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Jenea Hayes
Jenea has more than 15 years experience studying human behavior in a variety of professional and academic settings. Her research has included such topics as how people find information on the Web to the impact of privacy concerns on user behavior.
I heart my tablet PC
Figuring out the right way to capture information during user and stakeholder interviews can be tricky. I like to capture as much information as possible because I’m never sure what will turn out to be important later on. Audio or video might seem to be ideal; however, recording makes subjects nervous, lessening the value of the interview. Besides, going back through the audio or video is extremely time consuming and therefore usually cost-prohibitive.
I touch-type very well, and so I have the uncanny ability to type an almost verbatim transcript of an interview while simultaneously keeping eye contact and participating in the conversation. This can come in handy during some kinds of meetings, such as internal meetings or during a kickoff with a client, when everyone involved understands and is invested in the process and I, as the naïve consultant, can be forgiven for wanting to capture every word.
This approach is much less successful in the context of a user interview, however. Not only is it kind of creepy, but the presence of a computer acts as a barrier to communication. It’s noisy, and the screen acts as an actual physical barrier between interviewer and interview subject. Furthermore, a computer is a complex, interactive device, so looking at the screen can be distracting for both interviewer and interviewee. Since we like to err on the side of a quality interview over perfect documentation, for a long time this has meant using a paper notebook for user interviews.
Enter the tablet PC.
Crappy interface embarrasses Sulu on national television—not cool
Wanna Bet is a new show on ABC wherein celebrities bet on whether “ordinary” people can accomplish extraordinary things. Whichever celebrity has the most money at the end of the program gets to donate it to the charity of his or her choice. The way it works is that the show introduces the ordinary person, describes the (usually very odd) action this person is going to attempt, and the celebrities write down their prediction and bet amount. The attempt is made, the person succeeds or fails, and then the celebrities reveal their bets to much fanfare.
So far so good, right? The trouble is that there is some kind of disconnect in the betting process. On the first episode George Takei (better known as Sulu from Star Trek) excitedly revealed that he had guessed correctly and had bet $20,000. The show’s hosts, however, informed him he had only bet $2,000. For anyone not employed as a designer of interactive systems, it looked like George Takei was having a senior moment. It was embarrassing. The other celebrities on the show spent the rest of the episode pretending to have flubbed their bets to make up for it.
So where’s the failure here? George Takei is getting on in years; maybe he’s just not very comfortable with technology. Leaving off a zero is an easy mistake, right? Maybe, except that in the very next episode of the show, the same thing happened to comedian Melissa Peterman who thought she bet $5,000 but “really” bet $6,000. She’s only 37 and sharp as a whip. The show is now two for two, and I would argue there is a failure in the system.