By Brian Still | Member
The first truly mobile, commercial cell phone was Motorola’s DynaTAC. First introduced in 1983 and often referred to as the “brick” phone, it weighed a couple of pounds and was almost a foot high. As an analog device with only a one-hour battery life, even if one could afford its $4,000 pricetag, there were not many places with network coverage to warrant its use. Don’t get me wrong—to have one then was to be cool, which is why folks like Gordon Gekko (Wall Street) and Zack Morris (Saved by the Bell) had one. There was a certain status that came with the brick, even if functionality was lacking. (Did you use a brick? If you have pictures, send them to me—maybe we’ll post them in a later column.)
Fast forward now to a world where, thanks to Bluetooth, our cars, once the carriers of early mobile phone packages, are themselves mobile communication devices. It seems as though everything around us has the potential to offer networked information input and retrieval. And every day it seems mobile devices get smaller or lighter or thinner while becoming more functional. When we say mobile now, we really also mean ubiquitous. Thanks to the mobility and portability of our devices, and the enhanced network infrastructure they allow us to access, we retrieve, store, even contribute information in simultaneous and multitudinous ways that have, for many of us, become so embedded that we often don’t think about the type or degree of our engagement. The mobility of our technology has, for those with access, helped to blur the lines, ironically, between what we think is or is not technology. To be mobile cannot mean just the physical removal of a phone from a wall and the landline to which it is attached. To be mobile is to be immersed in an environment where hardware is not just unleashed, but what we think about it, and the environment it impacts and is impacted by, is transformed.
Devices are increasingly not like devices as we expect them to be. The progression of the cell phone to this point has more or less followed the model of its precursor, the landline phone. We need keys on a phone like we do on a keyboard—they really are historical relics. IPhones and other competitive variants represent the beginning of the disappearance of such antiquated models. What will be next? We cannot expect technology to converge toward some sort of perfectly usable, single model. There will always be new devices, new types of mobility and portability, and each will complicate as much as they resolve. Even now we are closer than we might think to embedding, via RFD technology, network access into our own bodies.
Without a doubt, mobile or portable computing has dramatically affected us, and is still affecting us. As technical communicators, we must be aware not just of the ever-growing assortment of devices for accessing information, but we must also understand and design for the experiences of users who are working, learning, and living in a ubiquitous computing world. Arguably, it isn’t something we’ve done a very good job of to this point. Jakob Nielsen’s 2009 informative follow-up study on mobile usability shows us that when it comes to interface design, although hardware has improved, its usability hasn’t. In fact, users in this most recent study, working with better phones and faster networks, took longer and performed less effectively compared to users carrying out the same tasks a decade before.
As Nielsen rightly points out, phones have gotten better. The problem is that they have not been designed adequately to take into account a mercurial environment, one full of overwhelmed users who still want more, who want to search quickly and receive results quickly. We are driving, eating, and multitasking while we engage with our phones or other devices, and it is this convolution of technology and activity, something I call technophrenia, that is not being accounted for when we design information and interfaces for users.
Users are distracted, and as much as they want fast information to use, they’re not very good at managing the information they want. In fact, the more they get, the worse they are at using it. This is especially true if information comes too quickly, as it often does, or it comes amidst a torrent of other information, flowing from different channels into the same brain. This is because, and we’ve known this for a long time, we can’t take it all in just because we have better (or more) technology. But ubiquitous technology allows us, like addicts, to try to absorb and manage more and more. Ultimately, a mental bottleneck occurs, and even if we need to dig deep, synthesize the information, and make suitable decisions, we often cannot. We skim the surface, trying to strike a delicate balance that has us switching from one source to another. As we do this, our comprehension doesn’t improve. Rather, over time, our comprehension diminishes.
When we studied a group of representative students for a client in the Usability Research Lab at Texas Tech University just last year, we asked them to use a new online reference tool. To make the environment as realistic as possible, we allowed them to take (as well as make) phone calls, engage in instant messaging, watch television, use other software on the computer, listen to music on their iPods, or do whatever else they typically did while they worked. After our testing, when we went back and analyzed time on task, we determined that on average every user spent only 18 seconds (30%) of each minute actually engaged in a specific task. The rest of the minute, a majority of the time in fact, was spent on other tangential activities.
Technical Communication’s Role
What can be done about technology? Certainly, we can’t fight it. Besides, technology, and trying to deal with it, is too much fun. And for technical communicators, it represents rich opportunities. When the issue has less to do with hardware and more to do with users interacting with information in context (the classic “particular audience, particular purpose, particular place” line many of us have used to describe technical communication to students), technical communicators offer leadership, vision, and actionable guidelines.
Usability studies, attuned as it is to real users carrying out real tasks in real environments, might be a good place to borrow from as we look to craft new designs for mobile interfaces and the information we access through them. A focus informed by usability will remind us that, as cool as the next app might be for the next great mobile device, if the developers don’t get who uses it, what they’re doing while they use it, and where they’re doing it, at some point it will not be used to its maximal effectiveness.
It’s About the Environment
As Nielsen’s study tells us, the reason why current users don’t perform any better, despite having better phones, than users a decade ago, is because they primarily want to search to complete tasks. Overwhelmed by a bounty of ways to access information, users today almost exclusively choose to search, which despite the richness of results returned still means time-consuming typing that often leads to errors in entry. Compound this with the fact that users are multitasking with a brain not changed much since 2000, and overload and breakdown in performance can’t be avoided.
This is at least true if no allowance is made for the user environment when developing information, especially information used in a mobile setting. Assuming the hardware is just fine, then we need to turn our attention to the environment where mobile devices are used. We cannot dump content designed for a largescreen monitor onto a mobile device and expect efficient use. If we know that users are multitasking, we cannot expect them to input search terms on a phone with the same ease of use as a keyboard for a desktop computer. Usability, regarded as a design tool and not just for the evaluation of high-fidelity versions of software and hardware, can help us look more closely and accurately at how users perform, and the barriers that hinder that performance, in the environments where they work and live.
Site Visits
Often the first thing we do to learn more about users is shoot out a survey. That’s great, but it isn’t enough, especially if we want to understand how users use devices like cell phones. Carol Barnum’s book on how to conduct effective usability testing has a wonderfully comprehensive section on site visits, or what some call contextual inquiries. I recommend taking every opportunity available to you to go on location and watch users do what users do.
You can do this formally, actively shadowing them and interviewing as they work (or afterward). Or you can lurk without anyone noticing, but you must get out into the field, beyond the convenience of friends, coworkers, or, even worse, yourself. Understand the distractions that confront users as they interact with information or interfaces you design for mobile applications. Is it noisy? Are they doing a lot of different things? What do they use the mobile device to do?
Recently, I rode along for a few hours with a Texas state trooper. I was stunned by how much technology he relied on to do his job. In the midst of watching cars for violations, he was monitoring the activity of other troopers in his area, as well as using the touchscreen monitor to enter license plate numbers on the fly, record video and audio of his stops, and even print out tickets and court summons using a built-in printer in his vehicle’s back seat. How could I ever develop a new application for him to use if I didn’t understand firsthand the environment in which he worked?
Early Prototyping
Usability practitioners preach testing early and often. Big problems found early typically don’t cost as much to fix. We miss an opportunity when we don’t get users involved as early as possible in offering their feedback on devices, applications, interfaces, and information ultimately designed for them to use. Bringing users in early also enables them to help design, not just evaluate. As a designer, you are letting them be users early in the process so that you don’t move too far forward on an idea that might not pay off when it finally goes live.
Brett Oppegaard, an adjunct faculty member at Washington State Vancouver, received a grant to develop interactive multimedia content for the Fort Vancouver National Site. Although he had some ideas for how he wanted to start and what he wanted the content to say, he elected to involve users as early as possible, employing a novel early prototyping approach. Knowing that the interactive content would eventually be made available on mobile devices, Brett fashioned a piece of wood roughly the size of a mobile device. He then had users walk around the historic site. As they reached significant places where a finished application should provide information on their mobile devices, he asked users to let him know, using the wood prototype, what they expected to see and hear, and what menu they’d like to have available to them for navigating the content. Oppegaard collected a large amount of user-driven data that will now play a key role in fashioning a usable application. Whenever possible, learn what users think and what they want early, not late, in the design process.
Think Thermostat
A thermostat should never stop monitoring an environment; otherwise, it won’t adjust the temperature appropriately. In the same way, if we consider the environment where users use information, the devices they use, and the users themselves as dynamic forces always in the process of transformation, then we should think about our work as designers, communicators, and evaluators as ongoing. We should avoid focusing on anything being final. First, let users tell you what they’re thinking as early as possible, even with a paper prototype, if that’s all you have. Then go onsite as much as you can to know what the temperature really is where users live. And keep this iterative process ongoing. Michael Morgan at eBay calls it “360 degrees of usability.”
Because technology will only keep growing, providing us with more information, from different directions, and at faster speeds, we need new ways to manage it, to make the cacophony of information more usable in the real places where we live and work. There are no quick and easy answers, but let’s start by going on location, by understanding our users, and by letting them help us help them as early and often as possible. At some point, doing this might mean technical communicators will impact mobile computing as much as it has impacted us.
Brian Still (brian.still@ttu.edu) runs the Usability Research Lab at Texas Tech University, where he also serves as an associate professor teaching technical communication.
REFERENCES
Barnum, Carol. Usability Testing and Research. 1st ed. New York: Allyn & Bacon, 2002.
Morgan, Michael. 360 Degrees of Usability. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2004. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=985921.985941.
Nielsen, Jakob. Mobile Usability. (20 July 2009.) www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-usability.html.
