Matthew Robert Simpson

Undo and erase events as indicators of usability problems

One approach to reducing the costs of usability testing is to facilitate the automatic detection of critical incidents: serious breakdowns in interaction that stand out during software use. This research evaluates the use of undo and erase events as indicators of critical incidents in Google SketchUp (a 3D-modeling application), measuring an indicators usefulness by the numbers and types of usability problems discovered. We compared problems identified using undo and erase events to problems identified using the user-reported critical incident technique [Hartson and Castillo 1998]. In a within-subjects experiment with 35 participants, undo and erase episodes together revealed over 90% of the problems rated as severe, several of which would not have been discovered by self-report alone. Moreover, problems found by all three methods were rated as significantly more severe than those identified by only a subset of methods. These results suggest that undo and erase events will serve as useful complements to user-reported critical incidents for low cost usability evaluation of creation-oriented applications like SketchUp.

Backtracking Events as Indicators of Usability Problems in Creation-Oriented Applications

A diversity of user goals and strategies make creation-oriented applications such as word processors or photo-editors difficult to comprehensively test. Evaluating such applications requires testing a large pool of participants to capture the diversity of experience, but traditional usability testing can be prohibitively expensive. To address this problem, this article contributes a new usability evaluation method called backtracking analysis, designed to automate the process of detecting and characterizing usability problems in creation-oriented applications. The key insight is that interaction breakdowns in creation-oriented applications often manifest themselves in backtracking operations that can be automatically logged (e.g., undo and erase operations). Backtracking analysis synchronizes these events to contextual data such as screen capture video, helping the evaluator to characterize specific usability problems. The results from three experiments demonstrate that backtracking events can be effective indicators of usability problems in creation-oriented applications, and can yield a cost-effective alternative to traditional laboratory usability testing.

SHOW AND TELL: ACCESSING AND COMMUNICATING IMPLICIT KNOWLEDGE THROUGH ARTEFACTS

This paper contributes to the current discourse on the role of artefacts in facilitating and triggering interaction among people. The discussion will focus on artefacts used as part of an interview method developed in order to discover knowledge that was observed but absent from both project reports and other documentation within multidisciplinary collaborative research projects, located within the field of Interaction Design. Using artefacts in an interview context enabled participants to reveal insights that were, in turn, participatory and human-centred. Thus the method was effective and appropriate in illuminating knowledge situated in interaction. This ethnomethodological tool enabled participants to reflexively externalize their understanding of the complex interactions that occur within projects, encouraging participation, interaction, visualization, reflection and communication through the use of tools aimed at capturing and illuminating the lived experiences of human engagement. These interviews were conducted with a selection of participants, chosen because they were researchers, working together within a cooperative research centre. Keywords: best practices, consultancy, critical systems, theory, user-centered design (UCD)

Using Games As a Means for Collaboration

The availability of a good interface for online user collaboration has been a sore point for most collaboration applications to date. While MUD’s, MOO’s, IRC and other chat applications are well suited to impersonal communication, the meaning of a single message can often be misconstrued or misunderstood, and the effort often required to learn control of a new application while understanding navigation in a virtual world, can be difficult to overcome. The Nexus promises to aid in the intuitive act of communication, interaction and movement and in the process enhance the collaboration experience for the user, through the use of a game engine.

Observing Architectural Design: Improving the Development of Collaborative Design Environments

The physical environments in which design collaborations take place provide many affordances, which enable interactions to occur both seamlessly and (in most cases) successfully. Physical collaboration is also facilitated through many aspects of the design process. Virtual design collaboration on the other hand, while successful at achieving the direct representation of activity around the artefacts being manipulated, lacks many of the physical affordances which make collaboration in the physical realm successful. The aim of this paper is to present the physical affordances of design interaction, isolate those which aid the success of physical design and identify which factors are potentially beneficial to improve the affordances of virtual collaborative design environments.