World Usability Day 2007

Today is World Usability Day, where the focus is usability in healthcare. In Toronto, the Toronto chapter of SIGCHI called TorCHI is having a meeting of usability experts and presentations at the Bahen Center at the University of Toronto. Ilona Posner is introducing World Usability Day, she is talking about the problems that she experienced in trying to see the webcast of World Usability Day from Boston, explaining about the usability problems of web software and computers. The organizers of this event are TorCHI and Usability Professionals Association Worldwide. Last year World Usability Day 2006 had 40000 participants, 225 events, in 175 cities and 35 countries. In Toronto, there were 2 events and 200+ attendees. Tonight's program is the following:
1) Web 2.0 and Healthcare, 2) Patient Safety and Human Factors, and 3) Reality Checkup: A Conversation with a Physician.

The first presenter is Holly Witteman, PhD Candidate in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. The topic is Usability, eHealth and Web 2.0. Within eHealth, Web 2.0 is characterized by open community and communication in the health area, and the technologies applied to health. Blogs can be used for personal expression. Wikis can be used for collaboration for medical education, for creating repositories of information. Social networks are embedded within the Web 2.0 web sites like patientslikeme. CarePages is also another example of social networking site for health care, also sermo is another example. Mashups can be used to look at disease outbreaks around the world, and sicknesses around locations using mapping tools like Google Maps. Tags are also another technology used in health context like in YouTube. Podcasts are also a popular medium for distributing information in audio. So what does this have to do with usability? User-generated content introduces the notion of credibility, is the information credible and valid. In health care, the information is evaluated by a community of experts to determine the credibility. When it comes to health information online, one size does not fit all. There are individual differences and need to be incorporated in usability assessments.

The second speaker was Anjum Chagpar from the University Health Network who talked about a Systems Approach to Patient Safety. She is the manager of a lab looking at next generation medical devices. She gave an example of Denise Melanson who died because she was infused with 4 days of a drug dose within 4 hours. The cause of this accident was multifold. The label on the drug was difficult to find the dose information, the dose information was in brackets (1.2 mL/hour) instead the nurse read the first number which was 28.8 mL/24 hour (which was given in an hour). Second, there were interface issues with the infusion pump. There was no check for unsafe values to enter so the pump allowed the nurse to enter 28.8. All this shows that there is a need to design systems that minimize errors. Health care is changing from secrecy to disclosure, from a blame culture to a just culture. Why do we have poor design in healthcare systems? Because the devices used in healthcare have different market drivers from consumer technology, the devices are not high tech because there is high risk. Human factors is not incorporated in the design process because due to the complexity of the health care environments and there are no consistent user interfaces. Therefore, health care needs human factors.

I didn't attend the third presentation as I head to head back home.

Happy World Usability Day!

On Technorati: World Usability Day

TorCHI talk: Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton

Tonight, Bill Buxton from Microsoft Research is at U of T for the TorCHI talk, talking about his book "Sketching User Experiences".



If you're at the talk, they're selling his book and having an autograph session!

The title of his talk is Design, Design Thinking and Sketching. Bill provides a new way of thinking to design, which is badly needed in industry and business. According to Bill, there are problems in new product development in companies, and frustrated designers within organizations. There should be a chief design officer in the company that works with the chief technical officer, to articulate the requirements for design to translate design technology into products. Bill's book is designed for managers of companies to read, rather than for designers. Design sits within the ecosystem, the design life needs the physical infrastructure. Designers and usability experts need to understand executives, there needs to be cross cultural people to build the bridge.

In the product development process, there is no phase 0 which is the design before building the product (engineering). What is the product going to look like, is it feasible to build, why do we want to build? Bill just kidded around that he was able to publish his book based on the realization that design needs to happen before the engineering phase. We can then think of product design just like digging for artefacts like in archaeology. Design is not a separate phase, it permeates within all the development phases in engineering and also in sales. In fact a product should begin to be developed just like a film is made, and before it is green lighted. There needs to be a business plan, a list of people who are the "actors" in the product, how much the product will cost, etc.

So what is design? Sketching is a method for design, which is used in different types of design like graphics design, fashion design, and industrial design. The design spaces needs to be explored by looking at alternatives. For example, he gave an example of drawing a phone which he claimed most people (even the design challenged can do), drawing a phone's interface (which is much difficult), and drawing the experience of using the phone (which is the ultimate goal in product design). According to Bill, we are going from a materialist design to experiential perspective of design.

So what makes a sketch? First, the sketch is free-hand drawn. Second, the lines are not complete. Third, the sketch is not finished, it is open-loop rather than closed-loop. What is the anatomy of sketching? Sketching is about opening doors, not closing doors, so no higher resolution is required to communicate the intended purpose/concept. Sketching is meant to suggest and explore, you should not have to be complete the first time. Ambiguity is the most important part of design. If you want to get the most out of a sketch, you need to leave big enough holes. If you start to put more detail and close the imagination, then this is not a sketch but more of a memory recording. According to Bill, design is like a funnel, you have a million ideas and then you start reducing ones and throwing them out, until you come out with the idea that becomes the product. There is a continuum between design and usability, from sketch to prototype, along the investment and time axes.

Great talk, as always, Bill is a good speaker, and I think a good example of how you can have a good career in academia, research, and industry.

On Technorati: sketch, Bill Buxton, design, user experience, TorCHI

TorCHI meeting tonight at Autodesk Canada (formerly Alias)

Tonight, I attended the TorCHI meeting which was held at Autodesk Canada, where Alias used to be, before Alias got bought out by Autodesk. The talk tonight was by Gordon Kurtenbach, Director of Research at Autodesk. Before going into Autodesk, I took a pic of outside Autodesk below.



Here's what I got from the talk. I've always wondered why did Autodesk (which is into engineering design software, the famous product being AutoCAD) buy Alias? At the time (about 1 and half years ago), I didn't quite understand. After tonight's talk, now I understand why.

So, as I always do at talks, I whipped out my laptop and started making notes. I wanted to write this on the blog so I searched for an Internet connection. I got connected to One Zone but I couldn’t connect to the Internet so I’m writing this in Word. This is the talk by Gordon Kurtenbach as part of the TorCHI meeting for the month of March. Gordon is the mastermind behind marking menus, he has 21 patents, and won an Academy Award for Ryan. Autodesk bought Alias Wavefront over a year ago. Alias is well known for its Maya software which was used for making the computer generated characters for the Lord of the Rings. Beside movies, games are becoming very realistic as well as commercials.

Architecture is now doing rendering with 3D realism, to see what the thing they are building, before it gets built. The media tools are used to amplify the artist’s talents. The technologist should not turn into an artist and vice versa. The user interface needs to fit the skills of the user. So what is considered natural interface for the user? It really is relative to the person who is using it.

What is natural? What is intuitive? What do those terms mean? It means it is a knowing of what the user will do. Ben Schneiderman, Stu Card, and others were the ones that laid the background for graphical user interfaces. With a musician, practice is what you do to learn how to play an instrument. Gordon’s PhD thesis dealt with accelerating the practice of user interfaces from novice to expert.

Gordon’s work on marking menus deals with the user using a pen to move and mark, and there is a menu associated with the direction of the mark. Marking menus can perform faster than regular linear menus which we have in software.

Another example of another user interface is to use bimanual input. Gordon is showing a video of Bill Buxton showing tape drawing, which car manufacturer companies use to show a drawing of a car.

Learning from a traditional medium, the tape drawing can be replicated in the computer as shown in the picture below.



It is the mastery of the skill that makes an expert able to use an unnatural interface (to a regular person) become a natural interface.

Alias then took these research ideas and prototypes to the field, and created Alias SketchBook Pro for performing sketching on a Tablet PC. Alias created a tracking menu for zooming and panning using a “jar lid” where the widget of the tool moves along with the jar lid. The widget tool can have two or more tools simultaneously attached to the cursor. The whole idea is to put all the accessible tools for the user clustered and close to this jar lid or wheel.

There was this really cool screen where you can move the screen and navigate inside and around a virtual car. This eliminates having to wear glasses and do virtual reality. Gordon ended his talk in that context matters with user interfaces.

All in all, it was a great talk. There were demos afterwards. This is a great example of taking a PhD thesis, and then applying it to research in industry and making a career out of it. I'm sure I can definitely learn from this, when it comes for me to get a job after my PhD.

On Technorati: Alias, TorCHI, AutoDesk