Remember when mobile phones still had external antennas? Everyone thought they were annoying as hell, because, for example, you could not put your phone in your pocket upside down. Secondly, the antenna tended to break. Now, did I say everyone hated external mobile phone antennas? No, not everyone. Radio engineers liked them. And justifiably so: external antennas improve signal reception, improved signal reception reduces energy usage, which in turn improves battery performance.

Wired describes the struggle and compromises Nokia went through when tucking the 8810's antenna inside the phone (the case is part of a wonderful article called design under constraint). Nokia pulled some pretty smart tricks: they printed the antenna like a chip, gave the phone a shape that would lead the users not to cover the antenna with their hand, and they made part of the casing out of plastic (the rest of the phone was metallic).

Once again this shows the rocky road from concept to implementation. At one point or another most mobile phone developers could see consumers would prefer internal antennas. It was a matter of making it technically feasible, and being willing to compromise signal reception in favor of a product that's easier to handle. Because all other things being equal, a phone with an external antenna will always have better signal reception than one without, and thus better battery performance. However, when looking at today's mobile phones, we can safely say that users were happy to trade in some battery performance to lose the antenna. How technology, a smart design, and the right compromises can improve usability.

On Wednesday May 13 there is a symposium on contextmapping at IDE, TU Delft. Liz Sanders, Jacob Buur and Froukje Sleeswijk Visser are the main attractions, and the symposium is followed by hands-on workshops on contextmapping.

Front end user research
In user-centered product development it is fairly common to pay attention to testing: evaluating whether your design fits the needs, capabilities and preferences of the anticipated user group. Often, less attention (and effort) goes out to making the design that is tested as usable as possible to begin with, for example by getting a thorough understanding of the user group, through methods such as contextual enquiry, field ethnography and contextmapping.

Contextmapping?
Contextmapping is a procedure for conducting contextual research with users, where tacit knowledge is gained about the context of use of products. It aims to inform and inspire design teams, where users and stakeholders actively participate in the design process to ensure a good fit between the design and the use of a product.

Symposium
Intended audience are design practitioners, students, and researchers. Attendance/participation is free of charge, but you will have to register online because of limitations in space. The symposium features presentations by:

• Liz Sanders: President of MakeTools, a design research firm. She is a pioneer in the use of participatory research methods for the design of products, systems, services and spaces. Liz speaks about and teaches human-centered design to students, clients and colleagues around the world.
• Jacob Buur: Professor of User-Oriented Product Development at the Mads Clausen Institute at the University of Southern Denmark. His research focuses on the study of people, technology and work in order to create innovative products. Fascinated by bright user interaction designs he is convinced that we need more knowledge about design collaboration and design learning in order to improve product development processes.
• Froukje Sleeswijk Visser: The first Ph.D. student on contextmapping, a phrase coined in her MSc thesis to indicate user participation techniques she had applied and developed. In the past five years of PhD research, Froukje worked intensively with students and design teams in industrial practice to 'bring the everyday life experiences of people into design'. On the day before the symposium, Froukje defends her thesis (at 12:30 in the Aula of TU Delft).
• 10 graduate students who give pecha kucha-style presentations about how they applied contextmapping in their graduation projects.

You test your product, so you know its usability. But maybe you don't. Because in user tests participants represent users, simulations represent products, and the lab represents their living room. And you ask them to do something they may not do spontaneously. As a consequence test findings might not be that representative for the real world situation. Paula Wellings, from adaptive path, wrote an excellent piece about the representativeness of user testing: usually the focus lies on prototype fidelity, but - especially for physical, connected, multimodal products - also environmental and social fidelity should be considered.What it really comes down to is that you look at each of the elements that make up human-product interaction, and consider whether what is used in the test is representative for the real world. Shackel's (1984) framework for human-machine systems (pictured above) consisted of four elements: the user, his/her task, the system, and the environment in which the interaction takes place. In this paper (free pre-print pdf) we extended Shackel's framework to match the current situation for electronic consumer products (see picture below). System became product, environment became context and we added these elements:

• 'other users', because most consumer products are not used by just one person.
• 'other products', because the majority of electronic consumer products is not used in isolation, but have to be connected to other products sooner or later.
• 'product service combinations' instead of just 'product' or 'system', because a lot of electronic consumer products feature a service that impacts the product significantly, e.g., a mobile phone and the subscription, iPod and iTunes.

For electronic consumer products, we consider 'the goal' or task to be a part of the user.

The framework can be used as a sort of 'checklist'. Take a look at the elements and relations in the framework to take stock of the most important use cases for your test, and consider the respresentativeness of the elements and the relationships between them. And whether that really matters. Because sometimes, to fulfill the goal of your usability test you may not need the full degree of representativeness.

[Illustration at top: Bob van Vliet]

Recently ran into my old 'buzzer', a sub-brand of pagers that Dutch telecom providers used to target younger people halfway through the nineties. This specific model was called The Maxer. For those of you who never had or experienced this short-lived product: to send a message to someone with a buzzer you had to dial the buzzer number, leave your message on tape, and then an operator would type out your message and send it. It was one-way communication: you could receive a message or phone number, but there was no other way to respond than to grab a phone somewhere. You did not need a subscription to be able to receive messages, but as a consequence the costs of sending a message to a buzzer were quite high: about 1,25 euro.

Awaking the desire to respond
But why would telecom providers be launching youth-targeted pagers at a time when mobile phone technology was already taking off? I got an explanation from a KPN product manager during a lecture (must have been around 1996): they knew it was a dying technology, but it was an excellent way to let young people experience how convenient it is to be reachable everywhere. And once you're reachable everywhere, that awakes the desire to be able to respond everywhere and KPN had just the product to fulfill that need: mobile phones. Because of the low price for the device (I got mine for around 12 euro's and 3 barcodes from Pepsi bottles), no subscription costs, and no cost to receive messages, the threshold to start using a buzzer was low. And once you had experienced the joy of mobile technology... you were sold.

I went to the night market. Got this receipt. Not very informative, but it did make me laugh (the Dutch word 'diversen' on a receipt means something like 'whatever'). Another interesting aspect is that I made my purchase in the future ('5-11-11', upper right corner).

Crowdgeneration
Asus and Intel take a shot at crowdsourcing. You can now design your dream PC at www.wepc.com. Having people design their dream product is a tried and tested way to discover user needs and preferences. Nokia had people in developing countries draw their dream phones in the OpenStudio project. Liz Sanders is a staunch evangelist of generative tools and techniques as a means of discovering (especially latent) user needs. By combining generative techniques with the power of the web (2.0) you get crowdsourced generative tools, as for example the wepc website, and the online redesign community redesignme.org.

Who are the designers?
Redesignme.org's members mostly seem to be (aspiring) designers, which means that the designs at that website are more sophisticated than the sketchy designs at wepc.com. As a consequence the designs at redesignme.org may be more than just carriers of user needs; they are designs in their own right. On the other hand they might be less 'trustworthy' carriers of user needs, because they are not not made by naive users, but by designers, who might be suffering from the designer-user gap.

Designs that are not designs
In a paper called Facilitating 'user push' in the design process*, Diane Gyi outlines the power and pitfalls of user-generated designs in the design process. She points out that viewing user-generated designs as 'designs' might be missing the point. User-generated designs should not be considered designs, but containers of valuable information in a form that generates empathy:

The designers were also frustrated at the quality of some of the sketches. In fact on de-briefing the designers, they suggested that they should sit with the users and sketch their ideas as they were talking. It was also observed that it was hard for the designers to let go and in this case study they needed to re-sketch and remodel the original designs for presentation to the rest of the company. Yet the personal format of the original annotated sketches and models could be a powerful way of bringing user views into the ‘boardroom’.

* Gyi, D.E., Campbell, R.I. and Cain, R., ''Facilitating 'user push' in the design process'', Proceeding IEA 2006 Congress, RN Pikaar, EAP Koningsveld adn PJM Settals, Elsevier Ltd, Maastricht, Holland, 2006.

Flowie is a 'persuasive virtual coach' to motivate elderly individuals to walk. It uses a step counter with a wireless connection to keep track of your favorite lazy senior's daily movements and a screen at home (see picture above) that lets elderly people see at a glance whether they have been active enough over the course of the day.

After consulting with seniors an animated flower was chosen to provide the feedback. If the user has moved sufficiently, the flower is happy. If they don't move enough, it looks sad. The flower lays low if everything goes OK, but tries to get the user's attention if he or she needs 'a little push'. By touching the screen, users can get a more detailed insight in their progression over time. Field studies showed that the participating seniors felt comfortable being coached by Flowie, and that they felt more motivated to move.

Flowie was developed as a graduation project by TU Delft Master student Iñaki Merino Albaina, within the independent@home research project.


Flowie from Iñaki Merino Albaina on Vimeo.

If you have to explain to someone what human centered design is and you only have about two minutes: show them this movie from MAYA design. It clarifies.

[via: Erik Dahl]

Someone found the time and state of mind to color organize her iPhone icons. Strange? Maybe not. Color organizing stuff seems to fascinate people. They do it to books...

They do it to CDs:

Why? No idea. Useful? Nope. Efficient? Don't think so. Fascinating? Yep. Here's some sorting by color that makes a little more sense: socks.