When context really matters: entertainment, safety ... or neither?

Yesterday, Mark Handley drew my attention to a video of the recent evacuation of an All Nippon Airways Boeing 787 due to a battery problem: "Here's a video from inside the plane:  The inflight entertainment system has clearly just rebooted, and about half the screens are displaying the message "Please Wait" in large comforting letters. Maybe not the most appropriate message when you want people to evacuate quickly!"

Fortunately, it seems that passengers ignored the message asking them to wait, and did indeed evacuate instead. But did they do so as quickly as they might have done otherwise? We'll never know. They will have had many other sources of information available at the time, of which the most powerful were probably other people's behaviour and the appearance of the evacuation slides. The digital and physical contexts were providing different cues to action.

Brad Karp observed that : "Presumably when you activate the slides, you either want to kill the entertainment system or have it display "EVACUATE!"

Alan Cooper, in "The inmates are running the asylum", discusses many examples of interaction design. One he explores is the challenge of designing good in-flight entertainment systems. For example, he points out that the computer scientist's tendency to deal with only three numbers (0, 1, infinity) is inappropriate when choosing a maximum number of films to make available on a flight, and that choosing a reasonable (finite) number makes possible attractive interaction options that don't scale well to infinity. He also argues that the entertainment system needs two different interfaces: one for the passenger and a different one for the crew who need to manage it. But if you watch the video, you will see that half the screens on the plane are showing a reboot sequence. Who designed this as an interface for passengers? If the system developers don't even think to replace a basic reboot sequence by something more engaging or informative, what chance of them thinking about the bigger picture of how the entertainment system might be situated within, and interact with, the broader avionics system?

In-flight entertainment systems don't seem to be considered as part of the safety system of the aircraft. Surely, they should be. But that requires a broader "systems" perspective when designing, to give passengers more contextually relevant information that situates the digital more appropriately within the physical context.

Happy (entertaining, safe) flying!

Sometimes it just works!

Last week, we were in Spain, enjoying the sunshine and using the motorways. And I was really impressed by their toll machines: attractive, easy to use, and even delightful. Even though they were taking our money. My very amateur video of the machine in action isn't great (sorry!), but it shows the key features of the system.

1) The instructions screen presents a clear representation of what to do next, independent of language. This isn't essential, but provides backup for those who might not be able to interpret the main interface.

2) Each action is clearly illuminated in a timely way: insert ticket; pay (card, notes / coins); get change; optionally, get receipt. Sure, the action sequence is simple, and there's limited scope for error, but the device leaves little room for doubt. [Contrast this with the story a colleague told me of observing someone buying a ticket from a UK rail ticket machine who could not locate a notes slot, so folded up a £5 note and fed it carefully into the coin slot.]

3) The coin slot, in particular, is well designed, opening and closing smoothly to accept coins at just the right time.

I know it's simple, but that's surely the point: it's only as complicated as it needs to be, and no more, and it's easy even for someone who speaks no Spanish to use without help.

Human–Computer Interaction specialists like me tend to notice poor features of interactive systems; it's delightful to celebrate a system that really seems to work well, come rain or shine.

Second-hand serendipity?

Doing research on serendipity enables me to reflect more than I would have done otherwise on experiences that I'd class as serendipity. Preparing for a recent workshop, I realised that it was a serendipitous encounter that led to all our work on serendipity, and transformed the careers of at least two members of my research team...

DSVIS 2004 was held at Tremsbuttel Castle in Germany. People from Lexis Nexis UK participated (i.e. the company paid for them to get out of the office and attend an academic conference that was frankly quite tangential to their core business). Over a beer, I mentioned that one of my post-docs had done his PhD on journalists' information seeking, and that Nexis had been an important product for them. The findings about how journalists used information (and particularly Nexis) was interesting to them, so they commissioned us to run a workshop for their staff on journalists' information seeking. This was followed by further consultancy projects on lawyers' information seeking, and collaboration on a research project on "making sense of information" (MaSI). These projects led to new Lexis Nexis products that are still going from strength to strength. All because Lexis Nexis supported their staff to go to a workshop in Germany in 2004 and we met there.

That same meeting enabled me to develop information interaction and sensemaking work that was foundational to the SerenA project studying serendipity. It also provided lots of opportunities for at least two members of my research team to study legal information seeking. So that one meeting, all starting with a beer (!), has been of immense value, to both us and Lexis Nexis. I suspect that my team have never realised quite how much all of our careers owe to that one serendipitous connection that they weren't even a direct part of!

When is "Okay" not Okay?

Twenty (or more) years ago, I worked with a software development kit that demanded that I click "OK" every time it crashed (which was at least once a day). I wanted a "Not OK" button  – not because it would have a different outcome, but because it better expressed what I was feeling at the time.

Now I find that Facebook puts the same socially inappropriate demand on the user:

This dialogue box uses socially appropriate terms such as "Sorry" and "Please", but I want to say "I've noted the problem and what to do about it", not "Okay". The software developer presumably regards the requirement to click "Okay" as as simple acknowledgement that "something went wrong". And at one level that is all that can be said: no amount of ranting will change the system. But "Okay" usually means something stronger: that I accept the behaviour, and don't mind if it happens again. It presupposes that the individual has choice: to accept or reject the behaviour. And implicitly that the other agent will take note of the response and act accordingly in future. In this case, of course, there is no such learning, no such evolving relationship between user and system. It's a pseudo-dialogue, and actually it is not "okay" at all.

Hidden in plain sight

Last weekend, I was showing a visiting colleague around the Wellcome Collection. As he stopped to take a photograph with his iPhone, I noticed that he unlocked his phone first, then flicked through several screens to locate the camera app, selected it, and took the snap. I quickly took out my own iPhone and showed him how to access the camera function immediately by sliding the camera icon on the "lock" screen up. He was amazed: a mix of delighted and appalled. He considers himself to be a "power user" but had never noticed the icon nor discovered its purpose.

I had noticed the camera image a few months ago, following an operating system upgrade, but I also had not discovered its purpose unaided, having assumed that it was some kind of information rather than a functional slider that provided a useful short-cut. I had to be shown the use by someone else who had already discovered it. Doh!

Once discovered, the feature is quite obvious. But it is not as easily discoverable as it might be: there is no immediately presented information about key operating system changes, and few people search for features they have no reason to expect to find. Children may explore objects just to see what happens; many adults lose this. Just putting something on the screen does not guarantee that it will be noticed or appropriately interpreted.

Social interactions are so often a powerful means for learning about the world and the less obvious affordances of systems.

It was a dark and stormy night... accounting for the physical when designing the digital

Yesterday, I used the London cycle hire scheme for the first time. I had checked all the instructions on how to hire a bike online before heading off to the nearest cycle station, all prepared with my cycle helmet and my payment card. For various reasons, it was dark and drizzling by the time I got there. The cycle station display was well illuminated, so I could go through the early stages of the transaction without difficulty, but then it came to inserting the payment card. Ah. No illumination. No nearby streetlight to improve visibility. I found myself feeling all over the front of the machine to locate the slot… which turned out to be angled upwards rather than being horizontal like most payment card slots. I eventually managed to orient the card correctly in the dark and get it into the reader.

Several steps of interaction later, the display informed me that the transaction had been successful, and that my cycle release code was being printed. Nothing happened. Apparently, the machine had run out of paper. Without paper, there is no release code, and so no way of actually getting a cycle from the racks.

To cut a long story short, it took over 30 minutes, and inserting my payment card into four different cycle station machines distributed around Bloomsbury, before I finally got a printed release code and could take a bicycle for a spin. By then it was too late to embark on the planned errand, but at least I got a cycle ride in the rain...

The developers have clearly thought through the design well in many ways. But subtleties of the ways the physical and the digital work together have been overlooked. Why is there no illumination (whether from street lighting or built into the cycle station) for the payment card slot or the printout slot? Why is there apparently no mechanism for the machine to detect that it is out of paper before the aspiring cyclist starts the interaction? Or to display the release code on-screen to make the system more resilient to paper failure? Such nuanced aspects of the situated use of the technology in practice (in the dark and the rain) have clearly been overlooked. It should be a universal design heuristic: if you have a technology that may be used outdoors, check that it all works when it's cold, dark and damp. Especially in cold, dark damp cities.

If we can't even design taps...

Today, I got a wet arm: the tap control was immediately behind the faucet, so I reached through the line of fire to turn it on, and the inevitable happened. But it looks Well Designed:

I thought I had already encountered every possible type of poor design: the tap that is unpredictable because there is only one control to govern both temperature and flow rate:

The tap that needs the explicit notice to tell the user how to make it work:

The taps where it's almost impossible to tell whether the water will flow from the shower head or the main tap:

The tap that looks as if you should turn it, when actually that controls the temperature, not the flow; for that, you have to pull the control towards you:

Yvonne Rogers told me of a tap that would only work if you were not wearing black....

The user of a tap wants to control two parameters: the temperature and the flow rate. There are plenty of designs around that enable people to do this without any faff at all. But these are apparently not interesting or exciting or aesthetically pleasing enough. So innocent users get frozen, scalded, bemused or unexpectedly wet as tap designers devise ever more innovative taps. If we can't even get tap design right, what hope for more complex interactive technologies, I ask myself...