I had a chance to put into practice a concept from the course. Here is my experience:

I had a chance to put into practice a concept from the course. Here is my experience:

    When my team chose two research instruments for our project, we chose to conduct interviews and surveys. I ended up conducting the interview along with another group member. To add some context, our group was researching how environmental awareness impacted consumer purchasing. We interviewed a UofT employee and they had a really interesting perspective.
    Overall, we did a good job creating unbiased questions and we had a good ordering of questions to avoid bias. This was reflected in the interview where the interviewee appeared to answer all questions honestly. Now I have conducted interviews before but not to this rigor. Given that the interview lasted approximately twenty minutes, it was tough not showing any sort of emotion as to avoid bias. Nonetheless, I did the best I could, and conducted the interview while my other group member wrote down the responses. The interviewee elaborated much more than I expected on our questions. The interviewee seemed relaxed and engaged throughout the whole interview as well. By nature of an interview, my other group member and I had several follow up questions for the interviewee that also proved insightful.
    Going into the interview, I wasn't expecting to get such detailed responses, nor did I expect to get such informed responses. For instance, we had questions in relation to government regulating people's hot showers and a common theme for his responses focused on providing education rather than regulation. This was a point we had not thought of which really impacted our approach going forward.
    What I took away from the interview was more than just the interviewee's responses. This was the first "real" interview I have conducted. I learned just as much about the interview process as I did about our problem space.

   

Color Deficiency and User Design

    This blog entry will be a little different than my others; I will discuss a broader issue as opposed to a given user interface. I suffer from color deficiency myself and I think this issue doesn't get enough exposure as it should.
    When designing a user interface, there are several factors from my experience and touched upon in this cited article [1], that could significantly improve the interface for color deficient people while not detracting from the experience for those who are not color deficient. These are: color selection, input forms, and links.
    By definition of color deficiency, colors are difficult to identify for the color deficient. Being mindful of the colors that color deficient people have a hard time differentiating is key. It's as simple as typing in a google search to find out. If two colors look the same on an interface to someone with color deficiency, this could prevent them for using the interface all together which is severe. Building off of this, this applies especially so to input forms and links. All to often, I've seen links which were colored dark red. To me, these links appear black and look just like any other text would. I've spent tens of minutes just trying to figure out where to go next while this could have been prevented altogether if the link was blue. The same logic applies for input forms.
    The fact of the matter is that user interfaces can be improved significantly for color deficient people with little to no effort. An increased awareness of this issue would go a long way.

Citation:
Silver, A. (2017, March 14). Accessibility: Improving The UX For Color-Blind Users – Smashing Magazine. Retrieved March 19, 2017, from https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/06/improving-ux-for-color-blind-users/

Norton Safe Search Interface Flaw

    Above you see the Norton Safe Search interface. Essentially it is a search engine with some built in safety features. It behaves like any other search engine does, however user experience suffers from one key flaw.
   In the image, I had search for "bad interfaces". Now we don't particularly care about what I've searched, but instead how the results are displayed. The view above is a full screen view of what you see after you make a search. The flaw is that you don't actually see the search results in your screen at first. Instead, you see the top six ads for your search, followed by some suggested searches related to your search. Then only after that do your search results come up. In order to view the results, the user has to scroll down after every single search.
    Two of the most important features for a search engine are the ease of use "for searching and navigating, and the provision of direct, actionable information relevant to the query" [1]. The Norton Safe Search engine fails both of these criteria as clearly illustrated. While the search engine may be safer, it is extremely frustrating to use. The average user may make several searches per use and having to scroll down just to see the results of the search detracts so much from the engine's usability.
    To conclude, the Norton Safe Search engine's interface could be significantly improved. If you can overlook the flaws, it does provide safer search functionality.

CITATIONS:
SEO: The Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization from Moz. (2014, March 04). Retrieved March 05, 2017, from https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/how-usability-experience-and-content-affect-search-engine-rankings [1]

Porter Airlines Check In Website

    This past weekend I flew to Boston. I've done this many times, yet this time I experienced one of the most frustrating user experiences in a long time. This occurred when I was checking in on  the porter airlines website.

    I went through the various check in pages carefully inputting my information. To my surprise, on the very last page when I clicked the check in button I got the following message. "On-line check in not available for passenger (my name inserted here)." Initially I thought maybe there was an issue with their server and I tried again later. However, I got the same message again. At this point I had already spent 20 min trying to check in so I gave up. 

    Come the day of the flight, when I got to the airport it turns out I was randomly selected for additional security screening. Now, that wasn't an issue but the least they could do is give you the message at the start of your on-line check in. Not when you've completed the forms and are trying to submit it. They should also re-word the message as it is so vague that it only causes confusion.

    Overall, they need to redesign this feature of their on-line check in as it is a really poor experience for a passenger. The majority of online check in services such as my family doctor's website indicate whether or not you can check in at the very beginning of the process. So such a design change has no downsides and porter airlines has no reason to have such a design. It's such a simple and intuitive design aspect.

    To conclude, the lesson here is design the interface to be as easy and straightforward for the user as possible. Do not cut corners. Note, I have not included images of this interface issue as the page contains sensitive data. Also, I have not seen this porter airlines issue raised anywhere in my web search.

The Lenovo Y50 Touch

    To the left you see part of my two year old Lenovo Y50 Touch. Overall, it is a great laptop, however there is a key design flaw. In the top of the image is the screen. If you look lower, right below the screen but before the hinge that connects the bottom half of the laptop you will see a plastic component. In my picture, there is also a piece of tape.
    Essentially, the piece of plastic is held by a 1 mm hook. The problem is the hook wears down, failing to hold the plastic component. Then when you go to open up the laptop, the plastic component gets caught on the corner of the bottom half of the laptop. This in turn pulls on a component called the touch digitizer and cracks it. To add to the trouble, the touch digitizer component is glued to the screen. In other words, when one needs to be replaced, so those the other.
    It's like a domino effect and all because of a 1 mm component hook. This hardware design has led to a horrible user experience. Due to the crack in the digitizer, the screen blacks out whenever it is moved. This limits usability greatly. The only way to see the screen again is to restart the computer. The user experience implications are huge. In order to fix it, the replacement of the screen and digitizer costs approximately $500. To put this into perspective, the laptop originally cost $1000.
    Whether this design flaw was intentional or not, it certainly does not bode well for Lenovo. The fact of the matter is they could have avoided all of this had they made a stronger component. A stronger component would have added minimal cost to the total as well. To conclude, the laptop is an awesome laptop with the hook intact. But once it wears thin, it will cause so much frustration.

 The IOS 10 Interface

     On the left is a picture of the IOS 10 Interface. At a first glance, the interface is sleek, instructions to proceed are provided, and it gives the user a good feeling. However, being an phone user myself, I have come across a design feature that is extremely frustrating. Essentially, the default process of unlocking an IPhone is to press the home button which brings you to the lock screen and then press the home button again to get to the home screen.

    This action may not seem like a big deal, however earlier versions of the IOS would not require you to press the home button twice. Instead they would bring you to the home screen the first time. So, it's as if the IOS took a step back when it added this extra action. It requires more work from the user for the same result. This aspect of the IOS hurts the user experience given how frequently a user needs to open their phone to the home screen.

    Apple's motivation for adding this extra step is as follows; by adding the extra button push, the IOS can verify if you have privilege to get into the device by fingerprint touch. Then the applications accessible from the lock screen can gain access to encrypted data. So if you want to look at your camera roll from the lock screen you can given that your fingerprint has been verified. This encrypted data access at the lock screen is a cool feature but it does not outweigh the frustration from needing to push the home button twice to get to the home screen. The reason being, the only current applications that access encrypted data from the lock screen are the camera and notification centre. The feature, while having potential, is not used nearly as much as it should to make up for the negative user experience. If anything, Apple should not have made the feature as the default option. The feature is too early for it's time, and is a real nuisance.
    Until more applications can have lock screen interfaces to access encrypted data, myself and many other users who I have talked to about this design aspect have chosen to turn off the feature. Nonetheless, even finding out how to turn the feature off was quite a pain and required searching the web.