UPA 2009 conference – Usability research and analysis

2 October 20091 June 2023

Leaner, more agile

This week, I’m attending a few days of training in agile software development, in an Innovel course titled Lean, Agile and Scrum for Project Managers and IT Leadership.

My first exposure to agile was in Desiree Sy‘s 2005 presentation, Strategy and Tactics for Agile Design: A design case study, to the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) annual conference in Montreal, Canada. It was a popular presentation then, and UPA-conference attendees continue to be interested in agile methods now. This year, at the UPA conference in Portland, USA, a roomful of usability analysts and user-experience practitioners discussed the challenges that agile methods present to their practice. One of the panellists told the room: “Agile is a response to the classic development problem: delivering the wrong product, too late.”

Continue reading “Leaner, more agile”

30 July 200930 July 2009

Ethics of interaction design: influencing user choices

The more choices people have, the more likely they’ll choose something utilitarian over something hedonistic.

ice-cream-cones

In an experiment by Aner Sela, Jonah Berger, and Wendy Liu, 20% of 121 participants chose low-fat ice cream when given a simple choice of two, but 37% chose low-fat ice cream when given a choice of ten. In this case, low-fat is seen as more utilitarian.

You’re probably not in ice-cream retail, so you may be interested to know that this finding also holds for hardware choices. When choosing one item from a selection of printers and MP3 players, the number of choices also influences what participants will choose. Given a simpler selection, two printers and two MP3 players, participants chose the MP3 player by about 3:1. However, just as an increase in ice-cream choices resulted in more utilitarian choices, so did an increase in the number of printers or MP3 players increased. When either the number of printers or the number of MP3 players increased to six (plus two of the other), the printers to MP3 players dropped 1:1. And, yes, in this experiment, the participants regarded printers as more utilitarian, and MP3 players as more hedonistic or fun.

printers-and-mp3-players

But it’s never that simple, because human brains can easily be manipulated.

The same researchers, in a further study, confirmed that people who earlier made a virtuous or selfless choice can more easily justify a subsequent hedonistic choice.

Offering users a virtuous choice If you ask visitors to an e-commerce web site to choose which charity should receive a portion of the site’s profits, the act of choosing between charity A and charity B probably increases the likelihood of a hedonistic subsequent choice.

You can combine all of this with other research findings. For example, when given a list of choices with the prices are in descending order (the most expensive item listed first), people are willing to consider spending 19% more, according to Cai Shun and Yunjie (Calvin) Xu.

Imagine the power of persuasion, or the influence, that an informed interaction designer can have on users, online customers, voters, and so on.

Clearly, there are ethical considerations. And the industry is starting to recognise this. For the first time this year, at the UPA 2009 conference in Portland, I saw conference presenters discussing ethics in interaction design. I’m sure the discussion is only beginning.

7 June 20098 June 2009

Researching usability research

I’m conducting ethnographic research into how usability analysts regard usability research.

How will I conduct this research?

How will I conduct this research? I’m conducting a form of community-based participatory research, so members of the community—the research subjects—will help me set the questions or lines of inquiry and will influence the research methods. This is appropriate since I’m researching people who research—people who likely have a greater awareness of research epistemology and the range of methods that can be used.

Want to participate?

If you have conducted any usability research at all, and you want to participate, please contact me by commenting. (Look for theimmediately below.) These comments are private. I’ll be at the 2009 UPA conference in Portland this week, June 8-12, if you want to meet in person.

Replies so far: 3. I have slots for only 8 more.