More is not always better!

Microsoft Office has been accused of bloat for many years now, and Microsoft Word has been no exception to this criticism. To some extent, this is unavoidable: Word needs to be such a general-purpose product that you have to cram it full of features in order to get as many people to use it as possible. Of course, each of those users only needs a subset of those features. I use the Word Count feature when I’m writing a manuscript for a journal that has a strict word count, but most users have no need for it. For creative writers, a majority of the features in Word are useless - tables, graphs, even fonts - are unnecessary and clutter up the creative process.

Steven Poole has written an excellent blog post about his history with electronic writing and promotes a program called WriteRoom that does away with all the distractions and interruptions that Word and computers in general provide. Writing suddenly looks like paper again with WriteRoom:

This application would likely drive me crazy, as I often need PDFs and spreadsheets open as I write my scientific manuscripts. But for those that just need to write, the distraction-less interface of WriteRoom is likely as close as you can get to computerized perfection.

GUI Wars: Web Browser Find Functions: Safari vs. Firefox

This is a great example of using attention research in user interface design. Standard Find functions in programs like Microsoft Word pop up a dialog box. You type what you want to find, then it highlights the word. It’s hard to find that highlighted word a lot of the time.

Firefox improves the search process by making the search box a bar that is part of the main window. Research has shown that attention often is distributed across discrete objects, and switching between objects incurs a cost (Egly, Driver & Rafal, 1994). With this layout, you don’t need to shift your attention between objects (though the search bar is all the way at the bottom):

The highlighted word is not that hard to find, but depending on where the word is, it can be difficult to do. In this case, you don’t incur an attentional shift cost from the Find window to the main browser window, but you do have to engage in costly visual search for the highlight word! Problematic.

The new version of Safari, however, fixes this incredibly well. It has the search bar right at the top, but it dims the entire page that’s not your search term and pops up and highlights in a bright yellow your search term. Luminance, motion, and color uniqueness. Talk about attention capture (Yantis & Jonides, 1984)!:

Making the Find tool part of the main window: excellent. Using animation to induce motion, brightness, and color uniqueness so that you can easily find what you were searching for? Genius.

GUI Wars: Window switching: OS X vs. Vista

Most computer users have a lot of windows open at once - web browser, e-mail, Word, Excel, etc. etc. Switching between them could always be accomplished through a variety of methods, but the latest operating systems have tried to jazz that up. Since a year or two ago, Apple’s OS X has had a feature called Expose. You press a mouse button or function key, and all the windows shrink to give you a live preview of each one. Then, you click on the one you want:

This works nicely because it gives you a bird’s eye view of all your windows. You can navigate this screen with your mouse or with arrow keys, so you can stay mouse- or keyboard-consistent.

Doing this in Windows Vista, the newest version of Microsoft’s dominant operating system, looks like this:

Pressing Alt-Tab brings this up, and multiple presses of Tab cycle through all the windows. This is nice because you can flip through your stack of windows until you find the one you want. In fact, the feature is called Flip3D.

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So the question is: which one is better? To answer that, we need to delve into the visual search literature. Visual search is a task used over and over again in attention research. You’re looking for a target amongst many distractors. What’s the best strategy you can employ to find it? Well, it depends on the properties of the targets and distractors. If your target is highly salient (i.e., unique compared to all the other items), search can be fast when you’re presented with all of the items at once. This is known as parallel search, and it’s fast no matter how many items are on the screen (find the green square):

However, if your target isn’t salient, then you’re slower. You generally have to examine each item individually until you find your target. This is known as serial search (find the green square again):

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So back to the window switching interfaces in both operating systems. How often is the window you want salient? Not that often - it’s not like the window that you want is bright green and everything else is gray. But you do have expectations sometimes. “I’m looking for iTunes, so I expect the window to look a certain way.” So you may be able to perform parallel search and get your search done faster. Not always, but sometimes.

Think about how both interfaces work - which interface allows you to perform parallel search? Expose! Because Flip 3D does not present you with all targets at once, there is no way you can perform quicker parallel search. You must perform serial search each and every time you switch windows. Considering how much people multitask, this can add up to a meaningful amount of time quickly.

There is the issue of clutter, though. More clutter in a display means longer searches. Expose definitely leads to more clutter than Flip3D, so a search in Expose may take longer. This primarily occurs is you have many windows open. Flip3D is not as cluttered because it only presents you with one window at a time, which underestimates how many separate objects we can handle at a time.

All in all? When it comes to switching windows, OS X’s Expose has the science behind it. By allowing users to engage in parallel search for their window, multitasking can be done much more efficiently than Vista’s Flip3D.

HFES 2007 Annual Meeting: Interesting research!

There was some really interesting research at the HFES 2007 meeting in Baltimore that took place at the beginning of October. I actually commuted Monday-Thursday to Baltimore from Washington, D.C. - an hour trip each way. It was exhausting, so I don’t know how fully cognizant I was during a lot of the talks. But here is what I can remember that I found interesting:

• Meta-information: This was a panel discussion about displaying “information about information” - meta-information. This was especially interesting to me because the person I’ll be working with at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Dr. Susan Kirschenbaum, does a lot with how to display uncertainty information on submarines. All information about the environment comes in to submariners via computer. The information may not always be 100% accurate. If the computer is able to determine how it is uncertain about a reading or decision, how best to display that to the user?
• Visual displays: This was a great session because so much of the research relied on basic visual attention principles that I research. This was all applied - mostly towards aviation, though there was a talk on taxicab drivers. Factors like clutter, salience, and distraction were all mentioned as speakers discussed the next generation transportation displays.
• Neuroergonomics: This was another panel discussion led by George Mason’s own Dr. Raja Parasuraman. His goal is to use neuroscience research to inform the design and usability of complex systems. Human factors has been using behavioral data from cognition studies, and the next step is to use neuroimaging data to continue to inform design principles. The talks were heavily geared towards neuroscience, but it did have some great implications for movement perception, navigation, individual differences, and other important human factors topics.
• Augmented Cognition: Neuroergonomics is in contrast to a movement called Augmented Cognition, which is all about using real-time neuroimaging data (mostly EEG) to determine workload. It’s not a bad goal, but (A) I saw a lot of the Augmented Cognition talks, and they’re really far away from any reasonable implementation (B) Are drivers going to have to don their EEG helmet before driving? Just military? How convenient can you make it? (C) They’re still working on the real-time estimation of workload. The next question that they haven’t tackled is: then what? How do you change a system to adapt to that workload? That may be the hardest part.

Overall, it was a worthwhile conference for me to attend. I was glad to learn about the kinds of research that goes on in the human factors field, and what the “cutting-edge” is!

Ikea directions and nonverbal instructions

So I got a new mattress and bed frame recently. The bed frame came from - where else? - Ikea. Great looking stuff for cheap! Of course, I dragged it home, opened the box, and gasped, horrified at the instructions:

Admittedly, the first pages of the instructions were good about telling you what you were supposed to have. But there were no words. Only pictures.

At first, I thought “How could you not have words?” But then I quickly realized how visual of a task this it - putting the long piece of wood against the shorter piece, and using one of this type of screw to fasten them. The adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” definitely applies. Looking at the picture below, you kind of have an idea of what you’re supposed to do:

But imagine if you were given words instead of that picture! “Place a screw (Screw B) in holes 2, 3, 7, and 8 - two behind the headboard and one at the footboard. Then, insert a half-moon fastening device (Device A) into the hole. Using the hex wrench, tighten a nut (Nut B) onto each screw.”

I’d much rather have the picture. Along with the fact that Ikea can include these directions with their furniture worldwide and not have to deal with translation, it’s a smart move. It utilizes our imagery and our mental mapping skills. We’re visual creatures, and this plays to our strengths. Well done, Ikea. If only I could actually put my bed together!