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Susan Weinschenk: Hi, I'm Susan Weinschenk, Chief of Technical Staff at Human Factors International and welcome to our live webcast today, our first one in 2008 presented by HFI's Usability Broadcast Network and I'm very happy to have with me here today my good friend and colleague, Dean Barker, Executive Director in the Midwest at HFI. Thanks for coming. Dean Barker: Thank you very much for having me. Susan Weinschenk: So our webcast today, the title is "What have we learned?" Have we learned something? Dean Barker: We have, yeah. Susan Weinschenk: (Laughs) And this is an interesting webcast, I think. It's a little different from some of our other formats. What we're going to do is we're going to take a look at some of my favorite research papers, I have to say "my" because you were telling me before we got started that some of these may be weren't your favorite papers but my favorite research papers that we have seen and looked at from the year 2007 through our "Putting Research into Practice" course and actually, I have to tell you that it's not just looking back because I snuck in there a few papers that haven't been in the course yet but likely to be in the upcoming 2008 version – the new version of the course that we have. So that's what our topic is today and we're going to take a look at each of these papers, discuss them maybe even argue them a little bit you know, in some places where Dean and I may not argue. Dean Barker: I think discuss... Susan Weinschenk: Discuss, okay, we wouldn't argue on camera. Dean Barker: No. We can do it off-camera. Susan Weinschenk: Or off-camera (Laughs). We're not going to argue on camera. Let me tell you a little bit actually about how we get these papers because you had asked that you know, just the other day. We have six papers that we are going to talk about today and you know, why do we pick those six and where do those six come from? So it's kind of an interesting story. It starts with Dr. Kath Straub, who you know, our Chief Scientist at HFI and one of the parts of Kath's job, as Chief Scientist is to comb through enormous amounts... Dean Barker: (Laughs) Susan Weinschenk: Of research papers and I think and I should get the updated numbers so this is a ball park but I think she goes through 1500 papers – one thousand and five hundred papers every year. Now she doesn't necessarily read those all in-depth. She picks them from a whole array of journals and conferences and journals in the field of Human-Computer Interaction but also in the field of Marketing and Software Engineering, I mean she's really combing through a huge selection of journals... Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: Looking for interesting new research. She takes that 1500 and starts to narrow them down and then starts feeding them usually to me because she wants an opinion and so I'll look at them quickly and decide whether we want to keep them in the mix for papers. These are papers we are going to use for webcasts, our classes, and our newsletters or just to inform our staff in general. And we're looking for – you know, why does a paper make it in and why does another paper not make it into our list? We're looking for a number of things. One is, we're looking for it to be sound in research which is actually harder than you might think. Dean Barker: Yeah and we'll talk about some of the issues with doing this kind of research and also maybe some of the – some of the particular commentary in regards to items that may have been missed or opportunities for additional research or additional analysis for some of these studies. Susan Weinschenk: Yeah and you'll find, as we go through that, that some of them are not perfect either, are they? Dean Barker: There's no such thing. No such thing as a perfect study. Susan Weinschenk: In terms of the research methodology but we are looking; we're hoping to find sound methodology in papers so that's one criterion. We're looking for things that are obviously of interest into our profession of usability and user experience. We're looking for sometimes just fun, different, new ideas, maybe an update. I'm always looking for things that maybe contradict some of what we have thought for a long time in the field. So you know some new research may show that our thinking is wrong, so a lot of different criteria that go into that. Also, it has to be understandable... (Laughs) Dean Barker: Sure. Susan Weinschenk: Which is not that easy, some of these papers are written in very you know those of you out there who read research papers in school, know that sometimes they can be very hard to read and understand. Dean Barker: Do you speak scientific journal? Susan Weinschenk: I do speak scientific journal, yes and then of course for the webcast here, I had to especially pick papers where you could discuss what was going in a few minutes. I mean some of the papers that I actually like – it will take like an entire hour... Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: To try and explain what they were studying and what they found. So I was trying, I was picking things that could be explained in a short amount of time. Dean Barker: Also in the larger set too and we talked about this yesterday when we were getting ready for this webcast, that in the "Putting Research into Practice" class as you said, there's a larger breadth in disciplines and domains that gets looked at and goes into that and the papers that we have today, I would say are really and sort of squarely in that core of human-computer interaction and user experience that ... Susan Weinschenk: Yeah, and sometimes in the course we'll go a little farther afield from here and I try to... Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: To keep it in, alright. So having said all that, let's start talking about some of the papers. Dean Barker: Alright. Susan Weinschenk: So the first one that we're going to talk about or first, here's the list of everything we are going to do and the six papers that I said. The first one that we're going to focus on is one on data gathering methods for children and the question is, are there different methods you should use when you're doing research with children? And I thought this paper was interesting. First of all, they reviewed the literature on differences between children and adults in responding to questions and surveys and you know when you start to think about it, of course it makes sense, right? Any of you who have children or talk to children, you know that talking to them and the responses they give is not exactly the same as talking to adults, well it depends on what they are asked. Dean Barker: Depends on what adults you are talking to. Susan Weinschenk: Well, what adults you are talking to right? (Laughter) Susan Weinschenk: But they were looking at things like, they bring up the point for instance, children tend to say "yes" no matter you ask them especially if they are a young child and they go "yes, yes" and it doesn't matter what you're asking them, they're always going to say "yes". Also, they often can't express themselves. They may feel a certain way but they have a hard time expressing that and you brought up something too... Dean Barker: Did I? (Laughter) Susan Weinschenk: We were talking yesterday about – I think it was something that you found in the paper about the kind of response they give depending on the status of the interviewer? Dean Barker: Yeah right, so we're talking about a child, especially a younger child is responding to a parent or a teenager – someone perhaps who is more familiar or closer to age even versus if they're responding to a policeman for example, that tends to shape. They try to say more to please and more to say what they think the authority figure is looking for. Susan Weinschenk: So the more authoritative figure they are, you might not be getting an honest response? Dean Barker: It biases their response, that's right. Susan Weinschenk: Okay. Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: So given these types of issues and there were others that they talked about in the paper, you know, what are you going to do if indeed you are trying to, let's say you've got a website that's geared to children and / or a product, right? A toy or product, an electronic product that's geared to children, you know they have all these new computers out you know, they're like little laptops and they're for learning, right? Dean Barker: Got a Leapster at home right now. (Laughs) Susan Weinschenk: And you want to get feedback from children and what do you do to make them more valid so here's what they came up with. First of all, they tested out this tool and I love the name of it. It's called the "Smileyometer" which I think is a great name. Dean Barker: Isn't it the Smiley-o-meter? Susan Weinschenk: I think it's the Smileyometer. Dean Barker: I don't know what they call it – the Smileyometer, okay. Susan Weinschenk: Do you want to call it Smiley-o-meter? Dean Barker: Whatever you want. I'm going to refer to it is fine. Susan Weinschenk: Smileyometer sounds like really scientific. Dean Barker: Smileyometer, you like that? Okay. Susan Weinschenk: Right, whatever, the Smiley-o-meter or the Smileyometer, now I'm going to say it your way. (Laughter) Susan Weinschenk: And what this is just a series of pictures as you can see on our slide here and he's drawing a little picture, are you drawing a smile face for me? Dean Barker: It's a smiley face. Susan Weinschenk: Smiley face. Also, we – you noted – you caught this one, we were looking at the scale of pictures which is "awful" is the sad face and it goes all the way up to... Dean Barker: To brilliant. Susan Weinschenk: To "brilliant" and your comment was? Dean Barker: Well I – it occurred to me to check who offered the study and it seems that they were British. Susan Weinschenk: So as it is "brilliant", if a U.S. researcher had done this, it would be the "top one" would be... Dean Barker: It would not be "brilliant". Susan Weinschenk: "Wonderful" or something but the word "brilliant" is used so that's what brilliant came from and so you show these pictures to them, right? And they pick which one they are feeling rather than trying to express how to say it. Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: And they found that that was very useful for measuring how the child is feeling about the experience that they just had. Dean Barker: Yeah, and I believe it's strictly pictograms too. Susan Weinschenk: Yeah, they don't have the words. Dean Barker: Even in the slide... Susan Weinschenk: We have the words there. Dean Barker: Right, right. Susan Weinschenk: But in what they were showing to the children, there are no words, it's just the pictures, yeah. Then they did comment that it's not that good for children under the age of 9 because the young children tended to always say everything was wonderful. Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: Which I thought was kind of funny – interesting to have predicted that and then they have another one called the "Fun Sorter" and the Fun – now there's no other way I can read that? Dean Barker: (Laughs) No other way of saying that. Susan Weinschenk: The Fun Sort-Er? Dean Barker: No. Susan Weinschenk: Okay, Fun Sorter. Well, that, they said was a good tool for having children rank items you know, what was the most fun to the least fun? And in the example here, these would be like different products or things that they had tried out and they would say "Oh, that one was the best and this one was the worst" and they would rank it. Almost like you know, card sorting in a way, right? Dean Barker: Yeah, absolutely. Susan Weinschenk: Because you decide which one is best? Dean Barker: That's right. Susan Weinschenk: And that – now one of the things too that we were talking about yesterday was – that we talked about in the paper was which of these is good to sue for subjective evaluation and which are good to use for more of you know, well kind of for actually showing the usability. Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: Remember we had that conversation? Dean Barker: Right, so we've got – so if we go to the next one... Susan Weinschenk: The next one, okay. Dean Barker: The "Again-Again". Susan Weinschenk: The "Again-Again" table. Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: It's where there are these different items, it would be the different products or different items or different parts of the website, you know? However you want to list that, and then the child would say whether they would want to do it again. Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: You know, a "yes", "no" or "maybe". Dean Barker: Right and so the whole idea with children is basically you are assessing how much fun... Susan Weinschenk: Right. Dean Barker: It is for them to interact with this product... Susan Weinschenk: That's the subjective part. Dean Barker: Right and in all of these instruments, the Fun Sorter, the Smileyometer... Susan Weinschenk: (Laughs) Dean Barker: The "Again-Again" table – these can all be used to assess fun but one of the things they state in the conclusion then is that they recommend the Fun Sorter – just look at this here "the Fun Sorter be used and reserved for usability." Susan Weinschenk: It is sort of ease of use. Dean Barker: For discerning ease of use... Susan Weinschenk: Rather than just "is it fun?" Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: We have like "is it fun, is it easy to use?" Dean Barker: Right and the point that they make is based on their study and based on their literature, it's very interesting that even very young children understand abstractly the different constructs between "fun" and "easy to use"... Susan Weinschenk: They understand ... Dean Barker: Even though there is a correlation of how much fun and the perceived ease of use. Dean Barker: There is a correlation but the children kind of understood that over here you're asking about whether it's fun and here you're asking if it is easy to use? Dean Barker: Yeah and they can separate that. Susan Weinschenk: Which I don't – which I don't think a lot of adults could do – that separation, right? Dean Barker: (Laughs) Susan Weinschenk: Okay, so – conclusions then that they came up with an well, these are I think, pretty obvious when you look at the list but I think what's useful from this is that they are concrete guidelines, right? Dean Barker: Yeah, right, right. Susan Weinschenk: And you know next time I go to do a study, I'm going to want this list in front of me as a reminder all the time. So keep everything short. Keep your tasks that you are doing and your study short. Children have a short attention span, yeas and some adults. Dean Barker: (Laughs) Susan Weinschenk: Pilot the language, they don't mean like the foreign language. The wording of how you speak – just make sure that the children understand what you speak and the terms that you are using. Provide assistance for children who don't read. You know children under the age of 7 or 8 aren't really going to be that good a reader. Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: Limit the amount of writing that the child has to do so provide the words for them that they pick if they are readers or let them draw something than having to write words. Use appropriate tools and methods, make it fun, expect the unexpected – like have a back-up plan when they do something that you don't expect them to do. Dean Barker: As they always do. Susan Weinschenk: As they always do. Don't take it too seriously meaning don't try and run statistics on this. This is more for trends and to get a feeling for what's fun and what's not and what's easy and what's not easy. And be nice to the children because – and I would think that would help with the authoritarian, right? Dean Barker: Yeah. Susan Weinschenk: Because if you're really like strict and serious then the children are going to start to react as though they are reacting to an authority figure, right? Dean Barker: Yeah and I like, as you said, I like the way they took their conclusions from the study and distilled them into a set of guidelines so I think out of all – all the papers at least that we're discussing today, they've done a pretty good job of taking the research and making it useful... Susan Weinschenk: Really practical. Dean Barker: In terms of moving forward in user-centered design. It's going to be a very practical outcome from that. I also think that these guidelines, certainly they are good, not only the context that they are talking about, in applying for user-centric design applying for children but also, a lot of good advice here for usable design and... Susan Weinschenk: Yeah actually we've heard all these things, right? Dean Barker: And universal design, right, exactly. Susan Weinschenk: I don't know "make it fun" though; we don't always make it fun. Dean Barker: We should. Susan Weinschenk: We should? You think people will come to do usability tests, it should be fun? Dean Barker: Toys, balloons, something like that... Susan Weinschenk: Yeah actually. Dean Barker: You do that, you do some of that. Susan Weinschenk: Yeah, I do that. (Laughs) Alright, let's move on to the next paper. The next one is trust factors in health websites and this is a set of researchers who actually did a couple of huge studies and did a number of different papers in the years 2006 and 2007 and I think they actually had like three different papers coming out to embody their findings because they did a lot of research. So we picked one of them for this and one of the things that I find really interesting in their paper is – is – I think that it was in their paper, the research that showed that 80% of all internet users have accessed and used ... Dean Barker: Of adults. Susan Weinschenk: Of adults... Dean Barker: Right, right. Susan Weinschenk: Have accessed and used health websites which is a huge number. Dean Barker: And that dates back – it was in their secondary research, that dates back to the fact that 2003 so I'd assume that it's the more accurate. Susan Weinschenk: I believe these guys have a later paper in which they checked again and updated by that number by the way. Dean Barker: Okay. Susan Weinschenk: I mean, I don't know if it's Sillence? How do you pronounce this researcher's name? I'm going to say Sillence. Smileyometer, Sillence! Dean Barker: (Laughs) Silence? Susan Weinschenk: I believe there's another paper in 2007 which they updated and it had the same or a little higher number. So a lot of people going to health websites and it's an interesting question about how do people react an interesting factors about trust because you know, it's your health and sometimes it's quite personal information. You know you're coming to a look at a health problem that you found or that someone has and so the question is you know, how much do people really trust the information that's at a health website? And they had a theory and they wanted to break this down and they had a stage theory saying that there are three different levels of engagement. That there is the first impression of the website and then there's later on, when people have a first impression and they are looking at the content and even later on, are they willing to do a long-term engagement? For instance, are they willing to register or put personal information at the website, you know, like to get you know some of us have a survey if you fill it out, it will come back and tell you how healthy you are or what your risk factors are. Dean Barker: And I thought it was interesting too the way they discussed that ultimate stage and their model too was as a relationship from the title of it when they get the graphical stage model, they talk about this relationship between the website and obviously the vendor... Susan Weinschenk: Right. Dean Barker: And the way it interacts with the end user because they do talk about that sort of "evolving over time" so you know I think the construct of a relationship is key in that. Susan Weinschenk: Right. So here's what they found out in that first phase, that rapid screening, they're looking out whether people come to their site, whether they stay or leave right away and the most important factors for rejection – people would leave if the name for the website wasn't appropriate, it wasn't expected. If it was very complex or busy, lacked help in navigating around, was boring, had a lot of pop-up advertisements, small print, too much text, corporate look and feel or a poor search. So these are – you know we could look at this and I believe that they do say you know they're thinking of this as the "look and feel" kind of idea. This is a lot of the typical usability in interaction design issues that we looked at in HCIs. So if those things weren't done well, then people would leave right away. In the middle phase, so let's say you make it past that, and the user doesn't reject and they stay, then they're looking at the things that are important to the user for them to decide whether they are going to trust the website, right, and stay on is really the quality of the content and the information, whether they think is it coming from the expert, is the information you know, is there and expert behind this? Trust the information's being provided, is it unbiased, are there illustrations, is it personalized to me, is there a frequently asked questions and discussion group in easy language? Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: And the interestingly, on the last one if you'll notice that column is totally blank, you know what were the factors that made people willing to register and give more information? They've had so few people that are willing to register and give personal information that they couldn't derive any factors – not many people do that. Dean Barker: Although they do have in their model, you know they do have – they have some attributes that they talk about in terms of like one of the examples is the freshness or how updated the content is, those things... Susan Weinschenk: Right. That helped people be willing to do the long-term engagement, you mean? Dean Barker: Yeah. Susan Weinschenk: But they were so few of that that they just couldn't come up with any definitive factors on that. Dean Barker: Yeah. Susan Weinschenk: So you know, some of the comments I have and that they have and that I have coming out of this so first impressions count and actually we have another paper that we're going to talk about in minute that really gets at that one. Dean Barker: Yeah. Susan Weinschenk: That people pay attention to these interface design and "look and feel" issues when they are deciding whether to continue to spend time at the site. After that first impression, the quality of the content and the idea of who – do the people who have written it, are they really experts? That comes around as important and just how hard it is to get people to register and we have got this whole – part of our work at HFI that Mona Patel has really spear-headed on Persuasion, Emotion and Trust. Persuasive design, persuasive architecture and I think that that's where it really comes in. If indeed you want people to sign up, it is possible to do and there are many sites – we have some clients where we helped them design sites actually health-related sites, in which the goal was to have people register. Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: You're going to have to do, you're going to have to pay very specific attention to that and there is a lot of planning in knowing what the user's motivations are and keying into that in order to find out and that's really is another webcast. We're going to have a webcast on persuasion and persuasion architecture later in 2008 but in this particular research, they didn't have too much to say to that one. Dean Barker: Yeah, I thought it was interesting too, you talk about the work that we do about in Persuasion, Emotion and Trust, in a way in this paper they discuss Trust and this sort of dated notion that they have of basically a continuum of trust and mistrust and they say that design is- sort of we would think of design as that first stage is a predictor, they've used their model here in assessing design is mistrust so one end of the continuum and then the quality of content if you will, the actual trust and the content and the expertise act as in general trust so as they go through the stages, this ability to use their model you know thinking "mistrust" and "can trust"- just thinking about it and conceptualizing to two ends of the spectrum is interesting. Susan Weinschenk: Yeah, that's right. Dean Barker: That was basically their conclusion although what I'll say was interesting you know reading the conclusion of them and looking back, it gets back to the issue that you started with at the beginning of the broadcast, they state that pretty elegantly in the conclusion but I don't know that if you follow the evolution of a model, and certainly through the foundational research, that they did-that their secondary research, I don't know if that's necessarily supportive in the same way that they've described it in the conclusion. Susan Weinschenk: Well, one of the interesting things about reading research like we have been doing for this webcast we've been reading these papers, is you know, some – they have theories, right? Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: And they're trying to prove their theory and sometimes the evidence, it's like they get interesting findings but not necessarily proving or disproving the theory and so sometimes when you're reading these papers, you have to do – at least what I do is I pull out anything that is useful and in this particular paper, I thought the background and the research literature-they had done this really extensive review of literature and I thought that actually was more than superficial or more useful than their particular findings. Dean Barker: That's right, yeah and I would agree and I think that also, as part of that issue as related to how precise they are in their definition of things. So there's this notion, with this kind of research, I mean it's caveat emptor where you have to when you're reading things you need to be critical about it and there's always this issue of conceptualization and measurement so are they – are they defining these constructs or operational definitions of these designing constructs... Susan Weinschenk: Right. Dean Barker: Are they really measuring that? Susan Weinschenk: Are they really measuring that? Yes. Dean Barker: Because by the time you get to the conclusion, here the conclusion is very interesting and I want to believe it but what they're concluding isn't precisely what was measured in the course of the study. Susan Weinschenk: Right, right. So when you're reading a study like this, one of the mistakes I think people make when they are reading research like this is that you can go to the trouble to track down these articles and read through them... Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: But a common mistake I see in people is that they would just kind of you know, go to the end of the conclusion and assume that's it. Dean Barker: (Laughs) Susan Weinschenk: And you really can't do that. You really have to read the whole paper and you might find out there is some interesting stuff but not necessarily their conclusion. Dean Barker: Yeah, into your point, I think, as practitioners, it's all well and good to read this from an academic standpoint but as practitioners in usability and user experience, in our search for a user interface design, the whole point is to read it, distill it, think about it critically, and take what's useful for your practice, right? Susan Weinschenk: Yeah. Also, very handy though, one thing that I really like since I – we – one reason that people like coming to our course – our "Putting Research into Practice" course is, it is really neat when you can be at a meeting and say, "According to Sillence, according to a research review by Sillence in 2006, 80% of adult users on the internet have been to a health-related website in the last 12 months" – however you want to say it. Now that's like instant credibility to whatever group that you're talking to so that's the other reason why I think it's very good to have this sense of what's the research out there and what's the latest and what's it saying. I think that's really – it can help. Alright, let's go on. We're going to a different topic on error messages. When and how should error messages be presented for web forms? And so this study, I thought it was really good, I really liked this one. You know it was very concrete. If you look at this chart that we have up on the screen here, it will show the different – their construct that we're looking at so think about a web form, okay? You're at some web application and there's a form and you're filling in fields and in this example, I think they used a form where you know, they had name, address, country, phone and a few other kind of demographic kind of questions and you've made a mistake in one of the fields, right? The question is when do you show them the error message, right, and how do you show the error message? And so they broke it off – into the following. First of all, you can show it immediately or afterwards meaning I fill in the name and if I have made an error in the name, and as soon as I go out of that into the next field, as soon as I leave the field some kind of error message is going to come up, that' what you call immediate, right? Dean Barker: That's right. Susan Weinschenk: Sometimes, in the old lingo we would call it field-level error messages, right? Dean Barker: Field-level. Susan Weinschenk: Or it could be afterwards so meaning I fill out all the fields and I press submit or something like that and then after I submit the form some error messages come up, that's the "afterwards". Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: But then the parts stray out even further than that. Dean Barker: Yeah I think the model is quite sound. I mean one of the interesting things about this is the way that they've thought from a design standpoint as this is useful for a designer alright, the way they've thought through and illustrated these possibilities... Susan Weinschenk: Yeah. Dean Barker: As connected to the design was pretty well done. Susan Weinschenk: Yeah it's well done. So that is the immediate one you could have it either be-they call it "embedded" or "dialogue", right? And in the embedded, the message is going to come up right next to the particular field and in a dialogue, a dialogue box is going to pop-up and that's the same for the afterwards. So you end up with all these different possibilities right? We've got some examples on the following pages; we've got the "Afterwards, embedded, all at once" right? Dean Barker: Yes. Susan Weinschenk: So this is afterwards, it comes back after the whole form has been submitted. In embedded, it's embedded and it's all at once and on the next page we have afterwards, dialogue, all at once. Next one is afterwards, dialogue, one by one and so just giving you an example of what these are going to look like. Dean Barker: Yeah and also, to point out too with the dialogues, they noted but did not distinguish between modal and non-modal dialogues. It could be either and I don't think they studied the effect of that actually. Susan Weinschenk: So – so you want to – the difference between modal and non-modal dialogue? The whole dialogue box is a quiz for Dean. Dean Barker: Oh good, a pop quiz. Susan Weinschenk: Yeah. Dean Barker: The modal dialogue box is the box that pops up before you can take any additional information. Susan Weinschenk: Anything else... Dean Barker: You have to dismiss it. Susan Weinschenk: You have to deal with it. Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: And the non-modal will allow you to type of something else. Dean Barker: Right, correct. Susan Weinschenk: This would be one of the quizzes when I would teach class years ago in a GUI design exam. Dean Barker: Must have taught me something useful, I think. Susan Weinschenk: (Laughs) Then the last example here, the immediate, dialogue. So what did they find? They found interestingly, that presenting the messages afterwards was more effective, they found that and their theory was that people had two modes they were working in. There was the "completion mode" when they were filling it out and the "revision mode" when they expect to make changes. Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: And so their theory was that people would tend to ignore error messages when they're in the completion mode and they'd pay attention when they're in the revision mode and so they are saying that indeed did happen and that's why presenting the errors afterwards was better. Now you had a few you know, objections, right? Dean Barker: I don't know if I had some objections. I do think that the – they make a case for these three, if I look back at these three ways to present the error messages that they recommend and if you're playing the "At Home" game, number one is AEA, number two is AEO and number three is ADO so they're recommending in their conclusion to the paper, they're recommending that error messages shall always be presented after, right? Susan Weinschenk: Right, right, right. Dean Barker: Instead of immediately. Susan Weinschenk: Right, that's what they're saying. Dean Barker: But I do think, if you look at the data and then if you sort of think through the utility of some of these approaches that – what they call the IE – what is that -the Immediate, embedded... Susan Weinschenk: The immediate, embedded. Dean Barker: I would reserve that in your toolkit as a designer for when it's useful, right? The data doesn't necessarily rule that out and I think that there's some merit to it so if you're filling out a web form and you know you're ordering – you're ordering wine online, and you choose the state from the drop-down. I live in Minnesota and wine can't be shipped to Minnesota for legal reasons, don't wait until I'm all done filling out a bunch of forms before that's presented. They fail to distinguish between what I would discern from a user point of view, a critical error and other errors. There's no taxonomy, there's no classification on... Susan Weinschenk: The severity of the errors. Dean Barker: The types of errors... Susan Weinschenk: How much time you're wasting in that error... Dean Barker: Yeah all that is graded equally... Susan Weinschenk: Right. Dean Barker: And I don't think that that's really the case. Susan Weinschenk: Yeah. Dean Barker: So you know again, as we were talking earlier, take the findings with a grain of salt. Susan Weinschenk: Right. So in this case, presenting the information afterwards is better in general but it doesn't mean that in specific – in your specific instance, that's the best way to go. Dean Barker: Yeah and I don't know either if these are necessarily mutually exclusive. Susan Weinschenk: Right. Dean Barker: Right...so I mean I suppose it depends. It depends on corporate or product level or standards and guidelines are going to dictate... Susan Weinschenk: Right. Dean Barker: But you can certainly make a case for instance, in having an immediate or in other instances having an afterwards error message and then developing rules that would go into a style guide... Susan Weinschenk: To tell you when to do in a case. Dean Barker: Yeah, in different cases. Susan Weinschenk: Alright, let's move on. The next one is aesthetic perceptions of web pages and the question was how much does the aesthetic sort of website impact how the user is reacting in and to the web page and in particular, they were interested in whether people are making quick judgments and whether quick judgments will hold over time. Dean Barker: No. Susan Weinschenk: And this is a topic that you know I'm particularly interested in. I'm interested in this whole, I've been doing a lot of reading and research on the whole idea of non-conscious processing and you know the book, "Blink"... Dean Barker: Blink. Susan Weinschenk: And the fact that we are making split second judgments and decisions non-consciously. Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: And this doesn't necessarily get into that but I think that some of this – some of this feed into that so they had two phases to it. What they did was show websites to people and had them judge how attractive they thought they were and they showed it for a half of a second, so 500 milliseconds. Then later on, they showed it to them for 10 seconds and they wanted to see you know, would the judgments be similar over time. Now we have some examples. They have some examples of the top websites, the higher number of views that were perceived to be aesthetically pleasing and then we have some of the bottom-level, some of the worst ones that were less aesthetic and what they found was that in the very short range, the decisions that people were making in half a second were highly correlated with the ratings over longer exposure. Dean Barker: Right, right. So the users' opinion was I think the phrase they used was "non-transient". Susan Weinschenk: Right, didn't change over time. Yeah, so I just – do you have any comments on that? I just thought that that was an interesting study and you know again, that's probably going to feed into my thinking of the quick judgment idea. Dean Barker: Yeah I thought it was good actually, I thought it was a good study. I thought it was a good paper. I liked their model, their discussion of what they referred to as "classical aesthetics" and I think we have that on the previous slide where they talk about the expressive and sometimes the creative element of that. Susan Weinschenk: Right. Dean Barker: They broke that down into some constituent parts. I thought it was good and they basically used attractiveness as sort of the main construct in discussing this in terms of aesthetics. I do think that again, with a grain of salt, not to be a contrarian but the notion of attractiveness... Susan Weinschenk: You're always a contrarian. (Laughs) Dean Barker: This notion of attractiveness is something that has some cultural implications, right? And I can't remember where the study was from, I believe it wasn't from the U.S. but there are cross-cultural things here that are certainly additional to research. Susan Weinschenk: Right, right. Alright, let's keep going. We have two more to cover. The next one is on older adults and synthetic speech. Dean Barker: The book, I was going to bring that book. Susan Weinschenk: What book? Dean Barker: The book! Susan Weinschenk: Oh, you mean the book you and I wrote on... (Laughter) Dean Barker: Long-term memory... (Laughter) Susan Weinschenk: Excuse me? Dean Barker: (Laughs) You remember we did a lot of work with this. Susan Weinschenk: We did a lot of work. Dean Barker and I wrote a book. Do you remember the name of the book? Dean Barker: Designing Effective Speech Interface. Susan Weinschenk: That's good - published by John Wiley & Sons. Yeah, okay, so you were going to bring a book and ... Dean Barker: Well, I was just going to show them the book. Susan Weinschenk: And tell them about the book. Dean Barker: Remind everybody that they can now find it on EBay because it's been discontinued. (Laughter) Susan Weinschenk: It was a number of years ago that we wrote the book. Dean Barker: Yeah, I think we sold all the public money. Susan Weinschenk: (Laughs) We did not use the public money. So Dean and I are interested in speech interfaces right, as you might have guessed since we wrote a book that I totally forgot about. So I thought that this was an interesting study. They were interested in specifically the difference between synthetic speech and natural speech so maybe we should take a second and describe that. Dean Barker: Yeah. Susan Weinschenk: So in a speech interface, when you're on the telephone and you're listening to what you might think are those computer-generated speech, automated speech systems, you might be – there are a lot of different ways to put that together and it kind of breaks into two categories. You might be listening to a speech where they took a person and recorded different words and then they just pieced those words together or you might be listening to a system where the speech is being generated on-the-fly from a computer. One sounds more natural, right, because it is recorded from a human and that's the one that we're calling natural and one sounds like synthetic you know, like a computer and I have to tell you this one time, I'm trying to remember where I was, I think I was doing a study of a usability test and it was a phone system and it was synthetic and we were testing this with older adults and this one older lady said, "I can't understand that man. He must have like a Hungarian accent." And it was like, computer-generated. (Laughter) Susan Weinschenk: But she thought it was a Hungarian accent. Dean Barker: They're very similar, I think. Susan Weinschenk: (Laughs) No, they're not. (Laughter) Susan Weinschenk: Okay, so they wanted to know with older people, especially older people with hearing impairments, is one better than the other? That was the question. So they had 96 participants, 3 different age groups, they had young, middle-aged and old. The average age was 22 for the young, 51 for the middle and 70 for the older. They used the synthetic versus the natural and then another interesting thing they did in there was context. Was there a context like a whole sentence around it or was it like a really quick answer? And then they also looked at presentation rates – really fast – the person at the computer talking really fast or the person at the computer talking slowly. So here's what they found. Dean Barker: I was just going to say... Susan Weinschenk: Did you want to comment? Dean Barker: Yeah, well I think the "fast" was basically natural, sort of a natural pace. Susan Weinschenk: Yeah, it wasn't really fast. Dean Barker: Based on what they think of, and it's actually kind of funny, what they think of the mood, the question, the tone and voice. Susan Weinschenk: Oh yeah, the mid-western because the mid-westerners have no accent. Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: See? We don't have an accent. Dean Barker: We talk normally. Susan Weinschenk: We talk normal and everybody else has an accent. Dean Barker: Has an accent, right. You bet, okay. (Laughter) Susan Weinschenk: Yeah and so? Dean Barker: But they did say then that the slower version was – they didn't speed up... Susan Weinschenk: No, they didn't speed up. They took it normal. So I really shouldn't say fast and slow. I should say normal and slow. But they said... Dean Barker: They say fast and slow but it is normal and slower than normal. Susan Weinschenk: So what they found was first of all, the context of the whole sentence, how it helped. That improved performance for all ages but even with the context there's still a difference. The older people don't perform as well in understanding as responding as the younger people did and then the other interesting thing was that the slower synthetic was not good. So slowing it down, if it is synthetic speech, actually made it worse. Dean Barker: Yeah, this is fascinating because you would think that logically, it is the other way around. Susan Weinschenk: Yeah you would think it's the other way around. If they just talk slower, then everything would be better but not in synthetic speech, right? Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: Now – oh, and here's a table and I think that this page shows that the best performance was with the natural and the context of sentences and the worst performance was the synthetic and not in context sentences. Dean Barker: Yeah I think this is a great snapshot of the study. Susan Weinschenk: Yeah. Dean Barker: Perhaps this could have been color-coded but they did a good job with ... Susan Weinschenk: A good job with the chart. Dean Barker: Depicting that and that makes a lot of sense. .. Susan Weinschenk: Yes. Dean Barker: When you visualize it this way. Yeah? Susan Weinschenk: Okay. You had to comment on this one. Dean Barker: You're looking at me like... (Laughter) Susan Weinschenk: Well, you had a comment on this one yesterday. Dean Barker: Well, so you mentioned the notion earlier of hearing, I forget how you phrased it...but the level of hearing capability... Susan Weinschenk: The hearing acuity, yeah. Dean Barker: They do make the case in the paper, now I've got to find my notes, where they talk about hearing acuity in older adults and they certainly admit to the fact that older adults naturally have lesser hearing acuity than younger adults to the point where they say therefore that you can argue that in older adults hearing ability accounts for most of the worst performance on their tasks. Susan Weinschenk: Right. Dean Barker: Now they didn't measure that, they don't take it as a separate... Susan Weinschenk: Right. Dean Barker: They don't take it as a separate variable... Susan Weinschenk: As a separate variable at this stage. Dean Barker: Okay, so they're obfuscating the hearing ability and age... Susan Weinschenk: Because it may not have anything to do with age, it may just be... Dean Barker: Right and they didn't quantify that at all, they quantify it briefly and they also don't care that down the middle-aged group you know, from other literature you can make an argument for saying that it's not a difference between young and old but really progressive hearing... Susan Weinschenk: Progressive hearing... Dean Barker: And when it starts declining with age. Susan Weinschenk: So they didn't measure that at all. Dean Barker: No, they didn't. Susan Weinschenk: But we suspect that that might be active, right? Dean Barker: That's right. Susan Weinschenk: So if your target older group is older and may have some hearing impairments... Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: You should actually watch out for synthetic speech especially as hearing impairments increase and don't slow down synthetic speech, thinking that that's going to help. Dean Barker: Well, right and the other thing too is that they didn't do strings right? Susan Weinschenk: Right. Dean Barker: It was just monosyllabic words. Susan Weinschenk: Right. Dean Barker: And so I think that this is certainly an area and you know this from our book, even though it was years ago, that there's more research needed in this area. Susan Weinschenk: Right. Okay, we have one more study before we do that one; I want to remind people to submit your questions. You can submit questions to us using the button in the corner of the screen and we have a few questions that have come out and we're going to answer questions in a few minutes. So go ahead and submit while we go over this last study and then we'll take some questions. So the last one here, is to deal with the "F" pattern. (Laughter) Susan Weinschenk: Don't look at me like that. Dean Barker: I didn't say anything. Susan Weinschenk: He's just giving me his dead pan looks. (Laughter) Susan Weinschenk: Like "Go ahead, I dare you – the F pattern." Dean Barker: This was your favorite study, right? Susan Weinschenk: This is not my favorite study and I included it here for a reason but it's the "F" pattern, let's talk about what the "F" pattern is and this is Jacob Nielsen, I think, right? Dean Barker: Yeah. Susan Weinschenk: The one that you first found positive that when people look at a page, they are looking at an "F" pattern and I have to draw an F backwards (Laughs) Dean Barker: You have to go like this here... (Laughter) Susan Weinschenk: For the audience, so that they're spending time looking at the top-left part of the screen and then they are also spending some time looking at the central part of the screen and then they kind of go down on the left-side and things that are on the right are ignored and so in this study, they wanted to look at the use of eye tracking, and eye gaze patterns to see if the F pattern would hold and they thought that they were interested in looking at whether it would hold depending on the type of content like text-based versus picture-based and whether people were searching versus browsing, right? So they took some undergraduate students, 17 women and 3 men between the ages of 18 and 26 and they had them perform three tasks. A search task, a browsing task and search task for a non-existent product. Yes, Dean? Dean Barker: Okay, and so the first time I read the paper I sort of took it on surface value and then I had to go back and read the definitions and this threw me for a loop and I'm trying to cover while I look for my notes here because they had unique definitions of search versus browse. Susan Weinschenk: Right. What we discovered when we delved into it... Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: And this is again why you have to read these critically, is that what they were calling a search and what they were calling a browse was not really what we think of as search and browse. Actually, very important, I have done personally research on this and you really have to define what you mean by search and what you mean by browse. Dean Barker: That's right. Susan Weinschenk: So for the search task, they had, they asked people specific questions, about a product you know, "can you find a product that does this?" that's – you know, we think of search as go to the search bar and type something in. Dean Barker: Type in a key word, get a results page. Susan Weinschenk: So I think the way they were using search was what we would call browse. Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: And when they said browse, what they really meant was open exploratory to have people go to the website and just look around, okay? Dean Barker: I think that's right. Susan Weinschenk: We have to watch out, you know we have – we have some of the pictures of all the things that are showing and they are showing the F pattern as well but I think, if we get to the last page where we have the relevance of this study, we have to be careful about making conclusions about searching versus browsing on this one. Now I also have an interesting problem with this study because of the idea of the F pattern and age because I have been doing some of my own research you know, on the side... Dean Barker: On the side? Susan Weinschenk: No, not on the side, I'm going to get into trouble with my CEO. (Laughter) Susan Weinschenk: On the side of my usual role as Chief of Technical Staff. Dean Barker: Oh, I see. Susan Weinschenk: When I'm not you know, working with you, on the side, oh forget it! Okay, I have been doing some of my own research on generational differences, that's going to be another webcast that we do, I'm going to present some of my findings on that and actually I'm very excited about that because I believe I'm going to be an invited speaker at the UPA talking about the generational differences. Dean Barker: Oh fantastic! Susan Weinschenk: And my work that I have been doing shows that there has been a difference in gaze pattern in age and generation. Dean Barker: Interesting. Susan Weinschenk: And the pattern that we are talking about here is typical of people of what's called the Net Generation, aged between 18 and 26 and if you look at the age of this particular study's participants, it's 18 to 26. Dean Barker: Yeah, it's the same. (Laughter) Susan Weinschenk: So and that is another thing, I mean Kath Straub and I have a lot of fun talking about how scary it is you know everything we know about humans you know, all the research that's done is aimed at the college level– you know, one could ask whether college students are typical around the rest of the world? And I'm going to say that they're not. Dean Barker: You've got one too. Susan Weinschenk: I have one, I know and he's certainly not typical there too. So that's something that I worry about too when we look at some of this research about where people are looking and eye gazing patterns and even how are they reacting to even you know, health websites. I'm finding that visually there are a lot of differences in ages. Dean Barker: Yeah you know and I think that it's also true and we brought this up in an earlier study in regards to the notion of cross-cultural design and cross-cultural issues. So we're making a lot of assumptions and we've talked about this before in various programs but we make a lot of assumptions that we describe as human factors when truly they're cultural factors. Susan Weinschenk: Right, right. Dean Barker: You know the classic notion when somebody says and even starting with the literature with the F pattern, that we read from left to right, up to down, well even that's very much a cultural reference. You would have to do some other research... Susan Weinschenk: Right. Dean Barker: To see... Susan Weinschenk: Yeah, the whole idea of reading from right to left you know...how does that change? Dean Barker: Right. And even with this F pattern, there is another school of thought with the spiral pattern, right? And so the idea being that people start with the center of the page and then they... Susan Weinschenk: Go around. Dean Barker: They spiral out in counter-clockwise, is that right? Spiral out from there and so you know, once again, we get to the "take it with a grain of salt" with this study. Susan Weinschenk: Right, yeah, yeah. Okay, well, that's the end of the six studies that we picked and now we're going to have some questions. Are you ready to take some questions? Dean Barker: Let's take a look. It depends on the questions, I suppose. QUESTIONS & ANSWERS:- Susan Weinschenk: Alright. So, let's see what we have here. Here's a question. Where can I read more about trust factors for health websites and other sites that ask for disclosure of personal data? You know I think, first of all, I believe we have a newsletter on this topic so go to the HFI website and look at the newsletter on – I think there's one. Dean Barker: There's a newsletter on this and a white paper? Isn't that the white paper? Susan Weinschenk: No, pardon? Dean Barker: Is there a summary in the white paper? Susan Weinschenk: Yes. There's a summary in the white paper if you have downloaded the white paper, there's a newsletter article and then if you go to – if you look at the – the white paper, let me hold the white paper up which you can download from the HFI website for today's webcast, and you will see the Sillence paper summarized and thank you Dean...summarized here. Go – you should be able to – you know some papers are really hard to get hold of like you should have special access... Dean Barker: Pay for them? Susan Weinschenk: Yeah, you sometimes have to pay for them but the – well, I think that the paper is not expensive, it's about $20 or $30 dollars, I think that you can probably get hold of the Sillence one online if you just typed in the name of the paper. They're – as I said, there are three different research papers on this topic from this group that came out in the last year, all about health websites and trust and I would, you know, if I were you, I would spend the $30 per paper or try one of them and download the paper and there's going to be a wealth of information there about trust and health websites and then you'll be just you know the page with the references from the paper and then you can start looking up those and that's what I would do if you are really interested in this field. Dean Barker: That's true. Susan Weinschenk: You know, I don't think at this point, I don't know for instance any book that distills all the research, I really think at this point you've got to go and look at the research. Go to the white paper, find the Sillence paper, download that paper from the internet and go from there. Dean Barker: Yeah and I would also say too that I'd like to mention that the references and the bibliography provided in that paper are pretty extraordinary. Susan Weinschenk: Yeah. They're really good. Dean Barker: And these authors did a particularly good job with the secondary research and all the foundational material that they had amassed... Susan Weinschenk: Yeah. Dean Barker: To develop their initial model so of them all, this is particularly thorough. Susan Weinschenk: Yeah I think it's worth reading just for the literature. Alright, the next one - search versus browse. Regarding the searching versus the browsing study, don't you think that gender also makes a difference? Only three men participated in the study. And I did notice that. You know, that is a very good question and I have not seen any definitive studies and I've been looking-any definitive studies about gender in some of these question like the patterns etc., and I've been looking for it and in the work that I've been doing, I've been looking at generational differences for instance, I've been looking to see at the same time if there are gender differences and I'm actually not finding strong gender differences. I'm finding generational differences but not gender. So I would have to say right now, no – you certainly could, there's no research saying it doesn't make a difference but right now I'm not finding a lot of evidence out there about differences in gender. Dean Barker: You could assume though that it is basically following the same model asking for directions and there are some gender differences in that, don't you think? Susan Weinschenk: Yeah, I do actually. Heck, you know there are gender differences there so it should show up in asking for – so what's the equivalent of asking for directions or search? Dean Barker: Is it search? Well search is really different, don't you think? Susan Weinschenk: I wonder if men go to the live chat you know like the shopping sites where you can go there and ask for help when you can't find something, I wonder if men use that as much as women? That - I would like to find that out. Would someone please go do some research on that? That's a great question. Dean Barker: Can we take a poll? Can we take an online poll? Susan Weinschenk: An online poll? Dean Barker: Absolutely. Susan Weinschenk: Okay. No I don't think we can do that. 13.23 Dean Barker: We're not set up to poll. Susan Weinschenk: Oh, you know I want to do – but we want to do that so we're going to make ***Jesse Berkowitz watch this webcast and find some software that will allow us to have a live poll because that will be fun to know. Okay, so search versus browse. Does research suggest the best search box placement? Is it better to the right or the left side, more at the top or at the bottom? There is and you know if I have to cite a particular study, I'm going to have a hard time doing it, there's a study that shows where people expect – expect – not necessarily that it's the best, but where people expect search to be in. It's and I kind of have it as a rough name at the top of my head of that article... Dean Barker: But based on convention rather than pure usability. Susan Weinschenk: And the...we will be...this will be in our...let's see, there's a set of researchers who did some work a number of years ago, you know where do people expect the logo to be, where do people expect the search box to be, where do people expect the nav bar to be? And then they did that research a couple of years ago and they recently updated it and now we're going to be putting it in the new version of the PRP, Putting into Practice course. If whoever asked this question, if you will send me an e-mail, susan@humanfactors.com I'll get the name of that, it's not research about the best place but about where people expect it. People expect the search field to be in the top-right. No all on top but towards the right. Dean Barker: But that's a valid criterion though, don't you think, for making your design decisions. Susan Weinschenk: Right, right. Dean Barker: I mean, certainly from any of the research. Susan Weinschenk: Well, it's not saying that it's the most effective or people type it in the fastest or anything else but it is where people expect it so that would be on the right, where you often see it right, on the right and up. Dean Barker: The upper-right. Susan Weinschenk: And maybe people expect it there because it is there a lot, I don't know. What was the biggest impact on the field of usability in 2007 - a particular event, a finding or anything else? That's an interesting question. I haven't thought about it. Have you thought about that? Dean Barker: No, not until I saw the question. Susan Weinschenk: What do you think this will be? I would have to say, but I'm really biased on this, to me the biggest impact on usability in 2007 is the broadening of the field. I think the field of usability is – it's almost like a maturity issue, you know? We had to kind of close in for a number of years and get rigorous and get certain of a methodologies and our findings and now I think the field is quite mature, now I think we're starting to broaden out so we have people talking about it as user experience, we have people starting to bring in other factors such as "non-conscious", right? Such as the persuasion and persuasion architecture and to me that's kind of the most important trend that's going on, it's that we're really broadening out into related sister areas and bringing that into the field of usability. Dean Barker: Yeah, I think that's a great response and that's certainly a huge shift even a little paradigm shift, because it's pretty radical for the field. I mean, I don't even know the...we say "field" you know, we've...we've changed, you know? We're now talking about user experience and using that language rather than usability per se. Susan Weinschenk: Right, right, at HFI. Dean Barker: And I also think, just you know, a view from the trenches – from my perspective that the mobile world and the wireless world are having a huge impact and I think from a practitioner's standpoint you know, what do we need to know again, now we need to know about the effective dimension and all these issues of persuasion, emotion and trust from a human standpoint and then we also need to know from a design standpoint or a technical standpoint, how to deal with this ubiquity of mobility and mobile devices in the ecosystem where people have information and access to information as they go around these various ecosystems and access it from a computer, from their car, from their hand-held, that's changing things. Susan Weinschenk: Yeah. Dean Barker: And it's going to continue to be a shift in that direction. Susan Weinschenk: Yeah, yeah. Good, interesting questions we're getting. What study trends do you see on the horizon for 2008? Assuming the question means like research trends, I think that's what they mean. Boy, you know I'm thinking in my mind as you're saying that, I'm running through the – because we have been looking at all these...I picked these six, some of which were from last year and a few from next year-this year, and you know, we've got a whole bunch of papers right, that we've probably looked at like you know, I don't know – maybe a 100 papers in the last two months so I'm running them through my head trying to answer your question. I think we're seeing a lot of work in the area of – which I just mentioned – on persuasion, on trust and a lot of cross-cultural work. There's going to be some interesting papers that we are going to talk about this year about these different differences in cultures or differences in countries and analyzing the particular characteristics of a culture and then predicting how the people will react to a website based on that. So I think that we will see those trends as well. Dean Barker: Susan, what about the trend in where the actual research is being generated from because we were talking about that yesterday... Susan Weinschenk: Oh yeah, we talked about that yesterday. Dean Barker: Because again obviously, that speaks to sort of the evolution of maybe more research happening in a cross-cultural sense... Susan Weinschenk: Yes. Dean Barker: But the research which is no longer being generated from the kind of U.S. centered... Susan Weinschenk: No, it's not. Those of you out there who've read "The World is Flat"... Dean Barker: Yeah by Friedman. Susan Weinschenk: It's what we're thinking about and Friedman talks in there, and I definitely see this in the last couple of years more than it might have been before, a lot of research that's being done in the U.S. compared to research being done in China, in India, in Israel, in Europe, in Eastern Europe, it used to be like 70% of the research in this field or in almost any scientific field was done in the U.S. and we had a little bit done and I'm not just talking about what was being made –what was making it into the journals, I'm just talking about who was doing the research out there. Dean Barker: Yeah. Susan Weinschenk: I realize I go back thirty years reading research, right; I've been reading research for actually probably more than that if you count starting grad school. So the research used to be... Dean Barker: You first started when you were five. Susan Weinschenk: Five, yeah. It used to be more U.S. based but over the years that changed a little bit but in the last 5 to 7 years, it's changed dramatically where I'm going to say that about 30% of the research is being done in the U.S. and 70% of the research is being done outside of the U.S. and yeah, it makes for you know, those interesting cultural...and it's good but we – as you know, we being U.S. based, we have to look at the research differently. I find myself a lot looking at it and thinking "I wonder if this would be you know, if this would hold up in the U.S.?" Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: This is of course what the rest of the world had to do for many years (Laughs) when all the research was U.S. based. Dean Barker: Well, I do think also then as a consumer, these types of studies and this type of information, I do this work for iCell and it's very similar because of the nature of that kind of work. It's international, it's cross-cultural and you've got all sorts of people collaborating coming from different backgrounds and primarily languages, right? Susan Weinschenk: Yeah. Dean Barker: And so you've got this issue where this work is being created maybe not in the first language but actually in the second language so you do have to actually be cautious and sort of make sure that you are looking for potential biases or issues... Susan Weinschenk: Yeah and you know sometimes, what we do is, we contact the authors when we're trying to get clarification in something you know maybe the translation isn't clear and we'll actually contact them for a little more information so that's also a possibility. Most of the researchers, you can usually find them based on their research paper and they love it when people you know, send them a question. Alright, a few more questions we have time for. Does HFI have any other information to offer about users 40 to 65 years of age group? Where can I find it? So when we do our generational webcast and I don't remember exactly in what month we've planned that in and by the way our – this would be the time to mention it – our next webcast which is coming out in just a couple of weeks in February – February 10th...is on "Looking ahead in 2008" and it will describe all our webcasts that we're going to have. One of those is on generational differences and the definition, the reason I am hesitating is the definition this person wrote in- they said 40 to 65 and that's actually not how that's usually parsed out so when you talk about generations in literature, they talk about – well, there's not always agreement right, they talk about 13 to 25 and in the work that I am doing, I separate that out actually. I actually talk about 18 to 25 and 13 to 18... Dean Barker: Let's say 13 to 25. Susan Weinschenk: Yeah, that's a strange grid so 18 to 25 and then at the high end, you've got 61 and above, you've got 44 to 61and then you've got 26 to 44 so you know, this 40 to 65 – it could probably be 44 to 61 – it would be the way it is described in the literature. That is the...it's just interesting with the generational...this one though, the 44 to 61 is-no, I'm sorry, the 26 to 44 is the least researched, the least talked about group in terms of you know, usability and user experience. It's a smaller demographic with the boomers at one end and the Net Gen on the other. (Laughs) Dean Barker: Right. Susan Weinschenk: And everyone is ignoring them and interestingly from the informal "hand-raisings" that I've done when we're giving talks, most of the people in HCI are in that – in this group (Laughs) about 26 to 44 and it has the least amount of research on it. So I don't have a good source for you. I do not have a good answer for you here. I'm actually going to try and collect some more data as I have some data that I will be presenting at UPA and at our webcast and I'm actually going to try and collect some more especially in that age group so maybe I'll have some more data but there's not a lot of information. If you're out there and you're in grad school and you're looking for a good topic, I think that would be a good one. Okay, a question on the one about aesthetic perceptions. Regarding the "Attractiveness" paper, did they test to compare the usefulness of the web page compared with the prettiness or aesthetic attractiveness? If a web page is attractive, it could still be useless in terms of allowing the user to find information. And my memory of this, Dean tell me if you agree, is that they were not looking at the - you know, typical definition of usability and performance. They were just looking at this idea of aesthetics. Dean Barker: Aesthetics. Susan Weinschenk: This idea that aesthetics is pleasing, right? Dean Barker: No, no I think that that's interesting and that's correct. I'm looking back at my notes and they did a really good job of attractiveness and defining that and their model with classical and expressive elements of attractiveness... Susan Weinschenk: Yeah, yeah. Dean Barker: But they didn't correlate or associate that with usability. Susan Weinschenk: Okay. Dean Barker: Good question. Susan Weinschenk: So I think we've come to the end. Dean Barker: Is that it? Susan Weinschenk: We've you know, wasted another hour – no, I'm just making a joke. That's what Click and Clack would really say. Dean Barker: Oh, I see. Click and Clack. Which one - are you...I don't listen to APR now. Susan Weinschenk: You don't listen to the radio, no. No, I knew that you didn't. (Laughter) Susan Weinschenk: Okay, we've come to the end. Let me remind you of a couple of things. This broadcast, should you ever be nutty enough to watch it again, or have someone you want to send it to watch, will be archived at our website and you can download it and it will take about 2 to 3 weeks for it to be there. Dean Barker: Not to download? Susan Weinschenk: What? Dean Barker: Not to download? (Laughter) Susan Weinschenk: No, that doesn't take 2 or 3 weeks to download. Dean Barker: Good. (Laughter) Susan Weinschenk: It takes 2 or 3 weeks before it's there. Dean Barker: I see. Susan Weinschenk: And it only takes a minute to download, I'm sure. Dean Barker: Much better. Susan Weinschenk: Then the white paper is out there now, if you'd like to download the white paper and it has a summary of these papers and bibliography for them so you can get...find out what the actual articles are. We will have our 2008 website schedule up at the website shortly. Our next one on February 10th will be an overview of all these studies. Oh! I have the wrong date. It's not February 10th, it's February 7th. I had no idea it was wrong. So the next webcast is February 7th, that's a Thursday. Dean Barker: And you'll send the whole world an Outlook reminder on that. Susan Weinschenk: (Laughs) And I'll send the whole world an Outlook reminder on that-on the Outlook calendar. I want to thank everyone for joining us today and thank you very much Dean for coming on with me. Dean Barker: Thank you, Susan. Susan Weinschenk: Bye. Dean Barker: Bye. |
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