Designing the User Experience at Autodesk

UX in Real Life

 By Allen-Hongwei Bai

“All eyes are on user experience” -  this was mentioned many times by the speakers at the UPA China Conference this year. On returning from the conference, we organized a half-day outing for the UX Club members to go out and observe different kinds of user experiences in real life: in the park, the subway and the streetcar. This blog gives a brief introduction to what everyone observed, with some pictures.

Restrict some actions to encourage people to do the right thing

The trash cans in the park usually have two openings, one is for recyclable waste and the other is for rubbish, which makes filtering easy. When removing the waste from the bin, workers can easily do the post-process. Additionally, this design helps to raise everyone's awareness of environmental protection.

However, many people don’t care much about which opening they use, because both kinds of waste (recyclables or rubbish) can be put into either of the openings. There are also two different kinds of trash can in the park –  one which has the two openings together on the top, and another which has the two openings on opposite sides of the bin. A common phenomenon is that most people don’t follow the rules when putting garbage into the latter type of bin; they don’t even know that there is another opening on the other side!

 

Image 1: Side-by-side openings for rubbish and recyclables

Image 2: Trash can with openings for rubbish and recyclables on either side of the bin

Would people do the right thing if more restrictions were in place here?  If there were different shapes for the recyclables opening as opposed to the rubbish opening or if they were at different heights would people put their rubbish in the correct place?

Add necessary information to help people reduce their steps

In the park, toilet signs contain very useful information, especially if someone needs to find a toilet nearby quickly! The following two signs are the most common.  Compared with the sign in Image 4, the sign in Image 3 adds a line of text to tell people the distance to the nearest toilet, which is what most people wanted to know. Because of this, it doesn’t just enable tourists to reduce their steps but it is more useful.

Image 3: Toilet sign with additional text

Image 4: Toilet sign without text

All public information should be streamlined or it may be confusing. Take the following road sign for example, many people are confused by “Zhangjiang Rd” and take a while to figure out where it goes (the fact is, Zhangjiang Rd is straight, but Ziwei Rd goes around a corner).  In this case, the text is not helpful as it actually confuses the matter, and it certainly wouldn't help anyone reduce their steps. Would it be better to consider using a different type of sign to show that Ziwei Rd is a curved road?

 

 

Image 5: Confusing road sign

 

Text should not be the only thing shown

The choice of font and text layout are important considerations for information displays in public places. However, they are not the most important thing. The essential thing is to ensure that the text is readable in the environment and can be understood by the target user. The following picture shows some fire hydrant equipment in a subway station. In order to get a better visual result, three Chinese characters are mapped to two English words.  The result is that the English letters are broken up into three groups “Fire Hyd Rant”, but is it readable? The answer is obvious.

 

Image 6: English text arranged to match Chinese characters

 

 Labels, graphics and text

In some streetcars there is a new mechanism for opening the door.  When people want to get off at a station they can open the door themselves by pressing a button on the door when the indicator lights around it are lit. However, many people miss their station because they don’t know how to open the door after the streetcar has stopped even though there is a text label next to the button to tell them what to do. If there were some graphics added alongside the text, it would be easier for everyone to understand how to operate the door.

 

Image 7: Would an image here help users understand how to open the door on the streetcar?

 

And last but not least

User experience is not just a paradigm for thinking about software design – it can be applied to everything in our daily life, and to any services you want to provide for your users.

Navigation, not the same old story

By Kursat Ozenc

Navigation in software products usually has two meanings: one being 'to move around software’s mental space', and the other 'to get around spatially-based software’s two or three dimensional world'. Navigation in mental space means easy access to architectural pathways such as menus, functions, etc., whereas the latter means traveling in a spatial ‘world-like’ or virtual representation. In this article, I will focus on navigation in a 2 or 3 dimensional space and sketch out the main paradigms shaping today’s navigation design.

Reflecting on state-of-the-art frameworks, products, and applications, one can discover four influencers in current navigation design efforts:

1. Gamification: ‘Gamification’ means providing a game-like experience in other domains. In 3D modeling software, this means adapting navigation tools from the game domain to enhance the user experience. Most games offer a spatial journey to their users, which usually requires extensive navigation controls, whether it be a 1^st person or 3^rd person game. The advantage of gamification is the playful, engaging experiences it can provide; the disadvantage is the potential for misuse of gaming metaphors without proper justification.  
   
   
2. Reverse Webification: ‘Webification’ refers to the simplification of a software feature to make it suitable for a web context. However, in recent years, with the ubiquity of map applications over web and mobile, software designers are looking at these simpler navigation controls for inspiration or adaptation. An advantage of reverse webification is ease of use, but with the risk of oversimplification of tasks that need a more complex interactive behavior.
   
   
3. Disruptive technologies (Mobile, Gestures, and sensors) Disruptive technologies have had a tremendous effect on navigation design. With the widespread use of tablets, touch and location-aware interfaces, navigation design gained new traction towards its long-awaited promise of augmented reality, or ‘immersive’ experience. Tablet/mobile apps now give users built-in navigation metaphors. Think of an iPad with a motion sensor, or a mobile app using image recognition software. In both, navigation design becomes more like real life (and therefore intuitive) rather than virtual and metaphorical. This provides both advantages and challenges for designers. One advantage is the ability to create simple, powerful interactions that don’t tax the mental and financial bandwidth of your user. For example, imagine an augmented reality app that uses motion and image recognition technologies with very little user input or guidance required. One disadvantage is the ’halo effect‘ of these disruptive technologies, which can lead to over-expectation from your users.  For example, they might ask for a holographic navigation control because they have seen that technology in a recent Hollywood movie.
   
   
4. Felt-life experience & Metaphors Designers always face the paradox of creating new solutions while maintaining old conventions. Along these lines, felt-life experience plays an important role in defining the amount of novelty required. Felt-life experience means two things. First, the user’s built-in capabilities and their perception of affordances, in the context of navigation. This means up and down, left and right perceptions, which are also called direction metaphors. Felt-life experience also means the sum of all the user’s experiences with other products available to them. The advantage of felt-life experience is the designer’s ability to be one of their own users, and empathize with them through research and role-playing. The disadvantage of too much reliance on felt-life experience would be a tendency to inflexibility where a novel behavior is needed.

What do these influencers mean for navigation design in the context of product development? Navigation is used in an array of domains including map-based products, 3d modeling and animation software, geographical positioning devices, and games. Given the richness of these domains, these influencers can help designers find creative navigation solutions for the creative arts, engineering, entertainment, and way-finding. The designer’s role in creating new ways of navigating is also constrained by other inside factors, such as legacy code inside a product, stakeholder expectations, industry standards, etc.  To effectively deliver a navigation design that can add value to a product, designers need to pay attention to these influencers in the design process. In a way, all these influencers are expectations from different stakeholders, and mainly from end users. In my next post, I will focus on users through the lens of their main influencers.

Geeking Out with the UX Book Club, Part 2

By Ian Hooper

Have you ever wondered what the difference was between Concept Mapping and Cognitive Mapping? Do you want to know more about Design Ethnography? Did you ever wonder about the history of Card Sorting? If so, then Bruce Hanington and Bella Martin’s book “Universal Methods of Design” is for you.

This was the book that the Toronto UX Book Club decided to read recently.  As I described in my last post, the book club had the opportunity to use the Autodesk office to video chat with the authors. We had a really good turnout that night as many of the regular readers showed up, and many new faces were also in attendance. The large numbers may have been due to the attraction of being able to meet with the authors, or it could be that there was more interest in this particular book.

The book has a rather long, but descriptive subtitle – “100 Ways to Research Complex Problems, Develop Innovative Ideas and Design Effective Solutions”. One of the book club members told me he thought that people were attracted to this book because they generally like simple lists of things.  “Just look at all those top ten lists you get at the end of the year”, he said.  The evidence was all around me.

It is true that this book provides a neat selection of the “top 100” design methods.  It is simply organized in alphabetical order, with each method getting exactly 2 pages: one page for the description, and the second page for pictures and case study examples. Rather than breaking the methods up into thematic groups or chapters, the authors use two small infographics to contextualize the methods.  The first characterizes each method using the following facets: behavioral/attitudinal; qualitative/quantitative; innovative/adapted/traditional; exploratory/generative/evaluative; participatory/observational/self-reporting/expert review/design process. The other infographic is a simple set of numbers from 1 through 5, representing during what stage the method is typically applied, from “Planning and Scoping” to “Launch and Monitor”.  The net result is that you can see at a glance where a particular technique fits in.

This brings me to one of the few shortcomings of the book.  It is a gorgeous book that is easy to read and a pleasure to have on my desk, but I really found myself wishing that it were more interactive.  Despite the handy infographics, I wished I could pivot and filter the methods to suit my needs.  For example, I wish I could have been able to click on the “Phase 3” icon to see a listing of all the concept generation and early prototype techniques, or to click on a quantitative/qualitative facet toggle as needed. There is an eReader version of the book, but from what I heard from those who purchased that version, it did not fully take advantage of the digital medium.

100 methods is a lot.  One of the book club members asked if anyone would ever use that many different techniques and if so…why?  Many of these methods were variations of other methods that were designed to achieve the same goals.  It was agreed that most practitioners use a small fraction of this total.  In my own work, I’ve probably employed a dozen or so different methods at various times over the years.  Those working in consulting seemed to use a slightly higher number, but the point is, different users, different workplace cultures and different projects can all motivate you to seek a more suitable technique.  With “Universal Methods of Design” at your fingertips, you have an easy reference of what alternatives you should consider.

p.s.

Cognitive Mapping is an exploratory research method that visualizes how “people make sense of a particular problem space” while Concept Mapping is a way for designers to generate new meaning by absorbing concepts into a visual framework.

According to Martin & Hanington, Design Ethnography “approximates the immersion methods of traditional ethnography, to deeply experience and understand the user’s world for design empathy and insight.”  The book includes a great list of recommended texts if you want to dive deeper.

Card Sorting was developed in 1946 (!) to assess patients with frontal lobe brain injuries.

Sustainable User Experience in the Clouds (1 of 3)

By Kem-Laurin Kramer

Cloud Computing is the next generation of computing. The trend towards increasing adoption of delivery platforms, such as mobile and ubiquitous technologies, make implementation challenging. The marriage of cloud and mobile technology demands attention from end users if it is to be the new “normal” mode of web service delivery. As more companies embrace cloud computing, end-user experience challenges can be mitigated with good UX practices and general guidelines.

As early as 2003, Forrester Research predicted a trend in both the mobile and cloud based web services delivery. Today, companies are beginning to set cloud occupation goals. We will see a change in service delivery from traditional packaged software to a wider audience packed in the form of web services, allowing for software liberalization to the masses. This will change how end users respond and interact with services delivered in this form. Companies will need to consider design for a universal audience who may not have the esoteric skillset of past professional users. Forrester analyst Glenn O'Donnell writes, "cloud plus mobile is a classic more than the sum of its parts combination." This disruptive paradigm will become a challenge as we ideate a sustainable user experience in the cloud.

From a UX perspective, we need to transcend the general principles of a good user experience: satisfaction, effectiveness, efficiency, learnability and memorability. We also need to infuse what I will call Cloud-Aware User Experience Thinking.  That is thinking about the transformed environment of the cloud and the user expectations in this new space. This includes a keen understanding of the following:

• Software as Service (SaaS): What it is and what it means for the end user?
• Universal Design & Service Liberalization: The impact of web services liberalization and what it means for the collective wider scale of users.
• Value of Service Delivery: Expectations of the value of web services
• Privacy, Security & Trust: Expectations of privacy, security and building cloud trust.
• Flexible User Interfaces: Delivery of cloud services to multiple platforms and devices
• Social, Collaborations: Leveraging and fusing the social and collaborative ideals into web service delivery. 

 

Cloud Computing and the New User Experience

Cloud computing is a disruptive model for enabling convenient, on-demand access to configurable shared computing assets and resources. This includes servers, networks, data storage space, applications, and other services. It is distinct from the World Wide Web. It leverages the web to offer a new way of service packaging and delivery. Cloud delivery means service providers have minimal interaction with the user and as a result can focus on quicker service delivery.  As the level of connection between traditional service providers and end users erodes, optimal UX design becomes even more important. Users need to be self-sufficient as well as learn and grow with little to no service provider support. Users also require a strong sense of safety in a space that seemingly often undermines such necessities of privacy, security and trust.

 

What this means for User Experience and Design

As traditional UX evolves to accommodate new technologies, we must understand the changing landscape, conditions, and user expectation. This is challenging but not necessarily daunting. Ensuring an optimal sustainable user experience will determine both long and short-term adoption and growth of web services as traditional software offerings transforms to SaaS.    Fusing the prevailing ideals of user experience and sustainability one can address the key ideas for building the right Cloud User Experience.

In my next article, I will take a deeper look at the following topics as we examine a more evolved user experience in the clouds. The article will address the following UX challenges.

• SaaS: From traditional software to SaaS.  
• Universal Design & Service Liberalization: Designing to a wider scale of users.
• Value of Service Delivery: Context of service value and what it all means for cloud computing.  

Taken together, this and subsequent articles will help expand UX thinking and help us as professionals to understand the broader scope of what it means to design a cloud user experience.