A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words!

You definitively know the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words", don't you?

Low Fidelity vs. High Fidelity

Generally speaking, the saying is absolutely true! But why do some of our drawings, sketches, GUI mockups or software prototypes do cause such an amount of discussion ... afterwards? Very often it turns out, that some of the discussions don't focus on what the original author intended.

I would like to show you two examples to guide you towards what the main intention of this posting is ... Tell me, what of the following mockups has the higher fidelity?

Do you think the right one? My answer: Nope.

The right picture might look better, because the there has been more attention to visual detail. But when looking at the interaction quality of the dialog designs (taken from the printerpullpages effort by the way), the left drawing offers nearly equals the interaction quality, maybe it even uses a better approach of visualizing content (the print page preview).

Got the point? When looking at ideas, it doesn't work better if it just looks better. Moreover, strange guys like the UX people do even try to avoid keeping too much attention on visual design (in the first run). Mostly we use something called "wireframes" to present our ideas. Why? Because otherwise you might easily run into something called "taste war" :-)

Problem solved, and now?

Not really! Now it gets even more complicated. As you may have noticed, there is an effort to improve the StartCenter. The original idea was to apply the refreshed the branding, then changes have been added which address the handling. Well, many people already brainstormed and presented ideas for this and that ... but what's the problem?

Now, it is really easy to mix up the "visual design" and the "interaction design". What is your idea about? Terminology also unchecked yet? Then, you are in real trouble ;-) At least if it is just intended to show your "visual" ideas.

When I was at the CHI (see CHI 2010, Day Four) I attended the course "Developing an Effective Prototyping Strategy". The guys proposed to address such problems with an fidelity matrix which is supplied to each design artifact. To me, being the author of the pictures above, it would have been easy to rate the intended fidelity of the content. Have a look ...

Of course, the example pictures have been discussed in detail and the intended use has been described. But does everybody like reading that? I assume not :-)

So, if people would like to discuss the graphical content of something like the StartCenter, then simply add the matrix. For example, it might then be very unlikely that get "hit" by UX comments about unfinished interaction design or sub-optimal information design. So, it also deals with your comfort ;-)


Another thing the guys in the course proposed has been the expiration date. Simply speaking: things change and you cannot do anything against it. In the first months your ideas might be great ... but then technical constraints change and your design might look like the wrong approach. Take care of that. So here is how this might be avoided ...

Summary

At work, I found this "fidelity matrix" and "expiration date" approach work very well. So I propose to add at least the former item to each of our proposals - website design, software mockups, marketing stuff, ... And then, let's keep focus! Then, a picture is really worth a thousend words. And doesn't cause a thousand lines.

Cheers,
Christoph

PS: Is there anyone who can help me to work on a small template for our wiki? I don't have any clue ... Currently, I think of replacing the fidelity numbers by little stars or dots.

Update: I've added a SVG template to the OpenOffice.org User Experience Tools Page.

CHI 2010, Day Four

Finally, the last day of the conference CHI ... so what happened?

Conference Stuff

I attended the course "Developing an Effective Prototyping Strategy". As far as I understood, the term "prototyping" comprised everything from idea creation phase until the start of the implementation phase. Personally, I tend to think a bit different about that ... I prefer to distinguish between idea generation, requirements engineering, design proposals. The latter one may be prototyped via paper, computer graphics, ... whatever is available :-) And this is already an important information - use whatever is appropriate for a certain problem.

One of the trainers published the book "Effective Prototyping with Excel". I am not kidding; he presented astonishing results of famous web pages and their Microsoft Excel counterparts. However, they affirmed that they had been using Calc for that purpose, too.

Two nice things popped up in the course: First, they use fidelity matrixes and and mockup expiration dates. I think I'll cover that later until figuring out how to make use of them.

After that, I went to a few presentations and joined a discussion group ... day job related. Finally, the conference ended with the Closing Plenary and "Doing what’s right with robots: an ethical appraisal of robot application". Very interesting.

Open Source User Experience

Later, I had the chance to talk with Paula Bach (Pennsylvania State University, Microsoft; I mentioned her in the previous blog posts) and Alex Faarborg (Principal Designer on Firefox). We went out for dinner and I introduced them the project and our UX team a bit.

Alex asked some very good questions about our goals and the overall strategy ... but since we (whole OpenOffice.org Community) haven't commonly agreed on anything, it became (again!) clear that there are still major issues within the project. At least when it comes - he also asked questions about that - the kind engagement of our volunteering community members. However, we will stay in contact since they (and others) are interested in a general open-source usability / user experience / human-computer interaction / ... activity. Cool!

Sorry for the picture of us three. I mean, not for the picture itself, but for the low quality ... there is always a risk when asking strangers to help out ;-)

So, to sum up the nice guys I've met in the last few days:

• Máirín Duffy (interaction designer, RedHat)
• Paula Bach (open source researcher, also working for Microsoft)
• Roshanak Zilouchian (open source researcher)
• Alex Faaborg (principal designer, Firefox)

Cheerio

Today I will depart - unless the recent activities of the vulcano Eyjafjallajökull will again cause delays or cancellations in the European air traffic. But even if everything wents fine, please don't expect further messages to soon ... I'll cure a bad jet lag ;-)

Bye,
Christoph

PS: By the way, the next conference is the LinuxTag in Berlin. My proposal "Project Renaissance in the year 2010" has been accepted. Great, isn't it?

CHI 2010, Day Two

Wow, time is running ...

As already said, yesterday I attended the course "Storyboarding for designers and design researchers". It was just great. But storyboarding? Isn't that the thing used for making movies? Doesn't it look like comic strips? What is it for?

Basically, storyboarding is a tool to share and idea within an interdisciplinary team. Okay, we assume that if you want to build a good solution for a complex problem, then this requires people being experts in different areas (e.g. our I-Teams). But that doesn't necessarily mean that they understand each other - each domain has a different language, a different understanding of things. (Ever watched a discussion between a psychologist or cognitive scientists with a computer science guy? Sometimes like being in a cabaret show.)

One proposed solution is storyboarding: a graphical way to look at the problems of one or more persons. It may look similar to a comic strip which explains situations and how the new "thing" (whatever it will be) has (a good) impact on the life of the user. It is not about discussing the final product ... it is about to get an understanding what the problem is about. To be absolutely clear: It is not about drawing comics! There are important rules which make it work ... or completely fail. End of disclaimer :-)

In my day job, we started using storyboarding with the help of a colleague with great design skills. Working in another department, we can rarely ask him to help us ... but the solution is so simple: Act with a group of people, take pictures, and add the things you need by simply drawing them.

We have been told to work out a remote control for several people watching TV. I proposed to consider the place restaurant, because I am sometimes a bit annoyed by all the TVs showing up here (yesterday, "our" restaurant had about 15 TVs running .... grrr). Other people decided to go for a family home, the gym, public places, ... We planned our scene and acted accordingly. After the planning, the simple "doing" took not more than 30 minutes - including enhancing the scenes by objects and adding sub-titles etc.

Here is the result...

You see that the tables, the TV and some other items are simply drawn. After showing that to other people, nobody had any question with regard to understandability ... which means that our team (Thank you members!) did rather well. Here is a picture of the teams showing their results ...

So is this something for OpenOffice.org? Sometimes yes, sometimes not. I think, if we go for more "unknown" topics like advanced collaboration and use of documents in (more) daily life, this could be something to consider. It worked very well - and providea information visually instead of having a lot of detailed text (which is sometimes mandatory).

The rest of the day is less important to you, I think. Except that I have been able to talk with Paula Bach (from Microsoft) who was one of the organizers of the FLOSS usability workshop I've talked about yesterday. Unfortunately, we had only a few minutes, but it is really nice. She told me that she will give a talk with some references to OpenOffice.org. If possible, I'll try to attend ...

The rest of the evening was spent with my colleague ... in the cinema. The media-showcase, where people showed their new solutions in short films. Hey, and the conference team provided popcorn ... this is how learning new things should work all the time ;-)

When I went home, I've met another guy staying in the same hotel. Okay, another two hours of intensive and funny talk. He turned out to be a usability professional for software APIs. I am not kidding ... he is a researcher/consultant to make software programming as efficient as possible. Interesting ...

That's it for today! As usual, I have to hurry up :-)

Cheers,
Christoph