User Experience

Latency and user-behavior in video games

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Latency and User Behaviour on a Multiplayer Game Server by Tristan Henderson - Networked Group Communication : Third International COST264 Workshop, NGC 2001, London, UK, November 7-9, 2001. Proceedings Editors: J. Crowcroft, M. Hofmann (Eds.): Chapter: p. 1.

Multiplayer online games represent one of the most popular forms of networked group communication on the Internet today. We have been running a server for a first-person shooter game, Half-Life. In this paper we analyse some of the delay characteristics of different players on the server and present some interim results. We find that whilst network delay has some effect on players' behaviour, this is outweighed by application-level or exogenous effects. Players seem to be remarkably tolerant of network conditions, and absolute delay bounds appear to be less important than the relative delay between players.

Why do I blog this? latency, uncertainties and discrepancies are important question when users interact with applications. This paper is a good introduction to how this might influence players' experience and how delays can impact the players' behavior. That is an issue which interest us at the lab; we would like to know how uncertainties and latency could modify the way mobile users of CatchBob! interact with the game and among the group. Actually this is more related to Fabien next-to-be research project :) Other related references about this topic:

A shift in user-centered design?

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Donald Norman wrote a relevant column in ACM Interactions, Vol.12, No 4 (2005), pp. 14-19: Fresh: Human-centered design considered harmful. His point is that user-centered design is now treated as accepted wisdom, which is bad since:

One concern is that the focus upon individual people (or groups) might improve things for them at the cost of making it worse for others. The more something is tailored for the particular likes, dislikes, skills, and needs of a particular target population, the less likely it will be appropriate for others.

The individual is a moving target. Design for the individual of today, and the design will be wrong tomorrow. Indeed, the more successful the product, the more that it will no longer be appropriate. This is because as individuals gain proficiency in usage, they need different interfaces than were required when they were beginners. In addition, the successful product often leads to unanticipated new uses that are very apt not to be well supported by the original design.

But there are more-serious concerns: First, the focus upon humans detracts from support for the activities themselves; second, too much attention to the needs of the users can lead to a lack of cohesion and added complexity in the design. Consider the dynamic nature of applications, where any task requires a sequence of operations, and activities can comprise multiple, overlapping tasks. Here is where the difference in focus becomes evident, and where the weakness of the focus on the users shows up. (...) Yes, listening to customers is always wise, but acceding to their requests can lead to overly complex designs. Several major software companies, proud of their human-centered philosophy, suffer from this problem.

Donald then explains what he means:

Maybe what is needed is more activity-centered design; Maybe failures come from a shallow understanding of the needs of the activities that are to be supported.(...) The focus upon the human may be misguided. A focus on the activities rather than the people might bring benefits. Moreover, substituting activity-centered for human-centered design does not mean discarding all that we have learned. Activities involve people, and so any system that supports the activities must of necessity support the people who perform them.

Why do I blog this? just another a brick about the lively debate between human-centered design and activity-centered design.

For cool hunting, go out!

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In a short interview of Josh Rubin (the guy who does cool hunting), there is this interesting excerpt:

Q. What tip(s) would you give a brand/marketing manager to help them become more aware of consumer/cultural trends in their day to day worklife? JR. Get up from the desk, go outside and walk the streets. If you're not in an urban environment, move to one. Travel often to get perspective. Learn how to search, sort and filter the blogosphere.

Why do I blog this? I think this is a crux issue; there are so many companies asking for more "consumers insights" and blablabla but the first lesson would be the go out and try to pick up facts, which is different from reading massive GFK or Datamonitor reports about trend watchingf. Of course I have to admit that execs may have lots of stuff to do but I am pretty sure they could be benefit from learning a bit how to observe what's going on right now in different places. It's not a matter of asking them to take care of consumer studies or ethnograpy but rather to keep in touch with reality. Personnaly, it's one my favorite activity: wandering around in cities and suburbs with a digital camera. There are so many trends that you can pick up! Pattern identification and analogical reasoning are then central in terms of skills required :)

How to discourage drivers from speeding

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At the HCI Lab (Stanford University), there is currently a research project about to discourage drivers from speeding. They put online the results of their brainstorm in the form of drawings which are amazingly interesting: If you want to know more about it, read: Dynamic Speedometer: Dashboard Redesign to Discourage Drivers from Speeding by Manu Kumar and Taemie Kim (CHI 2005).

For 'user experience' freaks, they also give access to their data here.

Papers about Mobile Applications Development

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Communications of the ACM has its last issue about designing mobile device experiences. Relevant paper around (only of you have the ACM subscription):

Why do I blog this? there seems to be a momentum about designing mobile applications and user experiences; especially about 3 fields: work, learning and games. The articles in this journal cover a relevant rang of topics; I was more interested in the one about user-centered design to mobile application development, but the others depicts other viewpoints that people are not always aware of.

Using train storage area to take a nap

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Via the very insightful french blog Internet Actu, this interesting account how about the designer Roger Tallon used Super-8 cameras in train to observe people and their behavior while travelling by train. The most interesting results he got was the fact that travellers used luggage storage area not to put their luggage but instead to get a place to sleep or have a nap.

Video Games Usability Testing

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It's not so common to have articles in Gamasutra about usability testing in video games. That's the case this week with Better Games Through Usability Evaluation and Testing by Sauti Laitinen.

The focus of this article is not only to tell why usability is important in games, but also to introduce two usability methods and the kind of results they yield. The methods are expert evaluation and usability testing.

It will be presented how these were applied in the development of Frozenbyte's Shadowgrounds (www.shadowgroundsgame.com) game. Adage Corporation (www.adage-usability.com) was responsible for the usability related activities in the project. Before moving on to the methods, the game will be presented briefly.

Why do I blog this? I am a regular user of usability tests to get insights about how people use specific games. The good point of this article is that is shows this can be applied to video game, exemplifying it with concrete examples. Connected Pasta people interested in this should also check the games user research page which proposes interesting and relevant references about this topic.

User-Robots interactions

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I had an interesting discussion by Frederic Kaplan (Sony CSL Paris) at the workshop, while hiking in the swiss mountains. Frederic is one of the researcher who tries to make Aibo more curious (as I mentioned earlier) My concern with robots is that it seems that there is a conspicuous lack on robot-human studies. I mean studying, from a user-centered perspective study, how people expect robot to behave/interact with robots/play with them/how it can supports multi-users interactions... To put it shortly, I was interesting to know how sony deal with that. It seems that they run few experiments, especially with children and more focused on the first 5 minutes of interactions with the robots. They did few longitudinal studies but no that much.

Why do I blog this?I see lots of opportunity there to use lots of user-experience analysis methodologies. Connected Pasta: I already blogged about the bridge between robots design and interaction design here

How people work in pairs (Steelcase study)

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While sorting my email, I stumbled across an email from the Steelcase newsletter in which they describe the next evolution of the personal workspace. The article describes how psychological and behavioral insights can be applied to workplace design. A nice version of the paper is available as a pdf here. The most relevant part (to my interest) is the description of the "8 Ways Pairs Work" (ther work a lot on categorisation as in how people behave in conferences which is quite informative foor designers:

  1. Talking Over the Fence: Unplanned, informal sharing across a panel or work space. Two individual spaces become one larger dyadic space as people share verbal and written information. Each person stays in his or her own personal work space, as these sessions range from one minute up to a half-hour.
  2. Progressive Dinner: Starts as a dyad, with a visitor seeking information. It quickly changes to three or more and then back to two, as people walking or sitting nearby join the party. Each person shares knowledge and ideas. The host often loses control as the group grows, until the interaction moves with the initial guest to a different space.
  3. Advise and Consent – Short Term A short, unplanned mentoring session. “Student” usually hosts the “teacher.” The host controls the computer, which supports learning by doing. Usually, the visitor will stand behind the host, which means a short visit, but the situation can feel like “backseat driving.”
  4. Advise and Consent – Long Term A planned learning session of an hour or more. Either the “student” or the “teacher” may host. When the teacher is the visitor, tools (papers, books, etc.) are usually brought along. Visitor needs a place to camp.
  5. Pumping Ideas: A co-creation dyad. Each person needs equal footing. These tend to be long, planned sessions and take place in a traditional “I” space. Can also involve “secondary guesting,” where a guest engages with others in the host’s space. The borrowed work space becomes a temporary home base for the guest.
  6. Two for the Road: When a dyad moves out of an individual work space to continue the interaction, such as when sharing a presentation. They can move to a variety of spaces: a large conference room, an enclave/mid-sized space, or even a traditional “I” space. These planned sessions are long-term and often require tools such as a laptop and projector.
  7. Reluctant Host: Unplanned, doesn't take long, and the host wants it that way. The visitor stays standing, while the host stays seated and maintains control of his or her workspace.
  8. Mi Casa, Su Casa: Tends to be unplanned, frequent and short in duration. Host is often a support person for the guest or a close co-worker. Typically, the host offers up temporary ownership of the tools and space to enable faster progress.

Why do I blog this? this kind of typology is alway interesting, it might help for our project that concerns interactive table.

The McGurk Effect: how visual information are so pregant

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A glimpse of cognitive science. I finally found a video showing the Mc Gurk effect. The seminal paper about this topic is McGurk, H. & MacDonald, J. W. (1976). Hearing lips and seeing voices. Nature, 264, 746-748. According to Lawrence Rosenblum:

The 'Mc Gurk' effect demonstrates of how we all use visual speech information. The effect shows that we can't help but integrate visual speech into what we 'hear'. It shows that visual articulatory information is integrated into our perception of speech automatically and unconsciously. The syllable that we perceive depends on the strength of the auditory and visual information, and whether some compromise can be achieved.

There is a movie here go there, and follow these steps:

play the clip several times, alternating between looking at the talking head while listening, and listening with your eyes shut. Most adults (98%) think they are hearing "DA" - a so called "fused respons" - where the "D" is a result of an audio-visual illusion. In reality you are hearing the sound "BA", while you are seing the lip movements "GA".

Why do I blog this? just to show how the integration of visual information are important and sometimes confusing for our cognitive system!

One-button interactions and game design

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Gamasutra has a relevant article about "one button" video games (Berbank Green ). The point is to explore human computer interaction with a concrete limitation: having one button. I picked up few parts but you should read it anyway!

In this article, one button is the limitation on interaction. Using this limitation, the reader can then draw their own conclusions about how these ideas may be exploited on multi-button interaction systems. (...) By beginning with the most fundamental interaction, it is possible to carefully explore and experiment with it. (...) Our button has two states: Pressed and released. How can this be used?

There are an infinite number of answers to this, so let's begin with some basic actions of early computer or arcade games.

  • Movement (the Player Toy's movement around the playfield)
  • Attacking (the execution of an aggressive move or construction and deployment of a projectile)
  • Activation (a change in state of one or more Toys or playfield elements)

All of the above might be considered actions of the Player Toy, and for the moment this will be the focus.

Then the author explains how game designers can derive applications from the above. I won't explicit the others parts of the article, just read! Why do I blog this? this kind of reflection by game designers is very worthwile, it gives a very interestinf summary of their vision and how they connect interaction with a pad to their interaction design.

Participate to a research about new types of digital photography!

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Here is a interesting project starting in June 2005 about new types of digital photography. It's conducted at the Future Application Lab by Lalya Gaye, Maria Häkansson and Sara Ljungblad. Lalya sent me the call for participation if you want to participate, hop in!

Do you enjoy taking pictures with your camera phone? Do you own a Nokia 6600 or 6630? Then you have the possibility to test a new way to take digital pictures by trying out our software prototype.

The Viktoria Institute in Göteborg is a Swedish research institute in applied information technology. We invite you to participate in a non-commercial research study starting in June 2005 about new types of digital photography. You get to try out a software programme that visually incorporates sound and movement into the pictures you take (see pictures below). We call this "context photography".

We hope that you would like to participate and try taking pictures and uploading them to a website. You will be asked to answer some questions at two occasions during the study. The programme will not affect any other software on your camera phone and you can still take regular pictures when the programme is not in use. After the study you may keep the program free of charge.

This is how it works:

  1. Send us an e-mail to picturethis@viktoria.se to tell us you are interested in participating. Please write [Photo study] as the subject of your e-mail.
  2. The study starts in June 2005 and lasts four weeks. We will send you instructions and the programme, which is easy to download to your camera phone. Now you can start taking pictures!
  3. During the study you are expected to upload your pictures to a website. We will contact you twice by e-mail to ask questions about the prototype.
  4. After four weeks the study is over and you may keep the software for free.

We look forward to your participation!

Numerical keypad: cell phone versus computer

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(via the very nicely done a href="http://www-clips.imag.fr/multicom/partenariat/Multifiche">french ergonomist website multifiches) Interesting comparison between the numerical keypad of a cell phone to the keypad of a computer: Rinck M. and Ellwart T. (2004). Repetition priming during the use and recall of numerical keypads. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 16, 841-861.

Abstract: In two experiments, we investigated how repetition priming--a type of implicit memory--may be used to improve recall of the layout of digits on push-button telephones and calculators--an explicit memory task. In Experiment 1, participants were able to use repetition priming by pretending to dial a well-known telephone number in order to recall the telephone layout of digits, improving encoding of the number and preparation of the corresponding motor program. In contrast, no facilitative effect of known numbers on encoding and preparation was found for the calculator layout. Experiment 2 showed that the priming advantage of the telephone layout is not due to a general inadequacy of the calculator layout: Experimentally induced semantic repetition priming and motor repetition priming were observed for both the telephone layout and the calculator layout.

It's about comparing the two different layouts. In other experiments it has been found that people memorize the phone numbers positions they know well. The authors validates this hypothesis and they found that this is not the case with computers. Another experiment shows that the this phenomenon is due to the fact that people often carry out the activity of composing known number on the phone keypad whereas they do not do it on the numeric kypad of the computer.