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Reader goals – Reading to learn

This series looks at the different site interactions that readers have with informational sites and is adapted from the full paper on the topic that I wrote with Jan Spyridakis and presented at HCII 2015: Using Readers’ and Organizations’ Goals to Guide Assessment of Success in Information Websites. See the entire series

Reading to Learn (to use Later or to Apply with Other Information)

Reading to Learn to Use Later, without a particular or immediate task in mind, is similar to what Sticht described as Reading to Learn [1]. The critical distinctions between this and Reading to learn to do now and Reading to learn to do a task later are:

  • The reading task in your content is a subtask of the reader’s ultimate goal of learning a new concept or skill.
  • The reader does not have a specific goal beyond an increase in knowledge.

An example of reading that facilitates this type of reader goal, where the goals are accomplished after using the website or in conjunction with using other information, would be websites and books about design principles so as to use the information later when designing a website. The connection between the reading and the ultimate application of the knowledge is too distant to have a meaningful and identifiable cause-effect relationship.

In a Reading to Learn to Use Later goal, as shown in the figure, the reader reads information from many different locations, of which your content might be only one information source. While similar to the Reading to Be Reminded interaction type, in this interaction type, the reader is seeking more information from the content. In this interaction, the content is new and the reader might consult multiple sources to accumulate the information required to reach the learning goal.

Reading to learn
Reading to learn

It is difficult to measure how well readers are accomplishing their ultimate learning goal when their interaction with the website may be one step of many and they might not use the information until much later. However, it is reasonable to collect information about the immediate experience. For example, the content could encourage readers to interact with the page as a way to provide feedback to the reader and to collect information about the readers’ experience. The content could also include quizzes, and links or affordances such as prompts to share the content with a social network.

[1] Sticht, T.G., Fox, L.C., Hauke, R.N., Zapf, D.W.: The Role of Reading in the Navy. DTIC Document (1977)

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Reader goals – Reading to do a task later

This series looks at the different site interactions that readers have with informational sites and is adapted from the full paper on the topic that I wrote with Jan Spyridakis and presented at HCII 2015: Using Readers’ and Organizations’ Goals to Guide Assessment of Success in Information Websites. See the entire series

Reading to Do a Task Outside the Website Later

When reading to do a task outside the website, readers’ accomplish their goals outside of the web and after they’ve read the content that provides the prerequisite learning for the task. Some examples of such interactions include:

  • The United States Internal Revenue Service’s instructions on filling out the Form 1040[1].
  • The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA)’s information about performing crosswind landings [2].
  • An article about how to do well in a job interview [3].

The figure shows the relationship between the readers’ interaction with the content and the task they hope to accomplish.

Reading to do a task outside the website later
Reading to do a task outside the website later

When authoring content for this type of interaction, the web usability goals include search-engine optimization. Term and vocabulary alignment is an important and easy way to make the content easy for the reader to discover.

Of course, providing meaningful, interesting, and helpful content is critical. In this type of interaction, understanding the nature and relationship of the content and the task are key elements towards getting meaningful feedback on how well your content is doing in those categories. Because this type of interaction consists of two, temporally-separate events–reading/leaning and doing–it might be more effective to assess them separately. For example, you could  include affordances in the content that test the intermediate goal of learning the content before the task is attempted and to consider using methods to collect and coordinate information about task completion.

Consider the case of a driver’s license test-preparation site. The site could include a quiz for the reader (and the site manager and stakeholders) to determine the readers’ learning and the content’s effectiveness in the short term. Perhaps also providing feedback to the reader on areas that require additional study. The task, passing the written driver’s license test in this example, would occur later and be measured at the Department of Licensing. The two experiences could be related somehow to evaluate the effectiveness of the test preparation site and the actual task of passing the license exam.

In this example, asking the reader about satisfaction could also be done during and after readers’ interaction with the content to understand how they feel about that, as long as the questions did not interfere with the learning task.

[1] http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf

[2] http://flighttraining.aopa.org/students/solo/skills/crosswind.html

[3] http://mashable.com/2013/01/19/guide-to-job-interview/

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Reader goals – Reading to do now

This series looks at the different site interactions that readers have with informational sites and is adapted from the full paper on the topic that I wrote with Jan Spyridakis and presented at HCII 2015: Using Readers’ and Organizations’ Goals to Guide Assessment of Success in Information Websites. See the entire series

Reading to Do a Task Outside the Website Now

Readers who interact with a website to do a task outside the website seek to complete their task while reading the website for the information they need. Examples of such websites include sites that describe how to repair a household appliance or how to cook a meal. The figure shows the interaction between the readers’ goal and their interaction with the content.

Reading to do a task outside of the website now
Reading to do a task outside of the website now

In this type of interaction, readers interact with the content after they decide to perform the task and end their interaction with the content when they feel confident enough to complete the task without additional information. At that point, they continue towards their goal without the content. Depending on the complexity and duration of the task, readers might return to the content several times during the task, but the key aspect of this interaction with the content is that it does not coincide with task completion.

This interaction can influence several aspects of the design. For example, readers might like to print the web content to save or refer to later, so it might be inconvenient to have the web content spread over several web pages. However, because readers might stop interacting with the content at any point, the content could be divided into individual pages of logical steps with natural breaks.

Because readers stop interacting with the content before the complete their task, asking for information about their task when they leave the content might be confusing because they haven’t finished it, yet. On the other hand, asking about the content might be reasonable.

Tracking progress, success, and satisfaction for this type of interaction requires coordination with the content design. The task and subtask flows must be modeled in the content’s design so that the instrumentation used to collect data about the interaction coordinates with the readers’ interaction. Because readers can leave the content before they read all of the content and still complete their task successfully, traditional web-based metrics such as average time-on-page and path are ambiguous with respect to the readers’ experiences. It is impossible, for example, to know if having readers exit a procedure on the first step is good or bad without knowing whether they are also dissatisfied or unsuccessful with the content. Ideally, collecting information about their experience will come shortly after they accomplish their goal. For example, posting a review of their recipe on social media after they finish.

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Reader goals – Reading to be reminded

This series looks at the different site interactions that readers have with informational sites and is adapted from the full paper on the topic that I wrote with Jan Spyridakis and presented at HCII 2015: Using Readers’ and Organizations’ Goals to Guide Assessment of Success in Information Websites. See the entire series

Reading to be Reminded

Reading to be reminded, or Reading to Do Lite, occurs when readers visit an informational site with the confidence that they already know most of what they need to know about a topic to complete their task, but they just need a refresher. Readers use the website as a form of offline information storage that they may use either online or elsewhere. By knowing the information is available online, readers are confident that they don’t need to remember the details, just where they can find them. Brandt et al. [1] noticed this pattern while observing software developers who “delegated their memory to the Web, spending tens of seconds to remind themselves of syntactic details of a concept they new [sic] well.”

The figure shows how interactions of this type might relate to a reader’s task.

Reading to be reminded
Reading to be reminded

Because, as Redish [2] says, readers will read “until they’ve met their need,” readers will spend as little time in the site as they need interacting with the content. Once they have been reminded of the information they need, they will return to their original task.

Topic design principles needed to serve this interaction include making the content easy to find, navigate, and read. Visible headings and short “bites” and “snacks” of information [2] are well suited to such a goal. However, my research in developer documentation says that these guidelines depend on the specific context–a reminder to know your audience. Knowing your audience is also key to using the terms they will recognize.

Website-based metrics are not particularly helpful in determining the quality of the readers’ interactions. A good time-on-page value, for example, might be short–to the point of appearing to be a bounce, or it might be long. The number of times a page is viewed  also has an ambiguous meaning when it comes to understanding the quality of the readers’ interactions.

At the same time, the readers’ engagement and focus on their primary task (the one that sent them to this content) means asking qualitative information about their experience is likely to be seen as a distraction. Asking about the reader’s experience should be done soon after the interaction and with as brief of a satisfaction questionnaire as possible—perhaps only one question, such as “Did this topic help you?”

[1] Brandt, J., Guo, P.J., Lewenstein, J., Dontcheva, M., Klemmer, S.R.: Two Studies of Op-portunistic Programming: Interleaving Web Foraging, Learning, and Writing code. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, pp. 1589–1598 (2009)

[2] Redish, J.: Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works (2nd ed.). Morgan Kaufmann, Elsevier, Waltham, MA (2012)

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Reader goals – Reading to do here

This series looks at the different site interactions that readers have with informational sites and is adapted from the full paper on the topic that I wrote with Jan Spyridakis and presented at HCII 2015: Using Readers’ and Organizations’ Goals to Guide Assessment of Success in Information Websites. See the entire series

Reading to Do Here

Reading to accomplish a task in the website, or Reading to Do Here, is characterized by readers interacting with a page in a website to accomplish a specific task through the site. In this interaction, the readers’ goal is to complete the task in the web site. Some familiar examples might include registering for a library account, subscribing to an online newsletter, or renewing a business license.

Readers interact with the content or the site shortly after they decide to accomplish the task and they leave shortly after they finish. The figure illustrates the interaction in such a task.

 

Reading to Do Here
Reading to Do Here

Readers who use content in this way will want to find the page to help them accomplish the task as quickly as possible and then complete the task as efficiently as possible. While they will want to know that they have successfully completed the task before they leave the website, after they leave the website, they generally won’t remember much about the experience unless it was especially negative or positive.

The figure shows a very common type of web interaction. Web usability guidelines describe the design implications that depend on the site, context, and audience in many texts. Because the readers’ task is performed almost entirely in the context of the web interaction, measuring the success of the interaction is easily accomplished through the site without imposing on the reader. The web server can collect data concerning the time spent in the interaction; the rate of successful operations (e.g., registrations, applications, or whatever the interaction is designed to accomplish); and the path through the interaction (e.g., back tracks, sidetracks, and early exits). Requests for qualitative feedback should occur soon after the interaction so readers’ remember the interaction. While this interaction model is intended for informational sites, it also matches the interaction model of commercial sites, such as shopping or other e-commerce sites. As such, many of the analytics tools and instruments that work in those contexts will also work in this interaction model.

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What to measure?

Creative Commons licenseThat measuring API documentation is difficult is one of the things I’ve learned from writing developer docs for more than 11 years. Running the study for my dissertation gave me a detailed insight as to some of the reasons for this.

The first challenge to overcome is answering the question, “What do you want to measure?” A question that is followed immediately by, “…and under what conditions?” Valid and essential, but not simple, questions. Stepping back from that question, and a higher-level question comes into view, “What’s the goal?” …of the topic? …of the content set? and then back to the original question, of the measurement?

For my dissertation, I spent considerable effort scoping the experiment down to something manageable, measurable, and meaningful–ending up at the relevance decision. Clearly there is more to the API documentation experience than just deciding if a topic is relevant, but that’s a pivotal moment in the content experience. The relevance decision also seemed to be the most easily identifiable, discrete event that I could identify in the overall API reference topic experience. It’s a pivotal point in the experience, but by no mean the only one.

The processing model I used was based on the TRACE model presented by Rouet (2006). Similar cognitive-processing models were also identified in other API documentation and software development research papers. In this model, the experiment focuses on step 6.

The Task-based Relevance Assessment and Content Extraction (TRACE Model) of document processing Rouet, J.-F. (2006). The Skills of Document Use: From Text Comprehension to Web-Based Learning (1st ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
The Task-based Relevance Assessment and Content Extraction (TRACE Model) of document processing
Rouet, J.-F. (2006). The Skills of Document Use: From Text Comprehension to Web-Based Learning (1st ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Even in this context, my experiment studies a very small part of the overall cognitive processing of a document and an even smaller part of the overall task of information gathering to solve a larger problem or to answer a specific question.

To wrap this up by returning to the original question, that is…what was the question?

  1. The goal of the topic is to provide information that can be easily accessible to the reader.
  2. The easily accessible goal is measured by the time it takes for the reader to identify whether the topic provides the information they seek or not.
  3. The experiment simulates the readers task by providing the test participants with programming scenarios in which to evaluate the topics
  4. The topics being studied are varied randomly to reduce order effects and bias and participants see only one version of the topics to bias their experience by seeing other variations.

In this experiment, other elements of the TRACE model are managed by or excluded from the task.

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Party like it’s 1995

Garmin GPS-III on table
My GPS-III Pilot getting to know the 21st century, again

A couple of days ago, I fired up my trusty Garmin GPS-III Pilot to take on a ham-radio trip. After it initialized and found itself, it declared the date to be Dec 2, 1995. I let it sit for a while, thinking that it might just be slow in waking up. After several hours, however, it remained convinced that Christmas 1995 was only just a few weeks away. I had another GPS (or 6) to use, so grabbed another one for the trip and I didn’t get a chance to investigate this temporal lapse until this morning.

It turns out, that this flashback was the result of a date-rollover error. Basically, the GPS uses a 10-bit number to count the number of weeks since January 6, 1980, when time began for GPS units. With 10 binary bits, you can represent 1,024 different things–weeks, in this case. After 1,024 weeks, after the GPS’ calendar returns to the beginning, back in 1980. This occurred in Aug, 1999, but was easily anticipated and GPS units manufactured shortly before that date could be programmed to accommodate the event by correcting for values that would result in a date that predated its manufacture. But, it seems that my GPS has lived long enough for that correction to no longer work as it did 15 years ago (i.e. the corrections to the current week values result in a date that’s reasonable to the GPS: 1995).

It turns out that many vintage GPS receivers manufactured in the mid to late 90s have similar problem, so it’s one that’s easily fixed by using a program written to update even older GPS units in preparation for the 1999 event. After running this program, my GPS-III Pilot is now living in the 21st century and is enjoying a morning in the sun on the back deck as it catches up with what’s been going on in GPS circles recently (i.e. it’s downloading the current satellite information from the GPS satellites).

This is interesting in that it’s a reminder of how even well designed software can surprise you, and it makes me wonder why I’m so attached to a GPS unit that’s almost 20 years old. It could be because we have had a lot of adventures together or it could be that I’m just a pack rat. Either way, we’re both sync’d up to the correct time.

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UX Careers 2015 – Seattle

I went to the UX Careers 2015 panel last night to hear about the future of User Experience from a panel of UX veterans. There were about 200 people in attendance to hear about the future of the career. The panel had a mix of in-house and agency UX perspectives, which provided interesting answers to the questions presented by the host.

About half the discussion was about job hunting–what to do/not do in an interview. How to stand out from the [ever growing] crowd. How it’s a “job-seeker’s” market, yet the need for UX researchers is likely to start diminishing. While the answers seemed to be all over the map, more than one panelist remarked that there are many different contexts in which UX research & design are applied and that one-size is not likely to fit all.

The career guidance could best be summarized as: be yourself, know yourself, present yourself with confidence, and find the best fit for you.

The other half of the discussion was about UX trends–the most interesting question to me being, “What’s the next big thing in UX?” (or something to that effect). First off, there is no “next big thing,” just an ongoing evolution of little things and the same old thing (e.g. research and design methods) applied to different stuff.  One point that was made, which resonated with my post about the Internet of things, was how the focus should be on the human experience (human-human interaction) more than the human-machine interaction/experience. The notion of invisible experiences and transparent processes was also mentioned.

It was exciting to hear that the future of the best user interface is no user interface. Now that’s a user interface I’ll be able to sketch even with my horrid drawing skills. Of course the user experience of that invisible user interface will still take some [considerable amount of  research and] work to design, but at least the UI will finally be easy to sketch.

If anything, the session confirmed that we live in interesting times.

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More goal setting

My blog vision is coming together. Shortly after my last update to the vision document, I realized I had another goal to add:

Limit blog posts to 500 words or less in size (about a 2-minute reading experience)

I’ve been aiming for this since the beginning–my intent being to keep each post succinct for the reader and force me to focus. As a result, I have a few posts still in the unpublished, draft state because they don’t meet that goal, but it’s been good practice.

In reviewing the earlier iterations of the blog vision, there seems to be some unarticulated elements. For example, the first goal was to generate content, but I’ve not set as a goal, develop an audience. While I do, eventually, want to develop an audience, my feeling is that I’ll need some set of content before promoting to an audience will be productive. So, the goal for this year is to accumulate that content. Next year, I might add “attract an audience” as a goal, but I don’t think I’m ready for that, yet.

The question that presents for this exercise is, should my long-term goal of developing an audience be included somewhere in the current vision document? That could be seen as a guiding, long-term goal, or a short-term distraction. As a long-term goal, it would help guide short-term decisions. At the same time, if having that in front of me might attract me to start trying to attract an audience before I have enough content to make it worth their while to stay–making it even harder to win them back, later.

I’ll need to think about that.

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The Internet-of-things is not about things

Tracy Rolling wrote a detailed, first-person, customer experience report in Medium about the limitations of activity tracking. It’s not that we can’t track activities, but that the resulting information is something less than useful to the average (read, non-fanatic) consumer. In her article, she describes how her activity tracker can log all manner of data, but it really doesn’t provide much in the way of information that’s useful to her on a daily basis. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that activity trackers are abandoned after just a short period.  Her article highlights the value of the end-to-end customer experience.

Looking in from the outside (I don’t own an activity tracker), I don’t know that this fall into disuse is because the tracker puts itself out of a job (saying, in effect, “You’ve achieved your goal! Congratulations. My work is done.”) or it just doesn’t live up to its promise, whatever that was at the time it was bought. In either case, it highlights what seems to be an inherent challenge that the Internet-of-things hasn’t overcome: providing a durable customer value.

In spite of the recent hype, tracking things isn’t new. I’ve been connecting things to devices and vice versa for 35 years. Connecting them to the Internet is new, but recording telemetry is not. The fact that every person in the civilized world is carrying a powerful computer (usually in the shape of a telephone) is a recent phenomena, that one would think holds some promise. However, without a need (be it present or latent), connecting monitoring transducers to a smartphone or the Internet still seems like it’s in the solution-looking-for-a-problem phase of technology.

It’s not unlike the early days of cell phones or PCs–when the technology was a solution in search of a problem. Eventually, problems will be identified (or invented) and then connected with solutions. However, in the meantime, there’s much to learn about both.