In person experiments

You can get the feedback, see the errors by yourself and overall have better engagement with your participant.

Before study lay out the scope and clear goals what do you want to know about your design. - It´s ok to have narrow scope, you dont need to test the large design at once.

Think about the testing environment - if this would be used in a crowded place, test it there; if it would be used in a quiet place, you need to test there.

How many people?

Come up with scenarios that users could really relate to.

Come up with concrete tasks.

Its necessary that you give the same tasks and the same input to all participants - this gives you the comparison moment.

You are testing the site not the user!

Experimental details

• Order of the tasks
• Training before the test (depends on whether the real users afterwards will get any training or not)
• What will you do when the user does not finish a task.
• Pilot the study - try it out before you are going to use it on the real participants.

Think out aloud method

Ask users to talk while performing tasks

• tell us what they are thinking
• tell us what they are trying to do
• tell us questions that arise as they work
• tell us things they read

Promt participants during the session to continue thinking aloud. They can easily forget it because it is not natural for them.

Designing Experiments

Independent variables - variables that the experimenter can manipulate before the experiment

Dependent variables - variables that the experimenter measures in the experiment.

Internal validity (kehtivus) - if i would fun the same test again would you see the same result

External validity - does it apply to only specific group or the whole world?


You have to use fair comparisons. You cant compare apples to oranges. The IPhone keypad example.


Vacuum cleaner example

Manipulation: vacuum cleaner
Measures: cleanliness, speed

Between subjects design - half of the participants use one vacuum cleaner the other half the other one.
Its hard to say if one vacuum cleaner is better then the other one. Maybe the ones we assigned to one vacuum cleaner are just better cleaners?
Worry about individual differences.

Within subjects design - everyone uses both interfaces.
Worry about ordering effects - in which order the participants use the different vacuum cleaner.
Half of your participants could test one vacuum cleaner first end the second afterwards and the second half of the group could do it in vice verse order. Its also good to vary the tasks environments. 



Three Major Strategies

1. Within-subjects: everyone tries all the options. Good when you’re not worried about learning/practice/exposure issues (that trying one version will ‘pollute’ the date from another version)
2. Between-participants: each person tries one. Requires more people, and more attention to fair assignment. Has the benefit that each participant is uncorrupted (at least by the study...)
3. Counterbalancing can help minimize variation in a between-subjects design

Visual design

Three goals for visual design

1. Guide - Convey structure, relative importance, relationships
2. Pace - Draw people in, help orient, provide hooks to dive deep
3. Message - Express meaning and style, breathe life into the content

Scott used cool trick. He showed 4 different webpages and blurred them. After the blurring you could still recognize the main elements of the webpages (like navigation bars, articles, interesting picture etc).

Three basic tools for visual design

1. Typography
2. Layout
3. Color

Typography

Gill Sans (1928)

Six typographic terms

1. Point size - is not letter size but the box around the letter
2. Leading
3. x-height - height of the lower case letter (letter x). - Typefaces with higher x-height are easier to read by lower point sizes and lover resolution screens. Lower x-height gives ore elegance to your text.
4. Ascenders and Dscenders - above and below x-height.
5. Weight (light, regular, bold)
6. Serifs

Numbers have small caps- lowcase too.

alexpoole.info - serif and sans serif typefaces - is one better to read?

Expectation plays an important role (example with the phrase "The Cat" or "Tae Cht").

Grids, grouping and alignment

When creating templates design for longest text block.
In general left-aligmet text is faster to skim.

Design in gray-scale at first. When this works add colors.

Its good to use color for elements for example that are clickable.

Reading and navigating
Informavores - go through a lot of information quickly and get what you need.

How do you know a page has poor scent?

• flailing
• low confidence - they dont know where to click
• back button - they are using it a lot of

If using icons use also words next to them to help to understand. Use trigger words, not words that are funny. You can also use longer terms .. like 7 words.

You can use also block navigation - speaking block navigation. Often more is better. 

People are more than happy to scroll if they think they will be rewarded.

http://hciwithscottklemmer.blogspot.com/2012/09/introduction-course-design-for.html