EBoard 08: Usability Testing (1)

This class will be recorded! Its use will be limited to members of the class. Please do not share with others.

Approximate overview

• Preliminaries
  • Administrative stuff
  • Q&A
• Investigation 3 presentation prep
• Investigation 3 presentations
• Investigation 3 debrief
• Usability testing
• Investigation 4 group time

Administrative stuff

General Notes

• Happy Monday! I hope you had a wonderful weekend. Let’s all share a word about how the weekend went.
• I have not yet caught up on grading.
• I plan badly; the visit will likely be May 7 or May 10, rather than May 4.

Upcoming Activities

• Tuesday at noon and 3:30 p.m. Restorative Justice Circle: Mental Health.
  https://grinco.sharepoint.com/sites/Ombuds/SitePages/RestorativePractices.aspx
• Alissa Nutting & Dean Bakopoulos on “Made for Love”. Wednesday at 7 p.m. at https://www.prairielights.com/live.
• CS Extras Thursday at 5pm: Michael Spicer on Regulating the Internet and Machines: Creating Sustainable Social-Machine Relationships in the Digital Age. In the Events Channel on the CS Team.

Work for Friday’s class

• Prep for Investigation 4: Usability testing.
  • Pairs are posted on the Investigation 4 channel on the class team.
  • Investigation 4 Channel
  • Today: 20 minutes or so for planning
  • Friday: Class time mostly devoted to interviewing other class members. Note that followup questions will have to be via email or other out-of-class work.
• Readings on Teamwork (one long, one short, one one-minute video)
  • Journal question forthcoming.

Work for Monday’s class

• Finish writing up the investigation
• Readings on Brainstorming and Ideation and such

Q&A

I’m getting vaccinated on Friday, I might miss class on Friday.

That’s not a question. Just keep me posted and we’ll work things out.

Investigation 3 presentation prep

Do you want some time to prep before presenting? How much?

Investigation 3 presentations

Form

• Subject matter.
• Who did you interview? (Names not necessary, but generally characteristics might be good. “A Grinnell undergrad.” “A grandmother.”)
• What did you learn about the work?
• Tell us about the interesting tasks you identified.
• What else?
• Q&A
  • Mai
  • Anyone else
  • Sam

Order

• Cooking
• Super Smash Bros
• Drawing
• Distance Runing
• Coaching
• Playing Tennis
• Cashiering at McNallys

Cooking

• Did not focus on a particular dish, but asked people to cook a signature dish.
• Assumed that cooking was more than just following a recipe.
• Easy to find people who cook.
• Two students (face-to-face), one grandmother (FaceTime).
• There’s a lot of intuitive / ingrained by practice.
• Experienced cooks cut things more quickly.
• Experienced cooks have memorized / intuited things.
• Multitasking!
• Finding recipes is the easy/fun task. Already aided by technology. Difficulty is “I want a recipe that uses these things.”
• Chopping vegetables is a moderate task. It takes practices to do effectively. Some techniques take practices.
• Multitasking dishes is a harder task, such as when you’re making four dishes at once. (Example: Pancakes and noodles and rice and meat.) This task was intereesting for that.
• Questions
  • What’s the value of having other cooks in the kitchen?
  • Cooking vs baking?
  • Did you worry about asking questions along the way?
  • Professional cooks (e.g., the grill cooks at Frontier)?
  • Who is the target for your solutions?

Super Smash Bros

• Something that “we all” had in common.
• Super Smash Bros is a video game in which you are fighting against another character, controlled by the computer, a friend, or some other person.
• The map, terrain, and characters affect victory.
• Interested in the software asects. Also wanted to get better.
• Knew some serious Smash players who watch streams and do tournaments.
• “Three people in our social circle who are near expert-level.” Grinnell undergrads. One of them had even won some tournaments.
• Attack, dodge, launch attacks.
• Combo moves are an attack sequence. Many players dodge until they can use a combo move.
• Some stay on the end of the map to pull people off the end of the screen.
• Defense strategies were similar.
• Easy task: Basic attack (single button)
• Medium task: Recovery: Get back on the map
• Difficult task: Combo move. Requires precise button inputs.
• It’s not necessarily good to make these easier. But we could work on helping people get to the advanced level faster. Other ways to get joy and motivation, even though you are being trashed repeatedly.
• Questions
  • Did you focus on experts or novices?
  • How is their work time divided? Most of them grew up on the game, so it’s partially a tons of time things. Building up skill over time.

Drawing

• Interested in drawing; none of them had done so.
• Interested in how drawing would work online.
• All three participants are Grinnell College students in Art-134. All are fourth-year students. (So not professional art students.) Some difference in art; one took private lessons in HS, one has private experience; one had not done much art growing up.
• Students received iPads; there was an element of digital art.
• One student drawing on an iPad, one with charcoal positve space, one with charcoal negative space (using eraser).
• Students are currently drawing pictures of themselves.
• Most don’t have technology and usability problems with the current technology.
  • Private space
  • “Get your hands dirty”
• Might be useful to hear from professionals as to whether their opinions might differ.
• Easy task: Drawing lines (outlining major structures)
  • Face and facial structures
  • Multiple approaches
  • “Get a guide for yourself going”
  • Symmetry lines helped
• Medium task: Adding levels of shade
  • Done throughout process
  • Procreate had a large number of brushes; charcoal used in different ways.
• Hard task: Fine-tune
  • Not finished while observing
  • Difficulty assumed from the amount of time it seemed to take
  • It seems like there’s less leeway to go back and change something
• Observation was hard online
• Note: Digital drawing “I don’t know everything I can do”; smart or contextual guidance might help
• Question:
  • How could you have improved the observation if you were to do this again?

Distance Running

• Distance runners on the track team
• Observed practice and warm-ups (field stretches, sprints, etc.)
• Three participants, all of whom run at least a mile. All have at least four years of experience.
• Goal: Make running and practice easier for these runners.
• Researcher assumptions: Eating and practicing hard parts
• Participant statements: Hardest part is mental; how do you keep yourself going during a race.
• We learned that designing for a sport without accessories is hard.
• “Everything we came up with has already been invented.”
• Easy: Keeping routine and having motivation to run. But it’s a habit and a way to release their emotions.
• Moderate: Warm-up process. Not hard, but time-consuming. Takes about 45 minutes. No obvious outcomes. If you do them right, you don’t necessarily run faster, but you also don’t get hurt.
• Hard: Mental strength. Each has different approaches /
  • Mental need to stretch after race.
  • 5K/10K: Don’t get burned out during the race.
  • Having confidence/positivity going into the race.
• Questions
  • How did you deal with having to adjust the project? Adjusted on the fly (asking for a pause); adapt after the first person.

Coaching

• Sports coaches in Grinnell. They are experts and they train other people.
• Male coaches of Track, Volleyball, Basketball
• What are the most important things in a session with players?
• Coaches’ goal is to help players improve during practice.
• There a different responsibilities for head coach and assistant coaches.
• Easy task: Illustrate exercises using boards
  • Gather players together and show things on the board.
  • Explain drill is relatively easy.
• Moderate task: Motivate players during practice.
  • You can see coaches at the finish line saying things like “You’ve got this”
  • Different approaches.
• Hard task: Evaluating player progression and ability
  • Sometimes 1:1 in drills
  • Sometimes in live scenarios / scrimmaging
  • Expertise needed
  • How do you isolate a single player in team sports?
• Design concepts may differ between sports
• Basketball has something that measures the angle of the ball coming in. How might we get a bigger picture? Look to see where someone is losing energy.
• Drill facilitation / more/easier measures

Playing Tennis

• Chosen because interest but not experts and also knew some people on the tennis team.
• Interviewed three players from the women’s team.
• All started playing when they were young: 6, 10, 12
• Variety of reasons to play: Bond with grandfather, mother’s encouragement, obsessive family.
• Enjoy elegance and playing on a team. “Handling adversity on the court helps handle adversity in life.”
• Observed during practice and then asked some questions.
• Serving, volleying, and keeping score.
• There are more than four/five different ways to grip the racket; everyone has their own style.
  • Gap between theory and practice.
  • There is a standard way of doing things.
• At lot of nuance in technique.
• “Combo moves”
• Preferred to play against someone equally skilled.
• One used YouTube as a resource for improving their game.
• Scorekeeping. It’s a weird scoring system. Match is a series of sets. Set is a series of games.
  • Game is love, 15, 30, 40, game. But you have to win by two (at least at the college level).
    You score a point if your opponent does not return the ball properly.
  • Sets are scored to six games; you also have to win by two.
  • Match is best two of three sets.
  • “Hard to focus on the game of tennis when you are focused on the score.”
• Serving has three parts: Toss ball, jump, and hit ball.
  • Is jumping necessary?
  • Grip is necessary.
  • Can you apply spin to the ball to confuse opponent?
  • Technically easier
  • But involving mentally; need to empty mind.
• Rallying / volleying
  • Returning the ball
  • Involves movement from side to side
  • Try to keep the level relatively low, just above the net.
  • Aim! Hit it where your opponent is not. Left/right, short/long.
• Target for the scorekeeping was novice users. Most competitions don’t have official scorekeepers. Suggestion: App.

Cashiering at McNallys

• None of us had worked in a grocery store.
• People they interact with daily.
• Walmart felt less welcoming.
• Showed up “randomly” three days. All three interviewees were excited to talk.
• Interviewed HS student, someone who had been there about seven years, and a manager.
• Variety of aspects about the job. More than just scanning items and taking care of payments.
  • Now have to sanitize!
  • Deal with phone orders.
  • Direct customers to things.
  • Clip milk cards.
• Cash register is convenient; tells the bills and coins to return (pictorially).
• Milk cards also used to reboot the system.
• Easy: Milk card.
• Moderate: Returning change. Sometimes the cashier has to do math when the customer gives a non-exact amount of payment (e.g., extra coins).
• Hard: Orders, item location, item stock. Problem with taking orders: They had to see if things were on the shelves.
• Solution: Keeping track of stock. It’s dynamic. Locations don’t change, but stock does.

Planning for user studies

Investigation 4 group time

• Note: Work on realistic but short tasks.
• Followup question will be after class / via email.