I came across a blog post written by Frank Spillers titled: “The Science of Fun: How Fun Helps Improve Your Design”. He is a professional usability consultant who has worked with a number of large firms such as: Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Four Seasons, Logitech, and Microsoft just to name a few. In this blog post he shows how fun and a pleasant user experience can be used as a great usability tool. He outlines how you can design to the users’ emotions to make them more acceptable of your products. Why don’t you visit this blog post to see what I’m talking about?
Tag Archives: interface design
RAA5: Do Aesthetics matter or is it all about Usability?
Reference: Tractinsky, N. Aesthetics and apparent usability: empirically assessing cultural and methodological issues. In Proc. CHI’ 2002, ACM Press (1997) 115-122.
Objectives: In the past few years researchers of HCI have given much attention to usability while completely ignoring aesthetics. Do aesthetics play a role in users’ acceptance of a computer system or does it depend entirely on usability? Do researchers ignore aesthetics because they believe that it is culturally dependent or does it cross cultural boundaries? A research project conducted by Kurosu and Kashimura (1995, cited by Tractinsky, 1997) on university students in Japan shows a strong correlation between aesthetics and the apparent usability of an interface. In this paper the Tractinsky (2007) investigate whether these results are solely based on Japanese or whether they extend to other cultures.
Methods: Three experiments were conducted in Israel to test if the results would show some cultural variation.
Experiment 1: One hundred and four engineering students were used to evaluate 26 layouts of an ATM machine. Using an overhead screen projector, each layout was presented for approximately 20 seconds and subjects rated each one on its beauty and perceived usability.
Experiment 2: A different group of 81 first year engineering students were used to evaluate the 26 ATM machine layouts. This experiment contained two conditions, each containing two rounds. In one condition, the participants evaluated all 26 layouts for aesthetics in the first round, and apparent usability in the second round. In the next condition the order of evaluation was reversed.
Experiment 3: In this experiment participants completed the evaluation using a personal computer.
Main Findings: All three experiments were able to produce the similar results, which was analogous to those discovered by Kurosu and Kashimura (1995, cited by Tractinsky, 1997) in their research in Japan.
Analysis: Even though Israelis are not as sensitive to visual appearance as Japanese, the researchers found that they valued the aesthetical appearance of the interface just the same. This suggests that users’ sensitivity to the visual appearance of an interface may not just be limited to culture. Research has shown that users’ perceived ease of use of an interface makes them more acceptable of that system. I believe that much is lost when researchers focus solely on system usability while completely ignoring the aesthetical issues.
What is Rapid Ethnographic Research?
Rapid Ethnography “is a collection of field methods to provide designers with a reasonable understanding of users and their activities given a limited amount of time spent in the field gathering data.” [Paay 2009]
Rapid ethnography has interestingly become quite popular in the field of Human Computer Interaction. Why the rise in popularity you may inquire? Truth is that software development is rapidly changing and methods used to evaluate such software also have had to evolve if they are to effectively evaluate such software. The product and software development cycle has changed dramatically and previous ethnography methods used to evaluate such products are no longer efficient because they take too much time. Similarly the shelf life of software has decreased so dramatically that by the time previous evaluations are done the product would have become outdated and obsolete.
Also due to the nature of mobile devices, traditional design methods are often inadequate and fail to produce satisfactory results. We must realize that the design process for mobile technology is much shorter and yet more delicate, thereby making the ethnographic-based approach all the more necessary.
Rapid ethnography has promised to alleviate these problems we face today in the development process and also accomplish it all in a short time.
To maintain this short time evaluation rapid ethnography focuses on specific processes rather than the broad issues. According to [Millen 2000] it is based on three key ideas:
- Narrow the focus of the field research before entering the field. Zoom in on the important activities and focus on the key informants (subjects).
- Use multiple interactive observation techniques
- Use collaborative and computerized iterative data analyze methods
Today product development is not the same as it was yesterday and the methods used to evaluate such products in time past is not sufficient for today. Rapid ethnography is a faster and cheaper solution and yet able to offer the same quality of work as former methods.
References
Paay, J. (2007). From Ethnography to Interface Design. In J. Lumsden (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Mobile User Interface Design and Evaluation. Idea Group, Inc.
Millen, D. (2000). Rapid ethnography: time deepening strategies for HCI field research. Proceedings of the conference on designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, p.280-286.
RAA-1 Can Interface Usability Influence Trust of Web Retailers?
Source: Roy, M., Dewit, O., Aubert, B. (2001). The impact of interface usability on trust in web retailers. Internet research: Electronic networking Applications and Policy, 11(5), 388-398Retrieved from http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=863729&show=html
Purpose: Many studies have argued that interface design and usability can have a significant influence on a user’s attitude and trust of a website. The objective of this paper was “to present a study that tested the relationship between the quality or usability of the interface design and the level of trust of potential customers.”[Roy, M., Dewit, O., Aubert, B. 2001]
Methods: A questionnaire was used to gather information from the 66 participants based on the evaluation of site usability and trust. The questionnaire was sectioned into two parts:
- The first part gathered information about participants demographics and their previous experience with the internet
- The second part contained 46 questions, which was used for evaluating the websites’ usability. Twenty nine of these questions were borrowed from the index of usability, which was developed and validated by Lin et al.(1997) while the remaining 17 questions were borrowed from a questionnaire used by Mayer et al. (1995)
Using nine unfamiliar bookstore websites, the participants were asked to perform three tasks:
- find a predefined book
- find a book of their choice
- simulate the order process
Following this step the participants were asked to complete the second part of the questionnaire related to usability and trust.
Main Finding: The results show that four out five usability factors significantly influenced the user’s confidence in an ecommerce website. These factors included: ease of the site’s navigation, ease of learning, perception and support. Based on these findings, site consistency did not seem to have much of an effect on the user’s level of trust.
Analysis: The findings in this paper only seem to reinforce what we already know about the importance of usability in a user interface. The success or failure of any website or software product has a direct correlation to its usability. Two of the websites omitted from this research were Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Their exclusion was not due to their lack of usability, but because they had already established that’s sense of trust in users due to their great interface usability. A good knowledge of usability in respect to consumer trust is indispensable to anyone aspiring to undertake an online business.
Although this paper was successful in establishing the correlation between interface usability and trust it was limited due to the fact that the participants only simulated the order process. I believe that the results may have been different if participant were to use their credit cards to make an actual purchase.
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