Taking it to the streets: Investigating mobile and web UX through field studies

Editor's Notes

1. Emma
2. Emma
3. Emma
4. Emma News effect on the definition? “ outside the office.” “ In the user’s context” “ Mobile.” “ Nothiing about going to their location.”
5. Emma Define Ethnography Explain the difference explorattory and structured “ We’re going to cut off this slice of it” Another way to represent From Field Usability Testing: Method not Compromise Different types of field usability studies Exploratory (like condensed contextual inquiry but futher structured by giving tasks) vs. Structured (basically a lab study conducted in context b/c participants won’t come to lab or nature of the product prevent realistic emulation)
6. Emma Mood boards Contextual Interviews – Watching people work vs. Interviewing them in the workplace Exploratory/structured method vs. design
7. Emma Cost more Take more time A little scare to go into someone else’s world Complex logistics Quantifiable data / harder to compare Not replicable
8. Emma Sample size… May be less rigorous – replicable, sample size – but potentially more validity / If you have metrics you can replicate. Field studies thought of as quanlitative, but you can introduce metrics. Before ask them what we mean by field, define what we mean by field study… Gets back to the validity issue – we may evaluate things differently… Field study vs. field usability test study – are we testing, or evaluating – or are we observing?
9. Emma
10. Emma As we can see here "where the users are" and "context of use" for the mobile site. Any of these people could be a user and could participate in a field study. Introduce transit
11. De What is ST? About the organization building capital project and working w/ local agencies to operate services. Challenges: Capital agency that is moving towards an operating agency Sound Transit has been the popular name of Washington state's Central Puget Sound Regional Transit Authority since September 19, 1999. It was formed in 1996 by the Snohomish , King , and Pierce County Councils. Funded by a combination of voter approved local taxes, federal grants, farebox revenues and borrowed funds (bonds)
12. De About Sound Transit operates express bus, commuter rail, and light rail service in the region and constructs capital projects in support and expansion of those services. Focused on building new service” Extending ST Express Bus North Sounder South Central Link North and East Tacoma Link New Stations
13. De Since its conception ST has been focused on building. Once our projects are built we form partnerships with the local transit agencies to operate our services. This disconnected us from the “users” or “riders”. New leadership in the communications department brought about an awareness “that we are not our audience”. ST’s focus on building and working G to G left out the reason we are building. We didn’t really know our customers. The agency via the new communications director started asking these questions and this insight led him proposing a web redesign project. A shift in how the agency sees itself:
14. De On this slide, we want to make the point about how the organization sees itself differently than riders see the organization. And that internal perception carried through to the services and products we design, namely the web site. So you can transition to the next slide to show how this manifested itself in the design.
15. De – This is where I came in. 15 years of marketing experience focusing on web and digital media. I was hired as a consultant to “redesign the web”. ST had done ridership studies and focus groups but was not aware of human centered design. Our website was architected much like our org chart. Very focused on what we wanted to tell users vs. what users wanted to know or why they came to our site. Agency moving from capital building agency to rider focused operations agency. How do we create a site that served the needs of our riders. The only way to get out of our head was really to understand who are customers are, why they are coming to the site “top tasks” and what they needed.
16. De I put stats on the other mobile slide. Can we talk about what we want to see here.
17. De: Who are our users We researched the rider audience and developed these personas to capture who we are designing for.
18. Emma Make the point that field studies can be done throughout
19. Emma
20. Emma Very practical Takeaway Set-up the barriers – refute it… and show why… We are going to draw lessons from these studies.
21. Emma
22. Robert
23. Robert
24. Robert
25. Robert
26. Robert
27. Robert
28. Rober For the paper-prototype study – paper prototype tagged and marked, printouts on cardstock so they are easy to write on
29. Robert
30. Robert
31. Robert
32. Dedicated notetaker Mindmap Spreadshset
33. Dedicated notetaker Mindmap Spreadshset
34. When you are in the field, you are the face of the organization Be prepared to answer questions unrelated to testing or the study. Be helpful!
35. Be respectful of people’s time
36. Question – Format vs. where we all went out If all of your researchers are frequent debriefing Change your approach after sync-up Example 1: Having a designated notetaker cataloging and organizing notes Example 2: Walking through page by page of the prototype
37. Robert
38. Robert
39. Robert
40. Robert
41. Robert http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1240908 http://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2011/02/15/mobile-usability-testing-rig-for-m-cdlib/ http://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/cam-rig1.jpg http://gwdesign.tumblr.com/post/5019128889/making-an-aluminum-mobile-device-camera-sled http://blog.mobilefoo.com/usability-testing-mobile-devices#
42. Robert Camera should have manual focus Camera angle should be adjustable to accommodate different sizes of devices Recording software should allow for video to be rotated Flexible to support different types of phones Sled needs to be easy and light to hold
43. De
44. De Mobile experience Popular and high usage
45. Mobile features Context aware Real-time Functional issues / bugs / diversity of data doing a bug test / routes In our main field study We talked to 57 riders 12 non-native english speakers 22 people who access websites on their phones Adam – Link, Sounder & Busses Almost entirely frequent internet users 4 receive alerts Fernanda – Primarily (8) bus riders Various ages, but more youth (<21) than any other age group. Almost all use social media Bob and Keisha We called this couple event riders, but often we learned that this included people who were taking transit due to unforeseen circumstances – a car that had broke down, going to connect with other transportation (airport, amtrack, etc) Akio All riding on Link
46. De We know the web is never done and we continue to make improvements. In addition, the research has had the following impacts on our orgnaization. Institutionalizing : Changing how we make decisions, UCD is moving into the status quo, it is how we do things Broadening : Moving beyond the web to the cross channel experience, including station and signage and ticket machine design Influencing : Leading regional partners. : Model for other transit agencies in the region (King County, Pierce County, etc).
47. Emma Sample size… May be less rigorous – replicable, sample size – but potentially more validity / If you have metrics you can replicate. Field studies thought of as quanlitative, but you can introduce metrics. Before ask them what we mean by field, define what we mean by field study… Gets back to the validity issue – we may evaluate things differently… Field study vs. field usability test study – are we testing, or evaluating – or are we observing?
48. © 2009 Anthro-Tech | www.anthro-tech.com | 360.738.3121 An overview of user-centered design for developers June 2009