Overview

Tonight I had the opportunity to attend my 2nd Scottish Usability Professionals’ Association event in Edinburgh.  It was a good night which saw two speakers from the University of Abertay delivering two very different talks.

I am not going to talk about both.  Instead I would like to share my notes and thoughts on Dr Jackie Archibald’s talk titled: Emotional Avatars – What and Why, which I found extremely interesting and thought provoking.

Emotions

The talk saw Jackie begin by explaining the role emotion plays in modern day human computer interactions.  She discussed aspects such as perception, cognition, creativity and our ability to cope as reactions triggered by our emotions.  She also discussed how our current emotions can affect our memory, ability to plan, or complete tasks, and our ability to make decisions.  She went on to explain how displaying your emotions can often be seen as a negative thing.  People may questions your ability to work logical, or even think rationally.  However, she explained that emotion is important, and can aid interaction in an intelligent way.

Avatars

With the reasoning out of the way, next came the interesting part – emotional avatars.  She explained that an emotional avatar, was simply a virtual character who could display, and / or recognise emotions.  The use for them she suggested could be in education, training and as help systems.  She provided a example of a virtual avatar which was used in New Zealand to help teach kids working from home, which could help guide them through lessons.  This was called Easy with Eve, and supposedly could detect facial patterns in students and react to them.

She provided a few more examples, of avatars currently in use:

• Asking Anna, the IKEA bot
• Ask Rachel, Tesco
• Virtual agent Sasha, Kaspersky

Jackie, showing Virtual agent Sasha, the Kaspersky bot.

All very interesting and sharing one common trait – they are all provide support desk type feedback.  Perhaps this is how future FAQs (frequently asked questions) will turn out?  None from what I could gather had any concept of emotions, but simply how to display them.

Now the talk became more interesting as Jackie went on to explain the research three of her students had done around this area.

Dealing with frustration

The first student, John Hart had completed a research project titled “Dealing with frustration”.   He began by surveying opinions on virtual agents such as the Asking Anna IKEA bot.  The general feedback not surprisingly, was that people were not overly impressed by them.

For the next step of his project, John developed a travel website which intentionally frustrated users with introduced delays and broken links.  As people used the site it was noted their frustration levels began to rise.

His final step was to develop an emotional avatar, which would see if it could assist in reducing user frustrations.  He would then be able to introduce an agent to help assist the user, using affective language via a text based conversation panel.

What he found was:

• Users were both frustrated with the avatar and the website.
• Avatar frustrations seemed to stem from its limited knowledge base, meaning it struggled to answer certain questions asked of it during the studies.
  • The avatar provided no help to overly frustrated users.
  • Moderately frustrated users which it successfully responded to, noted reduced frustration levels to some extent.

Interesting, but without seeing the research myself it is hard to make much of it.  The approach appears open to a lot of bias and assumptions.  The fact that surveys were employed as a research tool, doesn’t hold much weight really in my opinion.  How, or when he decided to inject the avatar as well, I’m unsure of.  Still, it is very interesting and opens up ideas for how these could be used as a means of online engagement with users based upon some sort of emotional rules engine.

Improving self service systems via emotional virtual agents

Next up was PHD student Chris Martin, who was doing a research project titled: Towards improvement of self service systems via emotional virtual agents.  This project looked into how the user experience of a self service system such as a supermarket self service checkout.  The idea being that an empathetic system could be developed, which could understand, reason and react to peoples emotions.

The first stage of his project involved filming (with permission) people using supermarket self service checkouts, and noting their facial reactions while using them.  These would be logged as facial action units and when reviewed patterns could be identified.  It was found that the two most common action units related to anger.

For his next stage, knowing that anger was the most common response to these systems, he wanted to determine the most appropriate response an agent should provide to the user.  To do this he created a system which would mimic a self service checkout, but intentionally block the users from completing their task.  At this point, an affective agents (emotional avatar) would be introduced, and their response to the avatar would be recorded.  Seven different types of avatar were used to determine which was most suitable.  Each of these had a different facial expression:

• Anger
• Disgust
• Fear
• Neutral
• Happy
• Sadness
• Surprise

Of these, the one found to be the most inappropriate to use was disgust.  The one which received the most positive reaction was the neutral avatar.  I sought clarification after the talk if text was displayed to the user to match these differing emotions, but it appears that only an avatar image was presented to the user.  I assume some processes were still available to the user at this point to progress or cancel the checkout process though.

Usable security via affective feedback

The final research project titled: Usable security via affective feedback, was being done by a student named Lynsay Shepherd.  This one though was only just starting, so there wasn’t much to cover research wise, as none had really been done yet.

This project would look at how systems could improve risk awareness in end users using affective feedback.  Users would then become more aware of the risks their behaviour could introduce.

Thoughts

All in all, it was a really interesting talk and for that reason alone I’m glad I took the time out to attend.  I struggle though to see how avatars using current technology can react to end users.  I did ask the question and Jackie provided a decent enough response, although perhaps not quite what I was looking for:

• Biometrics could be used to determine user emotions.
• Mouse devices with hand grip detection, to determine frustration.
• Cameras which monitor facial reactions.
• Language used during text interaction with the avatar.

The last point certainly seems valid.  What would this be useful for though?  FAQ type systems?  Could you possibly drive site navigation via a keyword driven avatar, returning differing results depending on gauged emotions?

My thoughts with current technology are that outwith user inputs such as direct textual conversation, it is hard to gauge emotion.  I do think though that some form of rules engine could be developed to determine emotions and react to the user in different ways.  For example if the user exhibits some form of navigation pattern while using a website, which indicates that they might be lost, perhaps an avatar would help negate negative emotions, and if it successfully helps them find where they need to go, perhaps their mood may then even be positive.  Or, what if the user is found to be on a checkout process for some time, perhaps an avatar could be injected onto the page to provide assistance.

Regardless, I think relying upon hardware for now, is a non starter.  Perhaps as devices become more camera ready ( mobile is certainly miles ahead of desktops currently), then detecting facial emotions might not be so far away.  There is a big assumption of course that people will want their devices monitoring them, which I think is very unlikely to be a given, for many obvious reasons.

There is serious potential though for emotional avatars.  I’m still unsure where though.  The world certainly could do without another Microsoft Clippy that’s for sure!  With some thought though and making use of behavioural interaction modules that new content management systems are now beginning to make available, I think there could be room for these emotional avatars to build empathic relationships with users.

Thanks for reading.

Summary

2011 was a very busy year for me!  Being a father with my first kid now nearly three, I’ve seen almost all of my free time disappear.  You’ll probably have noticed this pattern in my blog contributions this year.  That being said, anything I have posted has had much more thought, time and consideration applied to it, so although contributions are down, a lot more people are coming to read what I have to say, which makes me feel much more inclined to get my good thoughts out there.

I could talk about all the good things I’ve learned this year and challenges I’ve faced, but the really good stuff which others can hopefully learn from as well, really needs its own space as separate posts to do them real justice.  So instead, I’ll quickly reflect on what you, as readers found interesting in 2011 and a little of what I have in draft for 2012 and things to look out for in 2012.

Top posts of 2011

What follows is the top 5 most viewed posts of 2011.

1. Mind mapping 101

   Sitting at the top spot for the year, was my 101 style article on mind mapping which described how I applied mind mapping to testing and why it found it useful.  As the year has progressed, this has become more and more popular.  Initially when I first published it, I honestly didn’t think anyone would have liked it!  It felt a little rushed out on my part.  I’m really glad it went down well though and people enjoyed reading it.

   This article has also made appearances on the EuroSTAR blog and the Tea Time With Testers magazine.  It has also been included as reference material for the Association for Software Testing’s Test Design course.  For all three of these, I am truly humbled, especially the testing course inclusion.

2. Tales from the trenches: Lean test case design

   At number two and actually from October of 2010, is one of my favorite blog posts: Lean Test Case Design.  The reason I like it so much, is because from this you can learn an actual technique that has been tried and tested, has worked and depending upon your context might well prove very useful for you too.

   Lean test case design made an appearance over two issues in the Tea Time With Testers magazine, mostly due to its length and was also with my Mind Mapping 101 post, one of two articles included as reference material in the Association for Software Testing’s Test Design course.  Again, this was extremely humbling and makes me more eager to share my thoughts with others.

3. Essential mind mapping: Rapid test design

   Coming in third, was my article on Rapid Test Design, which covered among many things: how the mind works while mind mapping, test conditions vs. test ideas, good test design and several techniques and approaches to improve your mind mapping capability for test design.

   This is one of the few articles I’ve wrote that I was happy with prior to publishing, so I was really glad to see it get such good feedback from the community.  I hope the next two follow ups are just as useful.

4. Test ideas for a login process

   At number four and actually not far behind third spot in terms of views for the year, was my few hours of brainstorming around test ideas for a login process.  This originally started out as a comment on a post by Santhosh Tuppad, but I quickly realised it would become too large.

5. Tales from the trenches: Lean Test Phase Planning

   In at number five was my article on Lean Test Phase Planning.  As with all of the Tales from the trenches series, this explains a tried and tested technique or approach that aides testing in some way.  I enjoy using this approach, for teams who still adopt traditional test phases, as it allows a context sensitive plan to be developed and collaborated on for the entire team.  Much like the saying that there is no i in team, this follows a similar approach, by allowing management the opportunity to oversee, without too much restrictive interference, produce a real customer focused approach to testing.

Some of what to expect in 2012

2012 will no doubt be another year with very little free time for me.  What I do have in draft so far I find very interesting, so I really hope I will find time to write up most of it.

Accessibility

When many people meet me for the first time they often comment on my writings about mind mapping, sometimes saying rather flattering things.  If I had a true love in testing, I would probably say accessibility is it.  I hope to express this a lot more in 2012, showing people not just how guidelines should be addressed, but rather the concerns beyond that and the common design decisions that often directly impact this.

I hope to share my thoughts on using accessible markup to enhance screen reader experience and talk about the common mistakes made with JavaScript and CSS and how we as testers can help our development teams overcome these. I really want to showcase how building accessible websites is not just about ticking boxes and also involves a high degree of critical thinking to get it right. Much like we would test for usability, accessible sites and products needs to be usable for their target audience. A visually impaired user for example can’t be singled out as a single type of user, as just like users without accessibility requirements, their usage of braille devices, screen readers or magnification tools varies greatly from one person to another. There is lots on this subject I want to talk about so expect several posts.

Documentation

I am a big fan of Lean Software Development.  Not in the sense of following its principles by the letter, but instead taking the useful aspects of it that fit my context and using them to provoke ideas to improve my testing and the testing of others around me.  I had planned to share in 2011 my thoughts on forms of lean test documentation, with examples of course.  This being a time consuming to write will now be pushed back to 2012.

Another documentation style post I had scribbled thoughts down on, was an evaluation of modern day knowledge bases.  I hope to critically analyse the flaws and failings of these; looking at the good, the bad and the downright ugly, before providing feedback on what we can do to improve these to meet the needs of our knowledge thirsty audience.  I’ve no doubt this probably won’t get read much by testers, but it is a very important aspect that we should all consider, and at least I know it will interest the one technical writer I know of that follows this blog (hi Gordon!).  Seriously though, if I had the time, I would research and critically evaluate everything that interests me!  There is nothing more satisfying for me and allows me to expose my knowledge to likewise critics who will help further my knowledge.

Events

I had promised and still intend to (although rather late) post about my thoughts on EuroSTAR 2011.  I will share that soon! I promise.

Other events I might blog about next year, will probably be BBST Foundations (which I’m taking in March), the first Software Testing Club: Scottish Tester Meet-up, other meet-ups that I might be able to attend, EuroSTAR 2012 (If I can get a chance to go) and anything else that might turn up.

Mind Mapping

I have another two posts to write in the essential mind mapping series.  These I hope will provide further insights into how mind mapping can really enhance your testing capabilities.  The third in particular I hope will really blow your mind!

Usability / UX

Being back in the web business working for a digital agency, I really have no excuse to not share my thoughts on both usability and user experience.  In fact, I have already written so much on it in my workplace in bug reports, that I could probably just copy and paste a lot of that here!

I have planned a technique/ approach styled article for testing usability and gauging user experience, much in the style of my essential test design article, which covered various non traditional techniques and approaches to test design.

I had also hoped to engage in more fringe usability thoughts around things you might not actually have consider to think about.

Other

I have lots of posts in draft, with ramblings I’ve scribbled down, the problem for me though, is that unless I get an opportunity to jump on the computer that instant and write them there and then, the passion and mindset to make them really worthwhile is often lost.  That being said, next year you might see some of my various other draft articles on communication, design, testability, test approaches and techniques and an oddly titled article called “Thinking in Paradigms” which has been gathering dust for some time, but really deserves to see the light of day!

Things to watch out for in 2012

So what can we expect from 2012?  I don’t know about you, but several things have already got me excited and show great promise for what should be another eventful year:

Events

If I could attend any two conferences next year my first choice would obviously be EuroSTAR 2012.  Why?  Well next year is not only their 20th anniversary (so it’s bound to be huge), but they also have Zeger Van Hese acting as their programme chair, so it’ll no doubt be a very exciting series of talks and events.  My next choice would have to be CAST 2012, purely due to the quality of talks going on there last year and its very affordable price.  That being said, the newly formed European Context Driven testing conference Lets Test, also looks like fantastic value for money.

Scotland is finally going to have its own tester gathering on February 9th in Glasgow.  For me that’s pretty exciting, so I hope there will be a good turnout and lots of interesting chats!

Just like every year, you can fully expect many great things to come from our friends over at The Software Testing Club.  This year was fantastic!  I’ve no doubt that next year will be even better!

Michael Bolton and James Bach have been working away on a new Rapid Software Testing Course for Managers.  I expect this will be fantastic and fully hope to encourage my employers to send me on it at some point in the future (hopefully next year!).

New pens

Sadly not as often as I would like, do I find bloggers who write stuff that prompts fresh ideas into my head and get me excited to read more.  In 2011 two new pens came onto the blogging scene that did that for me.  Chris Chartier and Del Dewar have both written really interesting, inspiring stuff, consistently this year.  Let’s hope that there is more exciting new material to come from them in 2012.

Other scenes

You often read people saying that there is a lot to be learned about testing in other fields (some closer than others) and while I agree that is very true, perhaps the “testing is like a box of chocolates” style articles take that a little too far.  However here are some excellent resources to follow in 2012, to get a bit more in your mind about other aspects of testing.  I use Google Reader to follow all sites that interest me, should you not have a method of keeping up to date with websites, I would highly recommend this.

Critical thinking is an essential skill for any tester.  I find both Brian Dunning’s Sceptoid and the group panel run Sceptics Guide to the Universe both interesting and a way for me to learn of new alternative ways to critically analyse things.  Both are podcasts, which I generally find time for on my travels to and from work, or while driving in my car.

Usability and User Experience are two fields that us as testers can learn a lot about and directly use that to influence bad design choices in our workplaces.  A fellow Scot Neil Allison does a fantastic job of collating what he finds really interesting out there in both fields on his blog Usability Ed.  Further ashore Luke Wroblewski is one of the real stars in the real usability research world.  He writes a lot about good form designs and to a lesser extent site design.  If you have lots of free time and want to take a segmented approach to learning more about UX rapidly, join the UX stack exchange question list.  Even for those who know a lot already, you still get some gems and excellent research references to use when backing up claims.  Beware though, you can expect your inbox to grow rapidly, I think on average over a hundred questions a week are posted there.

In the Accessibility world WebAxe does a fantastic job of keeping you up to date with the latest goings on in this field, occasionally publishing the odd really useful reference style article, that you can always refer others back to when discussing certain issues.  Karl Groves is also another one to watch, he thinks critically about real accessibility issues and doesn’t just conform to suggested guidelines or follow the crowd.  That is highly important in providing beyond the basics accessible content.

Wrap-up

I have no great plans for next year other than my blogging efforts and spending some quality time with my family, but I have made plans for 2013, when I hope that I should have enough free time, to tour a few test conferences with an eye opening talk, which might actually turn into a half day tutorial depending on how much time I get to work on it next year.  This is something I’ve longed to do for some time, so hopefully 2012 will also be about preparing for that and making it extra special.

To everyone who makes it over here to read my thoughts and all the kind people who subscribe and comment on them, thank you!  Really, I love writing about testing, but what I love even more is that others no matter how little, might find some use for it.  That honestly for me is extremely rewarding, so I thank you all kindly for that and with the exception of my yearly recaps I will continue to post only about what I think others could learn from, or recaps of events that I have attended.

All the best in 2012 and thanks for reading.

A gathering of testers!

After my first day at the EuroSTAR 2011 conference, I had the pleasure of attending another great event – the North West Tester Gathering.

This was actually the first ever North West Tester Gathering, so it was a real privilege to be able to attend this pivotal event.  With EuroSTAR in full swing you can imagine how busy this was.  Duncan Nisbet, Martin Walton and Stuart Taylor were responsible for organising this event.

I was really looking forward to it, having attended and had so much fun at the London Tester Gathering on the same month last year.  I made my way over to the event with the legend that is Tony Bruce, who just so happened to be staying in the same hotel as me.  Excellent company and a really smart guy, who see’s things for how they really are.

It was a fantastic night, which had kindly been given a very generous bar tab from one of the event sponsors, which kept everyone in a joyful mood.  I had been really looking forward to get the chance to meet Duncan Nisbet, who had been chatting with me over Twitter for some time.  I had seen him become very active over at the Software Testing Club and he had started to blog about his thoughts.  So I was intrigued to see what he was like in person.  He seems like a really genuine guy.  Him and his partner in crime Stuart Taylor, make a somewhat unlikely comedy duo, who can talk a lot of sense, but do so with a touch of humour.

The cure for cancer.

There was lots of interesting chats that night and as you would expect, several buzzwords cropped up often.  The flavor of the year, and probably for the past couple of years at least, has of course been Agile.  As you would expect there was a lot of talk about perfect Agile.  While I have nothing against Agile myself, I do tend to feel a lot of people look upon it as some kind of silver bullet, which will solve all their problems.  I am happy though that when mentioned, most seemed to be in agreement that whatever you choose to do and how doesn’t matter, as long as it works for you in your current context.  This of course is something I strongly believe in, which has seen me adopt the good from various methodologies, including Agile and Lean in my testing activities.

New role, new challenges.

Myself, having recently switched roles, had a chance to discuss the interesting challenge that was facing me in my new role.  I am now in a company working as thier sole tester; the first in over 15 years of business.  The company has 25 active projects, which is increasing each month due to the current boom in business for them.  So you can only begin to guess how excited I am by this, and the unique challenges it will provide me.  I’ve many ideas buzzing around in my head just now, so having the chance to talk about some of them and the challenges facing me, was really refreshing.

Stephen Allot and I got chatting about his work with Specialisterne Scotland, who employ and train people with autism in software testing.  My new company just so happen to be Specialisterne’s first regular client, which was really strange as I didn’t even realise that Stephen had helped start this project, so bumping into him by chance was very surprising.  It does however go to show how small our community really is.

Our involvement with Specialisterne is still in the very early stages just now, but having read two of the initial test reports created by the autistic testers for two small projects we gave them, I have to say I was really impressed.  In one report they described an issue found when they had used Wireshark to intercept traffic sent across the network while testing a login form, which revealed the password was being transmitted insecurely, in plain text!  It will be really interesting to see how the relationship evolves, but from initial impressions it looks to be a good opportunity for both of our companies, and with the amount of active projects we have, outsourcing some of the workload on a when needed basis will be essential initially.

Other chats

I finally got to meet John Stevenson as well, which I was really looking forward to, having followed his blog for so long and been impressed with his thoughts on all things testing and beyond!  Andy Smith also turned out to be a really interesting guy.  Very opinionated, but in a good way.  I was really surprised to find out that he didn’t blog about his thoughts on testing, as I’m sure we could learn a lot from him.

Probably the highlight of my whole time at EuroSTAR was getting the chance to attend Julian Harty’s talk “Pushing The Boundaries Of User Experience Test Automation”, which I’ll blog about in a separate post.  So when I spotted him at the meet up I jumped at the chance to introduce myself, since two of the topics he was covering in his talk: Accessibility and User Experience, are of great interest to me and probably with Usability are my main passions in testing.  We chatted for some time about automaton and accessibility.  He promised to share some more useful information with me which he did later by email.  Julian also told me a little about his unique role at Ebay, which has seen him talk at over 40 conferences this year.  A promotional role perhaps, but he has a very good thing going on there, which sees him positioned as an educator in his company and sometimes getting to do some automation.

The fantastic thing about these events is the opportunities they provide.  Me and Julian will now keep in touch and will look at areas that would benefit from automation to improve accessibility and UX testing.  Hopefully together and with others in the community we can improve this area of testing, which I really think doesn’t get the attention it deserves.  In fact I’ve already had promising initial discussions with my employers about Julian’s use of automation to improve accessibility and UX testing, to see if there is scope in the future for our development team in helping improve this area.  This I hope will allow us to build better relationships with Julian, Ebay and the testing community as a whole.

Adam Knight, Anna Baik, Andy Glover, Michael Bolton, Nathalie Rooseboom de Vries, Rob Lambert, Rosie Sherry, Ruud Cox, Shmuel Gershon, Stephen Hill and Zeger Van Hese (sorry if I missed anyone) were among the other people not already mentioned that I got the chance to chat with that night; some more briefly than others.

A fantastic initiative

The fantastic thing about this meet up was the sheer variety of high quality discussions going on.  The fact that we didn’t have any talks, or vendors showing off their tools was fantastic, as I much prefer plain good old testing chat.

If you haven’t been to a testing meetup before, I strongly urge you to get along to your local one, or if there isn’t one you could always start your own.  You will build relationships with people that will last a lifetime.  It was thanks to a Mr Stephen Hill for encouraging me to come along to my first one in London and from that one alone I’ve made many friends, with some like Stephen who will genuinely go out of their way for me should I ever need their help.

Rumor has it that there may also be a local Software Testing Club gathering in Scotland soon.  I hope it happens, as I’ll certainly be attending it.  Hopefully I’ll get the chance to make some new friends there as well.

So well done Duncan Nisbet, Martin Walton and Stuart Taylor for organising a fantastic night.  Hopefully this won’t be the last North West Tester Gathering I attend.

Thanks for reading.