Com 597 Interactive Design

Due 12/5/07

Can you see me now? Good.

            Television Picture Menus typically do not scream out easy to operate.  These are systems that receive rare consideration from the manufacturer, with the end user in mind, when designing them.  There are terms like DNR and Picture littered throughout these menus coupled with strange symbols designed to intimidate and confuse.  Electronic retailers have designed many services based around the confusing terms built into the television, to help the consumer get the picture they want.  Sometimes manufacturers do make an effort to make a useable system.  Many televisions have recently won awards for usability and design.  In the cluttered apathetic field, the award may not mean much but, as televisions gravitate towards being entire home entertainment systems there seems to be a larger focus on even the simple television picture menu design.  This study focuses on the picture menus of the LG, Sony, Philips, Panasonic, Pioneer, Samsung, and Toshiba televisions.  Criteria developed from John Maeda, Ben Shneiderman, Jakob Nielsen, and Bruce Tognazzini’s writings and works in design have been appropriated to evaluate these televisions within two different types of end users. 

            Two focus groups evaluated the criteria and added their own modifications to the metrics to contribute what they thought were most important in menu design as well. 
The first group was a group of tech savvy, male, video game enthusiasts with an age range of 21-23.  The second was a mixed gender group with an age range of 49-57.  The first group wanted speed and quality adjustments, they wanted to fine tune the television for the fastest speed clearest picture and the most realistic image possible.  The second group was mostly interested in a simple menu that would be easy to figure out where they needed to go in order to adjust what they wanted.  In other words one group really didn’t care about the terms used they just wanted adjustments and the second group was less interested in the adjustments themselves as long as they could navigate around the unit effectively.

            This is the criteria that developed from the groups and designers:

                        Clear terms

                        Clear adjustments (Focus Group 2)

                        Clear and out of the way descriptions (Nielson)

                        Quick and simple access (Schneiderman)

                        Until pictures are standardized they are optional and must have dialogue

                        Restore to Factory button (Tognazzini)

                        No memorization involved please (Schneiderman)

                        Hotkeys for more efficient and accurate adjustments (Focus Group 2)

The real focus of the groups wasn’t so much to help develop the criteria but to get more than one perspective on the televisions being evaluated.  The flaw with simple criteria evaluation is criteria are normally subjective to the designer and they also can’t predict every eventuality.  In a field like interface design criteria can be very limiting if a designer doesn’t include the feedback of the users.

            The anticipated outcome of the study is that there will be no television menu system that has an effective user friendly design.  Sony has won design awards for their menu system on the Playstation 3 and appropriated that to their televisions.  John Maeda works for Philips and helps design the company’s motto and products so we may see some unanticipated results from these groups.  The Best Buy in Lynnwood is where these focus groups studied the televisions on Tuesday the 27th (focus group 1) and Sunday 25^th (Group 2).  Here is how the televisions performed.

Part II Danger Malfunction

            LG had a very simple interface on the remote control which gave many of our users hope.  For the expert users this posed very little trouble in operating but as explained below it took too long to enter the picture menu.  The inexperienced users had trouble as soon as they opened up the menu.  The Term EZ Picture is meant to indicate that the picture menu is very simple to adjust and you don’t have to do any work, but if there was only one setting a user wanted to adjust they would find it very difficult to do so.  The adjustments are static on the EZ picture setting of Daylight and you have to change it to “User” in order to begin changing settings.  When given the task “adjust the contrast” the users didn’t see that term for several minutes as they struggled with finding the place that this term was hidden. Once they found out how they could adjust the television it was difficult to verify exactly what the unadjustable settings on daylight were so you could change only the contrast. LG failed on the basic first level of not having clear terms.

            Pioneer and Panasonic have similar flaws when you open the menu up, it is easy to get to the picture menu but once you’re there it might be impossible to do anything you want to.  The term Picture was in the menu and there was no real clue to what that might adjust because as you take it down from +30 to -30 the television itself looks relatively unchanged.  It certainly doesn’t reflect Contrast shifts and contrast isn’t even on the menu.  Brightness is present but has nothing to do with the contrast and there are many terms and abbreviations that are simply scary like Mosquito Noise Reduction, does this reduce the amount of mosquitoes that are attracted to the glowing television?  The adjustments are unclear due to a lack of understandable standard for normal and the terms are ridiculous.

            Sony has wonderfully descriptive pictures that nobody understood.  The pictures are there and definitely indicative of what they could mean but they are also too similar to each other to understand.  On top of that the actual item that is shifted is beneath the one that is highlighted so the second focus group had no idea how to actually get to the picture menu which wasn’t immediately apparent.  Once there Sony had very unfamiliar terms and adjustments and some very familiar ones but the menu had little explanation.  Once it was used the first time, it was easy to understand how to navigate but it didn’t promote ease of use and as mentioned previously the pictures were similar in meaning, if not in look, so you could forget which setting was where very easily.

            Toshiba had very easy to understand menus at least until given more advanced tasks.  Basic contrast adjustment terms and adjustments were pretty clear… but there was not a huge degree of response to the adjustments.  Toshiba had a special Colormaster adjustment panel when it allows you to adjust the Hue, Saturation, and Brightness of each of 6 colors individually in the television set.  The problem with this menu is that the inexperienced users had no idea how to use it so if something was incorrect about all they wanted to do was “Reset to factory” which was clear and there.  The experienced users wanted to make the image look better and more natural than the factory but the adjustments didn’t seem to affect almost anything at all unless all three were completely turned up to the maximum so they felt like it was a futile attempt to make the TV more versatile.  It seemed like there was a bar of the color on display so you could see how you adjusted it but it was set to display at far too bright of a level to begin with so it was extremely hard to measure the adjustments since they started at 0 and went positive or negative to equal degrees.

            Samsung was pretty much the friendliest to the expert users. They used older standards that are common on computer monitors to indicate brightness contrast and other settings.  When they had abbreviations they had it written out in a small status bar beneath the menu so if you were an expert user you could really understand everything and adjust it very quickly.  The menu opened up and the first setting is picture so it was super simple.  To the novice user it wasn’t as easy, they didn’t understand the various terms even when they were unabbreviated so it was slightly limiting as there were no explanations.  However the settings and tasks were easy to complete and any basic adjustment was quick the only problem was it required you to actually hit enter to adjust a given setting and some people used that intuitively and some didn’t.  This was a low cognitive load error and didn’t strain the user enough to make them hate the menu.

            Philips pretty much won as far as fulfilling all the criteria.  There really isn’t one topic among the list that they didn’t excel at.  The basic menu was set up purely with words which would create a language barrier but this is something that based on the country or user preference is adjustable.  We are assuming that this isn’t a design flaw because of the specific intentions of menu adjustment can permit for words to be used in native languages.  The Philips went beyond basic descriptions and allowed users to understand terms they were unfamiliar with by having it explained at the bottom of the screen and what it would affect.  The explanation was located out of direct sight so it wouldn’t affect the expert user. The only complaints the expert user had was that it took more than 3 selections to get to the picture menu and when you pressed menu which normally functions as a step backward button it completely closed the menu.  For the novice user there was pretty much no issue the menu familiarized them with selecting items to the point that by the time they got to adjustments unlike the Samsung it was already normal to press enter to adjust the item.  There was not one person who had trouble using this menu system to adjust the contrast.  Further more there was a very clear example of what the contrast would be adjusting as it removes the rest of the menu and displays the screen and the contrast alone at normal brightness while you adjust the setting which was actually surprisingly uncommon among the menus.

            The project results were unanticipated but very logical.  Many of these principles can be found in the course textbook that we have been using and it stands to reason that Maeda would have made sure to have a design team on the TV menu that many others would neglect.  If improvements could be made it would be to further the standards of television menus by including pictures next to the words the same way the Samsung TV menu did them and have a quick access hotkey for expert users on the remote.  Overall the Philips Menu system was exceptional and a quote from one of the group two participants sums up the menu accurately: “I really like the descriptions for the terms on the Philips because if I owned this television I would probably, eventually, adjust all the settings on the TV to my preferences because I wouldn’t have to read a manual.”  Low cognitive load means that someone is going to take advantage of an interface and use it to its complete potential.

                                   Works Cited  

Focus Group #1 Participants: Andrew Mariott, Magnus Gordon, Ryan Proctor, and Seth Gordon.

Focus Group #2 Participants: Clark Summers, David Keith, Joe Luther, Miryam Gordon.

Maeda, John “The Laws of Simplicity Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life”, MIT Press, 2006.

Nielson, Jakob “Heuristics for User Interface Design” 2005 http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html, Last Accessed: 12/03/07.

Shneiderman, Ben “Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design”, http://faculty.washington.edu/jtenenbg/courses/360/f04/sessions/schneidermanGoldenRules.html, Last accessed: 12/03/07.

Tognazzini, Bruce, “First Principles of Interaction Design”,

http://www.asktog.com/basics/firstPrinciples.html, Last accessed: 12/01/07.

I was looking at an HP Media Smart TV the other day (not one on my project list) and it was suddenly very apparent to me how terrible the TV was.  The first thing I noticed is something we all talked about a long time ago called feedback.  I could press buttons all day long that looked like they would do something and the television never told me they wouldn’t.  It just sat there… letting me blink at it.  the only time it did something was when my actions would result in something happening.  Ordinarily this might work but as the television had a very laggy response I simply assumed it would eventually start working…  That was a waste of time.

But let’s look at how this television measures up evaluated by the eight golden rules just to practice this whole criteria thing.  Inconsistency is huge in this tv, some menu parts are pictures others are phrases and words and they are all intermingled on top of that only responding some of the time is a huge inconsistency. it makes me believe it is going to respond if it responds part of the time because if a menu option isn’t greyed out i think I can use it.

 There were shortcuts but I never could tell whether or not I was using them right because they were the things that responded the least to my button pressings.

do I really have to mention that the feedback was lacking on this one?  I mean really I think it’s going to come up again already.

 I think this next one would be like designing the menu to close once you have changed settings or something similar to that, and on the off chance that what I did actually worked the menu did do that on it’s own and start playing a movie or whatever else.  So this I think was fairly effectively managed.

 Error handling on an Hp?  that’s funny…  I think they like to either restrict you completely from doing anything or let you blunder into all the serious errors you want.  there was a restore to factory settings button but aside from that there really wasn’t much to compensate for disastrous errors…. course it’s a TV…  what are you going to do? blow up the planet?

Reversible actions?  check, red hue slides both ways, we are good.

I think when you open up the menu system you are already stepping into the realm of initiation… in TV menus when you hop on that train the only difference is after a while you may have a premeditated path to try instead of menu exploration.  I think this is moot for this issue.

Short term memory consolidation on this TV is not actually that big of a deal… everything I wanted to change was very easy and intuitive to locate even if it didn’t allow me to change things once I found them.  My cognitive load was never increased because of the hard to find menu buttons or other similar situations – though the shortcuts on the remote do look difficult and not very memory friendly.

All in all this television performed very poorly, by fixing one of the major issues like feedback it could have done worlds better.  But what do you expect?  it’s Hp.

Fall 07

Project proposal

Intuitive Interaction

            I would like to do a case study on the Television Picture Menus that are an interactive component of nearly all televisions on the market.  The reason I am picking this topic is because it is something I am sure we all interact with on a regular basis.  I believe that the principles that Interactive Designers like John Maeda and Donald Norman follow can lend themselves to a critical analysis of the existing versions of Television Picture Menus.  Therefore I will use these principles to develop a set of criteria that will allow me to gauge the effectiveness of the interactive design in this product and compare this to several methods of Television Picture Menu design from brands like Sony and Philips.  If possible, then I hope to emerge with a new form of Picture Menu that is more effective than all of the methods reviewed and critiqued.  At the very least this paper will determine what method of menu layout and design is the most effective and user friendly in the industry.

If possible after the compare and critique, space permitting, then I will follow the amazing design process demonstrated by IDEO in the in class video that was presented to design this new form of menu.  The results of the paper should indicate that the current industry standards are insufficient and confusing.  I will limit the involvement of brands to those that are prominent in the industry.  If a television is made with low quality parts and picture, then it is not expected to have the best menu layout, let alone any other feature and will be pointless to include in the study.  The brands I will include are LG, Toshiba, Panasonic, Sony, Samsung, Pioneer, and Philips.  This should be particularly interesting with the award winning menu layout on the new Sony XBR4 Television set.

 I think visual basic is a baby step towards what the man may have actually influenced by trying to create his tripod interface.  Vb made programming easier to start and more fun.  I didn’t learn too much of it myself but I know it really spurred my brother on in his technological pursuits. What i consider an offsping of VB though are programs like dreamweaver and other website construction/ program helping code buddies.  Things like firefly that allow you to trouble shoot code on the fly and focus in on certain segments of hard code when needed and only when it was absolutely necessary rewrite the actual script yourself. 

Dreamweaver has a similar point click and shoot version of drag and drop website creation.  Now there are tuns of server hosted apps like Iweb etc that allow you to drag what you want onto a web application and viola you have a functioning website without knowing how to program one bit.  VB does require some coding knowledge but the tripod backbone wouldn’t even let you code.  it was an end user interface for program design.  You could only do so much with it but, imagine a calculator that you could rearrange the functions on and make your own functions simply by dragging around some buttons.  That’s exactly what Alan Cooper attempted to create and it was a pioneering movement.  I think it really contributed to and preceded the entire web application world today.

 One reason I support my choice to choose Alan cooper is because this is a great example of the 5th chapter of John Maeda’s book.  Differences.  When Microsoft adapted tripod they added complexity to turn it into VB emphasizing the fact that too much simplicity is really limiting. Simplicity is novel when we don’t have anything else, or when it isn’t my only recourse.  If I need to make a program to do something like add two numbers together I only want to press one button, but if I need to conjugate a verb and translate that into numbers then analyze the importance of Newtonian physics in the sentence that contains said verb maybe it should be more complex.  Perhaps on the way I can use a couple of simple functions that will allow me to have an easier time setting all of it up like an and then button but aside from that most of the other stuff sounds pretty esoteric and like it should be complicated.  Differences…  Are good.

 A keyboard is a typically simple tool, everything is usually very clearly labeled. But If I am an advanced user of a keyboard I can learn ( ooooo the fourth law?) that there are more functions I can do other than abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890.

I can hit alt f4… and dangit i just lost this whole entry .  The point is Cntrl C and Cntrl V can save your life if you accept a little bit of complexity into it.  and now I have to rush to the computer lab to hit alt prnt scrn or something of the sort and put money on my husky card.  Why wont the teacher just let us click send from a hotmail or myuw inbox and simplify my life!?  *cry*  I can make the background green which will be easier on your eyes!!!

Oh and apparently I should apologize for last week I forgot to use one of the conceptual models listed below on the journal assignment… something about the way the post was separated made me think it was a separate entry, but I know now that it wasn’t.  Don’t ask me how, must have something to do with the gestalt principle of organization.

I thought these were supposed to tie into the reading but this one doesn’t seem to at all.. so I’m going to go off on the story telling aspect of a satellite radio device.  The cool thing about satellite radio is that you have access to more stations.  But here is the catch, there is a subscription cost.  Now a lot of the time on the radio I don’t like what I hear and I try to change stations but frequently there is more of the same boring old repetitive songs that people just can’t seem to get tired of playing. This is due to modern forms of payola that really only allow them to play the same 21 and a half songs over and over and over.

Satellite radio tells a story of freedom.  I play fantasy football, and I play it well(6-1 fyi). what does that have to do with satellite radio?  Everything.  I am no longer bound to the constraints of localized broadcasts and with the right service I can get any NFL game at the time it’s playing and monitor the players most important to my fantasy team. I can even listen to it while I’m at work.  What’s more is that on the radio if I lose track of the score I can actually see it… on a radio broadcast!!  It’s crazy. the other cool thing is it categorizes national music into categories so that I can scroll through the type of music I want to listen to.  This gives me tons of options because it will even categorize hip hop down to the decade so if I am sick of what’s on the local radio right now I can switch it up and listen to hip-hop hits of the 90′s or 80′s.  How is radio interactive?  Because it is putting me in control of what I see and hear.  I can use the device to browse by artist, title, team, genre, song title, and more.  If in the event that I like what I hear and want to hear it again then all I have to do is hit pause and rewind and listen to the song or last play all over again.  Most satellite devices have built in memory storage for exactly this type of function.  Not only can I find exactly what I want to listen to but I can rewind and replay anything I hear.  What is more liberating and empowering than that?  controlling a national broadcast…  that is a pretty good story of freedom.  No longer being bound by the control of others and yet allowing my mind to be free of the burden of creating an Ipod playlist every single day is worth the 12 dollars a month.

 Ok  So I’ve been moving all day and then I have to read a couple chapters in a book where someone tells me I’m doing it wrong!  Hah…

Not really like that but I have to say in John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity I am seeing a few ideas that could improve my organization.  If I take the SLIP idea and apply it to the large task of moving all of my belongings from one place to another it can in some ways break down the daunting demoralizing wall of confusion that I face initially.  I can see myself using similar techniques to start packing things up in the first place but only mentally.  I broke things down mentally by what was important to me. I had groupings like bathroom supplies electronics, kitchenware, bedroom, junk, living room etc…  And I prioritized and reorganized my selections to make it as easy to manage and feel like I am making progress.  Had I a physical copy it would have been even more beneficial because then I could have crossed things off a list or thrown away the card when I was done with that task.  Of course that would only be one end of the moving…  unpacking is something else entirely.  Barring SLIP I really liked the first part of Maeda’s SHE acronym.  Shrink is a really good way to think about designing a product.  We all want things to be easy to use but many of us also want to be able to do certain things with those objects.  I like DVD players that can pause and fast forward…  More importantly I like DVD players that can step forward frame by frame.  enabling this function on a DVD player can add complexity, I have seen it done simply but it is something that could be a potential threat to simplicity in the wrong hands.  Thinking about that in every project can lead to really effective Hiding.  If the main functions are visible one good thing to realize is that someone using something in a more complex manner will probably be willing to do the complex task.  For example If I need to add captioning to a DVD it is nice to have a CC button but if I need that on a player that has a menu button I’m sure I will be willing to go through the menu to find it.  That doesn’t mean that it should be difficult but when something is a more advanced feature people become used to more complexity in order to use said feature. A simple remote is a greater gain because if the buttons are simple and easy to use it then makes the menu (which could be extensive) easy to navigate because you understand the remote.

I like some of the concepts in the story telling and design reading but I think the reading could have been better designed..  One thing it did make me think about however is the branding of the company UnderArmour.  when you hear the name or see the clothes or even just the logo, an image of what the product is is conjured.  This is branding at it’s best.  The design of the name alone lets you know what the product is about – This is the gear you need to be prepared for the battle.  Whether it’s a game of football or a long distance run, UA suggests protection and durability to keep you going.  Even the logo looks like it can beat other logos up. 

 Here you have someone who has a need conveyed to them via a real marketing executive who says “There is a demand for this in the marketplace.”  Someone takes that advice and runs with it.  They don’t just try to make what was requested but they try to make it as functional and useable as possible.  They do the research and fill all the requirments to make sure that when the product is created the obstacles that could pop up will be pre addressed.  This had to have given them an edge in the marketplace because they took a complete solution attitude towards a simple market valency. I don’t know what other laptop computers were like in the time but from what is sounds like this computer went through such solid development that every potential problem, (size, weight, display, and even durability) had already been pre addressed to make sure that the computer would be the premium standard in the industry.

When they specifically did the tests of how many G’s an object could withstand that is when I thought that the company was really trying to create something special.  They simply couldn’t have the unit damaged during transport and spent a great deal of time actually analyzing what would happen to the item.  When they weighed out different amounts in breifcases to determine proper weight distribution it was another ingenous step towards a complete customer centered idea.  Sticking with the core intention of what you need something to do will dictate actions especially if you are thinking of the end product overall and as a whole.

Also from chapter three I really appreciated the contribution from later on in it that technology should conform to the people not the other way around.  This ties in a lot with what we were talking about the other week where the design of an airplane was badly done and caused many deaths and a simple tweak of the shape of the knob made it so there was no more error or plane crashes due to bad design.  Tools created by man have to keep the user in mind at all times, that is why the laptop made by GRID worked so well.  There was a specific goal and it was tailored to a specific target group and when it was created that user group supported the investment that the company had spent and they saw a return with the popularity and success of the product that they said couldn’t be made.  The laptop had in many aspects, though I’m sure there are things that have improved over time, really been designed in a manner that put the users first, heck the user had the idea in the first place and that is the way every product should start.  IF I were this man and I needed this device what would I need it to do?  and how would it need to cope?

Can you think of something you need in your industry?

In regards to business social media is more like a business journal.  Blogs at this point are required to show you are keeping up with the industry… now of course you don’t have to blog every day in order to keep up, heck not even every week.. A solid professional blog can exist even if updates come once a month.  The fact is you are in the discussion and putting thought into what you have to contribute and more importantly reading the other points of view.   Too often do we look at the transmission side of the model.   sometimes you can get the benefit out of the reception of information to deepen your understanding of a particular issue.   Ibm aparently has a pretty open company to allow their people to blog about what ever they want…  This won’t work for everyone…  There are companies out there that consider this social media as a form of press and some companies can’t afford to have every line level employee being a press representative at the same time.  This could damage the companies reputation if the wrong things were said… even if it were as simple as complaining about the job.

 Social media is a powerful tool, and employees can be extremely credible and influential when they voice their opinion, but just because they can does it mean it should be encouraged?

What makes it ok and how do you determine that?

 What if the employee says something completely positive and heck even stocks rise because of that, yet it was still against policy and a misrepresentation or even accurate but wasn’t supposed to be said by that employee.  Blogging is cool… but are we letting it get out of control?

What if someone simply says the wrong thing in second life, or maybe I tell somebody about where I work while playing a video game with voice chat like gears of war…  is that a social media too? 

When you blog as a representative of a company what is to prevent that from taking over your identity?  Are we what we blog?

All that and more when we return from our sponsored commercial break.

 One of the things I tell people now a days is that you can’t just buy something on the internet.  You have to go into a store, talk to an employee and take a look at the quality of the object face-to-face.  It isn’t because online retailers aren’t trust worthy it is because you don’t get the whole story online, and they know that.  The first of two readings didn’t really lend me any particular insights into the nature of trust and credibility… it was interesting to find that people generally lumped a wealth of information together with trusting the site but that is generally common sense and not exclusive to online.. if someone tells me something i want the why and how so i know I am not just getting their word.  The second reading i found interesting because it was evaluating an organization like medline… Medline is a subscription organization and requires payment of some form for you to access all the content and databases.  I have used it hundreds of times myself and assumed that no one would ever find something like that not to be credible because it is supposed to be controlled.

The source on something like that then therefore is always controlled…  but the fact that someone could feasibly publish to websites like wikipedia claiming to be doctors or whatnot else is something that is cause for concern which is why i generally use wikipedia as a general knowledge resource and not for deep investigations.  when it comes to financial information and medical information unless it is possible symptoms when I am ill I will use a highly recognized source and one that is controlled if possible. Ie Forrestor for business or medline for research information.

I still don’t buy the television until I see it face to face.  Do you?

The thing is it doesn’t just apply to the character, it has to do with the entire story plot and world those characters exit in.  In analyzing or describing a real life situation such as an interview, the consistency of characters has to be there as well, you simply can’t hold an interview and describe a point of view or twist a narrative that doesn’t exist out of the data.

  Really what I learned is if there are rules to follow then obey them, if there aren’t any then make some for yourself.