Alleviating Office feature bloat with text-based search

A common complaint about Microsoft Office is how many features and commands it has. The new “ribbon interface” introduced in Microsoft Office 2007 was designed to help users find their desired command more easily. A prototype feature that was recently shown off let the user type in their intention. It almost works like the good-old command line of DOS or Unix, but with much more flexibility.

This is a keyboard analog of the “virtual intelligence” that would be an ideal interface. Instead of pointing and clicking, many users would like to talk to their computers in a (more or less) natural language and have the computer understand. The command lines of DOS or UNIX are rigid in their syntax, which did not correspond to natural language at all. Being able to type “Insert a picture” in Microsoft Word is much more natural. For that matter, there are many search engines striving to accurately reply to a request like “Give me census data for Illinois in 1997.”

While this will likely help users navigate the confusing Office interface, this screenshot shows just how many features there are. Type “insert” and get 205 command options? Page 1 of 23? This would take an incredibly long time to sort through this many options to find the desired one, which is not the best solution. Nonetheless, Search Commands is a decent first step, though.

Application Usability Webcomic

An amusing comic about usability at industry-leading companies like Google and Microsoft versus what most in-house company programmers put out for software (originally from http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2008/03/05/simplicity/):

Investing at a Glance: Morningstar Style Boxes

Morningstar is an investment analysis firm that is most famous for their in-depth analysis of mutual funds. What makes them relevant here is their fantastic data visualization tools. This company has determined that there are two important dimensions to understand a particular stock: how big the company is and how quickly it’s likely to grow. They’ve taken these two axes and created a nine-square box that has these two dimensions along the x and y axis. It is a useful conceptualization, and they are consistent in using it all across their site.

For example, for each mutual fund they analyze (mutual funds own a bunch of stocks, then you buy a piece of the fund), they can use this box. Glancing at this box immediately tells you what kind of companies you are buying. One key to investing is diversification, so you want to own companies in all the different boxes. Here, you can see where the fund sits on average and also where the majority of stocks fall:

Additionally, they use this style box to visualize market performance at any given time. The Dow Jones Industrial Average that most people follow is made up of 30 stocks, and the gains or losses of each get averaged, and that averaged is what is reported. However, the stock market is not just those 30 companies. Morningstar performs these averages for companies that fall in each of the nine boxes throughout the day and displays them and an indication of market performance. At a glance, you can see whether the entire market is doing well or if just a few areas are bringing up the average:

OK, so what does this have to do with cognition? Excellent visualizations lead to immediate information. Once you understand the axes and boxes, you can get an immediate sense of how the market is doing, what kind of mutual fund you are buying, or a variety of other information. You can even see information displayed through time.

As a final an decidedly older example of data visualization is Charles Joseph Minard’s 1861 thematic map of Napoleon’s march on Moscow. You don’t even need to be able to read the text to understand the graph. The leftmost point is the start of end of Napoleon’s March. The rightmost point is Moscow. The width of the thick line is the number of men he had in his army. Watching that number dwindle as he marches to Moscow and back is astounding. A line graph would have conveyed this information over time as well, but the extra dimension of the data points corresponding to geographic location adds an extra impact and presents additional information that can be taken in with a single glance. It’s a classic in the field and worthy of study.

Numbers are difficult for our brains to intuitively grasp; this is why data needs to be displayed in a chart or graph. When that graph is consistent and is easily readable, an amazing amount of information can be gleaned in a very short amount of time. This field of the psychology of Data Visualization/Graph Comprehension is relatively new, but absolutely Human Factors.

Halo 3: The Science of Fun

This story was originally published in Wired last August, but it’s still incredibly relevant to how Human Factors is finding its way everywhere. The author profiles employees at Bungie studios (which produces the wildly popular Halo games for the PC and XBox 360) that explore User Experience. These people examine how players play a game and determine whether their experience is fun or not. How do you define fun?

“Is the game fun?” whispers Pagulayan, a compact Filipino man with a long goatee and architect-chic glasses, as we watch the player in the adjacent room. “Do people enjoy it, do they get a sense of speed and purpose?” To answer these questions, Pagulayan runs a testing lab for Bungie that looks more like a psychological research institute than a game studio. The room we’re monitoring is wired with video cameras that Pagulayan can swivel around to record the player’s expressions or see which buttons they’re pressing on the controller. Every moment of onscreen action is being digitally recorded.Midway through the first level, his test subject stumbles into an area cluttered with boxes, where aliens — chattering little Grunts and howling, towering Brutes — quickly surround her. She’s butchered in about 15 seconds. She keeps plowing back into the same battle but gets killed over and over again.

Continually getting killed in 15 seconds is not fun. “Oh sure,” you may say, “that’s common sense! Obviously that’s not fun!” But how many level designers will realize that? How will they know it takes exactly 15 seconds for the common, inexperienced player? The designer may have considered it especially challenging, not realizing the full implications of putting all those enemies right there.User Experience is more than just applying basic cognitive principles of memory, perception, and decision making to game design. It’s more subjective than that (but that’s not a bad thing!). It’s about bringing in users and videotaping them, asking them questions, and maybe tracking their eyes. It’s like Quality Assurance testing, but instead of looking for software bugs, you’re looking for usability bugs. This is likely easier in linear games like Halo and more challenging in open-ended games like The Sims. But it must be done to ensure that gamers are getting a good experience - essentially, that they are having fun.

Link to the article: http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/15-09/ff_halo?currentPage=all (PDF)

Also, my friend and fellow graduate student, Carl Smith, is very much into the User Experience of games. He has a blog that discusses these issues at his blog, aptly named Evaluating Design.

Design that supports humanity

Innovate or Die is a Google sponsored competition for aspiring young designers to come up with a design to build a pedal powered machine that has environmental impact. The following YouTube video is of the wining design:

The design is simply fantastic, and while it doesn’t have much to do with the cognitive part of human factors, it shows how a bit of cleverness can harness otherwise unused energy. This kind of clever design is not just for the third-world, either, but also for the first world. MIT researchers have come up with a way to use the power generated by people’s footsteps to provide power to heavily trafficked places, like train stations:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0926/p14s02-stgn.html