Moderating Field Visits

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Del curso dictado por National Research University Higher School of Economics

Mobile Interaction Design: How to Design Usable Mobile Products and Services

3 calificaciones

National Research University Higher School of Economics

Mobile Interaction Design: How to Design Usable Mobile Products and Services

3 calificaciones

Every mobile app gives you something. It could be not only something tangible like the pair of jeans you've ordered using the app but also a piece of work like waking you up in the morning. It could be a feeling, for instance, a feeling of enjoyment obtained from watching a video clip or a feeling of closeness flashed out after receiving an old photo from a loving person via some instant messenger. That "something" is actually the reason why you use the app, it is the heart of the product, and in this course we will not talk about it. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. There are always two sides of a coin. There should be a person who makes that "something" accessible. It is astonishingly important because the use of the product loses its meaning if users can’t get what they want. The main objective of the course is to teach you to shape mobile products and services for people’s use. To do that, you’ll need to learn: - Interaction design activities and their place in the whole product design process - User research methods with a focus on the qualitative ones - Usability inspection and empirical usability evaluation methods - The process of design creation and best practices from interaction design, information architecture and visual design fields of study with a focus on the former Interfaces of handheld devices and tablets are in the spotlight. However, the processes and techniques covered by the course can be successfully applied to design interactions with mobile web apps and wearables. It should be noted that this course does not cover topics such as design management and mobile development, and it will as well not teach you how to use wireframing and prototyping tools. What makes the course unique is a focus on the way of thinking during a design process, the representation of a designer’s decisions in the form of design questions that make the continuous reflection on the design process possible and leads to the growth of the number of proposed design alternatives. The second unique thing about this course is a focus on the explanation of the concept of usability problems, and the processes of discovering and analysing them. Upon completion of the course, you will be able to: - Improve designs by eliminating different kinds of interaction problems - Design huge chunks of user interfaces in the case of adding a new feature to a product - Redesign a complete app by a given set of functions (e.g., extending an existing product to a new platform) The practical part of the course will require you to discover and eliminate interaction problems of a chosen mobile app. You will go through running guerrilla usability study, analysing gathered data, and making evidence-based design changes, which will enable you to create your first case study.

De la lección

WEEK 4: Guerrilla Usability Testing & Field Visits

This week is solely dedicated to two methods: Guerrilla usability testing and field visits aimed at evaluating usability. It examines how to plan and conduct them in detail. You’ll apply the knowledge acquired through this week to develop a test plan and submit it as a part of the second graded peer-review assignment.

Field Research: An Introduction14:53

Preparing for Field Visits9:29

Preparing for Guerrilla Usability Testing, Part 114:15

Preparing for Guerrilla Usability Testing, Part 210:54

Data Collection Techniques, Part 112:32

Data Collection Techniques, Part 25:47

Overview of Moderation Techniques For Usability Testing9:28

Moderating Guerrilla Usability Tests, Part 19:29

Moderating Guerrilla Usability Tests, Part 29:31

Moderating Field Visits11:30

Conoce a los instructores

Pavel Manakhov
Associate Professor
School of Software Engineering

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>> Hello, as you know from the first lecture this week.

One of the major differences between field visits and

usability testing is that in field visits, the course of a participant's activity,

guides the moderator through the whole study.

To decide when the participant's action is a problem or not you,

need to fully understand the motivation behind this action.

For example, you may consider someone's action as inefficiency,

whilst this someone just decided to perform another task first.

That is why, for moderating field visits,

the [INAUDIBLE] that includes participants explaining the action I used.

We discussed such moderation techniques earlier.

One of them is retrospection.

As you remember, it applies that the full session is recorded on the video.

After the session has ended, the participant is shown this video and

she explains why and what she did.

Here the designer asks follow-up questions.

Despite the fact that this technique can be applied in many different situations,

it's typically used when it is undesirable for

some reasons to distract the participant during task performance.

For instance, recall our example of the tablet app for shop assistance,

that was intended to be used in the course of the communication with customers.

In this lecture, I'd like to talk about the moderation technique which I touched

on earlier, while making the overview of user search methods.

Its name is Masters-Apprentice Model.

It's a part of contextual inquiry, a specialized variant of field visits,

proposed by Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer.

It implies role playing where the designer takes the role of an apprentice,

and the participant the role of a master, who teaches the apprentice to do her job.

Despite the fact that the model is not common nowadays,

it's still quite familiar such that people know how to act in accordance with it.

Holtzblatt and Beyer found out that it's not only easy for

people from the target audience of your app users, but for designers too.

People with no special backgrounds,

know how to conduct this technique much more quickly by acting like an apprentice,

than by memorizing the most rules for asking interview questions.

Master apprentice model is based on four principles.

Actually, you are already familiar with the first two of them.

The principle of context essentially tells you, firstly,

to go out of your office building, and go where an interaction occurs,

and secondly, to see the interaction with your own eyes, not just talk about it.

During the study, you need to ensure that the participant talks about

end goal experience, instead of summarizing the experience.

Focus gives the point of view the designer takes,

in the course of observation sessions.

We discussed it in detail in the lecture about preparation for

field users, this week.

The principle of partnership implies the following.

During the status session, you alternate between watching and probing.

You intervene a participant's activity to ask follow up questions.

For instance, every time when we saw that the participating firm,

this time the participant becomes accustomed with it.

Because you ask similar questions in the same situations.

And she starts to explain why she is following without your intervention.

Thus you become partners with the participant,

by maintaining the same model of interaction.

The last principle of interpretation implies sharing your understanding of

colors of participants behavior with them, in order to validate your interpretations.

Holtzblatt and Beyer stated that since participants are in the middle

of doing work, it's quite hard for them to agree with wrong interpretations.

That's actually quite true, but

it works only when you use observations to study the usage context.

You see, contextual inquiry where master-apprentice model

originated from, were initially proposed as a user search method,

aimed at understanding work in enterprise context,

when we use master-apprentice model for emulation purposes.

I do not recommend to follow the last principle.

You can validate interpretation just by asking open-ended questions,

as we discussed in the previous lecture.

I think you must have noticed that the master apprentice model

shares some common features with active intervention.

So it will be easy to explain it by mentioning the differences,

between these two moderation techniques.

But before that, I'd like to show you the structure of the observation session.

Many steps of this structure are similar to those from the structure of

[INAUDIBLE] test session.

An introduction here is equal to introductory

instructions in section there.

During this step,

you need to tell participants about the current study a little bit.

Explain what is going to happen, ask permissions, etc.

The conventional interview here, is the same as interview in studies.

It is aimed at gathering more information about a participant,

her experience in the subject domain.

The transition implies assigning the roles,

by providing additional instructions, that we will discuss next.

Observation session go in accordance with the course of activity in question.

It's where we use [INAUDIBLE] fueled by indications of interaction problems and

other things, where to find interesting to observe.

The last two steps are equal to the steps of linear visibility test.

All right, to the differences between two moderation techniques.

As you already know, the first difference is related to

explicit definition of roles of all three parties.

The mobile application, the participant and you, the narrator.

At the transition step, you need to remind participants once again,

that the app is the object of this study, or

in other words, that you are testing the app not her.

Then you need to define roles,

using instructions like the ones shown on this slide.

This one particularly is for observations of experienced users.

But you may reformulate it a bit, to make it more suitable for

studies involving novice users.

Anyway, the idea here to treat the participant as

an expert in what she does, and a primary speaker.

The moderator is an apprentice, but she may intervene the activity

to ask follow-up questions, similarly, as we discussed in the previous lecture.

Another new thing, is acknowledgement tokens.

An effect of that, when asked to talk, the participant feels the need,

as [INAUDIBLE] it, to check the connection.

Your job, as an apprentice, is to acknowledge understanding

using verbal but not always lexical sounds.

The choice of acknowledgement tokens is important,

because they must be neutral enough not to distract the participant anyhow.

In their review of scientific literature on the topic, and

offered two variants of appropriate tokens, mm-hm or uh-huh.

It's crucial to give them interrogative intonation,

to make the minute equal to this continuum.

During this study session, participants may stop talking for

many different reasons.

For instance,

the high-task complexity interferes with their ability to verbalize thoughts.

You more likely will see that in interactions with unfamiliar apps or

tasks.

Recall our discussion of normal stages of action model,

from the previous week, and you'll get why.

Reminders should be as unintrusive as possible.

And found that an appropriate way to encourage the participant to resume

speaking, is to use an acknowledgement token, such as mm-hm, first.

And then say something like and now, or so?

In fact, that's all the differences.

Your behavior, when we see an indication of an interaction problem,

should be the same as your behavior while applying active intervention.

And the last thing I'd like to bring your attention to.

In this week, we've presented the useability testing and

field visits as antagonists.

Where in field visits,

the course of a participant's activity guides the moderator through the study.

Opposite to visibility testing,

where the context of use is simulated by giving participants tasks to perform.

But in real projects, you may mix these methods.

For example, you may employ the use of interview-based tasks with

your observations, in order to cover tasks that haven't occurred naturally.

This is one of the reasons why I said that field visits, is harder to conduct.

And that is why I recommend to start from using useability tests.

Thank you, see you in the next lecture.

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