Balsamiq Sketchnotes

Our class has recently been using the prototyping software Balsamiq to create mockups and paper prototypes for our chosen products. While surfing the Balsamiq website I found that they actually had a page for blogs where the developers posted their thoughts on User Experience as well as some interesting statistics about users. Here’s a cool post about developing for Mobile Users. It’s in the form of sketch notes from a summit and is both informative and cool looking. Check out the PDF below!

http://media.balsamiq.com/files/blogs/sketchnotes/Mobile-UX-Summit-Sketchnotes.pdf

Then when your done skimming that, check out the rest of Balsamiq team’s blogs at the following url. It’s pretty cool to hear from industry professionals who are working to make development and design better and easier!

http://blogs.balsamiq.com/ux/

Thanks for reading! Seeya next time!

Game Atoms: The Anatomy of Games

Ever thought about what makes a game…a game? A game is really made up of three things: an input, a model and a feedback. These three pieces are derived from the Game Atoms theory created by Dr. Whittinghill. Game Atoms are what make up games and they are a really interesting concept, because the presence of game atoms is what makes games appealing to players or can turn them off. Too many game atoms can overload players while too little can make them quickly uninterested.

The above diagram is a rough sketch of the Game Atoms theory. The way Game Atoms works is that the user begins with an input. This can be a mouse click, a keyboard press or even a roll of a die. This input is then processed by the game’s model. A mouse click activates an object, a keyboard press fires a weapon or a die roll shows a number. The final part of the theory is feedback which comes back out of the model and gives the user some sort of response. The object starts a dialogue, the weapon hits an enemy and blows them up or the number on the die determines how far you can move.

There are two levels of the Game Atoms theory. At low levels, Game Atoms focus on control schemes with triggers activating gunshots or arrow keys leading to movement. At the high level though is where things get interesting! The high level of Game Atoms theory is more abstract. The high level encompasses the plot mechanics of the game, the ambience and the environments.

Did I mention that the city state floats in the clouds?

A good example of the two levels of Game Atoms theory is in the game Bioshock Infinite. In the game, the player plays a bounty hunter of sorts on a mission in an alternate history separatist state of 1900’s America. At the low level, the game is a first person shooter where as the player pulls triggers on the controller, their character shoots enemies and picks up health items and manipulates the game world. At the higher level though, the game is full of decorations and set pieces that hint at the alternate history timeline of the game such as a retelling of the Boxer Rebellion and the state’s secession from America. (There’s even a point in the game where the player finds a pseudo-temple dedicated to John Wilkes Boothe!)

The low level of Game Atoms make the game playable and are a necessity for enabling players. The high level makes games interesting though! This is actually a pretty important part of design, not just for video games! Game Atoms, I believe, can be applied to any product! Anything that’s designed needs that necessity that makes it do what it needs to do and at the high level there are facets of a product that make it appealing.

Take an iPhone. It’s just a phone at the low level, it does everything a phone needs to do. But at the high level it has a unique, innovative interface, applications, internet access etc. etc. These extra above and beyond features are what really make iPhones as popular as they are vs. say flip phones.

Anyway, Game Atoms is a cool concept and it really made me think about my own thesis project, MAEGUS. MAEGUS is a serious game that simulates wind energy and solar panels to help teach students about sustainable energy technologies! At the low level, MAEGUS needs to allow players to create and place sustainable energy technologies but at the high level it has to be a fun game to play, and that’s how this whole conversation started!

Figuring out how to balance out the game atoms is important and will be the challenge I’ll be taking on next semester as I work on MAEGUS!

Anyway, thanks for reading! Seeya next time!

The Hidden Magic of Tic Tacs

Have you ever held a box of Tic Tacs? The small capsule shaped mints that come in the rectangular box? They come in many different colors the most common being white, green, blue and orange. You probably have encountered these tiny mints before and found yourself trying to get one out of the container, only to shake out a whole mess of of them! Well here’s an interesting blog from a writer over at Foodbeast.com who not only reveals the secret behind getting a single Tic Tac out of it’s box, but also reveals hidden affordances in many other everyday snacks!

What sorcery is this? Well the writer Elie Ayrouth points some other snackhacks that you might be surprised to learn about so why don’t you check out his blog and investigate the further mysteries of soda tabs and how to maximize eating an apple!

http://foodbeast.com/2013/05/02/so-apparently-weve-been-eating-apples-all-wrong-video/

Thanks for reading! Seeya next time!

The Final Class (Sort of) Review

This week was our final class! Sort of. The professor opened by telling us that we wouldn’t meet next week and our final class meeting would be Dec 6th after Thanksgiving when we would have to give a presentation on our final Usability Report.

We then as a class discussed the last things we  had to do for the course and then focused on the final usability report the groups would have to make. The professor provided some ideas to make our reports more usable AKA less painful to endure! One good point the professor made was using a table for demographics sort of like the below.

So neat and clean!

An important thing to keep in mind is that charts in the report, and well the report itself, should communicate what’s important and make the significant results stand out! If testing a task, the information presented in the report should focus on when the task wasn’t completed or what was not usable about it. Of course the report must also revolve around the task and not the users who were tested, since the task is the subject!

After that our group decided what to do for our final report exactly. We decided to conduct usability tests on the website management system we had been prototyping since the beginning of the semester. We after all didn’t want to have wasted all that time just to abandon it in the final stretch! So hopefully in the next few days we’ll be conducting usability tests of our own!

Thanks for reading! Seeya next time!

Dat’s Bad Design: Diversity in Control Schemes pt.2

Videogames have been at the forefront of innovation in technology since they were used as modules in military research. In the early age of videogaming, new consoles focused on graphics to beat out their competitors. The leaps from 8 bit to 16 to 32 to polygons fueled ancient console wars. But in modern times, with graphics satisfaction quickly reaching a peak level, console makers have moved to innovating radical features to woo gamers.

Perhaps one of the best examples is Nintendo’s leap to motion control with the Nintendo Wii in 2006. With the Xbox 360 and PS3 on the verge of release, Nintendo pushed out their revolutionary new controller, the Wiimote, that used infrared sensor and a control bar to read the player’s hand and arm motions.

 

The Wii was met positively but was always at the tail end of the console wars because, in most cases, it just didn’t have enough games that utilized the motion control technology or games that did use it were too gimmicky. But that was only the beginning of motion control…

 

The Xbox 360’s Kinect system of motion control came out in 2010 and ever since it has been a major piece of technology used in research. But in gaming? Not so much. The 360 Kinect has been revolutionary in it’s motion detection system but it’s still highly inaccurate and games that utilized it were well…difficult for the wrong reasons. This is the major flaw with motion control gaming. Technology hasn’t gotten to the point where motion control is a viable control system yet game companies are still using it to sell their consoles and games. In fact the new Xbox One ships with the Kinect 2, for an extra 100 dollars may I add. But at least Microsoft has claimed that the Kinect 2 is much improved from it’s previous version.

Gimmicky control systems like motion control are ok in moderation. The Kinect and Wiimote are practically optional (most Wii games allow the use of a Classic Controller, similar to the regular Nintendo Gamecube controller or some other configuration) and up to the user’s decision whether or not they want to use it. But recently Nintendo made a wild swing that really has me on edge. Their new Wii U Gamepad.

The WiiU’s gamepad controller!

The Wii U’s new controller is similar to a tablet monitor with the control scheme pictured above. I personally have not dropped the money for not one, and probably will not because I’m completely turned off by this control scheme. The controller just looks uncomfortable to handle and from reviews of the new console it seems that the tablet screen in function is not as intuitive as one would want it to be. For instance many Wii U games have features simultaneously on the regular TV screen AND the Wii U Gamepad. This can be disruptive to game flow though since gamers have to look down at the pad which is really distracting them from the main action on screen! As an example, in one Wii U game the player must draw accurate shapes on the Gamepad as they are fighting on screen. Players cannot pause the action on the TV screen so they can actually see what they’re drawing in their laps and this is a serious hindrance!

I’m definitely not falling for Nintendo’s silly gambit, especially since the Wii U only supports one Gamepad controller at a time. It’s really just an overpriced accessory, since the Wiimote is still supported by the Wii U! These optional systems are mostly just off putting and as we’ve already discussed in class, things that are strange and new are harder to learn and get used to.

Which brings me to my final example of strange gimmicky control schemes.

The Steambox Controller

I don’t even know where to begin with this one. When Valve, the geniuses behind the Steam distribution platform and amazing titles like the Half Life series, Team Fortress and Portal, announced they were making their own console their was some crazy huge hype crazy fast. Then Valve revealed their controller which is pictured above. I don’t even know where to begin with this one!

 

The Steambox controller is mean to replicate a PC’s Mouse-Keyboard interface using strange touch dial surfaces. Yet the very idea of a controller with no face buttons, D pad or analog stick is mind boggling! It’s so new it’s scary! I don’t know how the Steambox is going to compare to other consoles who have very quickly adopted the dual analog stick-shoulder button configuration, but with Valve backing the project it just can’t be bad. Right?

Anyway, only the future can tell and I’d love to get my hands on it that’s for sure! Thanks for reading! Seeya later!

512 in Review and Mock Usability Testing

Class this week was a little different. We were in a different room than normal and started out by splitting up into groups (which is actually a normal practice). In our groups, we brainstormed and listed every research method we had studied and learned about since the beginning of the class! This process took about 15 minutes and at the end we had a list of 12 methods, including heuristic evaluation, focus groups, cognitive walkthroughs and other methods from earlier in the semester.

The professor then opened up a Google Doc and that’s when things got interesting. Other groups had access to the Google Doc and it had listings for the four different steps in the design process. We then had to fill out the chart with what we had brainstormed but at the same time the other groups were also filling out the chart. We weren’t allowed to delete entries into the chart so by the end of the session it was quite bloated.

The professor then guided us through the chart and helped flesh out our brainstormed ideas and also to identify what really was meant to go where. At the end, the chart looked like this:

This was a lot of text though and a lot to take in, so after a short break the professor led us through the design process using an example scenario.

We then discussed usability metrics. In particular four types of metrics were introduced to us:

• Performance metrics – whether or not the user achieved the task. Measured by error or efficiency.
• Issue metrics – A specific aspect of the interface that is problematic. Need to identify then rate severity of issue.
• Behavioral metrics – Observational data collected from the user. Can be verbal and nonverbal.
• Self-reported metrics – Collected with scales such as likert.

The class concluded with a brief playdate with Morae, a usability testing software that allows testers to observe and record a test participant’s actions on one computer from another computer. Morae seemed to be a robust tool and we barely scratched the surface of it’s functions during the last few moments of class. I’d like to try it out sometime and see just how well it can meet our group’s needs as we move towards our future testing.

Thanks for reading! Seeya next time!

Evaluation Methods: Focus Groups, Cognitive Walkthroughs and Heuristic Evaluations

This week’s class opened with a discussion of the differences and similarities of the evaluation methods presented in the week’s readings. The readings introduced Focus Groups and Cognitive Walkthroughs.

Cognitive Walkthroughs along with Heuristic Evaluations are both types of Usability Inspections. Heuristic Evaluations evaluate designs against Nielsen’s 10 Heuristics. Cognitive Walkthroughs are not as specific but aren’t broad either. Instead Cognitive Walkthroughs have 3-4 focused questions that explore user’s process and problems they face when using a product.

Focus groups help create guiding designs based on a target audience’s desires and needs for a product. They’re best done before designs are actually created so as to gather information about what a target audience specifically wants. Focus groups are made up of potential users and there are a variety of considerations to take into account with these temperamental and delicate user groups!

Also unlike Cognitive Walkthroughs, Focus Groups are not a usability evaluation but are instead user research and can be used for product evaluations as well. They are time consuming both to assemble and to manage. When recruiting for the focus group, the best people to recruit for your target audience should be based on who your personas are.

I like being able to categorize and order things in my head, so this week’s class really helped me understand  and sort the three evaluation methods we had been introduced to.

In the second part of class, we ran a focus group to redesign the CGT masters page so it would communicate information better. As usual the class split up into groups and we quickly outlined the type of focus group we needed, the profile of our focus group participants and what questions we needed to ask. Then two groups interviewed another group and gathered user research data. Then the groups switched and the interviewers became the interviewees.

The focus group session itself was a bit impromptu and very informal. It was pretty fun and interesting though to get the opinions of a variety of people and despite how sudden it was I felt that we got a lot of great information. We definitely got information that I wouldn’t think of normally so that was really helpful. It wasn’t particularly hard besides coding the important parts of the rambling of the focus group and keeping them on track. Overall, it was pretty interesting and a good experience.

Definitely good to keep in mind though how harrowing focus groups can be to handle so if we did it again it would be good to have a lot more of a heads up and more information.

Thanks for reading! Seeya next time!