It started as a task to understand how Android works and see what user experience (UX) opportunities it offered. Soon realised I’d have to learn Java which was going to turn my short exercise into a longer trial – ho hum.
We’ll, it turns out that the designers of Eclipse really do understand UX. My background in Prolog, Basic, C and Pascal meant I had the fundamentals for Java, but context help provided in the Eclipse IDE made me very productive, very quickly. Mmm… I could learn from Eclipse.
Rather than producing my n’tieth “hello world”, I wanted to develop something that needed mobility and would benefit from a tablet form factor. Through circumstance and coincidence, I opted for volleyball stats. At the time, the established software for collecting stats needed three pairs of analysts; one pair for each team and a backup pair. Surely, my Android app and me could do better than that.
Volleyball, in its indoor incarnation, is played by two opposing teams of 6 players who try to ground the ball in the opponent’s 9m square court. In the way is a net raised to 2.24m for women and 2.43m for men. Each team can touch the ball three times before it has to cross the net so teams typically use specialists players to prepare (touches 1 & 2) for the best possible attack (touch 3). The average rally takes 5 seconds which typically involves a serve from one team followed by three touches by their opponents. This means our analysts have just over a second to record details of each “touch”.
The established software also needed users to learn a set of codes so learning curve was extensive. I would produce a solution that was easy to learn and easy to use. I talked to some of my club’s coaches about stats and to one of the national programme analysts. As well as playing, I watched games and visioned actually recording stats myself. The concept was hatched.
I’d use the tablet’s touch interface to echo each player’s touch of the ball, indicating whether their contact was positive, negative or neutral. No complex codes. To make it easier for analysts, I’d also provide a visual layout of the court so that their actions could mirror the ball’s flight during a point. Finally, given that we’d be building up such a detailed picture of the game, we could feed this back to the analysts – they’d have their own live scoreboard.
Fast forward through the coding, unit testing and system testing to a test, on my laptop, at an actual game. I knew that volleyball was quick but I was a little taken aback. Moving the mouse and clicking in the right place were a struggle but hopefully the directness of a touch interface would be easier. The bigger challenge was watching the game and re-orienting to the app, multiple times in a few seconds. I had to accept that it probably needed a spotter (to watch the game) and a recorder (to capture what the spotter told them). Disappointing; but 2 down from 6 wasn’t bad.
The next milestone was testing with an actual tablet. Much easier to work with than a laptop and mouse but still a challenge. I did ponder restricting the app to only produce stats for one team but rejected this change as it didn’t take account of skill improvement over time and would deny those with faster brains and fingers. I did, however, allow for analysts to collect for both teams or just one – their choice.
So, maybe two analysts, maybe four but easier to learn and a richer more informative environment. Added some utilities (eg sharing) and did a little hardening so good for beta.
Why is it an example of good UX?
Rich, informative environment (eg scoreboard) helps memorability.- Information is grouped logically and some is presented visually (eg substitutions). This helps learning.
- Visuals and positioning (eg court layout) are used extensively for communication and control so the app is easy to use.
Our experiences (captured as memories) form the basis of our capacity to plan, make sense of what’s going on and imagine alternative actions. Given the mass of information with which our digital world bombards us, recalling a specific piece of information can be difficult. The way we improve access to specific items is by coding them and the more codes we allocate to an item, the greater the likelihood of retrieval (document tagging takes this approach). Our challenge is that retrieval can be unreliable (there are insufficient cues to allow retrieval), affected by interference (the information available through processing does not match stored information), over-stimulated (there are too many entries with similar cues) and can decay.
Vision shows us what things look like, how they’re structured and where they are. When a scene is viewed, the eyes rapidly move from one element to another in a jerky fashion. These movements are called saccades and at their end, the eyes rest and fixate on one point. Saccadic movement gives structure and texture helping us to derive greater meaning. The Gibsonian principle (JJ Gibson, 1979) covers such texture and is the theory behind the narrowing gaps between lines approaching roundabouts that prompt us to slow down.
Attention is the way we direct our perceptual system to selectively focus on particular items of information in the face of several sources. Arousal describes an ad-hoc event that stimulates the allocation of our cognitive resources – looking at someone when they call our name. Studies have found that we experience difficulties when performing multiple activities; we’re overloading a particular cognitive resource (eg listening to two conversations at once). If, however, we can use different cognitive resources for the competing activities, we’re more likely to cope; consider listening to the radio and emailing colleagues as we commute to work.
Language is not only a means of expressing thought (communication) but also influences our perception of the world. According to Sapir-Whorf, our experience of the world is enriched by the variety of the language used to describe it – Eskimos have a richer experience of snow than that of us in the West – you can ask Kate Bush why.
Developing procedural knowledge involves practice; repetition tunes our neural network. When we practice, we organise clumps of information to support the task and then execute in sequences of clumps. Knowledge of results goes a long way to helping develop skills. Feedback can be intrinsic (spiking a volleyball gives immediate kinaesthetic feedback) or extrinsic (we’ll know how well we threw a dart if it hits the bullseye).
These three stages appear in the refinement of vehicle gearing systems. Manual gearboxes are cumbersome and a pain in traffic (stage #1). Automatic gearboxes take all the pain away but also take away the control (stage #2) – it’s a bit rubbish if the car kicks down on the motorway when all you want to do is slowly accelerate. The next shift (excuse the pun) in transmission systems (sensonic, steptronic, tiptronic) allows drivers to decide when to change gears but removes the whole clutch nonsense. Great for Lewis and his F1 buddies but do we really need all that paddle activity? We thought we’d reached stage #3 but in reality, we’re back at stage #1. Today, I think we’ve got the balance right, true stage #3. The car decides when to change gears (no clutch, no paddles) but we can shift down or shift up if we want to do something particular. When the car senses that we’ve finished “active driving”, it quietly assumes control of the gearing decisions again. Automation has taken away the tiresome bits but we can assume the right level of control when we want.
Our lesson here concerns the ability of humans to effectively take control. With my new paddle shift gearbox, the situation is one in which I decide when to take control having been steering, accelerating and actively sensing road conditions. If I’ve been completely disengaged from driving and the vehicle forces me to take control, my ability to do so safely may be limited.
When building homes, for the majority of people, there are some fundamental principles. Before we get to deciding between Smeg and Miele, creation of space (whatever the external constraints) and maximising natural light will always be desirable. Similarly, flexible, non-oppressive security will be another winner. The same is true in building good technology; in parallel with reflecting specific requirements, there’s a set of principles to which almost all systems should adhere. It should be easy to move around into areas that suit our inclination without constantly meeting obstructions. We should also be able to benefit from natural illumination wherever we are… re-phrased, our way should be enlightened with knowledge as we go. Finally, while security becomes ever critical as more of our lives are lived online, we don’t want that security to be so oppressive that our use of the technology is impaired.