Monument to Henry the Navigator

FeraLabs and UX Lisbon are organising a one day workshop, spread over two days on Remote Usability between the 12th to the 13th of May. The workshop is being held in conjunction with the conference.

The purpose of both workshops is to enable you to turn data and observations from Remote Testing into valuable insights which can be actioned. After attending both workshops you will know what questions to ask the data, and be able to prioritize the feedback.

The cost of the remote workshops if booked by the 28th of February is € 595.00, the price includes entry to the Ux Lisbon Conference as well. For just € 795 you can attend an extra 2 workshops and the conference. These prices are valid until 28th of February. There is a discount of 10% for Usability Professionals Association, Information Architecture Institute, Interaction Design Association, Association for Computing Machinery, and 15% for UxBrighton members.

As we at Feralabs want to spread the message about Remote Usability, we will offer you a voucher worth €225 off your next remote usability study, valid until the end of 2010 if you attend the workshop.

To book your place for the workshop simply go to http://www.ux-lx.com/registration.html and email lisbon@webnographer.com so that your place in the workshop is confirmed.

Workshop 1: An Introduction to Remote Usability

Remote Usability is a collection of methods that over the last year has become increasingly popular. Most of us are designing and developing products that will be used anywhere in the world, but most of our research methods are tied to a physical location. Remote sets the researcher free from being tied to a place, and also enables the testing of more people. By the end of the session you will become familiar with a number of remote research technologies, from remote ethnography to synchronous and asynchronous tools, and will be able to explain when such tools are suitable for user research.

The workshop will cover :-

• The different methods 1.30
• Remote ethnography
• Surveys
• Synchronous
• Asynchronous
• Study design
• Recruitment Methods
• Basic Analysis

Workshop 2: Asynchronous Remote Usability testing in detail

Asynchronous Remote testing is when the participant is separated from the evaluator by time and place. Asynchronous testing is significantly different from the usual user research methods, in this half a day workshop James and Sabrina will take you through the steps and theory of how to carry out a study from the design to the analysis of the results. The workshop will demystify the basic statistics that will help you understand the results. You will also learn the basics about how to carry out a International Study, from the legal issues to how to deal with translation.

• Study design
• True intent studies
• Task based studies
• Simple Statistics
• Advanced Analysis
• Analysing task based and true intend studies
• Importance of filtering
• Coding responses
• International studies
• Legal

Last Tuesday I went to the first Groovy and Grails meet up in Brighton. Graeme Rocher, the founder of Grails lives in Brighton, so it was very exciting for the Brighton geek crowd to have their first very own meet up down at the coast and outside London. The most exciting thing was that Graeme was going to re-create Twitter in 40 minutes of live programming.

FeraLabs helped to organize the event, so I went along, even though I am not a programmer at all. My background is in design and HCI.  The thought of a geek programmer meeting was slightly disheartening, as I was worried that I was going to be sitting there with blank eyes, not understanding a word.

But to my surprise, my preconceptions were found to be wrong. I really enjoyed the talk.

Graeme started his presentation with a short introduction about Groovy and Grails, including the Grails philosophy, which did sound a little bit like a usability recipe for programming:

• build on the shoulders of giants
• embrace convention over configuration
• use sensible defaults
• achieve simplicity without sacrificing flexibility

Graeme also highlighted a few geek facts about Grails:

• Grails is 3-5 times faster then Ruby on Rails
• in March 2008 Grails had 7000 downloads a month, in March 2009 it had increased immensely to 70.000 downloads a month

Black window of horror

Then the programming action began. Graeme opened the black window of horror and created a new app. He explained the different folders that were created, and what the different items in them are. For a programmer this may have been a bit basic, but I got excited, as it was something that I recognized.

FeraLabs is building Webnographer in Grails. This means that I see these folders everyday. I work with them and around the code, working on html myself and trying not to break the Grails code.

Graeme Rocher

Graeme whizzed through the different steps of creating Twitter. He achieved this mostly through plug-ins, so it looked really easy. There was of course some manual programming, and Graeme explained the different steps and what the lines of codes were meant to do. 40 minutes later he had recreated the functionality of Twitter. It was ugly, but it did work.

A personal note about Grails: I liked that it seems to be using mainly natural language for its commands. This certainly helped me following the presentation, and will also be useful in my future work in getting a vague notion of what the different lines of code do and refer to.

In conclusion, for me as a designer, it was great to find out what all the bits and pieces of code do. I work with/around it every day and I am definitely curios. This does not mean that I will convert to being a programmer. Yet, this little insight that I got at the talk can definitely be beneficial to my future work, as well as other designers. It can help the communication between programmers and designers, encourage mutual understanding, and result in a better working relationship between both.

So I my question to the programmers is, are you willing to try seeing things from the design and user’s perspective too? And what do other designers think about hanging out with programmers a bit more? Do you think that cross mingling at different events can encourage better working relationships between designers and programmers?

Please leave your comments below. I’m keen to find out what you think.

Ben Schneiderman from the University of Maryland, gave a fascinating talk in Cambridge on 5th March 2009 about the topic of “Information Visualization for Knowledge Discovery.”

Ben has authored many books and papers on human computer interaction, and was the founder of the Human Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland. His keen interest is the field of information visualisation.

During his talk, Ben pointed out that in contrast to scientific visualization information visualization is a relatively young field as information visualization conferences have only been going for about 15 years. He added that, the challenge with information visualization is that the information keeps changing over time.

Ben presented his conceptual break down of information visualization tasks: “Overview -> zoom and filter -> details on demand.” What he means is that one should provide an overview first, showing all the information, for example complex graphs, diagrams and maps. This allows the user to orientate themselves and get the big picture. Then allow the user to zoom into more detail and filter out any unwanted information. Finally, allow the user to select an item and get more detail about it when required.

The most enlightening point that Ben made during his talk was that: “Information visualization gives you answers to questions you didn’t even know.” He went on to argue that “there should be a move from opportunistic discovery to a more systematic discovery of knowledge.”

Ben illustrated his argument with a number of demonstrations and screenshots of projects that he and his students have developed over the years. Each guides knowledge discovery thought the visualization of different patterns in the data. Ben emphasised that for information visualization “the interest is not in a particular value, but an overall view and patterns in the data”. Yet, he also emphazised the importance “trying to see the violations in the data that are contrary to your expectations”.

Ben demonstrated his famous treemap that has now been modified by many commercial companies. It has been modified for example  to visually show the constantly changing landscape of the google news aggregator, and even the New York Times has used it to show changes in truck and car sales.

Other tools which Ben showed were the ShapeSearcher which finds spikes in the data, Scattergrams which provide the opportunity of hunting for stuff, the alignment tool which can filter by event and show what happened before and after this event, and another tool which identifes gaps in the data.

The most intriguing example of finding patterns in data was Ben’s demonstration of the SocialAction tool, which uncovers hidden structures in social networks over time. The visualization presented the correlation between US senators voting the same way. It showed a strong that democrats and republicans vote the same way. Only four republicans sometimes voted similar to the democrats. Yet the most surprising finding through this visualization was that the correlation for democrats voting the same way was far stronger then republican voting the same way.

"The social network of the U.S. Senators voting patterns. Here, the threshold is raised to 290 votes. The Democrats' relationships are much more intact than the Republicans. Details-on-demand are provided for Senator Whitehouse, the senator with the highest degree at this threshold." (by Ben Schneiderman)

Ben concluded his talk with three key points for information visualization to guide knowledge discovery:
1.    Rank-by-Feature Framework, i.e. rank by what people want to know
2.    Decomposition of complex problems into multiple simpler problems
3.    Ranking guides discovery. It is important to provide systematic
       approaches for discovery.

Challenges of visual literacy

A theme that kept popping up in the talk and particular in the questions afterwards, was the challenge of visual literacy. Words can help to clarify matters of information visualization, but Ben explained that textual information is only good for simple queries (such as a rank list in Google search results). Visual tools on the other hand are better for complex queries.

For anyone who is interested in finding out more about the challenges of visual literacy, Ben recommended the work of Colin Ware, a perceptional psychologist, who looks at the challenges of understanding visual information.

Interesting reads about information visualisation:

Bederson, B. and Shneiderman, B. (2003) The Craft of Information Visualization: Readings and Reflections, Morgan Kaufmann Publ., San Francisco, CA. Amazon UK, Amazon US

Card, S., Mackinlay, J., and Shneiderman, B. (1999) Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think, Morgan Kaufmann Publ., San Francisco, CA. Amazon UK, Amazon US

Tufte, Edward (1983) The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Graphics Press, Cheshire, CT. Amazon UK, Amazon US

Tufte, Edward (1990) Envisioning Information, Graphics Press, Cheshire, CT. Amazon UK, Amazon US

Tufte, Edward (1997) Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, Graphics Press, Cheshire, CT. Amazon UK, Amazon US

Ware, Colin (2004) Information Visualization, Second Edition: Perception for Design (Interactive Technologies), Morgan Kaufmann Publ., San Francisco, CA. Amazon UK, Amazon US

Ware, Colin (2008) Visual Thinking for Design, Morgan Kaufman, Burlington, MA. Amazon UK, Amazon US

We are helping to organise a Groovy and Grails meet up in Brighton on the 24 March at 7pm.

Grails is one of the fastest growing web frameworks, and as Brighton has many meet ups for other frameworks and programming languages including Rails and Python, so we thought that it was time that there would be one for Grails and Groovy.  Another important reason is the creator of Grails, Graeme Rocher, has just moved down to Brighton.

Grails and Groovy

The reason that Wired magazine, Pepsi Cola, Sky TV use Grails, and why we at FeraLabs chose to develop Webnographer in Grails, is that it allows one to build an application quickly.

Grails uses the Groovy programming language, which is another creation from the United Kingdom. Groovy runs on the Java platform (which means it will run on most computers), and has a unique syntax that means it easy for both somebody from a Java background to start programming in it, and somebody more used to other dynamic languages like Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk.

The Book

Graeme has just written a book on Grails. He will bring a couple along to sell to the event, but you can order the book The Definitive Guide to Grails 2nd Edition (Expert’s Voice in Web Development) on Amazon as well.

The meet up in Brighton

At the meet up, Graeme will demonstrate the speed of developing in the framework by building a Twitter clone in less than 40 minutes. In my personal opinion not only is Grails fast to develop a web application in, it also has a very low learning curve for both the experienced programmer and the novice.

When and Where?

Danny Hope of #UXBRI (the meetup for User Experiance in Brighton) has kindly arranged for us to use the historic Regency TownHouse.

24 March @ 7pm
Regency Town House
13 Brunswick Square
Hove, East Sussex
BN3 1EH

Sign up for the event on Upcoming to secure your place.

The Babylonians, who were famous for their astrological observations and calculations (aided by their invention of the abacus)

Last night Martyn Perks gave a talk at the monthly UPA event in London arguing that creativity is stifled by an over reliance on metrics. He argued that insight for good design can not come from number crunching.

I spent allot of Martyn’s talk shaking my head.

One of the points that he made was that Usability was driven by metrics. I could not agree, because there are few people using real metrics to measure usability. Jeff Sauro and his SUM method is one of the few exceptions. The practise of the most common methods are dominated by Expert Reviews and Lab Studies with few participants. Many of the reports that I have seen are dominated by opinion and are not objective.

I can understand Martyn’s anger at some of methods that are used to collect and analyse numbers. As we have found with Webnographer it is easy to collect data, what is hard is to find out what the data means. It is easy to jump to conclusions from the data, that don’t hold out to be true.

A good example of misleading data is people trying to make sense of Google’s trends. If you look at the chart above it may make you jump to the conclusion that Palin is leading the race to the Whitehouse. Obviously this is not the case. (Thanks otrops for the link.)

The argument that I made to Martyn is that metrics can help at the right stage, and make the difference between an implementation of a design that is good, and one that is great. Many great designs from the walkman to the iPod have been dominated by a great ideas person, Akio Morita or Steve Jobs for example, who pushes through the great leap in innovation. After the initial design there are many versions of the same product, each one an improvement on the last.

The research used to inform the changes to the product should be tested using Sientific Method to see if the numbers that one is using hold true.

While data gathering and metrics can not come up with an idea, they can help to refine a product and improve it.

James giving the first Webnographer demo.

Today, James gave the first pubic demo of Webnographer at UX Brighton.

His short talk explained how Webnographer can offer fast insight into Usablity issues, and how it enables the collection of user behavioural data. James also highlighted the academic research that Webnographer is based on, such as the link between the eye and the mouse movements.

In a nut shell: Webnographer is a new service for Asynchronous Unmoderated Remote User Testing method. It enables faster and cheaper user testing outside of the labs, with user in their real environment. The services has been designed so that a team can get results back in just a few hours, while using more than the normal number of participants.

The talk was well received and stimulated interesting discussions. We were overwhelmed by the positive feedback and interest.