Archive for the ‘Usability’ Category

What are Twitter’s Problems?

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

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by Jim Bradford, MediCHI Consulting


Note: This is the second in a series of 3 twitter articles:

  • Twitter 1: What is Twitter good for?
  • Twitter 2: What are Twitter’s problems?
  • Twitter 3: How could Twitter be improved?

1.      What are Twitter’s problems?

I don’t know who invented the screwdriver but I can easily imagine his or her frustration. Here we have an elegantly simple tool for driving screws. The name says it all. There is no need for a user guide, or online help, or night courses at the local community college. You just buy a screwdriver and a bag of screws and you’re set!

Unfortunately the human race is endlessly inventive. We use screwdrivers to pry open paint cans, to depress those annoyingly recessed valves in pneumatic tires, and occasionally as a weapon during those regrettable domestic disputes that occur while trying to assemble Wal-Mart furniture.

Twitter was built to emulate the text messaging capability of mobile phones. However, over the past few years the Twitter user community has invented all kinds of new ways to use this simple tool. Unlike screwdrivers software systems can grow and evolve. I believe that the time has come for Twitter to do so. This section outlines a few of the major problems that are holding Twitter back.

“Flow By”: You may remember the famous opening scene of the first Star Wars trilogy that features a few lines of text scrolling off  into hyperspace. Imagine that the text was scrolling at twice the Star Wars speed. Imagine the tense concentration you would need to keep up. Now double the scrolling speed again and you will have produced an information processing task roughly equivalent to following the Twitter updates from a couple hundred people. The more people you follow the worse it gets. I call this the “flow by” problem. It is nearly impossible to keep up with the stream of consciousness postings of dozens of people–it simply flows by too quickly. This is of little consequence if the postings concern the dyspeptic ordeals of the family cat but it is a major deficiency if you are using Twitter to debate a political issue or monitor an evolving corporate crisis. Twitter needs to develop tools for keeping track of dialogs, multilogs, and focused discussion.

Dilution: Unless you are very selective in your choice of people to follow you are likely to receive a great deal of trivia about other people’s lives. I call this process, in which informative Tweets are buried in trivia, “dilution.” For example, I collected the following gems from one of my Twitter accounts during a 10 minute period on a Saturday afternoon:

Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it.
How to Download Music Off You Tube.
Do NOT Pay For White Teeth!
Florida looking good in their second pre-season game against Troy.
Hearing my brother & niece argue about her taking a bath.

When I recall that my primary interest is the design and evaluation of user interfaces for healthcare I.T., these Twitter gems start to look a lot like cubic zirconia.

Is My Targeted Audience Reading Me? If my purpose in sending short segments of text to perfect strangers is to communicate, then it is important that my followers read my Tweets and I read theirs. The “flow by” and “dilution” problems make this hard to do. It is impossible to know who has read a Tweet and fairly difficult to track the responses. This is where the Twitter “text message” model breaks down. Text messages are most often 1-to-1. Dialogs flow naturally out of 1-to-1 interactions. It would be easy to contrast the Twitter dynamic by saying it is many-to-many but it is actually worse than that. Your “many” (consisting of your followers) is not the same as my “many.” Human communication needs a social environment in which there is a reasonable expectation that all parties receive the messages that form the basis of human interaction. In this respect Twitter reminds me of one of those European art films in which  all the characters are talking and nobody is listening.

Hard to Hold a Serious Conversation: The fans of Twitter might argue that the service was never intended to be a discussion list. I’ll concede the point but even though microblogging wasn’t meant to serve as a discussion list its postings often create the desire to discuss. In Twitter there is no capacity to hold a sidebar discussion. I believe that within the Twitter community there is an unmet need for some clever amalgam of microblog + chat room + discussion list. It’s a safe prediction that in the highly entrepreneurial environment of social media, if Twitter doesn’t invent a way to combine microblogging and discussion then someone else will.

The Rise of Twam: Our capitalist economy finds its most uncouth expression in the phenomenon of Internet spam. At first examination it might seem that Twitter has a natural immunity to Twam (Twitter spam). Each user explicitly selects those accounts that he or she will “follow.” Unfortunately a social etiquette has evolved within the Twitter community that encourages you to follow those users who have opted to follow you. This reciprocity has opened the door to Twam. In the past year or so a substantial percentage of Tweets are created by software programs known as “bots” (“bot” is short for “robot”–a program that imitates the behavior of humans in chat environments such as the venerable IRC, “Internet Relay Chat”–one of the earliest social media systems). Within the Twitter community these bot-driven accounts are known as “zombies.” Recent studies have suggested that up to a quarter of all postings on Twitter comes from zombies ["Twitter Zombies: 24% of Tweets Created by Bots", http://mashable.com/2009/08/06/twitter-bots/ ]. So far the Twitter support team has been losing the intellectual arms race with the Twammers but rumblings within the community suggest that people are becoming more selective in choosing who they will “follow back.”

Nice to Meet You: For a service that is categorized as a “social media” Twitter is surprisingly bad at building relationships between people. For reasons outlined earlier in this article, it is hard to react and respond to specific postings and have others react and respond to yours. Of the several metaphors that can be used to describe the Tweeting experience one that emphasizes Twitter’s failures as a social medium is that it is like giving a speech to a group of people who are themselves in the process of giving speeches. Everyone is in the process of sending out “one to many” communications. The most frequent result is that people talk past each other and this is antithetic to forming meaningful (or even casual) relationships.

2.      Summary

In my examination of Twitter’s shortcomings I found 6 major deficiencies:

  • Flow By
  • Dilution
  • Cannot discover if messages have been read
  • Hard to hold a conversation
  • Twam
  • Poor at creating and building relationships

The next article in this series will offer some suggestions for improving Twitter (including a focus on some of the underlying user interface issues).

Posted in Twitter, Usability | 2 Comments »

Should we leave tweeting to the birds?

Monday, December 28th, 2009

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by Jim Bradford, MediCHI Consulting


Note: This is the first in a series of 3 twitter articles:

  • Twitter 1: What is Twitter good for?
  • Twitter 2: What are Twitter’s problems?
  • Twitter 3: How could Twitter be improved?

1.       Twitter Overview

If you have been living in a cave for a few years you may not have heard about the Twitter phenomenon. The service was developed in 2006 by Jack Dorsey. Twitter was inspired by cell phone text messaging which had already gained enormous popularity among teens. The idea was to send short message service (SMS) text messages via the Internet for free (a big win for the parents of text-addicted teens). Although there is no technical reason to adhere to the 140 character limit for text messages, Twitter limits message length to maintain the feel of texting. The original Twitter prototype was developed in about 2 weeks and from a usability perspective, it shows.

In the past 18 months Twitter use has grown explosively attracting approximately 1 million users who post about 3 million messages a day. The original teen users have largely been lost in a crowd of doctors, CEO’s, teachers and scientists. The key question “Is Twitter a passing fad (the digital equivalent of the pet rock) or a technology that is becoming a fixture of our technocivilization?” has yet to be answered.

2.      What is Twitter good for?

The original intent of the Twitter design was to create an online infrastructure to support teen texting. I left my teen years behind four decades ago but I imagine the great issues of teendom haven’t changed (boys, girls, who likes/dislikes who, and various answers to the perennial “Wazzup?”). As the user population has evolved so have the applications. In the recent contretemps following the Iranian presidential election, protesters used Twitter to keep the world informed of their struggle after the government ejected most professional journalists.

In my personal observation of Twitter traffic over the past two years (as well as several suggestions by Patricia Anderson at the University of Michigan) there are 8 areas in which Twitter has proved useful: social grooming (explained below), contact with the flock, news gathering, marketing, opinion sampling, topic-based research, crisis response, and ask-your-peers information gathering.

Social Grooming: Many higher primates (chimpanzees, gorillas, telemarketers) live in tribal groups. Group affiliation and status are maintained through grooming behavior in which one primate will pick parasites out of the fur of another tribal member. Since humans are embarrassingly short of fur our species has invented social chatter to take the place of primate grooming. This is close to the original intent of Twitter. The content of the messages is largely irrelevant – it is the contact and its acknowledgment that serve the essential social processes.

Contact with the Flock: Our political leaders (at all levels) tend to live busy lives. Nevertheless the average citizen has little contact with the people we elect. The sophisticated technology users on the Obama team began a quiet revolution in the way our leaders interact with their various flocks. Social networking sites have played a major role in this new outreach. A number of national figures (Senator McCain, Secretary Clinton and of course, the White House) have used Twitter to share a kind of public diary of their activities (Senator McCain’s postings are by far the most interesting–it has been fascinating to see how much minutiae a national leader must deal with). I suspect that Tweets between our leaders and their constituents tend to be one-directional because technology has yet to find a way to facilitate a meaningful dialog involving hundreds of thousands of people.

News Gathering: The news business has seen a lot of change in recent years. Cable news channels, the struggle of print media, the blurring line between entertainment and news, the politicization of news, the importance of news aggregators (such as the Drudge Report) and the rise of the blogging community have opened the door to all kinds of news gathering innovation. One of these is the use of “citizen reporters.” In a world of “sound bite news” Twitter is the perfect medium. Short, on-the-scene observations from ordinary people have proved a compelling supplement to professional reporting. In addition, more and more celebrities have begun to tweet. These 140 character glimpses into the lives of the rich, the beautiful and the famous are closely monitored by news organizations in the hope of being the first to report on breaking news.

Marketing: The vast and growing population of Twitter users is a very tempting target for marketers. It is very easy to subscribe to a user as a “follower.” Twitter etiquette encourages users to return the favor. This opens the door for the “follower account” to send unsuspecting users an endless stream of “Twam” (my term for Twitter spam). It is not clear whether Twamming generates much revenue. As a usability and medical systems consultant I aggregate news items of interest to my prospective clients and post them on my website. I then Twam my Twitter followers with the news item headline and the address of my website. The technique certainly drives up traffic to my site but I am not convinced that it is generating any useful business. The jury is still out.

Opinion Sampling: If you have a decent number of followers (at least 100) then you can usually post a question and get a useful answer. You must, of course, actually find the Tweets containing replies from a much larger flow of Tweets on other topics (Twitter provides a messaging capability but it is common for people to reply to questions with Tweets of their own). I have used Twitter to find new academic reference material for my research and to get quick, “straw vote” reactions to design ideas. It would be fairly easy to enhance Twitter to provide polling and sampling utilities. It is easy to imagine politicians soliciting feedback this way and news organizations using real time Twitter polls to engage with their audiences.

Topic-Based Research: Hashtags are used to tag Twitter postings as relevant to one or more topics. For example, in my postings on Electronic Medical Record systems I tag the post with #emr. Other Twitter users can search for recent posts on any given hashtag (a directory of hashtags can be found at: http://hashtags.org/). Twitter’s search function (currently found in the right margin of a Twitter screen) can be used to follow all posts containing a given hashtag. For example, searching on #emr will bring up all posts containing this tag displayed in chronological order. The list of postings can be used to find users with similar interests who can then be followed on Twitter. This is inarguably the most powerful way to network on Twitter. The network you create can serve as a powerful research resource. Remember that there is no rule against creating multiple Twitter identities. It is often useful to devote a particular identity to a specific interest.

Crisis Response: There are two kinds of crisis for which Twitter has proved useful. One is the “violent event” category (hurricanes, earthquakes, terrorist attacks). Even supposing that the technical infrastructure that supports Twitter (Internet servers, cell phone towers, etc.) remain intact, the kind of reporting possible through Twitter is more suited to news gathering than it is to coordinating relief efforts.

There is however, a different kind of crisis for which Twitter can be very useful. Poisoned peanuts, poisoned pet food, and products with manufacturing defects all represent crises to companies and  even entire industries. Twitter is the ultimate vox populi (voice of the people). Corporate crises tend to surface on Twitter long before they make the news. Major corporations should monitor hashtags associated with their name and the names of their products as a matter of routine.

Once a crisis response has been initiated Twitter can also offer a useful window on how the public is responding. Of course, Twitter is one tool out of many but it is one that risk management executives should take seriously.

Ask-Your-Peers Information Gathering: Once your list of followers is big enough Twitter is a pretty good resource for “neighbors chatting over the fence” interactions. My daughter has a dog that seems to have only a couple of functioning neurons. The intellectually challenged pooch has a thing for skunks. My daughter was at her wit’s end trying to deodorize her pet. I posted a quick question on Twitter and within a few moments I had lots of things to try (one of them even worked). As long as your questions are appropriate for  your follower demographics Twitter can serve as a kind of real time Wikipedia.

3.      Summary

In my examination of the ways that Twitter is used, I found 8 major areas of application:

  • Social Grooming
  • Contact with the Flock
  • News Gathering
  • Marketing
  • Opinion Sampling
  • Topic-Based Research
  • Crisis Response
  • Ask-Your-Peers Information Gathering

The list is surprisingly long and it is a tribute to human ingenuity. This is particularly true when we consider Twitter’s many limitations. These will be covered in my next article, “What are Twitter’s problems?”

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Posted in Twitter, Usability | 2 Comments »

Inhuman Factors–Producing Virtuoso Users

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

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by Jim Bradford, MediCHI Consulting

For many years universities have taught computer science students more than they ever wanted to know about Human Factors (Human Factors is the art and science of creating software that is intuitive and easy-to-use). Inevitably or in some cases, eventually, these students graduate and go to work for companies that create “feature driven” products in preference to “usability driven” products. Most computer science graduates have the knowledge they need to do good design work but they are rarely asked to apply this knowledge.

So, after a quarter century as a usability evangelist, I am throwing in the towel. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em as my grandfather used to say. In the next paragraph or two I am going to define a new discipline that I am calling “Inhuman Factors.” Inhuman Factors acknowledges that many products are complex, hard to understand, and never reach the point of being fully debugged. Inhuman Factors takes the view that difficult to use products will be the norm for the foreseeable future.

To illustrate the argument let’s pick on Microsoft for a moment. The Microsoft Office suite had humble beginnings. Their word processor was originally intended to replace the typewriter. Their presentation system (PowerPoint) was offered as a replacement for transparencies and overhead projectors. Their spreadsheet application was built to replace the bookkeeper’s humble ledger. In just a little over a decade these applications have grown to such monstrous feature-driven complexity that the company now oversees a certification process to identify those hardy souls who have actually managed to figure things out. Talk about making a virtue of necessity! This is the most brazen spin for bad design since Heinz claimed that their ketchup was hard to pour because it was “rich.”

One of the classic signs of a poorly designed user interface is a wide disparity between experts (power users) and the rest of the user population. Many years ago I worked in the R&D division of a large telecommunications company (now bankrupt – not my fault). I was part of a department that developed a very complicated in-house computer aided design tool. We did an after-the-fact usability assessment for this system and discovered that the most productive user was nearly 20 times as productive as the least productive user (a 2,000% difference – the least productive user took nearly a month to do what the most productive user managed in a day).

This is where Inhuman Factors comes in. Through a process of task and workflow analysis, through the development of meaningful cognitive models, and through the creation of useful exemplars, Inhuman Factors will do formally what that high performing user did intuitively. Inhuman Factors will deploy many of the same tools as traditional Human Factors but with a contrarian goal – the creation of virtuoso users who can take existing software applications to the heights of productivity that the sales force originally promised.

Please check back in the coming months as I elaborate on the theme of Inhuman Factors. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

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Posted in General Human Factors, Interface Design, Usability | No Comments »

What Is Usability and How to Recognize It

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

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by Jim Bradford, MediCHI Consulting

This article was originally published on the prominent healthcare blog, HIStalk

From time to time when I use a new application I seem to develop a kind of Tourette’s Syndrome characterized by teeth grinding, fist clenching, and dark mutterings. As I struggle through yet another badly designed, user-unfriendly system, I find myself wishing fervently that Bill Gates had finished college.

Technically, the user friendliness of a system is known as “usability.” There is an entire academic discipline (variously called “Human Factors” or “Ergonomics”) that is devoted to the study of usability. But if you don’t happen to have a Ph.D. in Ergonomics how do you recognize a well designed, highly usable system?

Mental Models and the Psychology of Geeks

The human brain constantly monitors the environment and creates models about it. This allows us to think about our environment and make predictions about what will happen next. We carry over this natural tendency to model things into our interaction with computers.

Not all models are created equal however. I have a friend who believes that if you set a thermostat as high as it will go, it will warm up the house faster. It is not an unreasonable model-it just doesn’t happen to be right.

The best system designers work hard to give you many clues about how a system works. This allows your brain to make a good model that produces accurate predictions about system behavior. When you encounter such a system you begin to feel that the system is natural, intuitive and easy to use.

Unfortunately geek psychology doesn’t often lead to this kind of design process. In 1971 Gerald Weinberg published his (now classic) book, The Psychology of Computer Programming. To boil a long tome down to its essence, the kind of person attracted to computer programming is frequently the type of person the media would characterize as a “troubled loner.”  Unfortunately the design of usable systems requires a well developed ability to understand how people think, feel and react when confronted with a complex system. As a rule, troubled loners are not good at this.

As a consequence, human factors experts are often drawn from the “touchy feely” disciplines (i.e., anything other than engineering or computer science). They are often brought in to fix computer systems that are so horribly hard to use that almost no one can make them work. This strategy is akin to bringing in a doctor only after the patient has died. The usability specialist does what he or she can but the result is usually a system that has evolved from being impossible to use to the point where it is merely frustrating to use.

The traditional approach to developing computer software (design-code-fix) is pretty well entrenched. Thirty years of preaching from academia has not noticeably improved the usability of computer systems. The key to usability, I believe, is an informed and demanding consumer. This is rooted in a fundamental property of a free market economy-if people stop buying poorly designed products, companies will eventually stop making them.

The Informed Consumer-How to Recognize Usability

Affordance: This design principle dictates that the appearance of things should provide a strong hint about how they are used. A hammer looks like it would be good for driving nails. A screw driver suggests how screws should be managed. An espresso machine, .. well . . not so much. Hammers and screw drivers have good affordance and espresso machines have poor affordance. When you look at the user interface of a new piece of software, do the commands, buttons, menus and other gizmos give you a good idea of how to use the system? If they don’t, it’s strike one against the designer.

Prescriptive Feedback: When using complex systems people will make mistakes and this provides the acid test for usability. Have you ever encountered an error message that says something like, “Illegal command or filename”? Good grief! Which is it, the command I just used or the file I just named? What law did I break? What makes a command illegal? Why can’t I call a file anything I want?

Can you imagine if other products were designed like software? Can you imagine a dashboard trouble indicator saying, “Illegal battery voltage or engine temperature”? If software doesn’t help you fix mistakes then it is strike two against the designer.

Task Fit: Software is a tool. Some software is a tool for creating documents, other software helps manage your finances and still other software exists purely to entertain you. Well designed software should focus on doing a small number of distinct tasks (a half dozen at most) and it should be obvious how the controls of the user interface help you do each task. Unfortunately many software companies prefer a “one size fits all” approach to development and end up creating a “one size fits nobody” product. If it’s not obvious how a software application’s capabilities relate to the task you have in mind, then it is strike three against the designer.

The Bottom Line

In recent years the nature of our daily lives has changed to such an extent that many of us spend the majority of our working and private lives sitting at a keyboard. Usability has become an important determiner of the quality of life for citizens of the twenty-first century. If the software you use is not intuitive, if it is not helpful, and if it doesn’t fit the tasks you want to do then walk away .. just walk away.

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Posted in General Human Factors, Usability | 3 Comments »