UX Crash Course
REU 2014
Chase Meusel
meusel@iastate.edu
6/11/14
Who am I?
Chase Meusel
2nd Year M.S. student working with Dr. Gilbert
Experience
• 2nd year running the UX Lab
• 1 year of web design/dev at Hawkeye Community College
Thesis research
• Show link between EDA and mental effort within 3D environments
• Show link between EDA and nausea within 3D environments
Who am I?
Research Interests
• User research
• Biofeedback applications in UX, VR, Simulators
• Blink rate = mental effort, pupilometry = mental effort
• UX research within video games
• Automotive applications of UX
Future Work
• Mobile UX observation techniques
• Social engineering by manipulating UX
Who am I?
Hobbies
• Board games (Takenoko, SotM,
Dracula, Talisman, BaHH)
• Video games (Hearthstone, Child of
Light, Titanfall, Halo, CS)
• TV/Movies (GoT, BB, BSG, Fate/Stay
Night, Howl, Totoro, etc)
• Reading (Muirwood, Kingkiller
Chronicles, Dresden Files)
Intros
Normally I meet everyone on the UX Lab tour but…
If everyone could share their:
Name
Major
Hobby
Research interests (if any)
UX Big Picture
UX Strategy
• Scope
• UCD Process
• Develop Model
• Organization
Process/Structure
• Organization
Maturity
• User Philosophy
UX Methods
• Usability testing
• Eye tracking
• Biofeedback
• Interviews
• Focus Groups
• Survey
• More
UX Tools
• UserZoom/Loop11
• Morae/Noldus
• VT2 + iMotions
• Qualtrics
• Recorders
• More
UX General Info
Usability vs User Experience
“Does it work?” vs “How did you feel?”
Different levels underneath UX
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Information Architecture - how data is structured (taxonomies)
Interaction Design - controls, mechanisms, processes users go through
Visual Design - more graphic artist, other departments
Usability Engineer - setting up usability tests
UX as a whole implements all of these as a UCD process
User Centered Design (UCD)
• Beginning the UX process early on in development saves costs and headaches
• Meeting with stakeholders / dev team to find out what they want and what
the constraints are
• Surveys / Focus Groups / Interviews / Observation Notes
• Meeting with real users to find how they currently use the
software/application or how they use similar software/applications
• Surveys / Focus Groups / Interviews / Observation Notes
User Centered Design (UCD)
• Identify personas / users
• Identify their mental models and the critical tasks
• Map how people actually use software with intended use from development
team (gap analysis, bridging the mental models)
• Test critical interaction points and bring results back to dev team
• Not teaching users what to do so you can get clean input
• Rinse and repeat to the level of detail your task requires
Activity!
Talk over grad college page review
Open Card Sort for what you would need to apply to grad college
• Gather elements, categorize, build IA
• Sketch out page based on class built IA
• Show suggested layout
Testing Process
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Preface online, unmoderated test.
https://s.userzoom.com/m/MSBDMjI0UzEwNiAg
collapsable side navigation
Allow time to take test.
Time to ask comments/questions.
Talk about results, go over analysis. (show excel sheets)
Talk about prototyping process
low vs high fidelity (pretty bias)
time investment
• screen captures (non-functional scroll, static weather, etc)
• working prototype with logic
• building actual application
• earlier is better in development cycle
• testing along the way
Testing Process
• discuss good testing practice
• make sure prototype works (browser, os)
• less precursor knowledge
• avoid keywords
• scenario based tasks
• visible tasks
• redundant information (video, audio, live coding)
Expanded UX Tools
Video
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Camtasia (screen capture)
Noldus media recorder (4 separate video streams in sync)
Facereader (affect, blink rate)
Eyetracking, iMotions (this is its own beast)
Audio
• think aloud protocol
• comments during study
Expanded UX Tools
Behavioral Coding
• Noldus Observer (in the world)
• Morae Observer (computer based)
• Modeling Trust, Cog Load
Biofeedback
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EDA
Heart rate
Blink rate
Blood Pressure
EEG
Expanded UX Tools
Prototyping
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Visio (win) / Omnigraffle (Mac)
JustInMind Prototyper
Axure
Loop11
UserZoom
OptimalWorkshop (card sort tools)
• Data Gathering
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Qualtrics
Google Forms
Interviews
Observation
Questions?
Extra Slides
What is your goal? Scope?
Academic  Research Questions / Focus
Industry  Product Development
Warrant
Principle that allows me to connect
reason and claim is…
Claim
Because of
Reason
Based on
Evidence
Acknowledgement & Response
Booth, et al
Developing The Research Question
Topic: I am studying _______
Question: because I want to find out what/why/how ______
Conceptual Significance: in order to help my reader understand ______
Potential Practical Significance: so that readers might _____
The Goal of Understanding the User
Not as much detail
Not as rigorous
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Enhance focus on users
Guide direction and decision making
Promote discovery and understanding
Facilitate feature design
Inspire innovation
Promote awareness and empathy
Enhance community
Overhaul the development process
Lots of detail
Very rigorous
The Goal of Understanding the User
Not as much detail
Not as rigorous
Detail & Rigor
• Amount of data needed
• Logic and assumptions vs data and evaluation
• Richness of the stories
• Number of resources needed
• Scope Accuracy
Lots of detail
Very rigorous
The User
Capturing tasks & behaviors
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Flow model – captures roles and responsibilities
Sequence model – captures tasks
Cultural model – captures values
Affinity diagram – captures issues
Holtzblatt, et al (2004)
Types of Measurements
• Eye tracking – What is the eye doing?
• Task is key here
• UX – What is the user doing?
• BEHAVIOR is key
• Other
• Interview / Think Aloud – what is the user saying?
• Translation can be critical, include “um” pauses, etc
• Survey – How is the user responding?
Eye tracking Measures
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Calibration analysis
Areas of Interest (AOIs)
Gaze replays – fixations & saccades
Time to fixation
Average fixation duration
Gaze plots
Heatmaps
Bee swarms
Raw data
Aggregated versus per user data
Filter, scenes, and fragments (tasks broken into these scenes)