#uxdispring2015

[utothex]

LIRR Kiosk Usability

So today I got my first taste of in the field research. As part of my UXDI pre-work I went to Penn Station to study people using the electronic ticketing kiosks and even interviewed a few.

That’s right, this class wanted me to interview New Yorkers in a rush about their most recent financial transaction that I was supposed to be observing them partake in. Apparently, this class wants to kill me.

But lo, surprise surprise, I did survive. And I actually got some useful information. 

The kiosks are surprisingly effective. Pretty much everyone who used them were able quickly and easily select where they were going and what type of ticket they were buying. The entire process was very smooth. In fact, I only witnessed a few bumps.

I witnessed a woman have to hit buttons several times to get them to work because the touchscreen was not responsive enough. This is a problem I’ve faced myself when using these machines and one of the people I interviewed also noted as his only issue with the kiosks that sometimes “the keyboards don’t work.”

Obviously any piece of technology is going to occasionally malfunction or be out of order, but that can be headed off a bit by having regular QA checks. As well as better touchscreen technology, but that’s an unnecessary expense at the moment as for the most part as the touchscreens work well enough.

The only other hiccups people seemed to encounter were after selecting how many tickets, not being sure where to press and having to search for their method of payment.

When reaching the screen above people would select the number of tickets and then many people weren’t sure where to press next. A lot of people moved their fingers towards the bottom of the screen where the “Go Back” and “Cancel” buttons are before moving up to “Press to Continue” button. Even people who knew where the right button was, paused and hesitated to make sure they were pressing the right button before hitting it.

Nearly every other screen proved to have a quick, intuitive movement to it where even users who were clearly unfamiliar with the interface didn’t struggle at all. So this stood out. Especially since one of the subjects I interviewed who claimed to use the kiosks every day said the only problem they ever had with the machines was long lines. 

One way to solve this problem would be to put “Continue” in green down at the bottom of the screen next to “Go Back” and “Cancel” buttons where people expect it to be. Another solution would be be to have the page automatically continue once the user selects their number of tickets. 

The reason it currently doesn’t do so is to allow the user to select both adult and children’s tickets. If you were to have the selection of a number trigger a continuation to the next page you could have people select the adult number and then the children’s number. This would add an extra step and risk confusion for those buying children’s tickets so extra research would have to be done, but it is a potential solution (if this is determined to be a large enough problem to need solving, most likely it is not as most customer’s most important needs seem to be met by the current system).

The other hiccup could also be contributing to the potential line issue. I saw user after user, when it came time for payment either needing to search their bag for their debit or credit card or needing to call over a significant other or parent or sibling to hand over their card or some combination of the two involving fumbling and a hand off.

The machines make a sincere effort to prepare people that they will need to use a card. They have the words “Credit/Debit ATM Cards Only No Cash” on the machine more than once. And even if someone was using a machine that accepts cash, you’d think they’d be aware they’d be using their card and prepared to use it.

To some extent this is unavoidable human behavior. Especially for machines that accept cash as people may not be sure what method they want to use to pay and if people choose to use cash, well, that’s always a more involved process.

But I do think the Credit/Debit only kiosks could improve their signage to decrease this time waste. The current signage, both the wrapping and plaque kind of blend in with the machine. People looking at the machine just see that as part of the kiosk without actually reading it. Instead, if they offered a plaque or wrapping that offered the same message, but included logos of credit cards and one for debit I think that stimulus would affect people’s behavior more.

Overall, though, the kiosks are surprisingly well designed (I say surprising because I’ve had my own issues using them). All respondents interviewed had an overall positive view of them saying they’re “very easy to use” and “more efficient” than the human tellers. 

One interviewee said they chose to use the kiosks because it meant “less human interaction.” A statement that on the surface doesn’t seem to offer much, but behaviorally signifies that the kiosks are easy to use. As a fellow introvert, I understand taking the path of less human interaction, but I also know that no amount of human interaction is too much if the other option is a headache. 

Seamless allows me to avoid calling a place and talking to a human for delivery, but if there are no good delivery options on seamless or it causes a place to get my order wrong or my order doesn’t go through, or Seamless is just incredibly difficult to use, then I’m still going to call in. This analysis of that statement is further proven when that same interviewee described their experience with the kiosks positively with enthusiasm and without hesitation.

[youngbydesign]

I graduated from General Assembly User Experience Immersive on Friday. It was crazy for the last couple months, but such a rewarding experience. I’ll miss the design studios, lectures, amazing instructors and my classmates.

[fully-immersed-dc]

[usersmeetsteph]

KKstudio’s The Uncomfortable Project

What happens if everyday objects are re-designed with a careful consideration of what would PREVENT them from being usable? KKstudio has done just that: http://www.kkstudio.gr/#the-uncomfortable

And it’s uncomfortable.

Amazing work...I hope kkstudio is now using their brain power to solve usability issues.

[faigylearnsux-blog]

Final Project! Here We Go...

For our fifth and final project, we’re working with our teams to solve a user experience problem for a real client. Our team is working with a client that has a product with a lacking internal user management system. In order to set-up the service, a client-side administrator needs to setup user permissions for all the stakeholders using the product in their company. Our team’s job is to make this process more intuitive. 

If we’re successful, hopefully this company won’t get as many calls to their customer service team essentially asking them to do things the client can do on their own. Of course, the client often doesn’t realize then when calling in, and the team is happy to help. However, the more a client can easily do on their own, the happier the clients will be and the freer customer service will be to delve into larger issues.

[ruohanuxforlife]

1001 ways of candy sorting 

[uxplorer]

Week 1 - Day 3 - Sketching & Flows

Today consisted of lofi and hifi sketching, flows, storyboarding, an introduction to the outcome programming side of things and some very tasty Dig Inn! 

Having predominantly jumped to hi-fi wireframed inside illustrator/indesign/photoshop, I was a little daunted trusting my ability to sketch with pen and paper, but I was surprised at the rapid idea generation that came out of todays iterations (at least 50 of them!!)

Story boarding my weather app

Initial rapid 10 second iterations

[utothex]

Finally cracked this book only to realize within seconds what amateur hour my analysis has been so far. I've only been going on instinct. I have a lot to learn. Both very exciting and very terrifying.

[faigylearnsux-blog]

Would You Buy Home Cooked Food?

It’s been a while since my last blog, so I have a lot of catching up to do here. We are halfway through the fourth of five projects in our program, and this one is a passion project. All of my team members are foodies, and so we agreed to work on a food-centered project together. 

We came across an interesting startup called Meal Sharing, which allows people to host or be a guest at a home-cooked meal. Our team is designing for a new feature which will allow people to buy and sell home-cooked food for take-out or delivery. Essentially, an Etsy for amateur chefs. 

This is actually a difficult problem to solve. As we learned through interviewing potential users, food is a deeply personal thing. We need to trust that cleanliness standards and dietary restrictions are respected. Food has the potential to make our bodies feel fantastic or incredibly sick, and when we eat someone else’s food we’re trusting them with how our bodies feel. 

We also learned that people feel very comfortable going to potlucks with friends, acquaintances and friends-of-friends and eating all the food there. When asked to define what made them feel comfortable eating food at potlucks from people they don’t know well (or at all), many people found it difficult to explain. Intellectually, people knew that eating random contributions at a potluck is not actually safer than buying home cooked food from someone in your neighborhood. However, the level of familiarity they had with the cook, even just by meeting them through a friend at the potluck, increased their feeling of safety tremendously. 

From these key insights, we learned that our Meal Sharing feature must make customers feel familiar with a given home chef. Therefore, we prioritized making a chef’s profile page robust, including a general introduction to the chef (aka a short bio), pictures of the food and the kitchen, and of course customer reviews.  

Here is a preview of our chef profile page, which is a medium-fidelity wireframe for the purposes of testing and iteration in the future:

[ruohanuxforlife]

First week done! 

[uxplorer]

Week 1 - Day 2

Today I definitely felt myself slide down the slope of pessimism, as we performed user interviews on members of our group for the first project. I struggled with trying to avoid bias and asking leading questions which often meant the interviews lost momentum and stalled as I tried to rephrase and stumbled on my attempts to probe objectively.

I stumbled a little further mapping out my observations on the affinity diagram, but as my interviews progressed, I was able to make a few more connections and hopefully can identify a few problems and trends to provide features that solve them.

Hopefully sketching tomorrow presents the ladder of optimism.

[utothex]

Good Design: Amazon Checkout

Ok, so that’s an image of a horse mask on Amazon, not it’s checkout, but putting a screenshot of checkout would mean sharing some pretty private information I don’t want to just put out there on the interwebs. So, this will have to do.

And even on this page you can see how perfectly designed the start of the process is. The price is in a larger font, bolded, and colored red (which is the easiest color to see). But your eye is only drawn to that second. First it’s the large, yellow, super clickable “Add to Cart” button. 

That button is incredibly inviting.

And then if you have an amazon account and have ever ordered from there before, all it takes is one more click as they have your address and credit card information saved. I’ve never experience a smoother or easier buying process. 

Amazon goes out of it’s way to make everything about the purchasing process as easy and inviting as possible. And again at each simple step Amazon provides a big welcoming and simple button. 

[faigylearnsux-blog]

There are no second class citizens in UX.

UXDI Instructor

[ruohanuxforlife]

Day 2 Conducting User Research 

Things I learned today:

1. Avoid leading questions. Seek out user’s behavior, not opinion.

2. To be a good user researcher, sometimes you have to unlearn everything that makes a good conversationalist. 

3. Powerful tool to synthesize findings from the interviews - Affinity Mapping. It helps you see the patterns. Grouping the post-its is a way to connect your data point. What’s the common theme that occurs again and again? What kind of pattern do you find among different users? Be creative and play around it. It’s like playing a puzzle game - where does each puzzle piece fit in the big picture? Data visualization is powerful. 

[uxplorer]

Week 1 - Day 1 - Intro to UX

I’m usually pretty terrible with names after first introductions but we began the day and the course by playing a ridiculous circle-of-name-games featuring a magic spray bottle called Oscar, which somehow managed to get a class of 27 people to remember each others names in 10 minutes. No mean feat! After establishing some house rules and running through a quick overview of what makes UX and who practices it, we broke up into groups of 3 at lunch to undertake our first research assignment, a ‘contextual inquiry’ where we would stalk observe a bunch of users in the real world, in our groups case, people using Citi Bike.

During our observation, about 12-15 people used the bikes, mostly to return them and by far the most frequent pain point we noted was people having trouble locking the bikes into their dock.  Users would ram the bikes into the slots 3 or 4 time before trying another dock, often trying up to 4 dock before either succeeding or giving up frustrated. The issue seemed to lie in the ambiguity of the docks interface, which flashed a tiny green led light if the bike was successfully returned, some docks didn’t seem to flash even when the bike was successfully returned, and some users seemed happy to assume the light had flashed when it hadn’t (I tested the bike one user had returned, and could easily pull it out of the dock!)  This seems like a poor signifier for an action which if performed wrong can cost the user $1200 (the penalty for an unreturned bike)

The station kiosk instructions were vague as well, with a monotonous corporate blue citibank color scheme, which could benefit from the use of contrasting orange or red, especially around the safety and penalty information.

The maps were also unclear, which is particularly misleading to tourists to the city, a significant proportion of citibikes user base.  The first map (not shown) showed a zoomed in segment of the few blocks surrounding the bike station in a standard north-south orientation. The map below it shows a few more blocks zoomed out, except this time the map is inexplicably flipped 90 degrees! And a map showing the larger area, displays an unnecessarily simplified Manhattan Island in the north-south orientation again.

One aspect which looked to be easy was the key cards for long-term members, who could skip the kiosk and simply swipe their key to release the bikes directly at the dock.  From what we had observed, Citibikes is better suited to long-term users, while the bamboozling process and caveats for new users would drive all but the most determined cyclists to cross the street and catch the subway.