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.

Gradually engaging your audience

Ever since I first heard Luke Wroblewski talking about the concept of Gradual Engagement, I had an immediate “Oh, why didn’t I think of that?” moment.

To put it simply, Gradual Engagement is the process of allowing a user to explore what you have to offer, before deciding if they like it enough to actually sign up for it.

Gradual Engagement doesn’t force a user to register first.

Software Test Pro, forced engagement. When attempting to access a podcast, I’m forced to engage into an unwanted membership, be that free or not.

If it does, you don’t even realize it has occurred!

geni.com’s old design used to make the family tree creation process double as a transparent sign up process.

Why should you be forced into an unwanted engagement, when all you want to do is get a feeling for something?

A glimmer of hope?

Crazy huh?  I’m sure CEO’s all around the world are scratching their heads thinking, surely if they register first, I’ll have more chance of keeping them?  No!  Half of the battle is getting people to register in the first place.  The sight of a big ugly old registration form is enough to make a lot of people turn around and run for the hills.  Furthermore, so many forms capture needless information just to fulfill some pointless metric, or open up avenues for the company to spam you.  Yes, users feel harassed at being asked for more information than they should do!  Why should they trust you?

Forcing users to jump over fences to get information that they want is not the way forward!

Most importantly, Gradual Engagement isn’t new!  It’s been around for a decades.  Remember shareware, freemium business models and the more recent spin liteware (no exact wiki reference sadly)?  These are all similar concepts.  Get people interested first before making them part with their hard earned cash.  The phrase Gradual Engagement is simply far more self-explanatory, and in turn makes itself more useable as a medium for making others see sense.

Why should you care?

So what on earth has all of this got to do with Software Testing?  Well if you think testing is merely about checking if software works or not, then I’ve probably lost you somewhat.  Don’t worry though; testing is much, much more!  Testing is among many things, caring about the success or failure of your product.  Part of the success may be investigating how people will interact with your software, and trying to proactively avoid them wanting to throw in the towel at the first hurdle.  By removing the hurdle in the first place, you give your product a fighting chance of actually being adopted by someone and not simply thrown away.  Good testers care about these things.  They think holistically, not just about what’s in front of them today or tomorrow.

A new playfield for the losers and winners

So moving on, we are starting to see consoles of all things getting their own apps.  Fantastic!  I can fast forward 20 years into the future and see myself never having to leave my couch!  The wonderful thing about consoles though, is that it’s a new paradigm to play with.  It is all very new so we can expect many great successes and many great failures.  For Gradual Engagement there is one excellent example of both already.

NetFlix provide a video application for the Xbox, which allows you to watch media content.  After downloading and launching the app you’ll be asked if you are a member or not.  Fair enough, but if you aren’t a member your next screen, instead of being a navigation paradigm to explore and preview their vast array of content (which they so want to show off), instead you are presented with a sign up for a free trial option.  So not only do you have to fill in a form of some kind, but you’ll also have to engage in a trial which you may, or may not remember to cancel should you no longer wish to use it.  For all you know, you might not even like it once you’ve signed up for it, so why the hell would you want to go through the hassle in the first place?  The damndest thing though, is that unlike web paradigms which have lots of interactive elements, the Xbox app is a linear process, so I can only ever go forward (sign up for trial), or back (exit app).  Pretty stupid, if you ask me!

ILoveFilm on the other hand, also have an Xbox application, but wait!  Listen carefully and keep this between ourselves for now!  ILoveFilm let you preview their content, they let you watch movie trailers, they even let you search for films you might want to watch and better still, you haven’t had to give them any information yet!  It is your choice if you want to proceed further and engage with them in the form of a mutually agreed contract.  You haven’t been forced into something that you might regret later!

Spread the word!

So go forth and tell the tale of the benefits of Gradual Engagement to anyone who’ll listen.  Make your company some more money and don’t forget to tell them who told them about it when you ask for that bumper pay rise!

Thanks for reading.

Learnability

Lots of people talk about the need for simplicity in designs, and some even provide various examples of what makes for a good minimalist design and what doesn’t.  I often find myself disliking lots of these examples for various reason, but mostly from my experience of critiquing designs from a usability perspective, and knowing what works, and what doesn’t.  That being said, I’ve no intention of rambling on about a subject which has been covered to great extents already by many people.  Instead I’ll talk about an often forgotten aspect of good designs, called learnability.

When we talk about the learnability of our software, we are generally discussing how hard it is for a user to learn how to use it.  Now the learning part could be the product as a whole, a feature, or just some aspect of the design that we’re unsure about.

This is a very interesting subject, and a wonderful aspect to test for as it really gets your brain cells working and debating furiously with one another.  However be warned, making design decisions based upon what we feel is right or wrong is a very biased thing to do.  We might feel the decisions that we make are for the best, but how do we really know for sure?  That’s why user feedback techniques such as paper prototyping, and usability evaluations are so useful, as they provide real feedback, from real users.  Of course, one of these techniques takes a very proactive approach to user feedback, whilst the other is more often than not a late, reactive activity which comes with a much higher cost to implement changes.

Common get-outs

Before going into some examples of what makes for good or bad learnability, I’d like to mention some things to be wary of when discussing learnabilty issues with others.

Users will be trained on how to use the system

In the past I’ve discussed some genuine leanability issues with developers, and encountered invalid arguments for why they shouldn’t be resolved.

One such argument was that all new users of the product (which at the time was custom built for individual companies) wouldn’t have to worry about learning certain aspects of the user interface, as they would be trained on how to use it.  We obviously couldn’t guarantee that a company purchasing our product would pay extra for training costs as part of their purchase.  Nor could we guarantee that whatever was being discussed as a potential learnability issue would be included in any training material, should it occur.

I’ve often encountered the training argument in the past when discussing learability issues, and it’s always an interesting one, as even should the training be provided to the users of the system, and the participants be able to remember some distinct issue that was discussed, and be such fantastic users that should they ever forget, they immediately read the products user documentation (more on that later), and then…  You see where this is going don’t you?  It’s kinda like writing a nasty big if statement, and finally at the end of all these pointless checks, something happens!

You could, and please stop me in my tracks if I’m talking nonsense here, but you could just do it right, and have an elegant design that doesn’t force the user to think deeply about how to complete some action they wish to do.  Rather than adding layers of bandage around the problem, simply fix it, and learn from what you did wrong to improve your designs in the future.

Probably the biggest flaw in the training argument is the inability to accept that this could be a fundamental issue with the original design.  In a worst case scenario, potentially requiring you to go back to the drawing board, and flesh out a new design that works.

The emotional investment problem

This is an emotional investment problem.  Some people find it hard to accept flaws, which will potentially require changes, or indeed re-writes to designs that they’ve invested time in, and have therefore become emotionally attached to.  We see this all the time in science with flawed theories which have had so much time invested in them, that some scientists are unwilling to accept that they simply won’t work as they’d originally expected.  Despite science itself ruling out supporting evidence for such theories, many will still strongly defend them, and refuse to drop all their hard work, to start again, or accept that their idea simply won’t work.  The good scientists, and developers will accept the flaw, and come up with a new approach that will work, and will keep the project moving in the right direction.

The documentation get-out

Another learnability argument, which I’m sure you’ve heard many a time, is that users can read the accompanying documentation, to learn how to use something.  Sure, obviously all users do that!  Just like training, this is another easy excuse to give should you not wish, or have the time to do something.  Most often than not the documentation discussed doesn’t even exist yet, so again this might not include instructions for the discussed issues.  We can’t predict how a user will react to learnability issues, but wrapping layers of further learning around them certainly won’t help matters.

As a side note, I absolutely love good documentation!  However should I need to access it, to learn the very basics of your product, then you have clearly already failed.

Learnability isn’t about teaching users how to use your product.  It’s about making them not have to think!  Or at least doing your best to prevent the amount of mental mind-work that they’re required to do.  People don’t like to think after all when using something that’s new.  Thinking too much is what creates rejected systems.  Things should be immediately apparent, and when they’re not, they should be so far outwith the critical path of your product that the user doesn’t care.  If they do, then great!  It’s their choice (yup that’s right, their choice) to learn that nice to have extra feature, which doesn’t necessarily prevent them getting from a to b.

Good learnability

When I talk about good usability, and learnability in products I always shout from the rooftops about a prodcut named Jing!  Jing is essentially a screenshot and video capture tool, which in itself is a very basic task.  The good thing about Jing is that they’ve realised that most people want to grab content quickly and share it with others.  This is essentially the model for their entire product.

Out goes the loading of an application to take a screenshot, or remembering some shortcut to take a picture, instead it’s replaced with a vibrant, highly visible globe which appears at the top of your screen.  When you don’t need it, you forget it’s there.  When you do need it though, it’s quickly accessible, and intuitive to use.

Should you wish to add some visual highlights to your screenshot, you can quickly, and easily, using the next to rapidly load edit screen.  From this screen you can simply choose to save the image and move on, or edit it, using some well thought out basic editing options, which are very quick, and simple to use.  Even the fact that the most commonly used edit action (a line) is pre-selected allowing you to immediately begin to highlight things, is well thought out, and shows that the company is keen to make the product work for those that matter most, the users.

The above image, demonstrates an edited screenshot in Jing.

You can choose to save, or upload to a service called screencast which will let others view your screenshot from anywhere via a simple URL, which is immediately copied to your clipboard for pasting in a email, or bug report, because obviously that’s what you would have done next.  See, a smart company who consider their users needs, right down to the minute details.

The whole process of taking a screenshot, editing it, and sharing it can literally take as little as thirty seconds, due to the easy to use (no thought required) interface.  Doing the same thing with video is just as simple, and painless.

Learnability is so important, and preventing your users from having to think, is what makes good products great!  Jing is an excellent example of simplifying your products critical path, and creating a really simple, sleek, usable system.

Borderline learnability

TweetDeck is a good example of what I would class as borderline learnability.

An example of TweetDeck’s user interface. The non critical path, tiny buttons are highlighted with a red border.

You can see from the above screenshot that the interface achieves the basic needs you’ve downloaded it for in consolidating your social media streams, and providing alerts when someone has mentioned you, or shared your content.  Whilst it has some niggles, for the most part the critical path doesn’t involve much thought.

What makes TweetDeck a good example for borderline learnability, is its use of extremely small icons, and lots of them, to do various actions.  In order to find out what any of these do, you’d need to hover over them and learn about what their capabilities from the tool tip.  With some you could tell immediately from the icon what they would do, such as the photo icon, which would indicate that you could add a photo to shared content.

The tool does however tread a thin line in terms of learnability.  Some users will love it, and want to learn extra functionality outwith the critical path, as and when needed.  Others might simply look at it, and choose to ditch it, thinking it looks too complex, or even just too much of a hassle for their liking.  That’s the problem with tiny icons for actions, they quickly went out of fashion because people didn’t like them, as their purpose wasn’t immediately apparent.  TweetDeck decided to keep them, and as they are not in the users critical path (viewing and sharing content), they don’t pain users as much.  However it is a slippery slope, which should be avoided when possible.

Poor learnability

vSphere from VMware, is a perfect example of poor learnability.  Essentially it allows you to manage virtual machines that you’ve added to a server with Hypervisor (ESXi) installed.  It doesn’t matter if you’ve had no experience of either product, or virtualization of any kind, read on.

Now I’ve got a fair bit of experience installing and configuring virtual machines, and apart from the very poorly laid out UI that is vSphere, there was one thing that had me utterly confused.  Any time I had to download a new operating system to install on the ESXi server, I needed to burn it to a DVD, and using the clunky vSphere interface, instruct the new VM to boot itself from this disk so I could go through the steps required to install the OS.

“Why not just upload the ISO to the machine, and install it directly?” you might ask.  Yeah well, that would make a lot of sense, however for the life of me I couldn’t find an option to do this on the interface.  It was almost as if they’d hidden it in plain site, just to toy with me!  Anyway this was plan A, the burning to DVD was plan B, developed from giving up and trying to find a workaround.

Fast forward about a week, and I had to burn a disk for another operating system I needed to install.  The problem was, this time the ESXi server refused to recognise the disk, or indeed the second one I burned shortly after trying the first.

Now I really needed to figure out how to upload my ISO files directly to the server, so I did a bit more exploring.  Thankfully by chance, this time I quickly found out how to do it.

Above is vSphere’s hidden option for opening your servers datastore, to allow you to upload content such as ISO’s for new virtual machines.

Hidden in the context menu of a table on the summary tab of the server, is an option “Browse Datastore”, which  funnily enough even though it is hidden away from you has its own shortcut key (how thoughtful).

Introducing affordance

Now this brings me to a topic we haven’t covered yet called affordance.  Affordance and learnability, are very closely related.  Whilst good learnability often goes hand in hand with not making your users think, affordance makes them think, and discover.

Affordance is very big in the mobile world, you’ll see a lot of affordance considerations there that you may not have thought about previously.  Things like pinching a picture to zoom, and sliding left to right to navigate content, all come with a level of affordance provided to them.

Affordance essentially dictates that a user will be granted the ability to learn a new feature in a product, and it will not be immediately apparent to them.  Really good affordance almost urges the user to learn and unlock a feature.  In the mobile world, with touch screen technology we see lots of good affordance techniques, and as people are often crazy about their phones they often learn these very quickly, or hear about them from others.

People are less passionate about applications, and will generally be less forgiving of poor affordance choices.  vSphere for me take the term poor affodance to a whole new level with their crazily placed context menu option, which leads you onto a popup screen, to then allow you to upload content to the server.

In products, just like learnability, considerations for affordance should be scrutinised when they are in your users critical path.  As a general rule of thumb, if a critical path option has a level of affordance for learnability with it, and it doesn’t have an immediately apparent alternative, drop it!

Wrapup

So I’ve talked a lot about learnability, and looked at some common get outs people will use to try and not fix these issues.  I briefly touched upon rejected systems, and why poor learnability choices can quickly lead to one of these.   I looked at the good, the ok, and the glaringly bad in terms of learnability, whilst also touching upon the topic of affordance.  What I’d briefly mentioned, but didn’t cover, was the use of usability techniques such as paper prototyping and usability evaluations to help uncover such issues.  That tough is another topic, for another time…

Thanks for reading.