One Month Later
I'm sitting behind a large one-way mirror with computers and monitors strewn all over the desks around me. The lights are off, and on the other side of the glass is a brightly-lit room with two people sitting in it. If the table was bare metal and the people sat facing each other, it might be a police interrogation room. Unfortunately for the thrill-seeking side of me, I'm taking notes for a usability study rather than a murder investigation.
I made the move to New York 4 weeks ago. In that time the weather has gone from making me sweaty in a t-shirt to giving me chills walking around in a winter jacket and scarf. I'm living in one place but freelancing, which provides me with the same sense of instability I had over the last year moving to a different town every few days.
Watching the participants try to use the virtual world being tested, I'm reminded why I like this work so much. Also in the room watching the proceedings is one of the developers of the virtual world, and hearing his occasional exclamations as the participants get confused is one of the most satisfying parts of the job. The first point of surprise is inevitably when people click through all the instructions the programmer painstakingly included, explaining in step-by-step detail how to use the program.
"Why did they skip all the text? Why didn't they read what was on screen?"
Bridging the gap between how the programmer assumes people will use their creation and how everyone else actually uses it is what it's all about. A lot of the time all the advice from a usability expert isn't half as effective as having a programmer sit and watch someone else use their creation for several hours.
Particularly interesting is when a participant like the one I'm watching comes in — someone in their 30s who hasn't used the internet in years and who has no email address. It's easy to forget people like that exist. Especially in a wired area of the country where real life soap operas such as NYGirlOfMyDreams.com make up the background noise of life.
As I make my way towards a normal working life, I'm enjoying having some of the important pieces fall into place. I now know where to go for photography equipment, and having discovered a nearby developing studio, I'm excited again about taking photos. On that note, the following are from the last month.
5 comments:
Great photos Nige. You're right -- good colours and lots of great shots!
Nice pics! Like many have said before me, I heart NY!
Nigel, you rock! I didn't know you had a blog until I found your comments on KT's.
That said, I have 2 questions:
Do you do anything with eye tracking? I had a fascinating conversation with a woman on the Y bus about her work in user research on eye tracking.
Do you do mostly observation of analysis? I ask bc she had a theory about men and women who work in the field.
Finally, your observations about the way things are designed vs. how they are used reminds me of my field. I love it when pedestrians track new pathways on the surface of the earth that the designers overlooked -- users know more. In fact, I fell in love with transportation alternatives looking at the paths through a field in Nepal. I feel sad when landscaper create obstructions to prevent these "natural" paths and force people to use the ones they designed... maybe it shows a lack of humility to greater powers. Software developers do this less....
Yeah, I've done stuff with eye tracking equipment before. It's really interesting (and a little sci-fi too) to watch where people are looking on the screen, or see heatmaps afterwards of the most- and least-looked at portions of a web page. What was the woman's theory about men and women who work in the field? To answer your second Q, I do both observation and analysis.
Oh, and regarding software developers vs. landscapers - if software devs don't obstruct people from taking their own paths, i don't think it's due to humility but rather lack of ability to control what people do with software once it's out of the engineers' hands. There can be quite a lot of ego in software development as well, e.g. attitudes along the lines of "my way is the best, and once users understand it, they'll fall in love with my piece of software."
Including her, I know of 2 women and you who do that kind of work. Since the computer industry is overwhelmingly male, I asked her if mostly women do user research (to explain the results of my statistically invalid sample). She said no, but she had observed that more women do observation and more men do analysis in your/her field. What do you think?
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