When I hear or read that line, it’s like a red flag in front of a bull, a warning light. It’s translation is: “Hello user experience, haven’t seen you for a while, but I got it right.”
The best addition to it is: “…and no manual is needed.”
Try to read such text in low light, such as in the evening with just a little reading lamp on. Try a wider paragraph width, larger line-spacing. A 150% of this blog will make it too.
Then look away from the text. You won’t see a thing, but just nice blinds, all ‘burned’ into your retina. The recovery of vision seems much longer than from a black-on-white scheme (reading a newspaper on a direct sun).
And why do I then use the scheme? It looks good. But after this experience, I am considering a change to basic.
As I mentioned earlier, we started working on gaze-aware interfaces during autumn 2006. One of the fruits of that research has now been published in the proceedings of the International Conference on Computers in Education, ICCE 2008 (paper is here).
We did a simple questionnaire-based analysis. The results of the analysis show some promises for implementing gaze-augmented problem-solving interfaces. Users of gaze-augmented interaction felt more immersed than the users of other two modes – dwell-time based and computer mouse. Immersion, engagement, and user-experience in general are important aspects in educational interfaces; learners engage in completing the tasks and, for example, when facing a difficult task they do not give up that easily. We also did analysis of the strategies, and we will report on those soon.
We could not attend the conference, but didn’t want to disappoint eventual audience. We thus decided to send a video instead of us. Have a look at it here. It feels that making the video was actually more time demanding than going to Taiwan and delivering the presentation. In addition, the lack of feedback is also worrying. Finally, we are not really media professionals, and you can hear and see it in the video (feedback of what could have been done better is welcome, use comments please!)
As I mentioned earlier, I am participating as a mentor in this year’s Season of Usability.
Selecting the students was very hard. There were approximately 8 applicants for each of the two projects, and unfortunately we had to reject applications of excellent guys and gals.
I am mentoring in two projects, namely in Improving HDR imaging with Qtpfsgui and in Improving Jeliot user interface and workflows. In the Qtpfsgui project, Vladimir started redesigning the user interface to improve the preview by letting the users modify the settings of operators and see instantly the outcome. In the Jeliot project, Sharad started big by studying the pedagogical principles of program animation and their effects on the design of user interfaces.
From the research point of view, the Season of Usability is an interesting way how to raise awareness of the usability issues in the OSS community. So far, they have been greatly overlooked. Being part of this is a great experience in itself.
..or maybe not entirely, I just wanted to draw your attention to this interesting but rather not surprising post . Somebody asked a Windows non-geek user to use Ubuntu for first time (I understood). Kind of usability test it was.
When it came to the conclusions of that post, it said:
The main issue with the desktop experience is that the geeky programmers and designers assume too much from the average user. They assume the user knows about the way in which programs are installed, or how the file system is set out. The average user will not go out of their way to google for help or even read the associated documentation that comes with Ubuntu and its default software. The little information pop-ups and guided wizards are critical to explaining how the user can accomplish the basic tasks they most probably are trying to do.
And that’s the no news. We knew this before, didn’t we. We had that discussion anyway before . Still, I expect, somebody will be of that opinion “it has a nice GUI so it is easy.” It is still a long way.