ContextualInquiry-Group:GGiD
From CS160 User Interfaces Fa06
Contents |
Division of Labor
Bryce: Target Users, Task Analysis Questions. Set up all the interviews and interviewed two people.
Robert: Problem and Solution Overview, Contextual Inquiry, Analysis of Approach, and interviewed two people.
Simon: Contextual Inquiry, Analysis of Tasks, and interviewed two people.
Vijay: Interface Design and interviewed two people.
Target Users
Person A
Our first interviewee has spent six years working in the public relations industry (two at our target firm) and earned a communications degree at San Jose State University. As an account manager, she handles the Adobe and eBay developer-relations accounts. Person A monitors news outlets to follow industry trends pertinent to her clients and studies publications, studying them for topic focuses and writing styles desired in client coverage. Most of this research is done online, although she watches the news on a television in the morning to get a broader view. She enjoys the power of tools such as news tags, but dislikes the setup time involved with technologies such as RSS readers.
Person B
Person B holds the highest position of the individuals interviewed as a senior account director. She has been with the company for six years, previously taught English in Japan, and currently leads the eBay and a data storage company’s accounts. As her team’s leader, Person B provides expertise and business strategy and also interacts with potential clients. These tasks demand constant communication with her team to oversee work from research to presentation. While the Internet greatly aids her in research, Person B dislikes the redundant steps involved in communication with her team members, such as copying files to a server and emailing them also to her employees.
Person C
Person C interestingly holds an engineering degree and worked for NASA before joining our target agency three years ago. As a senior account executive, her primary purpose is to aggregate relevant data to aid in media outreach. This job entails a significant amount of reading, going through newsletters and online sites. While most research is done online, she prefers printed hard copies. Person C enjoys talking to journalists and providing direction and strategy for her teams. On the other hand, she does not like assembling reports and writing emails.
Person D
Person D, a UC Berkeley Rhetoric major, recently joined the company a year ago as an account coordinator for the Macrovision and Fabric 7 accounts. She is in charge of coordinating accounts and gathering information, tasks that involve the same media consumption mentioned in the other positions, along with following calendars for calendars and speaking events. Similar to Person C, she prints out articles to read during her commute on BART and MUNI. Despite the accompanying busy work, Person D enjoys the impact and recognition she gets for her work.
Problem and Solution Overview
Our project enables employees of PR firms, whose job is to comb through the daily news, to work on the go. Users print a series of news articles on Anoto paper before heading out, and then read them while travelling. Any thoughts they have about how the article affects their client can be written directly onto the article. Upon reaching a suitable place to dock the pen, they can email their thoughts, along with the article, to coworkers. Our project improves the effectiveness of any pre-existing routine by ensuring users do not need to retype their comments later; they also have their own hard copy of the notes and article. For users who previously did similar tasks on a laptop, the Anoto pen and paper interface provides a more travel-friendly alternative.
Contextual Inquiry - Interview Descriptions
The Interview Process
We began each interview by introducing ourselves as UC Berkeley students taking a user interface design course, and asked the interviewee about her position at the company. We asked for details on what her responsibilities were and her overall role in her team. Before progressing any further, we made sure to promise the confidentiality of the interview (only using the information gathered for research purposes) and ask permission before beginning an audio recording. We wanted the interviewee to feel comfortable, so we also made sure to inform her that she would be free to correct us at any time if anything we said or assumed about her job was incorrect. It was her role to teach her work to us, and we made it clear that we were not there to drill her, but to learn from her.
Continuing on the lines of a traditional interview, we asked the interviewee about how she went about doing her work each day. At this firm, most of our interviewees had similar work patterns, but we would still ask about specifics for each person. As we went along, we would also ask which parts of her daily routine she found the most tedious, annoying, repetitive, or cumbersome. Also, we would ask which tasks she found very simple or easy, benefited by technology or otherwise. These opinions would form the basis of our discussion on proposal alterations later on.
We then transitioned into the real "contextual inquiry" part of the interview. This transition was made very clear by us setting new rules for how the interview would work. We would tell the interviewee to pretend to do parts of her work for the workday (because we interviewed near the end of the day, when most work was already done), and we would watch to look for patterns. We informed the interviewee that we would occasionally interrupt her work to ask questions, but that she was free to stop our interruptions if she wanted to get a point across. From there, the interviewee would start on a task (usually re-enacting something she had done during the day), and we would watch and ask for clarifications when necessary. Throughout the interview, we took rapid notes and tried to ask questions that were probing enough to encourage the interviewee to explain as many aspects of her job as possible.
Most of the interview was conducted at the interviewees desk, because that was actually where most of the work was located. A vast majority of it involved watching the interviewee interacting with her computer as she searched for news, pulled up results, scanned articles, and sent e-mails out to co-workers. We were lucky enough to witness one worker, however, show us how she would walk to the kitchen area of the office to borrow one of the printed publications from the office library. This led to an interesting conversation about how she would read materials while on her lunch break, or bring copies of printed material back to her desk.
Tasks and Themes
Tasks
1. Pre-work routine: All of the users started their day in a similar fashion, either by reading the newspaper in the morning or watching TV news.
2. News aggregation: Upon arriving at work, all four of the interviewees would spend anywhere from one to three hours browsing news online. The exact ways they got their news varied somewhat, but all of the users mentioned using some form of news aggregator, such as Google News alerts. Factiva and LexisNexis were other popular sources of articles; most found RSS feeds too difficult to set up.
3. Sharing news: All of the users, upon finding an article deemed important (meaning it had pertinent news regarding one of their clients), would paste the full text article, along with some comments, to everyone working for that client.
4. Off duty reading: Two of the four users mentioned they and other employees would typically bring the Wall Street Journal or another publication with them during their lunch break to read over; sometimes they would take home articles to read as well.
Themes
1. Short term news and the importance of time: 'Finding critical news articles and alerting clients to them before the clients found out themselves was important to each interviewee. Each person interviewed had a fairly tight schedule, typically full of clients that needed to be contacted and press releaseas that had deadlines.
2. Working out of the office: Half of our interviewers mentioned they preferred reading paper based news over online news; this likely contributes to the fact that all of our interviewees either read the paper before work, while at lunch, or during their commute.
3. Importance of organization: The time sensitivity of most of our interviewees' work required a lot of organization. Our third interviewee, who used a lot of postit notes, demonstrated this clearly. When out of the office, in a different environment, much of this organization was put aside, even though news was still being read. Interviewees mentioned they would read an article at home, but the ideas or comments they had about it would be forgotten before the next workday.
Unique Occurrences during the Interviews
One of the more lively occurrences that happened during the interviews was with Person A, who we followed to the kitchen as described in the interview process above. That was a good exercise in literally "following one's daily routine", and was justified as she really did need to take the walk in order to deliver a printed publication. On the way, we received a bonus in the form of a tour of the office and an explanation of the company's publication filing system.
Person B surprised us when she started talking about how the company was looking into RSS feeds, as that seemed like a big departure from their current workflow. She showed us an RSS reader she was given, but openly admitted that it was too hard to set up so no one really used it. These events sprung from questions we had about her alternatives for news sources, but we didn't expect it to be so revealing about the nature of the company.
Person C had a system of post-it notes that she used to manage her daily schedule. Her desk calendar came with a set of different colored notes that she used for keeping track of various tasks; at the end of the day she would put one on her computer with everything she had to do the next day. This interviewee's system proved exceptional because despite her image of being very tech-savy, she still preferred her system to using a calendering application on the computer.
Our last interviewee, Person D mentioned using "sparkler documents", which were Excel spreadsheets containing a list of figures and statistics pulled from the news about a client. These documents allowed them to list facts about their clients to journalists calling in with questions. Sparkler documents did not appear to be a formal or required part of work at the company, but we felt this clever and useful idea should have a place in our project.
Task Analysis Questions
Who is going to use system?
Individuals involved in information aggregation and distribution will use our system, due to its natural extension of their current workflow and habits. In our interviews, the account coordinator and executives were primarily concerned with keeping their team informed with current events, although every member personally participated in this activity at a lesser degree. Also, both Persons C and D exhibited a natural tendency towards paper copies, something that would ease the transition to using our solution. In addition, managers of these individuals would also find use of the system, as it will provide a way to monitor the information workflow.
What tasks do they now perform?
To gather the desired information, the individuals first traverse through multiple news sources, mostly online media. The point of entry for this search is either from headlines on the front pages or notifications from keyword trackers. Additionally, this step may involve search engines. As person A explained, the account coordinators often search for a list of keywords relevant to their clients on a regular basis. When relevant information is located, it is communicated to the other team members in one of two ways. First, the person may directly speak to the desired audience if they are in close physical range. More commonly, an email summary is drafted where the sender quickly summarizes the article, along with excerpting key sections and attaching the entire source for reference. This workflow also occurs in a supplemental form, where the users print out news to read away from the office. For Example, person C uses a local pub as a study hall, while person D read on her commuter trains in exchange for leaving work early. In both of these cases, the task workflow stays the same, as information acquired during this time must either be retained or later transcribed into the above described email format. Additionally, these individuals frequently credit data sheets highlighting key information about their clients. This task involves filtering through all recent email messages and summaries for relevant facts and statistics.
What tasks are desired?
The users want to efficiently convey important information and accompanying analysis to others formulated while they are away from the office. The current process involves redundant steps, such as transcribing information from handwritten notes into an email format and reselecting sections that they have already identified as important. As a result, the individual’s information retention granularity reduces, limited to blatantly important news rather than sources with more subtle, but nonetheless relevant, facts. Also, they would like to reduce the time spent on creating summary sheets, which currently require searching for information that has already been marked as relevant in the past.
How are tasks the tasks learned?
The primary source for learning tasks will be through the in-house technology department. At our interviewed firm, this group was in charge of introducing new tools to the employees, such as the RSS reader. However, it is important to realize potential lack of adoption through this form. Our interviews revealed that while the staff had been fully trained in using RSS readers, none of them had bothered to set up the systems since it presented a completely separate and new tool, which they had to integrate into their workflow. Therefore, our aim is to reduce this learning curve, by building on previously learned techniques, such as contextual menus. Additionally, another source of learning will be through peer example. Person D stated that many of her current tasks, such as press release styles and email formats, were learned from examples provided from her coworkers.
Where are the tasks performed?
Since the articles primarily come from online sources and equipment such as printers are needed, employees will need to queue up their selected articles and print them from the office. After the articles have been printed, the location is not restrained. For example, the users can use it at home, during commutes, or at a public location. However, work must return to the office, in order for the system to utilize email services and allow the user to edit any information.
What's the relationship between user and data?
News and publications serve as the basis for all communications and actions taken by public relation agencies. For the account coordinators, the information provides a source for deriving relevant analysis and highlights they can supply to their coworkers through summary sheets. In turn, the account managers rely on this information to inform their clients about recent headlines and also to identify media opportunities aligned with their objectives. Therefore, the notes and analysis conveyed through the solution serve as the bridge between information aggregation and its use.
What other tools does the user have?
Currently, public relations employees rely on two tools, email clients and Internet browsers. The Internet browser provides an outlet to monitor and read current information feeds while near a computer. Email acts a multi-faceted solution for the employees, providing more than a communication medium between other employees and clients. For example, Person B utilizes email as a repository for her drafts, while Person A uses it as a quick reference for key facts when talking to clients.
How do users communicate with each other?
The users will communicate with each other through email messages generated by the system. While direct in-person conversations may arise afterwards (such communication was fostered at our target firm with an open office environment), emails are the dominant form of communication in this workplace. Therefore, we have chosen to utilize this preexisting system to increase the utility of our own system.
How often are the tasks performed?
While article analysis and resultant communication are performed continuously throughout the workday, our solution focuses on offsite work, constraining the tasks to a daily occurrence. For example, the employees at our target firm only utilized printed material while away from the office. The post processing would also be a daily occurrence, since they will only need to review their queued work upon returning to the office.
What are the time constraints on the tasks?
Due to the fast paced nature of the news industry, the information captured by our solution must be available as soon as possible to the intended recipients. For example, Person A informed us that information is scoured throughout the day, implying that any delay of previous analysis would diminish its value to the company. Also, the main purpose behind the system is analysis of the printed material. With this objective, the accompanying procedural tasks, such as selection and printing, must task as little time as possible.
What happens when things go wrong?
When things go wrong, there are adverse reactions from the clients and managers. For example, a client discovering information or news before the public relations agency results in distrust between the two companies. However, current system holds many safeguards to help prevent such disasters, such as redundant availability of emails. Our solution will allow graceful degradation when problems arises, providing a paper source for the employees to reference in case of failure.
Analysis of Tasks
Easy Tasks
1. The user does a search (using a search engine of her choice) for news topics of her interest, and finds a lot of results. Or, the user receives many e-mail messages containing news articles from the Account Coordinator, and is responsible for reading over them by the next day. The user cannot finish reading all of the articles needed by the end of the day, and marks/prints some of them to take home with her. After collecting articles to take home, the user can choose to leave some behind (eliminate them from her stack) at the last minute as well.
2. The user would like to file or tag a particular news article (paper/online) for a certain team, perhaps a different one than her own. This would symbolize her desire for that particular team to be notified or at least aware of the article's presence. Folder structures in Microsoft Outlook help her manage these categorizations.
Medium Tasks
1. The user is reading an article (paper/online) and wishes to make some comments on the page. These comments will ultimately turn into notes that will turn into e-mails to other members of this user's team, and probably will launch a discussion (through e-mail) about the article.
2. The user is reading an article (paper/online) and sees some statistics for a company client. Because she is currently looking for "sparkler notes" for this company (a wide variety of interesting facts and numbers for filler during conversations with publishers), she would like to link the company name and the statistic for reference later. It is just a minor statistic, but over time she will compile a fairly large factsheet on a company based on the "connections" she makes in articles she reads.
Hard Tasks
1. The user has finished reading a very interesting article (paper/online) that is pertinent to the company, and wishes to share it with her colleagues. She wants to send the article link/title, the entire article body, and her personal comments on it all in the body of one e-mail. For online articles, the process consists of a lot of copy/paste. From a paper standpoint, she would normally find a corresponding copy of the article online and go from there. If there was no corresponding copy online, then the user would probably find a way to physically deliver the article.
2. The user has taken a lot of notes about an article she has read, and ultimately wishes to send them to her colleagues. However, she feels that her notes are poorly organized and sloppy, and wishes to refine them before she sends off the information. To save her notes for later, she e-mails them to herself and finds time later on to go back to the e-mail and edit the notes by hand. Finally, she sends the reformatted notes to her team members, who benefit from the added organization and clarity.
Interface Design
When designing the interface for the technology public relations firm that we examined we were mindful of several things:
1. It is important to stick to the normal workflow of the employees in the firm. Any alteration must be carefully thought through and should be able to be easily incorporated into their normal workflow.
2. Our solution for the firm does not necessarily complete any tasks that are not possible by other means, however our hope is that their existing tasks may be completed with greater ease and with less time in front of a computer screen.
3. It may be that our design ideas are most useful for employees similar to Person C and Person D. Those who have no desire to spend less time in front of the screen or work outside the confines of the office may find no added benefit to using Anoto pens to do their work.
A summary of the new workflow with the Anoto pen is as follows:
- When using services like Google News, Factiva, or any other news service or blog, the user will have the option of "queueing" the article in order to read a hard copy version of the article. After selecting all the articles that she would like to examine for the day, the user can print all the queued articles in bulk onto Anoto paper. The process of queueing will be taken care of through a Firefox plugin that we will create.
- The articles will joined on the pages by a user interface that can be interacted with using the Anoto pen. As the user is reading the articles, she can comment and has access the limited annotation features. One of these features is the ability to compile items for "sparkler documents" on the fly (Medium task #2).
- The articles along with comments, annotations, and topic tags can be emailed directly from the paper or emailed to the user herself to be edited later.
- Sparkler sheets can be printed as necessary and be specified to include only specific topics. The interface for managing sparkler sheets will also be a firefox plugin.
Storyboards for Easy Task #1, Medium Task #2, and Hard Task #1
Queuing Documents (Figure 1)
A. User browses to printer-friendly version of whatever article she would like to queue or highlights whatever text she would like to read.
B. User right clicks to access "Queue page" from the right-click menu. This option was installed when the user installs our Firefox plugin.
C. From the Firefox menu bar the user can access all queued documents and selectively remove certain documents from being printed or print all the documents in bulk.
D. This image shows the layout and interface of the printed Anoto page. The company that implements these ideas will most likely have a special printer set up that only prints pages on Anoto paper.
Sharing Documents (Figure 2)
E/F/G. The first thing to notice are the three "buttons" arranged along the right side of the document. Tapping these buttons puts the user into Bold mode, Sparkler mode, or Quotation mode. The user than circles whatever parts of the article they would like to bold, mark as a Sparkler comment, or to mark as a quotation. Quotations are often used in emails in the PR firm we examined to preface the whole text of the document and set apart what the sender of the email deems to be an important passage of the article. These quotations can be used to present the most important passage of an article if the reader of the email may not have time to read the entire article. Passages or words are also often bolded by employees to draw attention to specific parts of the article.
H. The section at the bottom of the page represents the email interface of the page. This section is only printed on the last page of a multi page article. On previous pages there will be only room for comments to allow more comments to be written for longer articles. The article can be tagged with multiple keywords if desired, with each tage seperated by a space. The emails written in the "To" field can be shortened aliases or full individual or team emails. When the user checks the send box, the data will be sent whenever the pen next docks to a script that will dynamically create an email message and send it using a pre-chosen email client.
I. Format of email.
Sparkler Documents (Figure 3)
J/K. If the user enters enters any information in Sparkler mode, then an alternate path of functionality becomes available.
L. The user can access a sparkler manager included in the Firefox plugin and then print out a sparkler document.
M. Tenative Sparkler Document Format.
Analysis of Approach
Affordances:
The affordances of the Anoto pen make it an ideal tool to use for reading and annotating documents on the go. The affordances intrinsically present advantages over other devices that could perform the same tasks; these affordances and advantages are described below.
1. Small and lightweight. Perhaps the best advantage of using Anoto is that it does not take up much space. One can comfortably use the Anoto pen in tight situations that are often common on public transportation. Since the interface is just a pen and paper, there are no power on/off delays required, which is important if users were working but suddenly have to catch a train or get off at a stop.
2. Comfortable reading medium. Our application is primarily focused on users being able to read news articles and write comments about them easily. Paper is conducive to lots of reading; that half our users preferred reading paper copies of the news reinforces this idea..
3. Comfortable writing medium. The pen is great for jotting down small notes; typical users only have a fews sentences of comments to write about an article.
3. Battery life is a minor issue. Although battery life is about the same as the average laptop, users do not need to bend over backwards conserving battery power so they can work longer. This is because of graceful degradation--the pen will not stop writing notes even though it's out of battery. The only caveat is that any notes written after the battery dies have to be retyped later.
Hardware comparisons:
Why the Anoto interface is better than a laptop or tablet: Laptops and tablet PC's are also mediums by which news articles can be read, and tablet PC's provide the additional affordance of being able to write directly to a news article. However, carrying an Anoto pen and paper is less cumbersome than carrying around a laptop. Paper also acts as a more natural medium for large amounts of reading - users who don't like reading news on a screen already have to do it many hours a day, and it follows that given the opportunity they would not do so. None of our users mentioned reading news online at home. Even if users read news on paper, one might argue that they could just write about the article on their laptop. This may be true, except that by contextual inquiry we found most users' comments on an article are never more than a sentence or two. It is hardly worth opening up one's laptop just to write a few sentences - jotting down notes directly with the Anoto pen is much more convenient. A final advantage of the pen over the laptop is graceful degradation - if you run out of power on the pen, you can still read the paper articles. In fact, you can still write down comment son them. It just means they have to be retyped later to send to coworkers. This is, however, significantly better than nothing at all. In short, because of the relative simplicity of the task required, using a laptop is overkill. The Anoto pen and paper take advantages of relaxed requirements with smaller hardware, making it better for our project.
Problems with other types of hardware: Other devices such as PDA's simply are not practical for this setup. One could still print out articles to read, but writing notes for them on the PDA is less intuitive than writing them on the paper directly. Additionally, like the laptop or tablet PC, it suffers from the same non-graceful degradation issues regarding battery life. SmartBoards obviously have no place here, since we are aiming to be portable.
Pros and Cons
Pros
1. Good for writing quick notes about an article.
2. More natural interface for reading news.
3. Small space requirement - don't need a cumbersome laptop.
4. Easy to add articles to print at the end of the work day.
5. Augments rather than alters users' main routine, lessening the learning curve.
Cons
1. Must choose articles before leaving work - cannot add more articles for reading while away from a computer with internet access and a printer.
2. Generally users will only use this for time insensitive articles, due to delay between release time and time the article is read. These kinds of articles may be opinion pieces or about industry trends.
3. If the Anoto pen runs out of battery, then comments written after that point must be retyped.
Extra Notes Not Recorded
USER A
- Work is online mostly, newsletter through e-mail, click Headlines, etc.
- New York Times is home page
- Look for big stories
- Reads hard copy during lunch (Wall Street Journal)
- Plan a story with the media (Information Week)
- Don't write the articles - we read the articles
- Connecting ideas
- With hard copies, it is too hard
- The Internet makes it easy!
- Full text is pasted in e-mail
- Outlook User
- Google News Alerts for the tags "ebay" and "developer"
- Paste a direct link into e-mail (use printer friendly format)
- Use aliases, Outlook knows who to send it to
- Body: The one sentence summary
- 50% of the time, get responses - sometimes acted upon
- Takes notes, puts it into e-mail
- Corporate server stores notes
- Server per office (this is San Francisco)
- We send PowerPoint presentations AND put it on the server
- For sharing paper...
- She walked over, gave it to another person
- May leave it on a chair, left open to page for them (will call later, otherwise may forget)
USER B
- Small teams
- Ebay, Adobe (affiliates), Informatica
- 5-8 people on a team
- Watches broadcast news for big news in the morning
- At work, picks up newsfeeds, e-mail newsletters (headline, flash, html)
- RSS feeds
- Hard copy? Does a scan
- E-mail, prefers on screen / online
- Tedious parts:
- Actively searching for information/news
- Factiva, Google News, Technorati
- Shares 1-3 articles per day
- SF Gate is her homepage
- Google searching informatica
- Came back from lunch...
- Went to News, sorted by date
- Saw that there was a new article, so read it
- Was relevant, so she wanted to share it
- Links change, so she included the full text of the article
- Asked for feedback
- Might need to tack action, so files it away into a folder
- Generates clips, sends to copanies - a client-based organization
- Sets up meetings with companies to share
PHYSICAL SET UP
- Magazines come in through the mail
- Receptionist files them away in the Library
- Old magazines thrown out after a year
- Use them to see trends in article-writing
- Newspapers have an even shorter life
- System is to check out one at a time
- She checks out one per month
- Depends on time, etc.
