territory for the adoption of our disciplines,” He explains. And Paulo Saavedra points out issues with leadership, saying, “I believe the Chilean market lacks maturity and literacy to embrace the importance of UX for optimizing business and fulfilling their business goals.”

Jorge Barahona adds that an important problem is lack of content in native language: “Contents in Spanish, not only because just 5% of Chileans speak and understand English, but there is not enough development of content in order to develop our own UX adjectives. We are unable to create enough topics for our own culture and experience to have a global influence.”

Moving Forward

What can be done to make progress in our field? Practitioners have hope in education as a tool to bring things to the next level. Professional organizations can also be helpful, but they are very challenging to sustain with volunteer models. Another helpful venue is the conference circuit, but regional events can be difficult for people who have little travel assistance from their jobs.

Wendy Vivero suggests, “In Ecuador we need more courses, workshops, and seminars given at the national level. Here, as in other Latin American countries, I believe that most of the training is done online and directly in U.S. or European organizations, and then complemented with work experience. We lack mentors, national organizations, and events that I see are happening in other countries of our region. In terms of academia, there should also be degrees in HCI, Cognitive Psychology, or Human Factors. I am not aware of any institution in my country to offer these degrees.”

Santiago Bustelo says that, “Given that UX disciplines always emerge bottom-up within organizations, an important step forward would be to have larger offer of quality education of high academic level.”

Paulo Saavedra highlights the role of peer organizations. “I believe that initiatives like the Certificate in Information Architecture (developed by AIChile) have contributed to the development of new professionals. This contributes a lot as there are more people trained with established methods and processes within reach, as opposed to what happened to those of us who started in the mid ‘90s when we had to learn by creating our tools.”

Saavedra believes, “we need further effort from universities to include these topics into the regular curricula of related fields, such as design, journalism, communication, advertising, or library science. For traditional programs such as engineering, it would be good to include some section on software design as seen through experience design, in terms of what they call the soft skills of software.”

Jorge Barahona brings up a laundry list of ways in which we can bring our field forward:

Bridging practitioners across the region.
Generating more content in Spanish will attract more interest, and therefore more development in our field.
Marking clear distinctions between UX and advertising.
Seminars and academic formation including research.
Continuing to educate our clients.

In sum, there are some things that the community of practitioners can do on their own, but other efforts depend on different stakeholders that have been slowly but increasingly awakened to the relevance of UX for their bottom-line, and we can influence them. Or as Santiago Bustelo says, “Industry is becoming increasingly aware of UX‚ at least as a buzzword. This is the time for UX practitioners to step in and make a difference.”

Conclusions

We find a region with lots of potential but limited and isolated pockets of progress. There are important cultural barriers for the evolution of our field but there is hope. UX has always been filled with dreamers.

There is also some hope in just waiting for markets to mature and naturally evolve towards models that prioritize design as many global companies have been doing. But we can help catalyze this evolution of these markets.

One interesting thing the community can do—and something I’ve personally attempted for several years—is to consolidate a regional community that can cross the siloed pockets of practitioners that we find now. We could share locally developed content, in our languages, through websites, and continue to regularize the development of regional events and conferences.

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The people interviewed in this article are:

Carolina Leslie, Director of UX strategy at Saiba +
Wendy Vivero, UX Architect – ImageTech, Guayaquil, Ecuador
Santiago Bustelo, Design Director and Principal, Kambrica and Latin America Regional Coordinator, IxDA
Luis Carlos Aceves, Director General – Usaria
Jorge Barahona, Director – AyerViernes
Paulo Saavedra, Director of UX, Multiplica LATAM

Most of the interviews were conducted in Spanish. It was a challenge for the author to translate subjects’ responses while trying to keep individual voices. If the guests’ phrasing is sometimes odd the author is to blame, not them.

This project was partially funded by project PMI USA1204, Chile

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对于用户体验发展来说，南美洲是一个有潜力，但却面临巨大文化障碍的地区。由于不同国家之间的文化差异，用户体验实践经历了不同的发展途径。“通用”的途径是不存在的。但是不要灰心，智利、阿根廷和巴西等国家已有专家致力于用户体验，他们正在建立地区性社群、制作本地内容并举办地区性活动和会议。

文章全文为英文版

남아메리카는 잠재력 있는 지역이지만, UX 발달에 있어서 상당한 문화적 장벽에 부딪히는 곳이기도 합니다. 여러 나라들 사이에 문화적 다양성이 존재하므로 UX 발달 또한 다양한 방법으로 실현되고 있습니다. 모든 문제에 적용되는 하나의 접근법을 찾을 수 없습니다. 하지만 희망은 있습니다. 칠레나 아르헨티나, 브라질과 같은 나라에는 UX에 몰두하는 전문가들이 지역별 커뮤니티를 구축하고, 각 지역 콘텐츠를 개발하며, 지역별로 이벤트와 컨퍼런스를 개최하고 있습니다.

전체 기사는 영어로만 제공됩니다.

A América do Sul é uma região com potencial, mas ainda é uma região que enfrenta barreiras culturais consideráveis para a evolução da experiência do usuário. Em virtude da diversidade cultural entre diferentes países, as práticas de experiência do usuário desenvolveram-se de várias formas. Uma abordagem “única para todos” não pode ser colocada em prática. Mas existe esperança. Países como Chile, Argentina e Brasil têm especialistas dedicados à experiência do usuário que estão criando uma comunidade regional e conteúdo local, e realizando eventos e congressos regionais.

O artigo completo está disponível somente em inglês.

南米は可能性を秘めた地域であるが、UXの進化の前に大きな文化的障壁が立ちはだかる地域でもある。異なる国々の文化的多様性が存在するこの地域では、異なる方法によってUXの実践が発展してきた。画一的な特効薬的アプローチは不可能である。だが、希望もある。チリ、アルゼンチン、ブラジルといった国々には、地域コミュニティを作り、地域向けコンテンツを作成し、地域でのイベントや会議を主催するUX専門家が存在する。

原文は英語だけになります

A pesar de que las Tecnologías de Información y la adopción de Internet es amplia y fuerte en Latinoamérica, nuestro campo se ha desarrollado lentamente y aún tiene que empujar al mercado. Como veremos, sólo hay algunos especialistas completamente dedicados a la experiencia de usuario. En este artículo, discutiremos la situación de diferentes países en la región enfocándonos en el interesante caso chileno.

Para preparar este artículo, hablé con algunos profesionales de la región para explorar sus diferentes visiones de cómo ha crecido nuestro campo, así como el estado actual de la industria. Discutimos cuáles son los principales desafíos organizacionales y culturales que enfrenta nuestra región, y cuáles son los próximos pasos que se necesitan para solidificar la UX. Aprendí que cada país tiene fuentes diferentes de liderazgo en este campo y que hay una disparidad considerable en la madurez de la UX en algunos países en particular.

Latinoamérica es un vasto territorio que cubre más de 6.000 millas de norte a sur en más de 20 países distintos con más de 600 millones de personas en una variedad de climas y mezclas raciales. No hablamos de una entidad coherente y culturalmente cohesionada, sino que de una región asociada de manera individual. Cada país tiene su propia moneda, sistema político, y normas culturales. El lenguaje es un buen ejemplo. A pesar de que la mayoría de los países latinoamericanos hablan español, los distintos tipos de español hablado son tan diversos como los tipos de inglés que se hablan en el mundo – piense en el australiano versus el tejano versus el inglés escocés. Hay otros países que hablan portugués, francés o inglés. Esta diversidad cultural se relaciona también con las diferencias en que las personas conducen sus negocios y – para acercarnos a nuestro tema- en cómo los modelos de negocio o estilos de interacción no pueden ser adaptados a un estilo único que se acomode a todo. Exploraremos cómo los diferentes países han adoptado las prácticas de UX de diferentes maneras.

El Estado de las Cosas

A pesar de que es un pequeño país de menos de 18 millones de habitantes, Chile tiene una de las posiciones de liderazgo en la UX en la región. En Chile el mayor empuje para la experiencia de usuario viene de profesionales que han podido movilizar a algunas organizaciones gubernamentales, y de otros que han creado una serie de agencias especializadas. La comunidad UX de Chile creó una organización voluntaria y logró convocar a interesantes conferencistas a lo largo de 6 años, llenando grandes auditorios con jóvenes diseñadores y desarrolladores ansiosos de entrar en la comunidad de experiencia de usuario. Además, hay una escena de innovación interesante en el país que está recibiendo todo tipo de apoyo. Muchos de estos proyectos de innovación trabajan con metodologías ágiles y han incorporado rápidamente conceptos de experiencia de usuario en sus procesos.

Las grandes y medianas corporaciones han sido más lentas en incorporar a especialistas de experiencia de usuario en sus equipos. La mayoría de las compañías están atascadas en la visión de que la tecnología es una caja negra: una solución que está mejor en manos de ingenieros, alejados de estrategias corporativas. Las corporaciones que han comenzado a incorporar la UX en su organización generalmente siguen dos caminos: la integran en sus divisiones de tecnología o de marketing.

Como señala Jorge Barahona, dueño de una agencia de diseño en Viña del Mar, “podemos ver progreso en entender y desarrollar conceptos globales sobre experiencia de usuario en grandes compañías. Sin embargo, lo ven como algo fragmentado y no como algo que añada valor a la organización”

Continúa, “las compañías están lejos de apreciar la verdadera ventaja de la experiencia de usuario y de entender que una mejor experiencia los lleva a necesitar menos publicidad y esto es, paradójicamente, especialmente verdadero en las áreas de marketing y tecnología de estas compañías. Las divisiones de marketing se transforman en patrocinadores de banners y agencias de publicidad que no conocen más allá de las campañas y comunicación disruptiva, y de divisiones de tecnología que albergan plataformas de software”.

Barahona concede que “ha habido algún crecimiento en estas compañías para aprender sobre temas de UX, pero siempre han sido cubiertos desde el lado de la usabilidad y de la interfaz de usuario, y no en términos de estrategia o diseño de interacción”.

Paulo Saavedra, líder de UX de una agencia de diseño en Santiago, dice que los roles de experiencia de usuario son asignados en posiciones bajas en las organizaciones. “El campo está más fuerte que hace 5 años. Desde 2012, es una prioridad para grandes compañías que ven una oportunidad en crear equipos internos que solucionen problemas de experiencia de usuario. Pero el lado menos amable es que no hay una orientación de valor real con apoyo experto. Crean equipos de profesionales jóvenes sin roles más experimentados”.

Saavedra llama a esto “una solución económica para las compañías que limita el desarrollo de proyectos con foco en los usuarios y pone el énfasis en proyectos que reflejen los intereses de las gerencias de las compañías. Esta es una desviación frecuente cuando los equipos de UX no tienen experiencia y tienen menos influencia que áreas como marketing, comunicación o comercio electrónico”.

En términos de educación, la misma comunidad de profesionales – conocida como AIChile, Arquitectos de Información de Chile – ha desarrollado un diploma en una Universidad privada que ha sido diseñado y es dictado por estos profesionales. Además, hay muchas otras universidades que ofrecen tanto certificados como programas de Magíster que incorporan cursos de Arquitectura de Información o Experiencia de Usuario.

Argentina es otro país con un interesante nivel de desarrollo en la experiencia de usuario. Santiago Bustelo, líder de una consultora en Buenos Aires y el coordinador regional de IxDA, describe la situación: “Desde el principio, la adopción de las disciplinas de UX ha crecido desde abajo hacia arriba, desde los individuos que están interesados y comprometidos con la práctica. Los profesionales han sido los que han tomado el rol de evangelizadores en sus organizaciones, generando interés a través de sus resultados”.

Bustelo claramente ve un creciente interés y madurez de parte de los profesionales argentinos y cita los siguientes ejemplos como prueba de ello:

Hay ocho capítulos de IxDA en el paí
El número de asistentes y la calidad de las presentaciones en eventos de UX crece cada añ
Este año, se realizará la conferencia Interaction South America, la más grande a nivel internacional, en Buenos Aires.

Otro país que muestra algunos signos de madurez es Brasil donde hablé con Carolina Leslie, consultora en Sao Paulo, que señaló: “El campo ha existido en Brasil por muchos años. Lo que hemos visto es la creciente importancia de la disciplina. Quince a diez años atrás sólo las agencias y compañías grandes tenían a alguien haciendo trabajo de UX y muchos de ellos ni siquiera se llamaban a sí mismos profesionales de experiencia de usuario”.

De acuerdo a Leslie, “las agencias online (una gran área en Brasil), servicios financieros, comercio electrónico, y grupos de medios son los clientes tradicionales. Muchos tienen equipos internos con docenas de personas, y han establecido una cultura que se enfoca en la experiencia de usuario. El gobierno también ha invertido bastante en el campo de la UX. Tenemos una ley de accesibilidad que solicita que todos los sitios de gobierno sean accesibles, lo que termina por ayudar también a la experiencia de usuario. Habiendo dicho esto, tenemos aún mucho terreno para cubrir el tema. Nuestro programa de devolución de impuestos, por ejemplo, necesita mucho rediseño”.

Respecto a la educación, Leslie admite, “ésta es la parte donde tenemos más trabajo. A lo largo de los años he visto muchos cursos sobre diseño digital y especializaciones en experiencia de usuario, pero la mayoría son muy prácticos; todavía estamos en pañales en lo que se refiere a investigación en el campo”.

En el lado positivo, ella añade, “tenemos una nueva escena de innovación y con la creciente cultura de pensamiento de diseño (design thinking) y el desarrollo del trabajo en experiencia de usuario. Estamos buscando nuevas inversiones de parte de emprendedores digitales”.

En otros países latinoamericanos, la UX tiene menos empuje. Se podría pensar que México, con su tamaño y la gran interacción que tiene con Estados Unidos, tendría un liderazgo en la región, sin embargo, la experiencia de usuario aún está en fases tempranas.

Luis Aceves, académico y consultor en Monterrey, habla del lento crecimiento del campo en México. “Aún estamos en un estado emergente. A pesar de eso, hay un número creciente de compañías que están dispuestas a invertir en diseño centrado en el usuario. Sin embargo, las pequeñas y medianas compañías aún no ven el valor de los métodos y técnicas de experiencia de usuario que aseguren que se sus productos tengan un foco en la gente. Y a pesar de que un creciente número de compañías ya lo hacen, se enfocan en el nivel de la interfaz (prototipos, wireframes, etc.), y no en las actividades de investigación de usuarios (etnografía, pruebas de usabilidad)”

En Ecuador, Wendy Vivero, diseñadora de experiencia de usuario de una compañía de tecnología en Guayaquil, describe un mercado emergente que aún lucha por vender sus servicios y explicarle a los clientes el valor de la UX. “No todos los clientes están dispuestos a invertir en costos adicionales que involucren pruebas de usuarios o entrevistas. Esto no nos impide conducir pequeñas pruebas de usabilidad e investigación de usuario básica para que al menos podamos saber sobre las necesidades, experiencia y deseos de los usuarios. Muchos de nuestros clientes han conducido investigación de usuarios de marketing y, a pesar de que no es ideal, les permite entender la situación”.

Vivero apunta a que ha sido el campo del comercio electrónico el que mejor ha entendido el valor de la inversión en experiencia de usuario. “El sector más dinámico, o con la intención más seria de entender a sus usuarios y darles una buena experiencia, es el del comercio electrónico, ya que sabe que el éxito depende de eso”.

Parece ser que a pesar de que la gente de negocios en la región debe prestar mucha atención a las organizaciones internacionales que están poniendo al diseño en el centro de su cadena de valor. Como declaró el CEO de Jaguar recientemente: “Si tú piensas que el buen diseño es caro, deberías mirar el costo del mal diseño”.

Sabemos que hay mucha actividad en algunos otros países – incluyendo una comunidad activa en Colombia, pero nos fue imposible contactar a esos profesionales antes del cierre de esta edición.

Desafíos

Los desafíos de nuestra práctica varían con el desarrollo en cada mercado. Mientras que algunos colegas están aún batallando para abrirse camino – haciendo que sus clientes y organizaciones nos conozcan y sepan que somos una solución importante en su proceso –, otros mercados ya están interesados en la experiencia de usuario, pero aún no la incorporan a nivel estratégico.

Santiago Bustelo señala que es difícil que las organizaciones salgan de su zona de comfort. “Incorporar la experiencia de usuario no es simple; requiere recursos, modificaciones en los procesos de las organizaciones, y visión. El sector con más agilidad en lograr estos objetivos y, por lo tanto, el más avanzado en el área, es el privado”.

“Si sólo una compañía avanza en un cierto mercado, eso ya es un avance. Y en un contexto competitivo, este paso adelante tiene gran notoriedad, particularmente en mercados maduros donde la saturación de la oferta hace que los clientes sean particularmente sensibles a la calidad del servicio. Las estrategias tradicionales para atacar el mercado han encontrado, o están encontrando, un límite, y la inversión en UX es un factor diferenciador para reducir los costos del soporte”.

Pero también hay otros amplios aspectos culturales que hacen del mercado latinoamericano diferente a otros donde la UX ha sido más fuerte. Si hablamos, por ejemplo, de comercio electrónico, nuestra región no ha tenido una historia previa de venta por catálogo, con políticas transparentes y con fácil retornos de los productos.

Esto ha sido especialmente verdadero en Chile donde por un largo tiempo ha habido un sentido de desconfianza entre comerciantes y consumidores: los consumidores son muy cuidadosos de recibir un producto defectuoso que será muy difícil de cambiar si es que la compra no fue hecha cara a cara. Por otro lado, los comerciantes temen que los clientes puedan aprovecharse del sistema si hacen que el retorno de productos sea demasiado fácil. Si a eso le sumamos que los servicios de correo o los transportes son privados y caros, se pueden observar fuertes limitaciones para el comercio electrónico. Sin embargo, hay una creciente base de consumidores que desea acceder a servicios y tiendas de mejor calidad, y un grupo de comerciantes que se están adaptando a los tiempos, aunque muchos aún siguen perdiéndose ventas al ofrecer tiendas electrónicas mediocres, y al no cambiar su cultura de servicio.

Carolina Leslie entrega un interesante punto de vista sobre cómo los problemas se pueden transformar en oportunidades. “El problema más grande, y también la oportunidad más grande, que yo veo aquí es mostrar el valor real de la experiencia de usuario. La gente algo sabe de que la experiencia de usuario es buena para ti, pero no tienen números sólidos que apoyen sus supuestos. Es increíble encontrar algunos clientes que tienen analíticas sólidas de su situación, de manera de poder calcular el ROI de un proyecto. Cuando esto no está, es difícil que la experiencia de usuario se transforme en algo más estratégico”.

Santiago Bustelo habla también de las barreras culturales en Argentina. “No tenemos una fuerte cultura de servicio ni en el sector público ni en el privado, los que podrían ser territorio fértil para la adopción de nuestras disciplinas”, explica. Y Paulo Saavedra apunta a aspectos relativos al liderazgo, diciendo, “creo que al mercado chileno le falta madurez y conocimiento para entender la importancia de la UX para optimizar y alcanzar los objetivos del negocio”.

Jorge Barahona añade que uno de los problemas más importantes es la falta de contenido en idioma local. “Los contenidos en español, no sólo porque el 5% de los chilenos hablan y entienden inglés, sino porque no hay suficiente desarrollo de contenido para desarrollar nuestros propios adjetivos sobre la experiencia de usuario. No hemos podido crear suficiente contenido para nuestra cultura y experiencia de manera de que puedan tener una influencia a nivel global”.

Avanzando

¿Qué podemos hacer para que nuestro campo progrese? Los profesionales confían en que la educación será la herramienta que los llevará al siguiente nivel. Las organizaciones profesionales también ayudan, pero son muy complejas de mantener bajo modelos de voluntariado. Otro circuito que apoya el progreso es el de las conferencias, pero eventos regionales son difíciles para aquellas personas que tienen poco apoyo de sus trabajos para viajar.

Wendy Vivero sugiere, “en Ecuador necesitamos más cursos, talleres, y seminarios a nivel nacional. Aquí, como en otros países latinoamericanos, creemos que la mayoría de las capacitaciones se hacen en línea y directamente en organizaciones estadounidenses o europeas, y luego complementada con experiencia laboral. Carecemos de mentores, organizacionales nacionales y eventos que yo veo que sí suceden en otros países de nuestra región. En términos de la academia, deberían haber grados en Interacción Humano Computador, Psicología Cognitiva, o Factores Humanos. No conozco ninguna institución de mi país que ofrezca estos grados”.

Santiago Bustelo dice que, “dado que las disciplinas de experiencia de usuario siempre emergen de abajo hacia arriba en las organizaciones, un paso importante hacia adelante sería tener una mayor oferta de educación de calidad en un alto nivel académico”.

Paulo Saavedra subraya el rol de las organizaciones de pares. “Creo que iniciativas como el Certificado en Arquitectura de Información (desarrollado por AI Chile) han contribuido al desarrollo de nuevos profesionales. Esto ayuda mucho ya que así hay más gente capacitada en la metodología y los procesos, en oposición a lo que pasaba con aquellos que empezamos a mediados de los 90s y que tuvimos que aprender creando nuestras propias herramientas”.

Saavedra cree que, “necesitamos mayor esfuerzo de parte de las universidades en incluir estos tópicos en su currículum regular en las áreas relacionadas, como diseño, periodismo, comunicación, publicidad o bibliotecología. Para programas tradicionales como Ingeniería, sería bueno incluir secciones de diseño de software desde el punto de vista del diseño de la experiencia, en términos de lo que ellos llaman las habilidades blandas del software”.

Jorge Barahona hace una lista de maneras de poder hacer avanzar el campo:

Generar más contenido en español atraerá más interés y, por lo tanto, más desarrollo en nuestro campo
Hacer distinciones claras entre lo que es experiencia de usuario y lo que es publicidad
Seminarios y formación académica, incluida la investigación
Continuar educando a los clientes

En resumen, hay algunas cosas que la comunidad de profesionales puede hacer por sí misma, pero otros esfuerzos dependen de diferentes actores que han ido lento pero crecientemente tomando consciencia de la relevancia de la experiencia de usuario en su negocio, y nosotros podemos influenciarlos. O como dice Santiago Bustelo, “la industria es cada vez más consciente de la experiencia de usuario, al menos de la palabra. Este es el minuto para que los profesionales de la UX den un paso adelante y hagan la diferencia”.

Conclusiones

Encontramos una región con mucho potencial, pero con espacios limitados y aislados de progreso. Hay barreras culturales importantes para la evolución de nuestro campo, pero hay esperanza. La UX siempre ha estado llena de soñadores.

También hay cierta esperanza en esperar que los mercados maduren y evolucionen naturalmente hacia modelos que prioricen el diseño como lo hacen muchas compañías globales. Nosotros podemos capitalizar esta evolución de los mercados.

Una de las cosas interesantes que puede hacer la comunidad – y algo que personalmente he tratado de hacer por muchos años – es consolidar una comunidad regional que pueda acabar con los silos de profesionales que encontramos hoy. Podríamos compartir contenido desarrollado localmente, en nuestros idiomas, a través de sitios y continuar regularizando el desarrollo de eventos y conferencias regionales.

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Las personas entrevistadas para este artículo fueron:

Carolina Leslie, Directora de Estrategia de Experiencia de Usuario en Saiba +
Wendy Vivero, Arquitecto de UX – ImageTech, Guayaquil, Ecuador
Santiago Bustelo, Director de Diseño y Coordinador, Kambrica y Coordinador Latinoamericano, IxDA
Luis Carlos Aceves, Director General – Usaria
Jorge Barahona, Director – AyerViernes
Paulo Saavedra, Director of UX, Multiplica LATAM

La mayoría de las entrevistas fueron hechas en español. Fue un desafío para el autor traducir las respuestas manteniendo las voces individuales. Si el parafraseo no es correcto, es responsabilidad del autor y no de los entrevistados.

Este proyecto fue apoyado parcialmente por el Proyecto PMI USA1204, Chile

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Thinking Thoroughly, Widely, and Deeply: Developing User Experience Designers in China

February 4, 2016 No Comments

In China today, there is strong awareness that user experience can add value to products and services. As a result, having designers in relevant professions on a team has become more and more important—even a necessity at some large companies or industries. But the role of user experience designer is often confused with other, more specific design professions.

Designers in each profession tend to be given a heavy workload within their narrowly defined skills. For example, UI designers devote most of their time and attention to drawing interaction wireframes, GUI designers to creating visual graphics, and industrial designers to creating product mockups. Although a strong focus on one set of professional skills can help a young designer grow, it can also encourage them to get stuck in their own domain and not pay enough attention to the complete user experience. To address this problem, designers must have a way to advance professionally and become qualified as user experience designers.

What is User Experience Design?

According to Kujala Sari and several other authors in their 2011 article, “UX Curve: A method for evaluating long-term user experience,“ user experience design is defined as the process of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction between the user and the product. To meet this goal, a user experience designer starts from traditional human–computer interaction (HCI) design, and extends it by addressing all aspects of a product or service as perceived by users. This means that designers today have to be cross-disciplinary in their approach.

Today’s Challenge

There is no shortage of good designers in China, but we lack a systematic approach to design. In her 2008 article, “Taking the Pulse of Chinese Design,” Jia Wei called for a design process with a particularly Chinese cultural basis. Without a locally based approach it can be difficult to meet users’ expectations. This is particularly important because end-users don’t try to understand or forgive imperfections or even bugs in a product. And unsatisfied users may complain or even spread negative reviews that can impact satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores.

To meet this challenge, it is necessary for all designers to become user experience designers––or at least be aware of how to evaluate and improve their own design responsibilities within the overall design. In addition, user experience designers must also know when and how to insist on elements of a design that improve the user experience––and how to find compromises when needed.

Several changes in professional practice in China are needed to support this transformation, including an updated definition of user experience designer. In the 2012 book, China’s Design Revolution, Lorraine Justice said that designers in China are moving from level two to level three in Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs—that is from safety to love/belonging. This move is seen in their practice as a shift from the aesthetic and behavioral concerns of specific design professions to the broader values of user experience. With it comes a shift from pursuing improvement in a narrowly defined profession to developing key abilities for user experience.

Developing a Solution

We established an experience design club as a branch of UXPA China in Qingdao at the end of 2014 (see Figure 1). Our goal was to find ways to more effectively develop user experience designers in China. We evaluated and selected several senior designers from local industries (Haier and Hisense), plus two senior design lecturers from local universities as the founding members.

A small group of people around a table. — Figure 1. Meetings of the branch of UXPA China in Qingdao (photos by the author).

During 2015, through a range of group topics and ideas sharing, we discussed the possibility and effect of aligning design theories with real design practices and researched the key abilities that a user experience designer needs to cultivate and master. The three key abilities are to:

Think thoroughly (know why and how)
Think widely (know why and when)
Think deeply (know more and beyond)

1. Think thoroughly (know why and how)

A user experience designer needs to think thoroughly both before and after coming up with a design solution. Specifically, designers must know why they have chosen their design approach and how to verify that the design is a good fit for the scenarios of use.

Unfortunately, few Chinese designers have paid enough attention to this skill. We observed that many of them work diligently, but they only focus on their assigned tasks and projects under pressure to meet budgets and schedules with insufficient resources. Once they get used to a design approach they tend to stick with it, reiterating the same pattern in every project. They seldom challenge themselves to improve their understanding and work on a higher level. As a result, their designs can be easily challenged because they are not based on evidence from user research or usability testing.

Case study: Rapid testing and design cycles

Projects inevitably have limitations of budget, time, and resources that make it difficult to conduct any real usability test. To find a way around this project, we tried conducting a usability test according to Steve Krug’s theory of rapid testing (from his book, Don’t Make Me Think). We wanted to conduct experiments to see how many users are really needed for a usability test to meet a balanced goal.

One test with eight users may find more problems in a single text, but the worst problems will usually keep them from getting far enough to encounter some others. Total problems found: five. Two tests with three users may not find as many problems in a single test, but in the second text, with the first set of problems fixed, they’ll find problems they couldn’t have seen in the first test. Total problems found: nine. — Figure 2. In Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug shows that two tests with three users can find more problems than a single usability test with eight users.

Using our long term relationship with students in the second or third year of university, we selected 20 to be participants in usability tests as “simulated users.” Every time we had a design that needed a quick usability test to verify a design, we randomly picked four students to complete the test. They completed at least two rounds of evaluation, sometimes working with us for a whole day or even two days.

The results were very positive: the cost and time duration was much lower than traditional usability tests and it was very productive after two or three rounds of testing. This valuable process of iterative design and testing usually takes just a few days to provide persuading evidence and shift the design direction of projects to head strongly in a good direction because participants are already on “standby.”

Alt text: A group sits around a small table. The screen image shows a page of test reports displaying the relevant information of a single problem, description, scenario, analysis, recommendations, and screen shot addressing where the problem occurs. — Figure 3. A quick usability test. (photo from http://www.ituring.com.cn/figures/2012/jiewang/tu/2-3-2.jpg).

To summarize, thinking thoroughly requires both professional experience and skills and correct approaches and actions that are a guide and support for the approach. Getting to know “why to design” using iterative testing that makes design recommendations convincing and reasonable is just like the back side of a coin: also necessary.

2. Think widely (know why and when)

User experience designers also need to think widely to get a broader view of their own domain so they can know why and when to insist or give in. Designers are influenced by both objective requirements and subjective initiatives. Requirements are normally unpredicted and uncontrollable because they are defined by product management which may not have user experience as their primary objective. Subjective issues can be managed and used effectively in the work only if designers understand the underlying principles that influence these opinions. To manage both well, “thinking widely” must start from the early stage of a project so that the designer can know when to compromise or be strong, not just simply keep fighting based on a limited viewpoint.

In Effective UI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software, Jonathan Anderson, John McRee, and Robb Wilson analyzed the factors involved in a design project. They suggested that designers should take the time to see things from the view of a project manager or leader, not just act as a limited contributor

We tested this concept by leading and tutoring a team of five students from different majors such as computer science, industrial design, visual design, and interaction design to attend the competition of UXDA 2015 (the annual UX competition of UXPA China). We wanted to see how the team, called Fisssh, would perform if everyone looked at the whole project as they worked.

Case study: Team work

The Fisssh team’s goal is to create an app for a wearable device that helps children learn to stop stammering. This project was not only about the design of the app, but to create a whole experience from the start point to the completion of product. When functioning as product managers, the students had to consider more that the specific design elements.

As they worked through different phases of the project, we assisted and reviewed product concepts, user research, competitor audits, design concepts, UI designs, GUI designs, software developments, and synchronizations with target hardware. (By deeply participating in each phase, students begin to realize how to apply design in a real product and gain valuable insights into why and when design functions in certain ways.) As we hoped, Fisssh was successfully promoted to the Top 10 among close to 400 teams across the nation.

Two children playing with the game on a tablet. On the left, two students standing at a podium making a presentation. — Figure 4. The Fisssh team presenting their product, “Shut up Peter” at the competition. They were promoted to TOP 10.

The best time to introduce and cultivate this sense in students or junior practitioners is when their design principles and notions about how to work are still in the being developed. Helping them form a clear idea of how user experience designers must think and behave in an early stage, rather than after they have finished training, is a better learning process. As they start their career, they do not have to spend time and energy reversing biased habits or incomplete recognition of their role.

3. Think deeply (know more and beyond)

Design’s ultimate goal––to help create a better user experience in a product or service, not just to produce a simple tool––works on a multiple layers beyond ordinary interaction and aesthetics factors. However, as far as we can see, many product and service areas are poorly designed in China, without enough consideration to human care and cognition. In the early 2000s, Patrick Feng, in his book Science and Engineering Ethics, pointed out that human values are reflected in the very design of artifacts, so ethics are also a part of the design process and should be taken into account as a product is developed. Even if the public takes some time to wake up and request a better level of user experience, designers must realize and act proactively, ahead of the current social beliefs.

Case study: Art alters perception

To raise the awareness of thinking ethically while designing, we conducted a public talk and two workshops at the Qingdao branch of UXPA China. The talk was open to anyone, especially designers, product managers, and developers based in Qingdao. The presentations analyzed some successful product design and then looked more closely at two famous design works.

Inspired by the work of Michael Garbutt in his article “Ethical Issues in Design,” we looked at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the US and the artwork displayed on the wall between Israel and Palestine. In the first example we showed a virtual memorial in the same style but for Vietnam. Our virtual memorial was several times higher than the real memorial, showing that the number of Vietnamese who died in the war is much higher than the number of Americans.

Photo of the original showing that it’s not much taller than a person and the mockup showing that it would have to be many times taller than a person. — Figure 5. A photograph of the Vietnam War Memorial and a virtual design showing the relative size if it included all the names of Vietnamese who died.

After presenting the two versions, we allowed the audience to discuss how the design would affect people in one country. We asked them to think about whether design might unilaterally lead to further misjudgment or even abhorrence towards innocent people in the other country, even if the memorial design itself won great awards.

In the second example, we showed how a group of creative designers took photos of residents’ laughing or smiling faces from both sides of various areas along the Israel-Palestine isolation wall. These photos were posted on the wall, with each side showing the photos from the other side. The tension was magically alleviated because people suddenly realized that those living on the other side of the wall live same lives as them.

A photograph of the wall, showing the scale of the images, which are up to 10 feet tall. — Figure 6. The wall of faces in Palestine featured large images of people smiling and laughing. Image credit: Face-2-Face http://www.jr-art.net/projects/face-2-face

In their article, “Face 2 Face,” authors JR and Marco said the images were placed in locations where they would be unavoidably encountered during daily life. “We want, at last, everyone to laugh and to think by seeing the portrait of the other and his own portrait.”

At the first workshop we arranged the audience into different conversation groups to ponder on these ethical issues. We hoped that this new way of thinking would be a moment of enlightenment for them. We know it is hard to change deeply seated ways of thinking, but it critical to develop habits of ethical thinking and have a broader view of the audience for design work.

Becoming a User Experience Designer

To become a user experience designer is to strengthen and equip oneself with key abilities and recognition of the deeper issues in order to be more competitive and complete. With a broadened vision and more flair for designing for user needs, user experience designers can apply their own professional skills to product and service design in an optimized way.

Even more, excellent user experience designers can act with a higher level of responsibility. Their designs and works have the power to change peoples’ minds and ideas, and raise the general social discussion to a higher level.

User experience is not a design issue but a huge mission towards making a better world. Just try to think thoroughly, think widely, and think deeply.

Want to Understand the Future of HCI? Take a Trip Down Memory Lane (Book Review)

July 1, 2017 No Comments

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A review of
From Tool to Partner: The Evolution of Human-Computer Interaction

Book website

About this book

A good reference for UX Theory

Primary audience: Researchers and Designers with any experience with topic

Writing style: Mostly text

Publisher: Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 165 pages, 13 chapters

Learn more about our review guidelines

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Jonathan Grudin’s new book, From Tool to Partner: The Evolution of Human-Computer Interaction, is a detailed history of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) that spans from the 19th century “human-tool” period to 2015. Grudin has been writing and presenting about the history of HCI and the themes that have emerged from research and practice for more than 20 years. I’ve read some of his work and attended a CHI workshop that explored key issues in the HCI timeline – like the move from non-discretionary use of computing systems (the early days of mainframe computing and office automation) by trained experts to discretionary use by nearly anyone in the world (smartphone apps). Grudin is highly qualified to write about the history and emergent themes of HCI.

The field of HCI is broad and complex, and Grudin’s 165-page book is ambitious in trying to cover Artificial Intelligence (AI), Human Factors & Ergonomics (HFES), Participatory Design (PD), Information Science (IS), Computer-Human Interaction (CHI), Management Information Systems (MIS), and Office Automation (OA). Grudin tries to show why these fields developed, why colleagues in these fields did, or did not, interact much at a professional level, and what assumptions and issues shaped the fields that contribute to HCI. Grudin makes clear in Chapter 1 that any history is based on an individual’s perspective, training, and experience and thus will highlight some topics (e.g., information science in Grudin’s case) and neglect others (usability engineering and user experience) that are outside of the primary experience of the author. His analytical approach is to examine the similarities and differences between fields and professional, academic, government, and commercial organizations to extract patterns and themes that have contributed to the evolution of HCI.

Why would our colleagues want to read about the history of HCI? Grudin argues that many of us are focused on one discipline and there is much we can learn by “crossing over” and capturing the wisdom (and the failures) of others. I thought that my background from 40 years of practice was interdisciplinary, but when I read Chapters 7 and 8, I found that I had missed, almost entirely, the disciplines of information science and office automation – quite relevant to my career in the 1980s when I was working on – office automation! In modern-day HCI work, disciplines like social psychology and big data have much to contribute to the designs of computing systems. This book could be a clarion call to look outside our primary disciplines.

Grudin’s second reason for why one should read a history of HCI is that it can help us celebrate the accomplishments of past visionaries and inspire future colleagues. This the book did well. I found myself wishing that I could enter a time machine, get young, and restart my career with Grudin’s book as inspiration. Grudin’s stories and references to visionaries and their work provide many guilty pleasures for those who are interested in just how our field evolved. Grudin delights with stories of information systems that were precursors to the web and references to demonstrations like the “Mother of all Demos” where Douglas Engelbart demonstrates 1968 research technologies (the mouse, video conferencing, word processing, hypertext and more) that took several decades to be realized. Science fiction writer H. G. Wells, perhaps most famous for “War of the Worlds,” was highlighted for proposing an information system based on index cards and sorting stations that would filter and transmit answers to inquiries. Another “information system” visionary, Paul Otlet, worked with the Belgian government to create a record center in 1919 called the Mundaneum where millions of index cards and images where organized and cross-referenced and available to a wide audience – a fuzzy precursor to the Internet. Grudin finishes this chapter with references to the more familiar work of Vannevar Bush on “memex,” a personal workstation based on microfilm that would allow fast indexing, linking to related material, and retrieval of documents and images. These early ideas and efforts at making large masses of information accessible were the historical underpinnings and metaphors for our modern computing systems. Dipping into the myriad archival references was unadulterated joy and is still a potential source of ideas and metaphors.

Grudin’s third rationale for studying history is to understand why “some visions and prototypes were quickly converted to widespread application, others took decades to influence use, and a few [e.g., odor generation systems] remain unrealized” (p. 3). Grudin delves into why AI research has had a roller coaster ride with limited prototypes generating outlandish expectations, like those of Marvin Minsky who in a 1968 Life Magazine article predicted a machine with the “general intelligence of an average human being.” Grudin delves into forces that affect the course of visions including hardware capabilities and the trade-offs that come with the autonomous systems that may not have the contextual flexibility of humans to deal with unusual situations (e.g., how autonomous cars make decisions about who should be injured, passengers or pedestrians, when there is an unavoidable accident). Grudin notes that the future will go from Human-Computer Interaction to Human-Computer Integration where computing and communication systems are truly ubiquitous partners with humans.

The final rationale for a history of HCI is to extract trends and patterns that can guide the career plans of colleagues in a field that is expanding, like the universe, faster and faster. Chapters 9 through 12 provide insights and themes that could be valuable to colleagues.

While Grudin’s book kept my attention with historical details, good stories, and insights for future generations (I spent many hours reading historical references), there were a few minor details that could be improved. It felt like one more editorial pass was needed to remove some redundancy and improve the overall flow of the book. The richness and breadth of the field does pose a challenge for anyone trying to document the history of a complex field like HCI. The book is filled with acronyms, and I did appreciate the list of acronyms in the Glossary. I found myself using the Glossary often as I moved through chapters. There are only a few pages dedicated to the Usability Professionals Association/User Experience Professionals Association. I wish that Grudin had dug a bit more deeply into the impact of the UPXA organization and the value brought by practitioners of usability and UX.

To conclude, I would highly recommend this book for both understanding the grand history of HCI and also for providing food for thought on what might be important for the future of our HCI colleagues.

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Challenges Facing Designers

Excerpt from page 100.

However, at least two serious challenges face designers and the rest of us. Just as an individual frequently has conflicting goals, software partners face divergent interests, such as satisfying the owner and diverse users of a website. Software that knows more about all parties might better resolve the trade-offs, but it will always be a balancing act. A collision avoidance system may have to choose between a course of action with a 30% chance of injuring its driver and another with a 70% chance of injuring a pedestrian. With autonomy comes responsibility. Second, a human partner who is knowledgeable, capable, and graceful in one context is generally the same in a related context, whereas software is often totally incapable outside a narrow focus. Designers must learn what people expect of partners, and we all must become familiar with non-human limitations of even the best machine partners.

Evolution of HCI over Generations

Excerpt from page 116.

HCI is now an all but invisible presence in product design, accessibility, sustainability, health care, supporting the aged, and other tasks. Just as builders are familiar with motors, developers embed interfaces without attending conferences or reading papers. J. C. R. Licklider anticipated that the most intellectually creative and exciting period in our history would be ushered in by the shift from digital tools to digital partners that smoothly take the initiative at times. To realize the potential will require researchers and developers who, like Licklider, see technological possibilities and understand the human partner. It will require familiar skills and others yet to be discovered. The first generation of computer designers, users, and researchers grew up without computers. Many of the second generation first encountered computers as university students and then entered workplaces and changed them. The current generation grew up using computers, game

consoles, and mobile phones. In primary schools, they searched, browsed, assessed, and synthesized. Now they message and photo-share on smartphones, author with multimedia, and embrace social networking. They have different takes on privacy and multitasking. Many absorbed a design aesthetic. They are entering workplaces, and will change everything once again.

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Memoir Monopoly: Improving Rehabilitation Activities for Elderly People with Dementia

July 1, 2017 No Comments

A picture and description of the Memoir Monopoly game board. — Figure 1. Memoir monopoly is a highly flexible rehabilitation game platform for elderly people living with dementia. (Credit: Graywhale Design)

According to a report by Alzheimer’s Disease International, the global population of people with dementia is now about 46 million and is expected to grow to 131.5 million by 2050. It is also estimated that most of these people will live in Asia. The number of elderly patients with dementia in Taiwan has also increased, and Taiwan lacks well-designed rehabilitation activities for these people. This topic was selected for further design development because the existing number of professional therapists is insufficient to provide the number of treatments required by this population. It was discovered that the existing activities are mostly conducted using paper-made rehabilitation tools. Patients rely on a therapist for guidance and it cannot be conducted by themselves. These tools have other drawbacks, including:

Inflexible content
Not linking directly to the patients’ life experience
A limited ability to provide useful stimulation for the patient

Figure 2 shows examples of current paper-made rehabilitation activity tools.

Four photos showing current paper activities. — Figure 2.Paper-made rehabilitation tools. (Credit: Graywhale Design)

In collaboration with therapists and using information and communication technology, a new software-based group rehabilitation activity was designed. The preliminary design included:

Rich and varied sound stimulation
Personalized rehabilitation content
A clear information architecture and interaction
Visual stimulation to enhance attention during the activity

Designing the First Version of the Prototype

Design Concept and Process

In the first version of the prototype, a highly flexible data collection process was established using a group game module on an iPad. This process was based on the paper-tool monopoly game that rehabilitation centers use to conduct group activities. Patients, family members, and caregivers were asked to provide personalized content for the patients such as photos, songs, and videos. Before starting the activity, the activity leader loaded the content into the game employing four iPads to create a unique monopoly “game map.” The game included one caregiver and five participants. The participants took turns throwing the dice and moving the touch-sensitive pieces on the game map to play with different games. The map included four different game blocks:

Reminiscence photos
Music and videos
Question cards
A pog game

Initially, a multi-disciplinary design process was conducted to develop a variety of prototypes that were then reviewed with therapists to ensure that the visual elements and interaction design would be appropriate and accepted by the participants (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. First version of design. (Credit: Graywhale Design)

Prototyping and Testing

The first prototype was tested with two groups. However, some problems were encountered due to cognitive and emotional issues of the participants. Conducting short-term testing with unfamiliar people, and introducing new activities that are not part of the regular routine can result in emotional problems. Understanding the feelings when dementia patients interview themselves is difficult. Since the therapist who participated in the testing had years of experience leading activities and the caregivers were familiar with the patients, it was determined that the caregiver’s observation of the patient participants would be more reliable. The therapist leading the process was observed and later interviewed to understand the participants’ reaction. Figure 4 shows participants testing the first version of the activity game prototype.

Four photos showing the prototype game board, participants testing the game, a close-up of the game board. — Figure 4. Testing the first version of the activity game design. (Credit: Graywhale Design)

Extending the testing a week provided the opportunity to develop a better relationship with the participants before the formal testing began. Completing the entire course of testing took four to six weeks. This minimized the sense of discomfort experienced by the participants. The participants knew that after testing there would be other interesting activities to participate in based on the recommendations from the therapist.

The testing revealed that personalized content encouraged the participants to tell more stories and that they were more likely to achieve the goals of the rehabilitation activity. They were also able to develop social relationships and make new friends with other participants. The interface also made it easier for the therapists to lead the reminiscing activity. However, several problems were identified. First, the participants had difficulty recognizing four iPads as a single complete game map. They tended to interact with them as four individual blocks. Some of the participants thought the iPad in front of them was their own so they would only interact with that iPad. Also, the screen of the iPad was too small. The activity leaders frequently had to move the iPad closer to the participants, turning the conversation into a one-on-one situation which often resulted in the other participants in the group losing focus.

Other drawbacks were identified in the first version of prototypes. For example, too many complicated visual patterns were used. The assumption was that these visual designs would be familiar to the participants and enhance their interest, but they actually resulted in confusion for participants with reduced cognitive ability who were unable to distinguish between a decoration and an interactive spot. There was also too much information on the screen, including a hint box, a light, and a direction clue. This was too much information and made the activity too complicated. Participants did not know what to do next and it slowed the activity. This required the therapist to spend more effort and time guiding the participants, adding to the pressure of leading the activity.

Second Version of the Prototype

Based on the test results from the first version of the prototype, the iPads were replaced with a 27-inch touchscreen all-in-one computer. The interface and interaction design was simplified by removing the visual decoration to strengthen the focus spot for the participants. The original activities were ordered as a step-by-step process and an end review was added:

Warm-up
Theme activities
End review

The revised process is shown in Figure 5. The information is displayed on the map as a step-by-step process. First, a color is shown; second, each step is displayed; and last, the map is shown. The participants can follow each step, one thing at a time. Figure 5 shows the information displayed as a step-by-step process.

Another important change was to replace the dice interface with photos of the participants as shown in Figure 5. This helped the participants remember what the colors of the dice represent. The participants knew it was their turn when they saw their photo. This saves the therapist time and effort when guiding the activity. A change in the interaction design was also made so that every touchable spot and all buttons were displayed as flashing icons (see Figure 6). After being guided for a few rounds, the participants learned to do this by themselves and even began teaching other participants what to do. This improved the interaction between the group members. The results show that the participants easily learned to play the activity game by themselves and their performance is better than previous activities.

Diagram displaying the revised game process. — Figure 5. Game process includes warm-up, theme activities, and end review. (Credit: Graywhale Design)

Three images showing the three steps in the game. — Figure 6. The information is displayed step-by-step. (Credit: Graywhale Design)

Two images showing regular dice and new dice with player photos. — Figure 7. Revised dice to headshot. (Credit: Graywhale Design)

Three images showing highlighted game icons. — Figure 8. Spot with white flashing icons. (Credit: Graywhale Design)

Additional design changes were made to the touch screen to make participants feel less frustrated or afraid to use the touch screen. Participants were observed knocking on buttons or pressing them a long time until there was a reaction on the screen. This is likely from experience using physical buttons, but it may lead to failure using a touch screen. The duration of the touching gesture was adjusted so that a long press or a short knock will result in a successful touch. The gesture trigger was also adjusted to be more sensitive to make it easier to operate.

A separate control panel was developed for the leaders to help them easily guide the whole group. An “align” button let the leaders reset the content to its original location. This helped them find the next object so they could continue to guide the group when the display was cluttered with lots of items (see Figure 9). The participants also responded to encouragement, so an “Awesome” button was added allowing the leaders to display a “You are awesome!” feedback message to encourage participation, pull participants attention back to the activity, boost their confidence, and also attract the attention of other participants in the group (see Figure 10).

images showing the cluttered game space, the align button, and the game space after pressing the reset button. — Figure 9. The align button can help the leader quickly find the next object to continue conversation. (Credit: Graywhale Design)

Image of the awesome button — Figure 10. The awesome button can encourage the group. (Credit: Graywhale Design)

From Product Design to Service Design

Testing the second version of the prototype took longer than the first one. Many of the centers and family members were not familiar with the activity process and this would affect the results. Other stakeholders had to be considered in the planning and analysis of the activity to improve the effectiveness of the activity for the therapists and patients, the primary stakeholders. We re-examined the entire event with a service blueprint and customer journey map and found that the “users,” “scenarios,” and “objects” were different when there is only the product. The “users” need to include family members, staff from the centers, and others in the care system, including many different professionals. The activity “scenario” was expanded from just observing the patients during the activity to include time spent before and after the activity. New scenarios were needed for patients living at home as well as those at the care center. Finally, “objects” was expanded to incorporate other items and service processes. Combining this with the current system would provide all the stakeholders with a better experience than previous rehabilitation activities.

A service blueprint was developed that included both tangible and intangible results. Intangible results are noticed when interacting with patents. The patients “feel happy” and have a sense of accomplishment, problem behavior is reduced, and relationships with other patients are established. Intangible results are difficult to notice or can be easily forgotten. There are few tangible results; a few photos at most. Without more tangible results, centers and family members may consider the activity meaningless, even if the patients are happy in the activity. The family members play a critical role since their evaluation of the activities has a direct effect on the evaluation and satisfaction of the centers.

Testing the Service and Developing a Fully Commercialized Service

To include the needs of the centers and family in the process, therapists visited patients twice for an assessment at the beginning of the service. Family members also participated at this stage of the process. They provided the personal content to be used in the activity. During the activity, therapists led a one-hour “Memoir monopoly” activity starting with the “warm-up,” then the “theme activity,” and finally the “end review.” Figure 10 shows patients and family during the “Memoir monopoly” activity. Photographs and videos were taken during the session and the stories shared by patients were recorded. The last step in the process was a “sharing event” conducted with their family present. The group watched films of the activities, listened to the stories, and watched the reaction to the games. Families were given their own story books to keep to preserve the patient’s precious memories. The story books and videos can also show changes in the patient. Therapist advice was also provided to help the families use the activity at home. Figure 11 shows patients and family during a sharing event at a center.

"Memoir monopoly" activity at day care center. — Figure 11. “Memoir monopoly” activity at day care center. (Credit: Graywhale Design)

Figure 12. Sharing event at day care center. (Credit: Graywhale Design)

The sharing event had a number of benefits:

The patients and family review of the process provided encouragement and a sense of accomplishment.
Family members had an opportunity to talk face-to-face with the therapist and learn more about the rehabilitation results of the patient.
There was increased trust between family members and the center.
Other staff members got a better understanding of the patients and learned more about them.

The development team plans to keep in touch with the centers and to continue to collect feedback from the patients, family members, and centers as a reference for future activity development. The service is being tested at four day care centers with up to 200 patients, 8 occupational therapists, 70 family members, and includes more than 100 activities. The results show the positive effect of the activities, obtaining high satisfaction ratings from both the centers and the family members. With the success of the service and the feedback from centers and the family members, we decided to move on and commercialize our service.

With the commercialization, there’s the potential to promote the game in Corporate Social Responsibility(CSR) plans. The cost of the service is significant, which is a burden for many centers. We try to work with companies who operate responsibly to address social issues and want to do social good in Taiwan. We’re working with the companies Aging Society and Aging Caring on plans to continue to bring our service to more centers and patients. The companies sponsor the service to promote their corporate brands, and the patients can then enjoy with the service for free. As the population in Taiwan ages, regulations and concepts need to keep pace so services like this can benefit the aging population.

Designing for Conversations (Book Review)

June 8, 2023 No Comments

A review of

Conversations with Things: UX Design for Chat and Voice

by Diana Deibel and Rebecca Evanhoe

Book Website

Rosenfeld Media, LLC

300 pages, 11 chapters

About this book

A good reference for Methods/How-To and Case Studies

Primary audience: Researchers, designers, and technical roles who are new to the topic, have some experience with the topic, or have significant experience with the topic

Writing style: Humorous/light, Matter of fact

Text density: Equal parts text and images

Learn more about our book review guidelines

Anyone who has ever been asked to design for chat or voice, been curious about chat or voice design, or wanted to make the leap into this specialty design discipline owes a debt of gratitude to Diana Deibel and Rebecca Evanhoe. Their book Conversations with Things: UX Design for Chat and Voice is a guidebook to everything we need to know about chat and voice design. Rich in data, experience, and relatable anecdotes, this book is easy to engage with and offers something to readers at any level of experience.

These two industry veterans have unpacked chat and voice design for folks creating conversational interfaces, anyone in a UX role, anyone on a product team engaging with conversational design, and general readers curious about the design of these everyday devices. In addition to these targeted audiences, I would add students, educators, and advocates concerned with privacy and inclusivity.

The usability of this book is high. It begins with an explanation of who should read it, what is in it, what online resources come with it, and where to start. There is even a frequently asked questions and answer section with suggestions for readers short on time or experience. This open and direct acknowledgement—that we are all humans with too much on our plates and we don’t all start from the same knowledge base—sets the tone and creates a bond of mutual understanding between author and reader, which characterizes the reading experience from the introduction to the end credits. Each chapter builds upon the previous one and stands alone with just enough relevant information repeated in the right sections.

Deibel and Evanhoe give the impression that they have read everything and spoken to everyone so that you don’t have to. The writing is clear and candid with definitions, explanations, cheat sheets, and checklists. Sprinkled between the tactical design advice, readers will find anecdotes from the authors’ own experiences that will resonate with anyone who works with other humans. We are treated to snippets of chat conversations between the authors that show us their points of view and where those views diverge and converge. They took the time to disagree with each other, so we don’t have to! Deibel and Evanhoe have achieved a rare thing: a book written by and for experts that is accessible to anyone.

Deibel and Evanhoe’s dedication to an accessible and inclusive experience goes far beyond style and tone. Every section of the book from the introduction through the final chapter dedicated to “Designing Inclusive Conversations” (chapter 11) addresses accessibility and inclusivity best practices in some small or large way. Readers will find well-placed and considered primers on inclusive codesign and research recruitment inside and outside the chapter on “Researching and Prototyping” (chapter 10). There are sections on racial and gendered stereotypes (chapters 1–3), sexual harassment (chapter 4), domestic violence (chapter 8), ethics and data privacy (chapter 7), accessibility, localization, multilingual support (chapter 8), and the many things that can go wrong when designing for chat and voice (chapter 11).

In the section called “Darkest Timeline” (in chapter 11), the authors urge designers to question what can go wrong even under the best circumstances. What happens when someone uses our products to harm themselves or others? We don’t interrogate our designs or stress-test our products often enough to prevent harm. These are not just edge-cases, Deibel and Evanhoe remind us. And neither are those instances in which we avoid supporting marginalized users by labeling their needs edge-cases (also in chapter 11). This book is a good reminder of the living, breathing humans we are meant to be centering in our human-centered design.

Packed into 286 thorough and thoughtful pages (not counting the index or acknowledgements) is everything we need to know to be better designers and consumers of the products we keep in our pockets and on our kitchen counters. Why do we need a book to help us teach machines to do a thing we have been doing every day such as talking to each other? It is because we do it every day without examining the mechanics of it. Chapter 1 sets up a mutual understanding with readers and defines conversational interfaces as conversations between humans and “non-human things that do their best to listen, speak, and chat similarly to the way humans do” (2). Chapter 2 breaks down talking like a person. We learn how much non-verbal factors, like a thumbs-up, smile, or groan, convey meaning in a conversation and how hard that conversation can be when extra-linguistic inputs, such as body language, facial expressions, or mutterings, are missing. The authors explain concepts like turn-taking (your turn, my turn, and your turn), timing (the interval between turns), conversational repair (prompting a person to repeat or clarify), barge-in (interrupting), and accommodation (mirroring a conversational partner’s speed, volume, tone, or word choice). These are basic concepts of human speech that so many of us take for granted. Chapter 3 discusses chat-bot and voice-bot personalities, stereotypes, and trustworthiness. Should your bot have a name, a pronoun, or a backstory? Maybe it should if you are making deliberate choices that prioritize users over idealized brand promises.

Chapters 4–6 dig into the design details. In chapter 4 you will learn about designing prompts including those questions or cues like “What can I help you with?” that get a conversation started and keep it going until a user completes a task successfully or needs help from a human (you must design that part, too!). Chapter 5 addresses user intent and the old, but still applicable, information architecture like bucketing, which categorizes intents to cue the appropriate prompts and pathways. Conversational pathways are the subject of chapter 6. Here the authors discuss how to start with and expand on even older concepts like flow diagrams that map the decision-tree of a conversation. They demonstrate how to turn flows into scripts one branch of the conversation at a time. For instance, you should script a pathway for “new customer onboarding success” separately from the script for “new customer onboarding failure.” My prediction from reading chapters 4–6 is that counting the number of turns it takes to get your question answered by a bot will soon replace counting clicks used in the early days of web design.

Figure 1. The beginnings of a flow diagram from chapter 6 (figure 6.3).

Chapters 7–8 address the advanced design considerations of context and memory (chapter 7) and complex conversations (chapter 8). There is an improbable, yet comprehensible, amount of content jammed into these 55 pages. Readers will discover the difference between bots that have pronouns and bots that understand pronouns. A users’ context and a bot’s short- or long-term memory determine how, and how well, a user can build a relationship with that bot. A bot’s memory and understanding of context is dependent on data sharing. Deibel and Evanhoe remind us that data sharing—like all sharing—should be consensual and the result of opting in. Data transparency goes hand-and-hand with building context and building trust. “The part you might have influence over [as a designer] is giving users that transparency” (183).

Content and memory are also vital to multi-modal, multi-session, multi-channel, multi-person, and multilingual conversations (chapter 8). In multi-modal interactions, people will use many senses at once when there are screens to read or buttons to tap as well as spoken prompts to listen and respond to. This means voice, chat, and interface design are not mutually exclusive in audio, visual, and touch-based interactions. Designers also must strive for simplicity in multi-channel interactions if a bot sends you to a website, app, or email, or vice versa. Multi-session interactions are an opportunity to build a relationship between a customer and a bot; the bot can utilize short-cuts as a user revisits prompts, but again, only if the user has given the bot permission to remember (that is, store) past interactions. As Deibel and Evanhoe note, multi-person or group conversations and multilingual conversations could be the subjects of their own books. They tackle each in chapter 8 with pragmatic tips, case studies, and anecdotes.

Finally, in chapters 9–11 readers will find practical planning guides for implementation and launch including how to conduct inclusive testing (chapter 9) and how to start small and fine tune your product (chapter 10). Deibel and Evanhoe advocate for smart refinements and incremental releases over the stereotypical tech approach of going big and fast and breaking things. After all, the things that could get broken are your brand and your customers. Why risk it?

You Can’t Predict It All

Here is a great example of a surprise that Diana encountered when she designed an automated phone call to gather data on flu shot compliance. After it launched, she was examining transcripts for unexpected utterances and flows to improve the experience. During the conversation, the bot asked, “It’s OK if you’re not exactly sure, but about when did you last have your flu shot?”
That is a great prompt! It takes the pressure off by helping people understand that they needn’t be exact. On the back end, the system was set up to accept a variety of utterances in response:
• Full numerical dates like “November 5, 2019.”
• Contextual windows of time, like “last fall” or “I just got one on Tuesday.”
• Uncertainty, like “I can’t remember.”
Pretty thorough, right? What they completely missed was this perfectly logical response: “Hang on—let me grab my calendar.” These utterers were people who had clearly had a flu shot and were willing to comply with the call. But because the team didn’t fully account for users’ situations in space and time, in the launched version of the bot, these responses yielded an error message. Although it is an issue that many users bumped into errors despite their perfectly logical responses, what is worse was how this actually impacted the resulting data. The people who indeed had flu shots weren’t counted. Talk about a bummer! In situ usability testing could have turned up this behavior sooner.

After 20 years in tech, I still consider myself a cautious adopter. Or perhaps it is because of those 20 years that I am skeptical about, and slow to embrace, chat and voice products. I’ve experienced enough gender-based harassment at work; there is no room in my life for devices that are designed to assist but that, in fact, perpetuate any kind of discrimination. That is why I believe Diana Deibel and Rebecca Evanhoe’s book Conversations with Things: UX Design for Chat and Voice should be required reading for anyone participating in the design or development of chat and voice products now and in the future. As I make the transition to full-time teaching, I can honestly say this book will be required reading in my classroom, and not just when we are discussing conversations with things.

Search Results for: interaction – Page 5

Street Corner Trash Bins

Poor Adherence to Standards and Familiar Cultural Constructs

Context of Use Not Understood

Lack of Consideration for User Limitations

Public Restrooms

Mismatch Between Typical User and Layout of Materials

Lack of Visibility of System Status

Department Store Dressing Rooms

Insufficient Resources to Accomplish Common Tasks

Lack of Visibility of Room Status

Where Do We Go from Here?

Background

Challenges

Translation

Information Architecture

Auditory Interface Design

Help as Needed

Visual design

Interface Development

Results

1. Understand Your Constraints

2. Develop a Visual Language

3. Balance Challenge with Skill

4. Make It Fun

5. Connect Learning to Prior Experiences

6. Replace Words with Actions

7. If They Do It, They Learn It

8. Maximize Collaboration

9. Plan for Cheaters

10. Measure Success

Wrapping Up

1. Entender Tus Límites

2. Desarrolla un Lenguaje Visual

3. Equilibrar Desafío con Habilidad

4. Hacerlo Entretenido

5. Conectar el Aprendizaje a Experiencias Previas

6. Reemplaza Palabras con Acciones

7. Si lo Hacen, lo Aprenden

8. Maximizar Colaboración

9. Un Plan para los Tramposos

10. Mide el Éxito

En Resumen

Chicago

Atlanta

North Carolina

Hyderabad

Initial Study Planning

Building the Chatbot

Chatbot Structure

Flows and Triggers

Connecting the Chatbot to a Messaging Service

Study Preparation

Providing Instruction for Participants

Ideal Applications

Conclusion

Where Things Stand

Challenges

Moving Forward

Conclusions

El Estado de las Cosas

Desafíos

Avanzando

Conclusiones

What is User Experience Design?

Today’s Challenge

Developing a Solution

1. Think thoroughly (know why and how)

Case study: Rapid testing and design cycles

2. Think widely (know why and when)

Case study: Team work

3. Think deeply (know more and beyond)

Becoming a User Experience Designer

A review of From Tool to Partner: The Evolution of Human-Computer Interaction

About this book

Challenges Facing Designers

Evolution of HCI over Generations

Designing the First Version of the Prototype

Design Concept and Process

Prototyping and Testing

A review of
From Tool to Partner: The Evolution of Human-Computer Interaction