User Experience
Northern User Experience Event – Social Media & Energy Use Behaviour Change
Dec 2nd
The nice folks over at the Northern User Experience (NUX) group recently invited me along to do a talk and interactive session on social media + energy behaviour change at their stylish space at the Round Foundry Media Centre in Leeds. The talk was part of the Leeds Digital Festival and also aligned itself with the World Usability Day theme of:
“Designing with an intentional outcome of sparking change in how people behave, communicate, and do things in the world”
So who are NUX? Their membership is diverse and dynamic and spans disciplines such as HCI, information design, usability, user experience and development with a vast amount of industry and academic experience to tap into. A meeting normally takes place every month on a specified subject with an open invitation to all interested and is headed up by Keith Doyle. Check out the latest news from NUX on their events page or follow hashtag #nuxuk on Twitter.
The format of the session comprised my talk of around 40 minutes followed by an interactive task, in total it lasted 2 hours. I presented 3 case studies, two for domestic energy and one promoting physical activity that used the same social media approach as the energy studies. I noted one of the first tweets after I started the presentation was “Strong Lincolnshire accent tonight #nuxuk”, knew right away I was in good company. The energy studies presented (Wattsup and Power Ballads) delivered innovative energy feedback through social media, specifically the Facebook platform. Wattsup and Power Ballads case studies are great examples of social media + energy feedback synergies for the domestic domain, even more timely now as major energy utility company Opower is using the same approach and commercialising ‘social energy’ into a product. However, let it be said that we at LiSC were early innovators of social-energy research and delivered Wattsup back in 2009, see here and here! As with most of our completed work at LiSC, both the Wattsup and Power Ballads work is in the public domain as published peer-reviewed papers available from here and here.
All present enjoyed the unique and engaging user experience the domestic energy studies provided with plenty of questions put forward. To finish the presentation I briefly spoke of our Electro-Magnates project investigating organisational energy, and how the challenges in an organisational environment are different from the domestic domain. Also noticed some of the developers present enjoyed the adoption of opendata and discovery of tools such as Yahoo’s YQL for scraping data. At the end of the presentation there was some agreement that the first step of designing any energy app was to name it using a witty pun, this approach is carved in stone at LiSC with many hours spent getting it just right, or just plain wrong….
After the presentation I facilitated an interactive session with the goal to design (via paper prototyping) an energy visualisation for a specific theme and target user group. Each group would then present their work at the end of the session by doing a 1 minute elevator pitch, with a vote to decide the winners. Four groups then set about doing the task with beer on tap, which never fails to stir up a healthy dose of creativity. After some cracking of the whip pen was put to paper. Prizes were placed on a pedestal at the front of the room, 1st Box of Jelly Babies and 2nd Box of Heroes. I know what I prefer.
So how did they do? Not bad at all actually. The take home message was to realise how difficult energy is to understand in terms of usage due to its intangible nature. Attempting to design a visual representation of energy consumption with a view for reductions is no easy task. The table below shows the themes and target users each group had to design for, great to see the ‘witty pun’ naming convention style was present, kudos.
| Group | Theme | User Group | App/Visualisation Name |
| 1 | University | Academics | Tune In Turn Off |
| 2 | Household | Older Adults | Just In Case |
| 3 | Organisation | Administration | Power Rangers |
| 4 | Organisation | Employees | Appliance Alliance |
First prize went to ‘Power Rangers’ – a visualisation that brazenly adorned a departmental manager’s avatar with items of super hero clothing if their department’s energy consumption is being reduced, but also removes the clothing if usage rises. Inter-departmental managerial super heroes are compared in a league table. At first glance it would be pretty easy to see which departments are doing well……
I had an enjoyable time during the talk and felt it was well received from the feedback at the end and through the on-going tweets. NUX are a great community to be involved with and have their fingers on the pulse of the latest developments in design, HCI and user experience. I’d thoroughly recommended anyone who is doing anything interesting in these fields to check them out, and also with a view to doing a talk as they are currently looking for new ideas.
As usual no visit outside my usual haunt of Sheffield would be complete without sampling a few beers. First stop was ‘The Hop’ pub with a nice selection on cask where I tried Osset Brewery’s Silver King and Excelsior pale ales. On my way home I stopped at the Midnight Bell and tried Leeds Pale and Blue Moon, I’m not a fan of Blue Moon, despite labelling itself a North American Craft Beer its basically a very fruity wheat beer.
Derek
Ben’s CHI 2011 Roundup
May 23rd
Following on from Conor’s post, here’s some quick comments about my experience at CHI.
This is a looong post so bear with me!
CHI is a big conference and there is a *lot* to see. One of the benefits of having several people attend is that we collectively get a lot more out of the conference than an individual would. We rarely ran into each other at the conference, each saw very different things, and this is partly why we are writing separate posts about our experiences.
I focussed more on the games aspect of CHI, attending several panels and SIG discussions on the theme. Also, since I’m currently in the process of finishing my PhD, I was in a much more reflective mood at CHI and as such my experience was less about specific research findings and more about themes and movements.
I was one of the organisers of the Social Game Studies workshop, which was held on the Sunday. We had a productive and interesting workshop, with some very interesting talks and papers that will be online shortly at the site.
We’ll post a longer report in time, but for me the main interesting discussion point was about the nature of social games with respect to real social relationships. We kept coming back to things like identity presentation and social responsibility. How, even though that “it is just a game”, the fact that real social relationships were involved meant that real-world social issues leak back and forth from within the “magic circle” of play.
There were many other interesting discussions on games throughout the conference. In particular Gifford Cheung presented two thoughtful pieces:
Starcraft from the stands: understanding the game spectator
– an intriguing look at the value of the spectator experience to games. Especially interesting was the behaviour of Starcraft fans watching videos on Youtube with masking tape on their monitors. This hides both the final result of the match and the video scrub bar that gives away the time remaining. Like a modern version of this episode of the Likely Lads.
Customization for games: lessons from variants of texas hold’em – an interesting poster about how the rules of poker evolve. I talk about the effect of social context on game rules in my PhD, so we had a good chat about it.
In the panel about World of Warcraft, Nick Yee made a couple of interesting points based on his research. Firstly, that player behaviour when role-playing correlates with their personality. In other words, it appears that even when pretending to be a radically different character, your personality still largely determines your actions. Seasoned pen-and-paper roleplayers will instantly recognise this, but it is interesting to see evidence for it. Secondly he pointed out that players conform to gender stereotypes when “gender-bending” (i.e. a male playing a female character). For example, it is a stereotype that females should heal more than fight, so female characters tend to conform to this stereotype, whether played by females or males.
There was also a couple of games going on during CHI. Conor mentioned our battle over the FourSquare mayorship. Also running was our social game of mischief, Feckr, and Backchatter. I made a concerted effort to do well at Backchatter, and managed to pull a victory in the last round. Backchatter is an interesting game about predicting Twitter trends during a conference and adds an interesting sense of urgency around paying attention to the programme. Importantly it doesn’t distract you from the content of the talks, if anything engaging you more. It’s an ok game, but more importantly it opens the door to more in-conference gaming in the future, which is a very exciting thought.
One of the most inspirational talks at CHI for me was given on the first day by Bill Buxton, head of Microsoft Research. He was basically talking about the importance of history to HCI, told through the lens of industrial design. A room at CHI was given over to his collection of interface devices, called “The Buxton Collection”. I urge you to visit his site and browse the devices online.
Above is a picture from the collection showing the evolution of iPod designs. The most interesting are the first and last. The first is a transistor radio from 1958 and the last is the IBM Simon phone from 1993. Buxton’s central point is that the clever design of iPods and iPhones seems like magic if you don’t know your history. However, the designers at Apple know their history very well, and incorporated old design features in their new products as a combination of remixing and homage.
Bill generalised this in terms of the early 1980′s music scene, where there was an ideological split between people who used synthesisers to create new sounds, and people who used samplers to repurpose and reuse existing sounds. We all know who won that battle.
This really resonated with me and the thoughts I’d been having about Conor’s paper on educational games at CHI. It points out that the games industry has spent 20 years synthesising a way to teach with games, which would have been better sampled from psychology. Just as Apple remixed old design concepts from the 1950′s, so must game designers be aware of their history and context, and remix ideas from traditional sciences.
Watch this incredible video about the attention to history and context in Kill Bill, and ask yourself – where is the Quentin Tarantino of game design?