Designing Inter-usable Systems

SmarcoS

• SmarcoS project aims to help users of interconnected systems by ensuring their inter-usability

• Partners from – Netherlands, UK,

Finland, Belgium, Czech Rep., Italy and Spain

www.smarcos-project.eu

Outline of the talk

• Challenges in designing inter-usable systems

• Motivation

• Research approach

• Findings

• Approaching the challenges: Prototyping inter-usability

• Requirements

• Key functionalities

Challenges in Designing Inter-usable Systems Ville Antila, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Oulu, Finland

Alfred Lui, Fjord, London, UK

Inter-usability

• Usability research and user interface solutions beyond individual devices and services

• Usability across the different user interfaces of a given system (including inter-device interactions)

Challenges in Designing Inter-usable Systems

Challenges

• The amount and diversification of computing devices is increasing and they are becoming more and more connected

Challenges

• Users expect to have access to the same applications and services with a number of different devices

Challenges

• Products are becoming increasingly ubiquitous systems; “hybrids of hardware, software and services” *Kuniavsky]

Research questions

•What are the current challenges the designers are facing?

•Are the methods and tools they use sufficient (in the changing product market)?

Answering the

Research Questions…

Research approach

• To identify some of the current challenges we carried out semi-structured interviews with 17 professionals from 10 different organizations (4 countries) • Organizations: from consumer product manufacturers to small

design firms and start-ups

• Interviewees: 6 interaction designers, 4 researchers (UCD), 2 freelance designers, and 3 founders of start-ups, 1 application engineer and 1 technical director

• Selection criterion: the products which they work on are on the selected problem domain and that the work field is related or close iteration with interaction design or usability research

Findings Development environment constraints

“There are component libraries and design guidelines between product families, but these do not go all the way into the ‘tools’ –level. It would be useful to share the same common tools with developers to avoid the usual challenge ‘this cannot be implemented on this platform’”

Interaction designer, UI designs for mobile and Web-based applications

Domain restrictions

“Many of our product users work in an environment where installation of new software or packages on their computers is restricted, for example by hospital IT departments. We have to work within these restrictions. For that reason we choose web based solutions for most of our projects because it does not require installation of software on the [devices] of the users”

Application engineer, user interfaces for applications in the domain of healthcare

Acquiring domain knowledge and user feedback

“A lot of the things we are changing, we will do more of a […] we put it out there and see if people are using it, we don’t spend that time doing a full usability type of thing. Moving towards what the ‘Google model’ is like, they almost put up the lab version or they have a beta version and people just use it, get the feedback and just improve it.”

Co-founder of a start-up on professional sports tracking technology

Targeting multiple platforms

“As [the application] must run on several devices, and the devices have different capabilities in terms of display and user controls, it is difficult to design a UI that can be used as fast and easy on all the devices.”

Technical director, mobile and ubiquitous gaming applications

Analysis Process phase Identified challenges

Early phase Hard to evaluate concepts without functional prototypes (simulation of interactive system) Seeing the big picture when designing a part of a interconnected service (often designers just focus on part of the system which can create inconsistencies and discontinuities between the parts)

Development phase

None of the tools available today is sufficient to build and test inter-usable systems Basic tools such as IDEs, Flash and PCB design tools are generic enough to fill the gap but by no means efficient for designers who want to weave digital data into physical materials Each failed experiment with physical objects incurs material, labor and transportation costs (unlike with fully digital products/services)

Evaluation phase User testing of embedded devices and interconnected services using low-fi prototypes in a lab environment is inefficient Difficult to evaluate the whole (interconnected) system; evaluation of separated parts does not necessarily correspond to good overall (inter) usability

Implications Identified need Requirements for methods and tools

Support for “seeing the big picture” – how the design fits in the whole system

Early prototyping through simulation Evaluation metrics to test consistency (semantic and syntactic) and continuity in cross-platform and cross-device interactions

Integration between design and development tools

Ability to test or “mash-up” the composition of interconnected systems (e.g. distribution and composition of functionalities between the cloud and dedicated devices) Support for rapid prototyping

Refinement of evaluation methods and metrics to test inter-usability

Evaluation methods and metrics to support inter-usability, taking into account both the composition of functionalities and the continuity of interaction Design guidelines to support semantic consistency across platforms (the use of metaphors etc.) Ability to use efficiency measures to validate inter-usability of cross-platform interactions

Discussion

• More questions than answers really …

Discussion

• More questions than answers really …

• Various fields and types of products, hard to generalize the findings

Discussion

• More questions than answers really …

• Various fields and types of products, hard to generalize the findings

• But…

• Common challenges in

1. dealing with complexity of systems

2. support for various devices

3. lack of tool support to deal with these challenges (e.g. prototyping tools/ design tools)

4. lack of metrics to evaluate the usability across the system (e.g. between devices)

Needs to address

• Design phase: need for rapid prototyping tools especially taking into account system complexity, such as interaction through various devices

Needs to address

• Design phase: need for rapid prototyping tools especially taking into account system complexity, such as interaction through various devices

• “Difficult to acknowledge the full interaction with the system when you are designing for a small part of it…”

• How to prototype the “full system” in an early stage

• How to translate that design into the reality (right way of delivering/documenting the design to product development)

Needs to address

• Evaluation phase: need for metrics to test and evaluate “inter-usability” of a system

Needs to address

• Evaluation phase: need for metrics to test and evaluate “inter-usability” of a system

• e.g. the role of different devices in the system, how the information flows, which devices are available in different situations?

• what are the important measures which determine the success/ ease of use for the product or service across devices?

Conclusions

• There’s a multitude of (interactive) computing devices out there and that number not likely to decrease

• Devices themselves no longer offer standardized means of manipulating information

• Information is everywhere (i.e. accessible from everywhere)

• There is a need to acknowledge the fragmentation of information appliances and the different roles of devices in accessing information, anywhere at anytime

• Need for tools and metrics to design and evaluate these systems

Approaching the Challenges: Prototyping Inter-usability

Why prototyping?

• Widely accepted means of exploring designs for interactive computer artifacts [1]

• Division to role, look-and-feel or implementation prototypes (depending on the factor that the prototype prototypes)

• Common categories are also: proof-of-concept prototype, form study prototype, user experience prototype, visual prototype and functional prototype

[1] Houde, S., Hill, C., What do Prototypes Prototype?, in Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction, 1997

Requirements for the Prototyping tool (1/2)

• To approach a prototyping challenge we should work towards a design environment where inter-usability can be tested

• In such environment we should be concentrating on how to design, test and analyze inter-usability on a given system

Requirements for the Prototyping tool (2/2)

• Support for design thinking by integration of design, test and analysis of inter-usability

From Hartmann, B., et al., Reflective Physical Prototyping through Integrated Design, Test and Analysis, UIST’06, 2006

Future work

• Research questions • How to rapidly prototype an ”interconnected” system

• How to provide and maintain awareness of the whole system behaviour

• Approach: rapid prototyping and simulation of system behaviour • How does a change in a part of the system effect the

other parts?

• What kind of logical rules should the system follow? What should happen and when?

• What input and output devices can be used, when and how?

Thank you! Questions?