ContextualInquiry-Group:4Corners
From CS160 User Interfaces Fa06
Contributions
- Maksim: Interviewed Subject C; brainstormed for storyboarding; contributed to wiki writeup.
- Natalie: Interviewed Subjects A + B; brainstormed for storyboarding; drew and uploaded storyboard sketches; contributed to wiki writeup.
- Ramy: Interviewed Subject D; brainstormed for storyboarding; contributed to wiki writeup.
- Tabassum: Interviewed Subject E + F; brainstormed for storyboarding; contributed to wiki writeup.
Target Users
Description of Users
Our original target user group, "bloggers," was too broad. We have decided to narrow down our target user group to casual, personal bloggers: these are people who maintain blogs of personal nature, talking about events in their day or things that are on their mind, and typically update their blog once a week. Our reasons for choosing this specific group of bloggers are: a) availability -- there are many such bloggers to be found; and b) background knowledge -- these bloggers are already computer savvy enough to know how to create and write in a blog, and know the problems that already exist in the current blogging systems.
We ultimately wound up interviewing a diverse crowd, although this includes people that did not quite fit in our target group. The people within our target group still spanned different years in the college spectrum and had different fields of study and interests, however.
Main Users
These are the users that fit perfectly in our target user group, and the people that we will focus our analysis on:
Subject A
Subject A is a senior college student who has been blogging since 2002. His technical background is extensive. He is majoring in computer science, and is therefore very computer savvy. He has been using computers since the age of eight and has mostly taught himself the basics of using computers, and additionally had a computer literacy class in junior high. He is also proficient in HTML. He writes blogs "basically as a public outlet," and uses LiveJournal for his blogging purposes. He is a casual blogger who sometimes writes once a week, or once a month -- whenever he has anything interesting to write about. He likes relating interesting (if sometimes embarassing) events in his life and receiving comments from friends on his blog posts, and dislikes certain drawbacks of his blogging service as is, such as not being able to blacklist users.
Subject B
Subject B has already graduated with a major in art at a university, but is now attending another art school to further his education. He is also fairly computer savvy; he got his first computer 11-12 years ago, and has been blogging since high school. He is proficient in HTML and maintains a web comic site, and keeps both a Xanga and a LiveJournal blog. He originally "used it [blogging] as a way to keep track of my daily activities," but "nowadays it's different things on my mind or recent artwork." He rarely logs onto the blogging services as he uses a third-party blogging client to publish his posts. He typically posts on his blogs once a week. He likes sharing his artwork online and reads posts made by his friends on a daily basis.
Subject C: Mr. Smith
Smith is a freshman college student, majoring in Computer Engineering. He is very good with computers, and can pick up difficult concepts very quickly. For example, he learned the Visual Basic programming language when he was 7 years old. Smith used a Xanga blog for a year in high school and updated it once or twice a week. However, he no longer uses a blog. He used the blog mainly to post interesting happenings in his life and share it with his friends. After a while, he tired of writing blog entries and stopped using his blog. He still feels that blogs are a great way to keep in touch with people that he normally would not be able to get in touch with. His main concerns about blogs include privacy issues (who can view his entries) and the lack of an easy to use mechanism to enter foreign characters into blog entries.
Additional Users
We interviewed other people that did not really fit in our target group:
Subject D
Subject D is an Arabic speaker who communicates with friends everyday. He lives in Egypt and goes to the American University in Cairo, so he and his friends all speak Arabic. Unlike most Egyptians, they all also speak proficient English. Subject D likes sharing the latest details of his life with his friends (for example, he just bought a car last week), and is thus extremely interested in personal blogs that allow for easy communication in both Arabic and English. To get around the difficulty of typing in Arabic, Subject D currently communicates using an alphanumeric English alphabet that approximates Arabic, a common quasi-language for middle eastern students. The interview was conducted online to save on costs.
Subject E
Subject E is a business manager in a software company located in Silicon Valley. Besides her general managerial jobs, she is also responsible for organizing online courses for new entrants to the company. These courses are conducted from her home. She is computer savvy and keeps herself up-to-date with new concepts and technology. She is also a mother of two. As far as blogging is concerned, she posts messages pretty regularly on her family blog only which is shared (i.e edited) by other members of her family as well.
Subject F
Subject F is a UC Berkeley student and an EECS major. His high school friends have a group blog where they share their experiences, pictures, opinions, events, etc. However, of late he has not been able to post messages to that blog or read postings made by his friends. The main reasons he mentioned are his busy schedule and lack of accessibility. He doesnt have a laptop and spends the entire day on campus (lectures, discussion sections and labs). The rest of his time is spent on doing home assignments.
Problem and Solution Overview
We are focusing on casual bloggers who for various reasons do not blog as often as they want to. They must take time out of their busy schedules to blog for leisurely, personal purposes, but can't afford to be burdened too much by the existing cumbersome blogging system. Thus, the main issues are those of convenience and portability. Our solution seeks to address this by providing an easily accessible interface (using the Anoto system) for jotting down thoughts throughout the day, freeing the writing/editing process from the uploading process and, in particular, allowing users to write whenever they feel like writing and not just when a computer with an internet connection is present.
Contextual Inquiry - Interview Descriptions
The Interview Process
We conducted interviews individually. We therefore each had our own unique approaches and circumstances:
Maksim
The interview with Subject C, aka Mr. Smith, took place in his room. The subject's environment consists of a desktop computer with a 19" LCD monitor on a cluttered desk table. The subject uses the tabletop rarely and prefers to do most of his work on the computer. On top of the tabletop reside letters, magazines, school papers, and assorted pencils/pens and papers.
The interview was carried out by sitting alongside Smith and observing him using his blog, in accordance with the Master-Apprentice model. When the conversation would begin to stall, questions were asked to further the conversation. Whenever the subject would give short answers, he was asked to clarify and/or provide more details. The subject demonstrated how to create a simple, text-only blog entry. In addition to his demonstration, he was asked what features he liked and disliked about the blog as well as his reasons for not using blogs anymore. His primary issues with blogs were the absence of a mechanism to write in Russian and his impression of an absence of privacy features for his blog (particularly concerning who could view his blog).
Natalie
I interviewed Subject A between classes at his school campus; we took a seat on a bench inside a building (where the sunlight wouldn't interfere with the screen's visibility), and I watched as he whipped out his laptop and connected to the school's wireless network, as he was oft wont to do. For my other interview, I went to Subject B's house, pulled up a chair beside him, and observed as he worked on his desktop computer in his room, with music playing in the background and art supplies sprawling all over his desk.
For both subjects, I first asked some preliminary questions (some things to loosen them up, as well as their background in computing, how long they had been blogging, etc.), and then observed as they wrote a sample blog post and explained the respective interfaces they were using, watching them intently and prodding for more vocal details as they worked, trying to follow as closely as I could the "master/apprentice" model from the readings. I feel that there was a major drawback during my interview process, insofar as people did not seem comfortable or ready to write a "real" blog entry on the spot with me watching them -- so they just showed me the equivalent of a "hello, world" program in a blog entry. I accepted this, since these blogs are of a rather personal nature, and I did not want to push further. I finished the session by asking other questions relevant to the task analysis section that did not come up in their explanations (such as what sort of things go wrong).
Ramy
I interviewed Subject D online over msn messenger and made sure to record our conversation for further analysis. Although a personal interview would have been preferred, Subject D lives in Egypt, and time and cost constraints proved prohibitive. I did however glean some interesting information from Subject D precisely because he lives in Egypt, particularly with respect to language barriers. Thus, although Subject D does not quite fit into our target user group, this interview will come in useful when considering features and benefits our system could offer.
The interview took a little over two hours of casual questioning. I asked Subject D to write as he normally would to an Egyptian friend, which prompted a series of quasi-Arabic sample sentences (written using English letters and numbers). I then spent the rest of the interview prodding him about these sentences, how he learned to write them, any difficulties he faced as a result of using them, whether he knew of any other means of communicating in Arabic, and so on. It turns out that quasi-Arabic is quite common and easy to pick up for people who know both Arabic and English, but Subject D nevertheless expressed interest in freewriting in Arabic if there were some other input device than touchpad or mouse.
Tabassum
The interview with Subject E was conducted in a Master-Apprentice model at her home in Saratoga on a saturday evening. The environment of this interview was her family room which consisted of a comfortable mattress, a couple of cushions, a laptop and children running around. She logged on to her family blog and wrote a comment on a picture posted by her brother. When asked she mentioned that the most important feature that she would love to have is to blog in her native language just like writing letters.
The interview with Subject F was more like a Question-Answer session in front of Dwinelle. I could not observe him do the task because he has stopped blogging for about a year now. However he agreed to answer my questions and admitted that he might start blogging again if he gets the convenience of posting on the move.
Common Tasks and Themes
In summary, some common tasks among our users included: 1) login and authentication; 2) creating new blog entries; 3) editing existing blog entries; 4) viewing others' blog entries; 5) commenting on others' blog entries; there are also some shared but not frequently done tasks, such as 6) setting personal settings, such as aesthetics and security. Common themes voiced repeatedly by users included security, privacy and convenience concerns.
In more detail:
A common theme among was concern about security in blog posting. Part of the reason Subject C stopped blogging was because he didn't like that anyone could see his entries, and did not know of a way to allow only his friends to view his blog; Subject A is concerned that there is no easy way to blacklist a person, such as a jealous ex, short of whitelisting a select few. Communicating with strangers did not seem to be desirable for any of our users.
Additionally, they all shared the central motivation of sharing information and socializing with friends. The type of blogging service that they used (livejournal, xanga, etc...) largely depended on which service their friends were using. The blog services are largely disconnected from each other, so it was important for the subjects to use the same service.
Subjects also reported that ideas for new blog entries would arise in places without a computer. With no computer nearby, the subjects would for the most part try to remember the idea for later entry into the computer, but often the idea would be forgotten before making it onto a blog entry. Most of the time, the subjects would not write down their ideas onto paper when they were far away from a computer.
Interesting/Unique Events
One interesting disparity between interviews was the topic of image hosting. Subjects A and B both posted images heavily on their respective blogs. However, Subject A often encountered problems in direct linking to images which would "result in a broken image link nearly all the time," and stated that one feature he would like is image hosting. However, Subject B (which was the later interview) stated that both LiveJournal and Xanga provide 1GB for image hosting -- I found it interesting that Subject A was not aware of this, despite his usage of LiveJournal for a comparable amount of time. They both use the HTML tag for placing images, feeling that the alternative is too cumbersome.
Something unique to Subject B was his use of a third-party client to publish blog postings, as well as his fairly active use of two blogging services. Part of the motivation was graceful error recovery. If the computer or browser crashed before he finished saving his blog post, the post would be lost. The third-party client takes efforts against this, saving periodically. The client also offers the ability to blog offline.
Subject C did not think that he needed a blog to post about events from his life, but noted that he would use a blog for note taking and reminders if a pen and paper input system were available.
Subject D demonstrated that language barriers are blown somewhat out of proportion. Although removing language discrimination would be a neat Anoto-inherent feature to have, people will find creative ways to get around language barriers with or without our system.
Subject E mentioned that she would not use Anoto pen and paper to post blog entries because she types faster than she writes. However, she thinks that it would be nice to incorporate this technology in her online courses.
Task Analysis Questions
1. Who is going to use the system?
The primary users of the system will be casual users of personal blogs. We consider casual users as those who typically update at least once a month and at most up to twice a week. The blogs of these users are located on the websites of popular blogging services such as Xanga (www.xanga.com) or LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com). The main motivation for these users to keep blogs is to communicate with friends and family and to see what they are doing. In addition, they want to share important events in their life by writing about them in their blog. Users also have a fair degree of computer literacy and knowledge of the internet, as they already have pre-existing blogs.
2. What tasks do they now perform?
Frequent Tasks
- Logging on to the blogging service
- Creating a blog entry and editing a previous blog entry
- Basic text manipulation: bolding, italicizing, underlining...
- Inserting links
- Inserting pictures
- Viewing other users' blogs (through a subscription page or e-mail)
- Commenting on other users' blogs
- Viewing comments on their own blogs
Not-So-Frequent Tasks
- Customizing blog-wide security settings
- Customizing the general look and feel of the blog
- Creating a blog account
3. What tasks are desired?
- Computer-less blogging -- i.e., users often forget what they want to write before they get to a computer
- Ability to write in other languages
- Ability to upload hand drawn pictures/diagrams
- Ability to input notes/reminders into his blog
- Graceful recovery -- blog posts are often lost completely in the case of a network or computer outage if they are not saved to the database in time (say, before your computer crashes)
- Enhanced security options
- Better image hosting options (in terms of space, direct links, longevity, ease of use, etc.)
- Search -- being able to search old blog entries
4. How are the tasks learned?
Our subjects all had a fair amount of computer literacy, which mostly gave them enough background knowledge to be able to figure out how to accomplish their tasks through the existing blog interfaces through trial and error. Additionally, the majority of the time the interface was easy enough to understand for users to accomplish the tasks they wanted to do.
5. Where are the tasks performed?
The nature of blogging as it is physically requires a computer and an internet connection. However, in this age of laptops and wireless networks, some users blog just about anywhere, from cafes to libraries to park benches, while some users use desktop computers -- their own and/or school/work computers.
6. What's the relationship between the user & data?
The data is experiences and knowledge the user would like to impart to friends, i.e. the content of blog posts and comments.
7. What other tools does the user have?
Alternative Blog Posting Methods:
- Cell phone: on some blogging services, the user can text message posts. Or, in some cases, they can use any phone to upload voice recordings.
- Client software: these are software clients that the user can download and use to publish, such as this third-party application.
Supplementary Tools:
- PhotoBucket and other external sites for image hosting
8. How do users communicate with each other?
Through the blogging service, users can comment on each other's blog postings. Users maintain a list of friends within a blogging service. This list may affect certain features: 1) privacy -- there sometimes exists an option to allow only certain friends view your posts and comment on them; and 2) subscription mechanism. Users can view a page containing recent posts of their friends, and follow up on these posts and comment on them. The comments for each entry appear right under that entry. Users can also view comments that their entries have received. This is the main vehicle of communication within the blogging service.
Casual bloggers also often communicate with their friends outside the blogging service, such as through telephone, email, and/or instant messaging.
9. How often are the tasks performed?
Most of the users read blogs almost everyday and write anywhere from once a month to twice a week.
10. What are the time constraints on the tasks?
There are a few different interpretations of this question and what it involves.
The actual event of writing an entry varies from user to user; some users may write a quick two-line message while others may recap their day-to-day activities for the past week. There is a fuzzy time constraint on how long an idea for a blog post is conceptualized and how long it remains fresh in the mind to be realized in writing.
However, a common theme would be the desire for writing to have minimal fuss. Users want to focus on writing and not the technical clunk that is involved with publishing a web site. They come to the site to write, not to learn HTML; there is no real training time involved in blogging.
11. What happens when things go wrong?
- Confusion/Errors on task
- Present Edit and/or Cancel buttons to allow the user to start over if confusion occurs
- Practical Difficulty
- Not enough time to write a full entry: Provide an option to store drafts of the entry to the blog.
- Catastrophe
- Accidental publishing of entry for everyone to view when it was intended for only a select group of people -> Show a reminder to the user for which group of people are allowed to view the blog entry.
- User's browser or computer crashes -> your entry is lost unless you saved it as a draft (or used a software client with auto-save enabled)
- Backup Strategy
- Blog server crashes -> The paper provides a backup copy of the entry while all all blog entries are stored on the server.
- Provide option to save drafts of an entry to the blog.
Analysis of Tasks
Easy
1. Viewing Blog Entries: This is the most basic functionality needed by the users. Personal blog entries of users should be easily accessible at all times. Users should be able to view most recent blog entries and retrieve old blog entries from an archive maintained by the system.
2. Writing/Modifying Blog Entries: Users should be able to easily write new blog entries and then edit them, by manipulating either the physical or digital copy of an entry. Once a blog entry has been posted, the user might want to append something to it later. The user can update the physical copy of the entry and the already posted copy will get updated with the new content. Furthermore, the digital copy can also be edited if the user wants to, for example, erase a part of the blog entry before publishing or cut and paste the image or part of the image somewhere else.
Medium
1. Formatting/Thickness/Color: Users should be able to specify basic background and writing colors, formatting, penstroke thickness and so on, on either an individual blog entry or a universal level. For editing the blog at a universal level, this will most likely require a separate menu. For editing individual blog entries, we are unsure if we would be able to use the Anoto software demonstrated in section or if we would have to incorporate our own rudimentary paint-like features.
2. View/Add Subscriptions: Users can add friends and subscribe to their blogs for later viewing. Again, this should be in a separate menu. Friends should be easily accessible/sortable and may have small display pictures to distinguish them -- this would necessitate some way to choose your own display picture as well. Finally, adding friends would require some sort of confirmation from the people the user is trying to add, for security reasons.
Hard
1. Publishing Blog Entries: This is hard because it will constitute the majority of our technical overhead. Users should be able to tick "publish" on their Anoto blog page form, dock the pen and rest assured that their blog entry has been published without having to touch their computer. This will require automatic interfacing with the blogging service (using saved login information) as soon as the pen is docked. Finally, this task becomes more complicated because Anoto penstrokes seem to be saved as images, which will require us to automatically host/link/upload images into blog posts.
2. Embedding Images: Similar to ButterflyNet, users can draw a hotspot on Anoto paper and later pick an image from their computers to insert there. On top of the complications of uploading Anoto penstroke images, our software should allow users to pick an image to fill the hotspot, then should overlay this image into the Anoto penstroke images before uploading the entire composite image to the blog.
Interface Design
Our design approach is very simple. The main idea behind our design is to provide convenience and portability to the user. To meet these end goals, we have designed our product such that the features are consistent with similar existing services which will eliminate the learning curve associated with any new system. In addtion to the features expected of a general blogging system, our interface will also provide the user with more advanced features that are desired by the user but not provided by any of the existing blogging services.
Our interface consists of a menu with 4 main tabs:
- Your Blog - This is the default view of the application. It displays all the blog entries published by the user with date and time stamp headings. All the entries will be sorted by date and time. Under each blog entry, there will be a link to the comments made by other bloggers on the user's blog entry. The user can view the comments by clicking on the link and the interface will expand in order to display them. Beside the comments link, there will be an option to delete the blog entry from the blog. User can remove an entry from the blog by simply selecting the delete button.
- Save Drafts - The drafts tab of the interface shows a listing of all the entries that were entered with the Anoto pen and were not marked for immediate publishing. The listing of entries is sorted by date headings with the full entries underneath each heading. Immediately underneath each draft entry are two buttons - Edit and Publish. The Edit button allows for the manipulation of the digital pen strokes of the entry as well as the customization of the entry background and stroke parameters (thickness, color). The Publish button publishes the particular entry to the blog. As soon as a draft entry is chosen for publishing, it is moved from the drafts list under the Drafts Tab to the submitted entry list under the Your Blog tab.
- Subscriptions - Here the user will be provided with an option to add the blog names of his/her friends. The added blog names will be stored in a list of subscriptions that will be owned by the user. The user will also have the capability of updating this list. When the subscription tab is selected, the interface will display random blog entries from amongst the user's list of friends. The list will be displayed on the interface, which the user can use to select a friend to view the blog entries published only under that particular blog name. These blog entries will be sorted by time-stamp. There will be a "Post Comment" button beside each blog entry. The user can select this button to post comments to his/her friends blog. Here is what the subscriptions tab should look like:
- Settings - The settings tab presents options to customize aspects of the blog entries. Options in this tab are - Manage Account, Change default appearance, Security settings, and Upload user pics. The "Manage Account" option allows for entry of a nickname and profile for the blog. The "Change default appearance" option presents settings to customize the ink color, stroke width, and background color with a preview window underneath. The security settings allow for selection of which parties are allowed to view the blog entries. These security settings are in accordance to the settings available in the blog from the particular blog service. Finally, the "Upload user pics" option allows for the selection and uploading of an image from the user's computer.
Storyboards
Analysis of Approach
Comparison with Competing Technologies
The affordances of the Anoto system are portability, ease of entry of special symbols and drawings, familiarity of data entry, and cost-effectiveness. These affordances complement the application of blog entry better than the other technologies that can be used for blog entry - the Tablet PC, the PDA, and the desktop computer. The portability and low power consumption of Anoto pens and paper allows the blog user to compose new entries at any time and anywhere. In comparison, the desktop PC isn't portable at all and the Tablet PC is portable but bulky. All three computing technologies require power either always or frequently. Since the Anoto system works like a normal pen and paper, the familiarity of paper allows for easy entry of drawings or special symbols into the blog application. The entry systems of special symbols and drawings on the other technologies is either non-existant (PC), too constraining on the user (PDA), or not as natural as handwriting (PDA and Tablet PC). Paper is also very cheap, so usage of the Anoto system with blogs will be cost-efficient to the blog user. In comparison, the other competing technologies are all expensive. In all, the Anoto system has the best combination of affordances that complement the blogging services.
Pros and Cons of Approach
The pros and cons of incorporating the Anoto system into the process of editing blogs are:
Pros:
- Familiarity of paper
- Portability
- Ease of drawing
- Cheap
- Redundancy of inputted data - paper and digital form
Cons:
- Hard to write on paper in the dark
- Battery powered
- Easy to get lost
- Need of special software to get to work
- Limited amount of memory for strokes
- Only supported on the PC platform
