Welcome to my two-part blog on Ethnography and the role it plays in usability engineering and user interface design.

What is Ethnography?

Ethnography is an approach to research that involves in-depth study of population groups through participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, and artifact analysis in an attempt to gain a thorough understanding from a number of perspectives. This research methodology is usually associated with the social sciences, in particular anthropology and sociology. Ethnography also takes place in the natural context of the subject being observed and, as such, the term is often interchangeable with phrases such as “field study” and “case report”. Traditional ethnography focuses on long-term studies spanning weeks, months, or even years. This is in order to understand, first-hand, fundamental answers in regard to the subject(s). Where do they live? How do they make a living? What do they eat? What are their linguistic, housing and marriage customs etc?

What does ethnography mean in the context of user interface design?

In the context of user interface design, ethnography is a valuable source of data for personas, scenarios of use, task analysis, requirements elicitation, and storyboards. Sometimes in life the laboratory setting can obfuscate data due to the very act of observation affecting the subject. Ethnography seeks to paint observations in their proper naturally occurring context, i.e. the point at which they would be using a software application and navigating its interface design in the course of their everyday life.

Ethnography as a usability method

Ethnography lends itself well to usability testing of user interface designs due to the principle of holistic human data collection. This works well in tandem with the fundamentals of user experience in user interface design. Ethnography brings with it a number of merits to usability testing. In comparison to observations conducted in the lab the authenticity of ethnographic reports is higher. Behavior observations are best understood within their natural environment and ethnography allows for this. As a usability method ethnography provides a much more comprehensive perspective of the users and their environment than other forms of research. Another advantage is that it employs a theoretical framework for contextualizing data.

When to use ethnography as a usability technique

According to usability expert James Horn, the use of ethnography as a usability method is “best used in the early stages of development, when you need to know more about the issues surrounding the use of a product rather than actual metrics.” In the very early stages of user interface design, using the ethnographic method will help you collect user requirements based on how users operate within their “native” environments, which is how they operate in the real world.  Obtaining these user requirements will then allow you to incorporate your findings into preliminary designs of a user interface. Of course, it is important to watch out for observer bias, as Information and results are highly dependent on the researcher’s observations and interpretations.

This is the second part of my 2-part blog on Gender HCI, starting with a continuation of topics explored in Gender HCI.

What topics are explored in Gender HCI?

In addition to the aforementioned studies on willingness to try out new and different features on a extant and familiar interface design and performance of tasks on large vs. small user interface displays, Gender HCI has delved into further topics. An example of this is with studies on confidence as related to problem solving tasks on a given interface design. Research shows that differences exist with regard to males’ and females’ self-efficacy in using user interfaces, and that low self-efficacy can be correlated with working less effectively with problem-solving features available.

Gender HCI also looks at general attitudes towards interface designs, web apps, and how and why people use them as well as reactions to graphic designs. While many of these issues can be analyzed through other usability methods, it is interesting to note gender differences because many user interface designs have users comprised mainly of one sex or the other. For example, designers of a wedding dress retailer would benefit from understanding the patterns of use that women employ when using interface designs. In addition, context-aware or context-sensitive systems have long been of interest, since they allow to adapt systems to the specific context of their users, such as location, usage behavior, time, or even gender and mood. Understanding how men and women differ in their requirements and usage would allow better targeting to their needs and hence potentially improve the gender-specific usability of an interface design.

Controversies surrounding Gender HCI

Gender HCI is still a nascent field and by its nature is open to controversy. In this day and age gender is being understood in more sociological terms rather than as an inherent biological binary switch. Many people find Gender HCI to be a method of reinforcing stereotypes and categorizing users based on gross generalizations. Thus, there is a large number of people that find Gender HCI to border on the offensive and perhaps even a pseudo science. Still, controversy does not automatically render this usability method invalid. Controversy may in fact turn out to be beneficial to Gender HCI since controversy is often one of the best marketing tools around and a surefire way to capture the interest of a broader audience, in this case the broader audience of computer scientists, web designers and interface designers.  Certainly it is commendable to look at research that seeks to give further insights into end-users and how to tailor products to them.

In this 2 part blog I shall look at the role gender plays in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). What is Gender HCI, after all? Does empirical data show significant differences between male and female end-users?

What is Gender HCI and what does it have to do with user interface design?

Gender HCI is a subcategory of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). HCI is concerned with the design and evaluation of interactive systems used by humans, such as user interface design. Gender HCI, a relatively new field that is still in its formative stages, shifts the focus to the differences between men and women and the role that plays in how they interact with interface designs. The term Gender HCI was coined in 2004 by Laura Beckwith, an Oregon State University PhD candidate, and her adviser Margaret Burnett. Relevant research reports that dealt with the gender aspects of user interaction date back all the way to 1987, namely Chuck Huff’s research on how games designed as “gender neutral” look like games designed for boys.

Gender HCI, like regular HCI, is a highly interdisciplinary field because it requires that designers and researchers from various fields collaborate to understand the ways in which males and females solve problems, communicate, and process information.  Researchers and designers must explore diverse areas such as psychology, computer science, marketing, neuroscience, education, economics and others to ascertain the information needed to research requirements and design successful user interfaces with potential Gender specifics in mind. Since it became clear that Gender HCI’s is a viable category of HCI, research and interest in the field has exploded. Today many computer scientists and designers are occupying themselves with system models based on gender differences.

Topics explored in Gender HCI: Why is it important for user interface design?

Gender HCI is not simply about adding pink to an interface design optimized for girls and, conversely, blue for boys. Examples taken from the available empirical data have shown that Gender HCI applies to many situations. An example of this is in spreadsheet problem-solving tasks where it was found that female end users were significantly slower to try out advanced software features. It has also been found that with smaller displays, males’ performance was significantly better than female’s. Larger displays improved the performance of females while the performance of males was not negatively affected.

This blog post is the second in a series of two about Human Computer Interaction (HCI)

Principles of User Interface Design for HCI systems

Since I am looking at HCI relative to interface design, it is important to underline how to improve the quality of user interface designs.  Thus, as interface designer one should be mindful of the principles of user interface design. According to Larry Constantine and Lucy Lockwood, these are:

1.    The structure principle – This is concerned with the overall user interface architecture and layout. An interface design should be organized in a way that is clear, apparent and intuitive to users. In other words similar things should somewhat resemble each other. For example, toolbar buttons should all look like toolbar buttons.

2.    The simplicity principle – The interface design should make simple, common tasks easy, communicating clearly and simply in the user’s own language. For example a search bar with the word ‘Search’ is usually better than the convoluted ‘Quick Keyword Search’.

3.    The visibility principle – All the options and tools needed to accomplish given tasks should be visible and easily accessible on the interface design without distracting the user with redundant information.

4.    The feedback principle – A good interface design should keep users informed of actions or interpretations, changes of condition or errors that are relevant through clear and concise language. This helps users feel in control of the process by being aware of their actions.

5.    The tolerance principle – The interface design should be able to accommodate a certain amount of failure from users (users, just like interface designers, are not infallible). A wrong click or some such other should be rectifiable. Undo and redo features that allow users to effectively time-travel through their steps are a good example of this principle.

6.    The reuse principle – An interface design should reuse internal and external components and behaviors, maintaining consistency with purpose rather than merely arbitrary consistency, thus reducing the need for users to rethink and remember. This is also referred to as the memorability of an interface design.

How to ensure that User Interface Design principles lead to optimal HCI systems

To ensure that these principles guide the interface design process and lead to optimal HCI systems, the use of wireframe tools can be useful. Often, the large number of stakeholders with various levels of technical expertise in the design process requires the use of such tools for visualizing requirements and concepts. Tools suitable for wireframing, such as Pidoco, a cloud-based rapid prototyping tool that works through a browser, allows interface designers to create wireframe prototypes of graphical user interfaces with simple drag and drop handling without the need for any programming. Interface designers can use this system to collaborate within a team through the cloud and get feedback from sharing prototypes, even going as far as conducting remote usability testing. This type of approach makes optimizing human computer interaction much simpler and safer and leads to more reliable results.

This blog post is the first in a series of two about Human Computer Interaction (HCI)

What is Human Computer Interaction (HCI)?

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is an interdisciplinary area of study that concerns itself with the point of intersection where people come into contact with computers, namely user interface designs. It also encompasses computer science, behavioral sciences, interface design and other fields of study. Although Human-Computer Interaction also refers to many products with traditional electronic displays and/or physical controls such as microwave ovens or aircraft (here, often the term Human Machine Interaction or HMI is also used), for our purposes let’s look at it from the point of view of computers, software and their user interfaces.

Human-Computer Interaction, Interface Design and Usability

The main goals of Human-Computer Interaction and interface design are to maximize usability and user satisfaction. A poor human-machine interface design, such as using non-standard interface design layout, can lead to a number of unexpected and annoying problems. Improving the interactions between users and computers and meeting the user’s needs regarding the interface design are important when creating successful systems. The design activities relating to Human-Computer Interaction significantly impact how successful systems are in terms of user acceptance, in terms of how productively the system can be used to accomplish critical tasks, and to how popular systems are with users and what market penetration they can reach. Often, the aspects relating to efficiency of use are summarized as usability.

This blog post is the second in a series of two about accessibility design as a usability method

The aims of accessibility design

Accessibility design is specifically targeted at designing user interfaces that assist people with various disabilities.  The needs relative to disabilities that accessibility design specifically addresses include the following four categories:

•    Auditory: Creating interface designs that are user friendly for those who have hearing impairments.
•    Cognitive/Intellectual: Creating interface designs that are user friendly for those with developmental disabilities such as dyslexia or cognitive disabilities that affect memory, attention, developmental maturity, logic and problem solving skills etc.
•    Motor/Mobility: Creating interface designs that are user friendly for those with difficulty or inability to use their hands (people with Parkinson’s disease etc.)
•    Visual: Creating interface designs for people with various visual impairments.

Why is accessibility design an important usability method?

Aside from the egalitarian implications, accessibility design is crucial to usability because it creates an interface design that can attract an even wider range of users and thus ensure more success for the website.  There are many users who are disabled and if a website is not designed with them in mind, they will not be able to use it.  This can be especially dangerous in the context of e-government where equal access is a must. It can also help to integrate accessibility design into the web development process because in addition to diversifying the number of users, it also makes for a development process that is suffuse with simplicity, as designers must find way to create a site that is universally usable for users of all abilities, thus diminishing their ability to create user interface designs that are too convoluted or contrived.

What is learnability?

According to the UsabilityFirst glossary, learnability is a measure of the degree to which a user interface design can be learned quickly and effectively. Learning time is the typical measure. User interface designs are usually easier to learn when they are familiar and designed to be easy to use based on core psychological properties. The learnability of an interface design can be, in turn, further broken down into five similar but distinct components: the aforementioned Familiarity, Consistency, Generalizability, Predictability, and Simplicity. When developing usability tests, it is important to keep the learnability of your user interface design in mind because a website or app that is easy to use will likely be used more often and more productively.

The five components of learnability

As mentioned above, there are five distinct components that comprise learnability.   It is essential to understand these constituents because they contribute to a user’s overall ability to learn a given interface design:

1.   Familiarity: Familiarity comes into play because users tend to expect certain things to happen.  This can include certain layout conventions, such as navigation schemes, color schemes or responses of an application.
2.    Consistency: Applications with a consistent interface design are easier to learn. This is especially important across various different parts of a software application, where changes of the interface design may confuse users or require them to adapt to yet another pattern.
3.    Generalizability: Generalizability means looking at other software applications that are similar to yours. The expectation of users is that tools which serve similar purposes include similar functions and respond to similar priciples. As users use many applications, generalizability helps them learn to operate an application without having to understand entirely new interface design concepts each time they encounter a new product.
4.    Predictability: Predictability means whatever tool you are developing, users of similar tools should be able to navigate your interface design with only the knowledge of using a similar tool in the past. That is to say that meeting user’s expectations improves learnability.
5.    Simplicity: Learning is fastest when there isn’t much to learn. Simplicity means keeping your interface design as lean and clean as possible for optimum learnability. Minimizing the amount of learning required by limiting the interface design’s complexity, improves learnability.

In part 2 of this blog post on context of use I shall look more intricately into the relationship between context of use analysis and user interface design.

Context of use analysis and user interface design

The importance of understanding the context of use when producing successful interface designs has lead to the creation of a usability method called context of use analysis that is commonly used by interaction designers and interface designers. Analysis is arrived at via a brainstorming methodology in order to devise successful usability tests during the development process of a website or application. Successful user interface design requires the analysis of user experience feedback in order to create a user interface characterized by optimal usability. However, collecting meaningful user experience feedback and interpreting it is not always simple, especially when interface designers lack a solid methodology or have not thoroughly thought through their usability tests.

The name of the game here is to be well prepared. Being able to define a site’s target users or knowing what kinds of tasks they will need to perform and what types of goals they want to achieve through the interface design is key. When interface designers are unclear about these salient usability test questions, creating a test that is realistic and relevant and results in meaningful knowledge about the new interface design concept becomes difficult. Without knowing about the context of use, interface designers run the risk of creating interface designs that do not satisfy the requirements dictated by the way the products will be used in a real-life context.  The resulting interface designs are often not sufficiently usable. This is why context of use analysis is a crucial usability method: it allows designers to create tests based on predetermined context-specific user needs and performance paradigms. Thus, designers not only learn what user experience feedback to elicit and how, but also have a framework to interpret the feedback in order to create a solid interface design that works for the user.

Why is context of use analysis a vital usability strategy?

When developing a website or application interface designers need to uncover crucial usability “probe” questions that speak to the usability heart of the matter. These questions seek to ascertain valuable information and insight that may not yet have been thought of by the interface designers. These questions, often derived through collaborative brainstorming sessions, help interface designers to tackle critical usability issues head-on when they design and distribute their usability tests. The deeper understanding of the design of a system relative to the context within which it is used can be a vital contribution in saving time and money during the testing and development process. It can also lead to significantly more successful products.

What are the drawbacks of imitating the desktop interface design?
Despite all the advantages, a drawback that I found with the interface design was that I found myself at times trying to use the same keyboard shortcuts etc. that I would use on a Mac to manipulate the various apps on Kohive. But instead of manipulating Kohive functions, I was affecting native apps on my desktop. An example of this was when I had various apps open in Kohive that cluttered the interface. I would inadvertently enable the Exposé feature which allows a user to quickly locate an open window, or to hide all windows and show the desktop without the need to click through many windows to find a specific target. However this applied to my desktop and still left the Kohive interface design as cluttered as before. Despite drawbacks such as these I find that this interface design scheme is very promising.

Seeing is believing

However, general good will and cooperation among team members is not the only reason all stakeholders should be involved in the usability testing process.  According to Jakob Nielsen, the main reason to involve all stake holders is because seeing is believing.  For example, if you are designing an interface design for a corporation you want all stakeholders to share in the usability process so that they can see the results you have.  Remember, stakeholder literally means someone holds a share in the company, and that means they hold a stock, an interest, in the work you produce as a usability tester.  If you involve them in your work and let them directly see your results they are more likely to allow you to proceed with your design based on mutual agreements that your results are valid.  In addition, if your interface design is a bomb because your usability test results weren’t as reliable as you thought, you will have less of the burden of blame because your results were originally approved by all stakeholders.  So, in short, if you are an interface or interaction designer running usability tests, make sure everyone in your company is involved in the process.  It can only be good for the interface design, for the end users, for the team – and for you.