In the former journal, I have evaluated kiosk information system of the video displays within the “Life and Times of Washington State” exhibit at the Burke Museum. The user group as I observed is casual weekend visitors, more specifically adults with children. My assumption is that the visitors will have no more than general knowledge about natural history. The challenge for an information system will be to encourage the interaction of parents and children. Also, it must present information in such a way that both children and adults are engaged. According to Nielsen’s Ten Usability Heuristics, I would like to use a heuristic study of the existing TV monitor system in an attempt to evaluate its effectiveness at achieving these goals.

Here are10 heuristics for this information system I developed with my friends, who came to the Burke Museum with me. Additionally, we set the severity ratings scale by one to five points (showed in Table 1). Because of the limited people, we just listed the problems we observed and rated it based on the agreement.

Table 1   Heuristics Evaluation Form

The results of my evaluation are showed in Table 2. I think there are serious problems in mappings and metaphors while there is little or no problem in speaking users’ language and keeping systems consistency. What we need to improve most is to design the figure and flow of this system by using nature mapping method.

Table 2   Reason of evaluation results

Who is Hiroshi Ishii?

Hiroshi Ishii is Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where he is head of the Tangible Media Group (TMG) and co-director of the Things That Think (TTT) consortium. Ishii’s research focuses upon the design of seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment. His group seeks to change the “painted bits” of GUIs to “tangible bits” by giving physical form to digital information. [1]

What is Tangible Media Group (TMG)?

The motivation for the TMG is that our ancestors developed in the past a range of specialized physical artifacts with different functionality, for instance to measure the passage of time, to predict the movement of planets or to compute. But many of these artifacts disappeared and were replaced by the most common of devices: the Personal Computer (PC). In consequence, the Human Computer Interaction is nowadays limited to the use of a screen (desk-mounted, head-mounted, hand-held, etc.), a mouse and a keyboard. The Tangible Media Group wants to reject this traditional way of HCI and wants to use real physical objects for representation and control of digital information instead. (Figure 1)

Figure 1

What are the conceptions related to “Tangible Bits”?

To achieve the goals of augmenting the real physical world by coupling digital information to everyday things, Hiroshi Ishii worked out three key concepts: “interactive surfaces”, “coupling bits and atoms” and “ambient media”. The concept “interactive surfaces” suggests a transformation of each surface (walls, ceilings, doors, desktops) into an active interface between physical and virtual world. The concept “coupling bits and atoms” stands for the seamless coupling of everyday objects (card, books, and toys) with digital information. The concept “ambient media” implies the use of sound, light, air flow, water movement for background interfaces at the periphery of human perception[2].

What are the Applications?

Tangible User Interfaces can be applied in many domains. Two of the most important domains are “information storage, retrieval and manipulation” and “information visualization”. Furthermore, there are a lot of other application domains for tangible user interfaces like “modeling and simulation”, “system management, configuration and control” etc.

The Tangible Media Group developed several research prototypes, for example metaDESK (Figure 2), transBOARD and ambientROOM (Figure 3)².

The metaDESK explores the concepts “interactive surfaces” and “coupling bits and atoms”. In a tangible user interface, windows are represented by lenses. There exist two sorts of lenses, active and passive ones. Active lenses are arm-mounted flat-panel displays, passive lenses are optically transparent. In addition to that, there are some instruments, which can be used on the surface of the desk. All these objects are sensed by a set of optical, mechanical and electromagnetic field sensors

The motivation for ambientROOM is about brain’s ability of getting information through two communication channels. In day-to-day interaction people obtain information in two ways: for instance, when somebody has a talk in a seminar, the other persons in the seminar listen to him and focus on him. But besides this primary information they also get information from ambient sources, for example what the weather is outside. They don’t have to concentrate on the weather and look all the time out of the window. Ambient sources like air flow or light are perceived and processed through background channels by our brain and indicate, in this example, what the weather is. But if the light conditions suddenly change, we notice it.

From the user’s point of view, the transBOARD looks like an ordinary whiteboard. But it allows distributed users to view both real-time and recorded drawing processes over the internet. The active surface of the whiteboard serves as a one-way filter for absorbing information from the real world. To provide this functionality, the transBOARD supports the use of hyperCARDs. These cards are barcode-tagged paper cards and serve as containers of “digital strokes” ².

Figure 2

Figure 3

[1] Hiroshi Ishii. [Internet]. : The Media Lab.; c2003 [cited . ]. Available from http://web.media.mit.edu/~ishii/

For more examples and comprehensive discussion of CBE/CSE formats, see http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/publications/citing_internet.cfm

[2] Topic: Tangible Media Group. [Internet]. : Christian Schmitz ; c2003 [cited . ]. Available from http://w5.cs.uni-sb.de/~butz/teaching/ie-ss03/papers/TangibleMediaGroup/TMG.htm

For more examples and comprehensive discussion of CBE/CSE formats, see http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/publications/citing_internet.cfm

In John Maeda’s book, it uses iPod menu example to illustrate the second law of simplicity — “Organize”. Apple iPod separated the four buttons surrounding the jog dial into a discrete row of buttons first (See Pic 1) and then integrated them into a single seamless control (See Pic 2) later. Now, let’s look at the menu system of Zune (See Pic 3). It is consisted of two separated buttons and one circle jog dial, which looks very similar with the second version of iPod menu.

Why don’t Zune integrate the “Play” and “Menu (Go Back)” into the circle control (like iPod)? I played Zune for a while and figured out the reason. The top and down position in Zune is used to control the volume so that “Play” and “Menu” buttons have to be separated. Then, how can we control the volume in iPod? It’s very simple: move your thumb lightly around the Click Wheel, which is the biggest feature to represent “iPod” and the reason that people believe iPod is “Cool”.

These two ways to control the volume in iPod and Zune reminded me two conceptions: “Continuous” and “Discrete”. Sometimes, people prefer “discrete” things such as the sequence of the songs, “stop/play” and “back/forward” options. But sometimes, people would like to choose “Continuous” stuff like image size, volume and progress. Also, the choice of these two conceptions is related to user’s purpose.

My friend told me she preferred to use Zune than iPod when she was listening to French textbook. The reason is that she always needs to draw back to one particular sentence while in iPod, it is not easy to go back to the particular position by moving thumb around. However, in Zune, you can draw back by holding the back button for several second, which is easier to stop at the particular position. In this case, “continuous” conception doesn’t work very well.

What’s more, what iPod sacrificed for its cool wheel is two-dimensional menu. In iPod, when you move your figure around, you only have two directions: back and forward. Thus, the menu in iPod has to be one dimensional. In Zune (also including many other mp3s), four directions are available: top, down, back and forwards. In that way, Microsoft traditional two-dimensional menu file could be realized.

Form menu design perspective, I cannot say iPod is much better than Zune. But as we all know, iPod is much more popular than Zune (Google search for “iPod” is 76,000,000 records while for “Zune” is 24,300,000 records). Why? Any one who have ever used iPod can tell you a lot of reasons: smaller size, less weight, better shell, more software support, cool style…

At the end, I would like to use storytelling way to explain iPod’s popularity. One Microsoft employee wanted to buy an mp4 to his son: “How about Zune?”

His son answered: “But I wanna iPod”

“Why? You never tried Zune before.”

“Because I wanna get the same one as my classmates have.”

The biggest feature for Zune is Wi-Fi sharing, which is designed based on the assumption that the primary user for Zune is not just one person, but a group of people.

The object I chose for this assignment is the information systems (kiosk) within the “Life and Times of Washington State” exhibit at the Burke Museum. The exhibit features displays of specimens and information that illustrate the natural history of Washington State from ancient prehistory until the present day.

The kiosks contain a video and stamp station. They provide the visitor with information about the evolution of Washington’s geology and biology, which is illustrated through exhibits of fossils, pictures, and plant and animal specimens.

When I saw this kiosk, the first thing came to my eye was the big screen. I thought this would introduce me some information about this exhibition, probably the historical information of Washington State. After interpreting the perception, I made an evaluation: “This information might be helpful to me.” Thus, I hoped to play this machine and listened to the introduction.

After I pushed the “Start” button, I expected the screen to play the video right now. However, the screen became black. It stopped several seconds and then sound came out. As what I thought, the video were introducing the historical background of Washington State. After one minute, I felt tired because the kiosk was too high to watch. Before I left, I hoped to stop it so that I began to look for the “Stop” button. Since there was only one button in kiosk, I pressed “Start” button again. This time, no feedback, the video was still playing.

“How can I stop it? I cannot see any button besides the ‘’Start’ one. It should be this button.” I was totally confused by the interface. At that time, I remembered that I could close my laptop by pushing and holding the power button for several second. It might be the same principle here. So I pushed and held the “Start” button for several second. However, it still didn’t work.

“It Did I miss any button?” I walked around the kiosk again. This time, I found the stamp function of the kiosk. There was a place that I could insert my card in and got a stamp related to Washington State history. But it seemed unrelated to the video. Although I thought the possibility of controlling the video from stamping button was very low, I still tried. As expected, the video was still playing.

Since I could not get any feedback from this kiosk any more, I decided to leave the video there. When I was ready to walk away, the video suddenly stopped. After the “Thank you” words, it showed “The video will last for five minutes. You cannot stop it in the middle” and then came out the sentence I saw at first “If you want to play the video, please press the ‘Start’ button.”

After seeing these words, I realized how stupid I was. But as a famous saying “There are no stupid users,” it is designers’ problem. I would like to evaluate this product from these four perspectives mentioned in our class: visibility, conceptual model, mapping and feedback.

1. Visibility.

I believe the biggest problem for this design is about visibility. If I saw the words on the screen at first, I would not spend several minutes to try to stop the video. If there were a label besides the button or stapled on the kiosk, I would not miss them.

2. Conceptual Model.

In this example, I had two conceptual models related to stop function of the video. One is the usual “stop/play” model (like DVD) and the other is my laptop stop model (push and hold for several minutes). None of them worked.

3. Mapping.

This video part of this kiosk did have separated design style form stamp machine. The reason I still tried stamp button was that conceptual model let me trust there must be button to stop the video.

4. Feedback

There was no error message in this example, even when I pushed wrong button. Since the screen did not provide me any feedback, I made several mistakes continuously.

Above all, the design of current kiosk is not good. What I would like to suggest is either to add stop function according to the normal conceptual model or to put the label stating no stop function there. If possible, error message function will also be much more helpful.

Paul M. Fitts was a psychologist at Ohio State University (later at the University of Michigan). He developed a model of human movement, Fitts’s law, which went on to become one of the most highly successful and well studied mathematical models of human motion[i].

Fitts’ law is a robust model of human psychomotor behavior developed in 1954. The model is based on time and distance. It enables the prediction of human movement and human motion based on rapid, aimed movement, not drawing or writing.

Fitts discovered that movement time was a logarithmic function of distance when target size was held constant, and that movement time was also a logarithmic function of target size when distance was held constant. Mathematically, Fitts’ law is stated as follows[ii]:

MT = a + b log2(2A/W)

where

· MT = movement time

· a,b = regression coefficients

· A = distance of movement from start to target center

· W = width of the target

This formula is used to model the act of pointing, both in the real world (e.g., with a hand or finger) and on computers (e.g., with a mouse). Fitts’s law is an unusually successful and well-studied model. There are hundreds of subsequent studies related to it in the human-computer interaction (HCI) literature, and quite possibly thousands of studies published in the larger psychomovement literature[iii]. Also, Fitts’s law has been applied to tasks where the user must position the mouse cursor over an on-screen target, such as a button or other widget. Fitts’s law can model both “point-and-click” and “drag-and-drop” actions.

Fitts’s law contributed a lot for pointing with the mouse, some consequences for user-interface design include: (1) Buttons and other widgets should be selected in GUIs should be a reasonable size; it is very difficult to click on small ones; (2) Edges and corners of the computer display (e.g. “Start” button in Windows XP) are particularly easy to acquire because the pointer remains at the screen edge regardless of how much further the mouse is moved, thus can be considered as having infinite width. (3) Popup menus can usually be opened faster than pull-down menus, since the user avoids travel; (4) Pie menu items typically are selected faster and have a lower error rate than linear menu items, for two reasons: because pie menu items are all the same, small distance from the centre of the menu; and because their wedge-shaped target areas (which usually extend to the edge of the screen) are very large³.

However, there are some restrictions during the application: (1) It applies only to movement in a single dimension and not to movement in two dimensions; (2) It describes simple motor response of the human hand, failing to account for software acceleration usually implemented for a mouse cursor; (3) It describes untrained movements, not movements that are executed after months or years of practice³.

Despite these limitations, Fitts’ Law was still one of the few hard, reliable human-computer interaction predictive models. Currently, I am doing the second round usability testing for WorldCat Search Product, which is used at the front page of UW library. I found a lot of problems related to GUI design in first round usability testing could be explained by Fitt’s law, especially for the size of controls and the type of menus. Although sometimes, it is hard to coordinate this with the actual functionality, it does provide some reference for designers.

[i] “Paul Fitts.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Fitts (2007)

[ii] “Fitts’ Law.” 1996. http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs5724/g1/ (n.d.).

[iii] “Fitts’s law.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts’_law (2007)

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