scottmacleodsblog

This week’s assignment deals with mobile devices. This topic hits close to the bone for me. I constantly see jobs in the UX field for those who have expertise with mobile devices. This makes me feel like I need to understand this medium and the fact is that I don’t. Actually I do understand it, I just don’t know why it’s in demand.

Given sufficient screen size, the web is currently a fairly, fully sensory experience: visual, including text, graphics, photo, sound, etc. It’s a great medium and I love designing for it. Depending on your technology, settings and screen size, we can render a Vermeer with a relatively lame level of verisimilitude. That lame level decreases by orders of magnitude when everything has to be miniaturized.

Although I seem to be fighting a losing battle, I can’t for the life of me figure out why you would even want to try to view a Vermeer on an iPhone. It’s a metaphor of course, but there are some things that work in some forms of a medium and others that don’t.  Mobile devices are good for some things, some times. But it seems like we’re trying to make everything that works on a laptop or even an iPad, work on a phone, all the time. Not.

Not unless everything on your iPhone can pop up, hologram Princess Leia-like, and render some sort of image that is WAY better than what’s currently visible on an iPhone or iPad.

Help me Obi-Wan.

This week we gathered results from Loop 11 on our survey questions from the previous week, although I had a few people I asked to complete the survey who didn’t finish until today or late last night.

Anyway, not sure how Loop 11 works. I had a zero % completion rate, which, as I explained in my .flv recording, I don’t understand.

I have high standards for proficiency and I don’t feel very proficient with Loop 11. And I last used screencast-o-matic during Usability I and I didn’t even remember the type of file I used (.flv, I discovered after going back to my Usability I course file).

 Anyhow, not happy with my Loop 11 results, and don’t really understand my results. I would have asked questions sooner but, having been at the UXPA conference all last week, I came back to two weeks worth of work that had to be done in one and didn’t look at my results until Saturday morning. Looking forward to having more time for class work this week and learning more about my Loop 11 results.

This week’s assignment was fascinating. We had the opportunity to use Loop 11 in order to create our own remote usability study (cool, just by itself because it seems like, without being students, this could be very expensive to set up). I was even more excited by the project because we were allowed to choose which websites and which tasks we wanted to test and one of the suggestions just happened to by kayak.com.

 Kayak.com was co-founded by Paul English, a former Intuit employee, and I heard him speak when, in 2011, he was asked back to speak to Intuit employees about entrepreneurship and what characteristics he looks for in kayak.com employees. It was a very interesting talk and I came away with the idea of being an “energy amplifier” for my team. So that just made using kayak.com as part of my test even more interesting.

 I’m coming back from the UXPA conference in Washington D.C., jet lagged and really feeling like I need another few days to recover, but it was a great experience and I got a lot out of it. Interesting that, despite the name change from UPA to UXPA, the focus at the conference was still very strongly on usability (eye tracking was big, research methods, etc.) and not so much on the “x” of experience.

 Still a ways to go, in my opinion, before we’re fully ready (as a profession) to include everything we’ve learned from usability, and also to include that X factor – experience.

This week in Usability II, we’re looking at two software packages for remote usability recruiting. Our assignment is to explore the features offered by Ethnio and those by Mechanical Turk, then pick which one we would use for usability recruiting, explaining why we made the selection and why the unchosen option wasn’t sufficient.

 I chose Ethnio mostly for its focus on usability recruiting. If you have a very specific task to perform (recruiting usability participants) then it seems sensible to use software that is designed for that very particular task. I work on TurboTax. You could use Microsoft Excel, for example, to prepare your taxes, but TurboTax is specifically designed for just that purpose. Assuming the cost is not prohibitive, for most people, it would make sense to use TurboTax to prepare your taxes, if you’re using software at all. The competition isn’t even worth investigating. Trust me 😉

 Likewise with Ethinio. I’m not sure if I would want to use Ethinio for the actual testing, but I would definitely prefer their software over Mechanical Turk for the purpose of recruiting for usability. Mechanical Turk is simply too generic; the usability equivalent to using Excel to prepare your tax return.