Human factors at the Navy; “The ones who win…”

I am slowly starting to get integrated into my work at the Navy. I am part of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center’s (NUWC) Combat Systems Division. NUWC is divided into many departments that are divided based on submarine systems. If you think of the submarine as an information processing unit, you have the input in the form of sonar and other sensors, the output of navigation and ordinance, and then you have the “brains” that integrates data and provides output solutions. This is what Combat Systems does.

The motto I see over and over is:

The ones who win get the right amount of the right information to the right people at the right time to help them make the right decision.

From a human factors standpoint, this is a critical mission. Information is needed in a real-time fashion; if a sonar display is 30 seconds old, it could be useless. Additionally, who needs to see what information? Commanding officers does not need the low-level details of how a target was identified. Instead, they need a big picture overview of the battlespace. Similarly, operators do not need the gritty numbers output by the sensors. The data needs to be interpreted for the optimal presentation to the operator. This is the domain of the Data Fusion group, which deals mostly in engineering, algorithms, and mathematics.

My boss put it most succinctly: engineers need to make sure bits flow to the screen. Psychologists need to make sure the information flows into the brain. From the sounds of things, I will help accomplish that task this summer by working with the group’s Applied Science Laboratory eyetracker.

It’s not the one I’m used to, but it’s much better for applied settings versus basic research. I am looking forward to it! More details as I get them.

Microsoft Word 2008 keyboard shortcut insanity

One of the rules of software design is that menus and commands should be as similar as possible between all applications. In OS X, Command-C means copy and Command-V means paste. This eases Transfer of Training from one application to another. Microsoft Word 2008 violates this principle, however. To initiate a search, the standard Command-F is used. However, to find the next instance of the search term, Command-G is traditionally used. This is not the case, unfortunately. It is possible to re-assign shortcuts to different commands. As blogger Pierre Igot found out, it is surprisingly and ridiculously difficult to do.

Snip:

“Easy,” you say. “Just go to the ‘Customize Keyboard’ dialog box, find the ‘Find Next’ command and assign command-G to it.” Right.

First of all, good luck finding “Find Next” in the list of commands in the “Customize Keyboard” dialog box. Due to Microsoft’s completely nonsensical way of naming Word’s internal commands, the “Find” command is actually listed as “EditFind,” but the “Find Next” command is not listed as “EditFindNext”:

That would be too easy. Instead, it is listed as… “RepeatFind”:

In the menus, the commands are listed as “Find” and “Find Next.” However, in Word’s internal naming, the command is “RepeatFind.” That’s not even transfer of training - that’s simple consistency, and it is not followed here.

Hit up the rest of the post and read about this exercise in frustration.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl: Text Input

Nintendo, being the child-friendly video game company, has tried its best to keep online play as safe as possible. Not only do users not have any real-time voice or text chat in-game, but each and every game requires its own game code. For example, to add a friend to Super Smash Bros. Brawl, users need to perform a multitude of steps that are quite confusing.

The worst part of the entire process, however, is adding friends to play with. To add a friend to play against, users need their 12-digit Brawl code, which they can only obtain outside of the Wii environment. Communicating this code requires writing it down over the phone, or waiting for an e-mail or text message. Anyone who remembers e-mail addresses like 72223.10@compuserve.com knows that randomly-assigned number codes are not easy to pass around. Users simply don’t have the memory for that many numbers, and the sending or receiving of that long number can get easily garbled.

What is absolutely mind-boggling, however, is the way to enter an easy-to-recognize nickname for that person. Firstly, users are limited to only 5 characters with which to name that person - an arbitrary limit. Secondly, the typical expectation for text input is an on-screen keyboard to do the typing. This, after all, is the de facto method of entering text. Instead, users are presented with:

Anyone who has sent a text message with their cellular phone recognizes this: it’s T9. It’s a human factors nightmare even though it makes sense on a phone with only a limited number of buttons. In order to type an “H”, users need to click on the “GHI” button twice. To type an “S”, users click on “PQRS” four times. This is necessary on cell phones because you have a limited number of keys. On a television monitor, you have a LOT of space. Why not make a full-sized keyboard?

After all, this is supposed to be a family-friendly game, but when non-text messagers have to type in a simple nickname, they get confused by the keyboard? Ridiculous! Poor design, through and through.

The entire Nintendo online experience is not a pleasant one, and can be summed up from a snippet from this VGCats comic. Click here to see the rest of it, which is Not Work Safe, not PG, and not Child Friendly. But it is funny!

Understanding users and the digital TV transition

This isn’t a traditional Human Factors problem per se. It’s more of a sociological issue, but it involves people and technology, so I will write about it.

In February of 2009, the analog television signals that get sent over-the-air to people with rabbit ear antennas will be shut off. In their place will be digital signals that will require a new TV or a converter box to receive. Anyone with cable or satellite television will not be affected.

Who will be affected? Well, that’s the problem. Anyone who is getting their TV via old-fashioned rabbit ears will need to do something. The government needs to get information into the hands of these people. But what is the typical profile of someone who is still using rabbit ears? They may live in rural areas, are more likely to be older, and are probably not technologically savvy.

From an article in the Washington Post:

Many of the older TVs belong to seniors and low-income individuals — populations that are typically harder to reach to educate about technical change. Yet these groups are also the people who most rely on their TVs for critical information such as news reports and public-service alerts. In nursing homes and retirement communities, where many sets need antennas to pick up signals, TVs could flicker out.

This is a human factors problem in that the technology is in place, but many of the people who will be affected by the new technology are not ready. The focus now falls on understanding something about the users - that they are not technologically savvy. Ads on TV may work fairly well, but directing people to the Internet will not be a good idea. Apparently, Britain spent a lot of resources hiring people to go door-to-door to inform people of the transition. Not in the least bit high-tech, but likely to be very effective. A non-technocal solution to a problem caused by technology - neat.

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.