Relevant to You? : HCI

Innovation in Feedback Collection with Windows Vista

andyed — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 23:15:00 GMT

I've written about the challenges of capitalizing on at-scale user feedback both academically and on the search blog (busted post alas, edit when fixed). One way to listen to users is to open up your bug tracking system to the world, as done by Mozilla.org. While this results in a great deal of information about user needs and pain points, it results in hundreds (if not thousands) of duplicates scattered around the bug database and associated component hierarchy.

We do a lot of structured feedback data collection at Microsoft, in search and across the organization, within Microsoft and in our customer's environments. As I've worked in this space for search, some good folks over in the operating system team have taught me a few tricks. Their approach is now available to the world of Vista users at the Windows Vista Scenario Voting site.

Collecting feedback in this way has numerous advantages over plain textual feedback or structured bug reports:

A user doesn't have to be a programmer to put their feedback into the right place, maximizing it's chance of impact
Communicating key scenarios focuses users on goals the software producer is committed to supporting
Feedback is encouraged to target key parts of the process, speaking the user language and using recognition not recall. That is, rather than requiring the user to remember the arbitrary "Step 4 of the network setup wizard", a plain language set of steps is provided

That last point may need a bit of elaboration. Here's what the scenarios page lists for View a summary of the latest content from RSS feeds.

Visit http://channel9.msdn.com/
View the RSS feed available from the page
Subscribe to it.
After an RSS feed has been subscribed to, view a summary of the latest content using the mini Explorer (bar on the side of IE, found by clicking the Favorites icon.)

Feedback can then easily refer to specific steps that are causing the user's problems. I expect gathering user reactions to and wishes for software products to be a key strategy for product success in the coming years. Already, some hypothesize that the ease of development and feedback loops are a key determinant of the web's success.

Gestures in Vista for the Tablet PC

andyed — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 16:35:00 GMT

Windows Vista offers a operating system level implementation of gestures called Flicks especially tuned for pen usage on tablets. There's an important difference between this implementation and gesture implementations like Optimoz for firefox: there is no explicit trigger event. In Optimoz, we designed the recognizer to only trigger on a click, defaulting to right click but re-configurable to other mouse buttons or combinations of modifiers and mouse buttons.

Triggering flicks is a much harder problem than working with explicit user triggers. The display to the right shows the configuration options for tweaking how sloppily the gesture recognizer allows your flicks to be.

In almost all cases, trigger free invocation, if successful, is preferable. Notably, it enables use of gestures for scrolling, something that never worked especially well in Optimoz.

There's another notable difference that's less positive in comparison to Optimoz. Because Vista flicks operate at the OS level, they don't have the ability of in-application implementations to access the content in the application, unless support is specifically enabled. Given an in-browser implementation like Optimoz, we can do all sorts of interesting things in the DOM. The best example of this is the "open dragged over links in tabs" that allows a quick open of a serious of linked sites -- especially useful for blogrolls.

I was an early dogfooder of Flicks but haven't played with the whole experience. I plan to get Vista running on my new home tablet this weekend. Should be fun!

For more on flicks, try my Windows Vista macro for the query flicks though if you're really into it, the results of my tablet pc macro for the query flicks are more geeky. I haven't written much about macros and the other new bits at Live Search yet as I'm waiting for the team to introduce the new features on the live seach blog. In the meantime, trust me: this macro thing is turning out to be very cool.

Tagged tablet pc & windows vista: Technorati Profile.

Layered UI: Another Example in the Mac "Time Machine"

andyed — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 21:39:00 GMT

Nate put together a nice collage of some layered UI work we did back in the late 90s next to a recent ship from Apple:

The webgraphics UI allowed a user to see all 10 titles and hover in to see details. The time explorer uses a cleaner mapping of y-axis to time, but lacks the the visibility advantages of the wbg design.

Note: I'm pretty proud of the search stack UI, notably as it was a hidden frame AJAXy implementation for IE, fresh after the introduction of innerHTML.

My favorite MSDN blog

andyed — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 18:47:00 GMT

The office 12 Excel blog is one of my favorite MSDN blogs, along with Alex and the popular favorites. The latest Excel post delves into the design process with a focus on the incremental formalization of artifacts. I love that Microsoft's embrace of blogging allows us to offer insights into the design process in a way that's both interesting and positive for product awareness. Here's a very cool pic from the post:

While tablet mode is a bit under-used in the search world, hand drawn flow charts and UI mockups seem to drive most of my fellow PMs to swivel and risk losing the wacom $35 pen ocassionally.

The nature of browsing is changing - report from WWW'06

andyed — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 16:54:00 GMT

Some good folks at the University of Hamburg published an update to some long standing historical numbers in web usage research that reveal the way users are browsing the web has changed dramatically over the last few years. Here's the punchline:

Table 1: Comparison chart of three long-term studies

	Catledge & Pitkow³	Tauscher & Greenberg³	This Study
Time of study	1994	1995-1996	2004-2005
No. of users	107	23	25
Length (days)	21	35-42	52-195, ø=105
No. of visits	31,134	84,841	137,272
Recurrence rate	61%	58%	45.6%
Link	45.7%	43.4%	43.5%
Back	35.7%	31.7%	14.3%
Submit	-	4.4%	15.3%
New window	0.2%	0.8%	10.5%
Direct access	12.6%	13.2%	9.4%
Reload	4.3%	3.3%	1.7%
Forward	1.5%	0.8%	0.6%
Other	-	2.3%	4.8%

In particular, note the dramatic increase in new window usage (including tabs). Usage of the back button is decreased, probably directly related to new window/tabs as an alternate page view management strategy. This work also produced the sexiest image of the conference, a positional click map aggregated across all the users studied and all the pages they viewed.

The dense region at the lower right is the search engine next button. WWW has a long tradition of publishing the proceedings online. This year the papers are available in XHTML, here's the link for this work.

Opera captures another low hanging fruit in the browser space

andyed — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 16:43:00 GMT

The browser cache is a largely untapped treasure of personally relevant, high revisit probability content. Opera 9, as pointed out by Simon Willison, is the first browser to support offline browsing from the browser cache.

There's more that can be done with the cache... check out this project that enables a fly through the cache, selecting text and image excerpts, to allow interesting content creations and a more tangible way to engage with you browser history. (In general, user's report using browser history functions even less often than bookmarks).