The Head First Only way

Busy busy

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 20:10:59 GMT

Yeah, I know. I haven't posted on here for a while. In my defence I must point out that my regular blog here has been getting frequent updates.

But I hope to be able to post about some cool stuff in the next couple of months - stay tuned!

More Adventures in Wonderland

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:19:39 GMT

After posting my last entry on virtual worlds I was contacted by Nicole Yankelovich, who is the project lead for Project Wonderland over at Sun Microsystems. She very kindly invited me to contribute a guest blog about the work we've done on Sun's site, and it's just gone live. Thanks, Nicole!

I'm also pleased to say that you can now also read about VEGA's virtual academy on our company website. I'm very pleased with the reaction we've been getting from demonstrations of our virtual world, and it's great that I can now spread the word online as well.

Momentum on virtual environments has really built up over the last few months. There seem to be a number of factors working together at the moment which are all encouraging greater interest in virtual worlds.

Firstly, the current generation of Internet-savvy students have grown up in an environment permeated with digital media. There's a fascinating article by Mark Mabrito and Rebecca Medley in the current edition of Innovate - the Journal of Online Education about how net-generation learners approach texts. Utilising a virtual environment is second nature to them, and the availability of such tools is not only taken for granted, it's expected.

Secondly, the cost of travel is skyrocketing as the oil crisis kicks in. If you've travelled by air recently, you'll know what a hassle it is. So it's far easier to put on a headset and fire up your computer to gain access to the meeting room or classroom where you can interact with your instructor and your fellow students. I've been able to attend virtual meetings from my desk when previously I would have had to spend at least six hours in a car driving to and from another of our offices. Wouldn't you want to do the same?

The vision for virtual academies we've developed is all about maximising access to learning. Our goal is to allow learners to meet within their existing network, in an environment which provides most of the advantages gained from meeting up in real life. In my opinion, we've crossed the threshold at which the experience is rich and detailed enough for it to pay off. Now all we have to do is get people out there using it and reaping the rewards!

Chris

Some thoughts on Virtual Worlds

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:27:49 GMT

I've been interested in Virtual Worlds (henceforth referred to as VWs) for a long time, but this year I've also become a practitioner. Together with some colleagues I developed a VW that ties in to our company's main business areas - training and simulation - to provide a prototype Virtual Academy that is intended to give an impression of how users might access training at some point in the not-too-distant future.

We used a development version of Sun's Project Wonderland toolkit for our platform - it's open source, written in Java (no surprises there) and supports 3D audio right out of the box. We'd managed to embed training applications and 3D objects from our existing products within a surprisingly short space of time, and I was fortunate enough to be asked to demonstrate it at the ITEC Exhibition in Stockholm earlier this month. To say it went down well would be a bit of an understatement; I spent most of the week showing it to interested attendees. However, it was only when we had feedback from a number of customers who said it was the most interesting thing at the show that I really stopped to consider why we were making such an impact.

Partly, it's the novelty aspect. VWs are still new enough that people don't really have a good idea about what they are (there are two main distinguishing factors: 1. They are social spaces; you use them with other people. 2. They are persistent; if you change something in-world, it's still changed the next time you log in, unless somebody else has changed it back.) People haven't really though about what they could be used for, and why they would offer advantages to more traditional ways of doing things. So if you've spent any amount of time considering this, you're ahead of the game at the moment. There is also a considerable amount of media interest in the field at the moment - when I went to VWE2007 in London last year, six of the eight people sitting around me were from newspapers or TV companies - and Google's new VW Lively can only build on that interest.

There's the geek side of things to consider, of course; give anyone the opportunity to run a cut-down version of The Matrix on their desktop and you're going to pique their interest. Joe Little commented last year at VWE2007 that "if it looks like a game, you're going to get fired" but that doesn't stop people coming to have a 'play'. VWs are engaging, entertaining applications and to a certain personality type they exert an attraction like catnip does to cats.

But it was clear that the overwhelming reaction of people at the show was a much simpler one: "I could use this." That was rapidly followed by a second realisation: "...and it could save me money." Once you have those two factors in place, it's just a question of standing back and watching things happen, whether it be in the fields of training, simulation, virtual collaboration, online meetings, virtual teams or whatever. We'll be looking at ways in which we can make all of those things happen, believe me.

Games as paradigms of usability?

Tue, 20 May 2008 07:38:21 GMT

Rebecca and the twins have a Nintendo Wii; I recently bought a Playstation 3. I've been thinking a lot about the way in which I interact with both systems. Putting the adrenalin-fuelled rush of the latest video games to one side, I'm talking more about the way in which game consoles and game designers adopt conventions for interactions and control input (or sometimes reject those conventions, with variable results).

I must admit that the game I've been playing the most - "Gran Turismo 5 Prologue" - has the simplest interface requirements of all, as you only need to understand how to steer, brake and accelerate to get a lot of enjoyment out of the game. The skill level required to compete in the game gradually increases as you move through it, but on the most part it is possible to achieve each challenge after a certain amount of practice and large quantities of coffee. Using a joystick, the cognitive load imposed by getting to know the control mapping is low and you can get on with simply enjoying the game. It must be a real hoot using a proper steering wheel controller.

"Call of Duty 4" has a much more complex set of control inputs that it teaches you by putting you through a basic training section - which actually copies the military approach it's trying to emulate. The skill level required to progress through the game increases here as well, but there are a number of instances where I was suddenly confronted by a scenario that seemed impossible to resolve; after a dozen abortive attempts to get past one level I decided to give up for the day and put the game to one side. COD4 is an example of a game in which you appear to have free rein to walk where you want and do whatever you want, but in actual fact there are a number of actions which you must perform, in order, if you want to complete each level. Effectively, all you're doing as you play the game is discovering which buttons to press and where to jump/shoot/crouch down/throw the grenade. You might get some choice as to your passage through the game, but assuming that you don't get blown up, you will come out of each level watching the same cut scenes. The big problem is that if you can't master that single, particular set of button-presses or other actions, the remainder of the game's content is lost to you. If you were designing instructional content and you pulled a stunt like this, you'd get roundly slapped round the head, and deservedly so. If games have a challenge of this sort, there should be a number of alternative ways to achieve the goal, not just one.

Which brings me to the game that everyone is talking about at the moment; it is, of course, "Grand Theft Auto 4." GTA4 doesn't suffer from the fault described above - or if it does, I haven't discovered it yet. Indeed, the number of alternative ways of doing things is astronomical. For a start, the game environment is so rich and immersive, it's tempting to just wander round the city taking the whole thing in and not bothering about gameplay at all. In fact, you could even stay in and listen to the in-game radio or watch in-game TV and still be entertained by celebrities like Karl Lagerfeld, Iggy Pop and Ricky Gervais. The number of potential interactions is immense, and you can choose which of them you want to address at any given moment. This sort of "sandbox" game (where you are free to move around rather than being forced to complete a linear series of specific tasks, one after the other) has only really become possible in the last few years. The resources needed to create something like this rival those used on any Hollywood blockbuster: the setting (action takes place in a thinly disguised version of New York City) is massive, and intimidating. Once again, the control inputs are complex, but they are introduced a bit at a time in a way that is vastly more subtle than COD4's basic training.

In each case the games have to address the same challenge: you have to provide a set of controls comprehensive enough to provide stimulating gameplay, but simple enough to ensure that you're focussed on playing the game not remembering which control it is you're supposed to be using. You might think that it's difficult to mess up the conventions of using joysticks to move and initiating actions by pressing one or more buttons on the controller, but I've seen it happen. In particular, the "preowned" section of most game retail shops always used to have multiple copies of the game "Turok: Evolution" because its designers had deliberately ignored all the main control conventions to up with their own schema instead. Result: the game was unplayable unless it was the only game you had ever played.

The Wii goes against control conventions in a different way, but luckily it's a very different kettle of fish to Turok. With the Wii, in fact, you're never entirely sure what sort of actions you're going to be asked to perform to complete a game. This makes things far more appealing and paradoxically, makes your interactions seem far more realistic despite the fact that the graphics are far less sophisticated. The Wii challenges your ability to learn psychomotor tasks involving your whole body, not just your button-pressing fingers; just play "Rayman Raving Rabbids" for quarter of an hour or so to see what I mean. As a result, Nintendo have raised the bar on interaction design by a staggering amount and the success of the console is well deserved. I'm sure we'd be fitter as users if more interactions with computers relied on large scale movement like this, but I can't see it catching on down at the local cubicle farm. What a pity.

Popularity doesn't always guarantee usability

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:15:00 GMT

I've joined the ever-increasing number of people who have a Facebook account, and I spent some time at the weekend developing my social network and adding little customisable applets that display photos from my Flickr account or tell me how many days it is until the next Talk Like a Pirate Day. I particularly liked the fact that you can drag and drop individual elements of the page to customise its appearance, and promote or demote applications according to their usefulness or priority. But as time went by I became more and more frustrated by the interface that Facebook uses and the way they have addressed some of the main design issues.

The basic login page is clean and simple - but the main issue I have with Facebook's design is that the context of any item on the interface is almost never explained. There's an implicit assumption that you already know how to use things, making it difficult for new users to pick up on the best way of doing things.

Let's take the "confirmation email" message. Most of them add a description on your social listing along the lines of "you worked together." However, there's no visible guide to how these relationship statements should be worded (if there is, I haven't found it yet) and after looking at other people's profile pages it's clear that there's no obvious convention about whether statements should be in the first, second or even third person. And who does the "you" refer to? Me, or my contact? Sometimes it appears to refer to both parties, but - and this is the irritating bit - not all the time.

The application doesn't seem to keep up to date with what you're doing, either. For two weeks after I signed up, I continued to get the "congratulations, you have now validated your account" message after logging in. After editing my profile, Facebook still suggested that I should add some information to it so people would know who I was.

Searching for people isn't my idea of fun, either - the search results returned rely heavily on the user having selected a network or provided a photo. Without those items of information, you have little or no chance of narrowing down where the person lives to a particular continent, let alone a town or a business. The automated search facility using your Hotmail or Yahoo address book helps a bit, but I have yet to find anyone to contact using basic search. I found it particularly confusing that the results in the search function only linked to a person's profile from their picture - there was no explicit "see their profile" link, yet links for all the other actions that you can carry out - such as "see their friends" or "poke them!" are all grouped on the other side of the column. Why isn't "view profile" one of them?

And why can't I join more than one network?

At present, I'm much happier with the interface used by Facebook's poor relation, MySpace. It's much more closely geared to social activities, messaging and searching, and (when it's working) it's more fun as well.

Needs more thought

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 09:59:53 GMT

I just got an automated email from LiveJournal informing me that it's my birthday on Saturday, and asking me whether I'd like to wish myself a happy birthday by clicking on the thoughtfully provided hyperlink.

I'm sure there's something wrong there. Just can't... quite... think... what...

Does scaffolding really work?

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 11:04:59 GMT

There's an interesting discussion going on at Slashdot at the moment about the findings of a team from the University of California in Los Angeles. The psychologists were looking at how rhesus macaque monkeys learn tasks. The monkeys do better performing tasks related to memory and recall when they are left to discover things for themselves - if a hint system was used during training, they fared worse in tests.

If we assume that humans learn in the same way, then it means there's such a thing as giving a student too much help. Passively accepting direction isn't as effective as active engagement in the learning process, something constructivists have been saying for years.

TUNING OUT

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 18:24:31 GMT

I've been getting into podcasts recently, so when Quicktime told me there was a new version available I took the plunge and downloaded the free bundle which also installs Apple's iTunes software. Since then, I've been trying to find my way around the program and learning its idiosyncrasies. And boy, does it have some.

I'm not particularly impressed, to be honest; there are a number of behaviours that must have made sense at the time but which are just plain irritating. Such as:

The folders idea is a mess. The software imposes some arcane criteria on what constitutes a movie and what constitutes a podcast, storing mp4 files in different folders within iTunes on what appears to be a completely arbitrary basis. Worst of all, you don't appear to be able to do anything about it. I can't move files from one directory to another if this contradicts iTunes's idea of what sort of content is involved. This has already pissed me off greatly, particularly when I'm downloading several podcasts from the same provider and they end up in different places.
I can edit data in some columns, but not others. There's no indication of which columns I'm allowed to change, and which I'm not. Sometimes, I can still change data in protected columns by entering the information in the "get info" window. Sometimes, I can't correct a spelling mistake in the podcast's description field. At other times, changing a podcast's filename results in the file being reclassified as a movie when it was originally a podcast.
As a result of the above, allowing the "genre" field to be set as "podcast" seems to be completely pointless.
If you aren't subscribed to a podcast, you get a "subscribe" button sitting alongside it. There doesn't appear to be any way to hide this button other than by subscribing, which in most cases isn't what I want to do.
Clicking anywhere within the podcast playback window appears to pause playback. All I expect it to do - all I want it to do, in fact - is bring the playback window to the top. If I want to pause playback, surely I'd click on the pause button?
iTunes duplicates the playback bar from the player window at the top of the main window, only without half the functionality. Why bother?
The "Get all" option falls over if you have "allow simultaneous downloads" checked and you are downloading more than three files, because by the time the first two have downloaded the third transfer has timed out. You'd think the software would be clever enough to identify how many simultaneous downloads to initiate if it's providing the option to do so.
If I add more content relevant to iTunes on my hard drive, I have to explicitly add it using the "Add folder" or "Add file" option. If I delete files, iTunes only realises that they're no longer there when I try to play them. Couldn't they come up with a way to catalogue the folders in use and identify changes? And add an option to ignore files that I've previously removed? That's how I'd have done it...

Seeing as iTunes is already at version 7, I guess the software's behaviour is firmly entrenched, and I don't expect it'll improve any time soon. So as a result I'm left feeling rather disappointed. I was expecting so much more.

Got any workarounds to the problems I'm experiencing? Let me know. Leave a comment!

Memes and macros: making learning stick

Sat, 09 Jun 2007 13:18:55 GMT

I had a very interesting conversation about learning at work this week, sparked by the popularity of the recent Internet phenomenon of LOLcats. What makes memes and macros like this so incredibly popular? Is it possible for me, as a training designer, to spark some of that same creative zeal in a learning environment?

The LOLcats phenomenon has been going for quite a while, but I commented on its sudden uptake in my regular blog last month. It's a prolific example of what Richard Dawkins calls a meme - the conceptual equivalent of genes, that allow ideas or concepts to spread and evolve. (At this point, you might want to wander over to the site of Dr Susan Blackmore for lots of useful stuff). Dr Blackmore describes activities such as the arts and sciences as memeplexes, where entire cultures and ideologies can be passed on by non-genetic means. As far as the Internet goes, chain letters, urban legends and "this is funny" emails are the most common examples. Every now and again, a new behaviour or mode of expression comes along that engages people in a particularly successful way, to the point where the recipient's reaction is one of needing to participate and spread the meme further. The latest example of this "übermeme" is LOLcats.

As I mentioned in my blog, what intrigues me about this particular meme is how quickly someone who is exposed to it picks up the inherent grammar or syntax that allows them to say, "this fits the meme" or "this is not part of the meme". After I wrote the blog article, I discovered a surprising and fascinating reification of this approach: a team of happy maniacs are in the process of creating a programming language that fits the meme. I also discovered that, on the Internet, graphical memes are usually described as "image macros". At this point, the beginning of an idea wandered vaguely into view.

Humans are, by nature, compulsive pattern seekers. We are all adept at recognising patterns in things to some extent, although some of us are much better at pattern recognition than others. Humans are creative. We are also explorers. We like to test the boundaries of our environment, and add to it. We love to make things, and I would argue that the majority of creative acts that occur these days are those which build on the creations of others. My response to the LOLcats meme was that I wanted to make my own version, to see if mine would fit the pattern.

So what should I bear in mind when I create learning events? Firstly, remember that we like to create things. It's no surprise to me that constructivist learning theory is so popular these days, as it taps in to this primal drive. I have a lot of time for theorists like David Jonassen, because my experience is that the approaches they suggest actually work.

Secondly, I should remember that we are very visual beings. We get a lot of information from what we look at. Content should be graphically rich, but this doesn't just mean putting bells and whistles on web pages or having rotating logos or things on fire on our screens. It's about distilling the underlying concept that is being taught into a simple visual metaphor, that gets the information across without distracting from it or masking it with trivia or baubles. At this point, all I need to do is point you at the work of Edward Tufte, who has already covered anything I could come up with, and presented it in a more succinct and accessible form than I will ever achieve. The graphical approach is also worth considering for looking through datasets; the folks I was talking to are developing a graphical interface for representing the interrelationships between concepts in an organisational learning context, and we're getting quite enthused by how intuitive the interface is becoming, even if the Encyclopedia Britannica folks developed a very effective knowledge navigation interface years ago.

The problem that I still need to solve, however, is how to make the learning events I work on as much *fun* as playing with the latest LOLCats toys. Anyone got any ideas?

Have a good weekend.

Scratching the Surface

Wed, 30 May 2007 08:54:22 GMT

The big news today has to be Microsoft's new table PC, called Surface. It employs a multitouch user interface very similar to the one demonstrated by Jeff Han at TED last year - you use your fingers to drag, stretch, rotate and otherwise manipulate graphics on a horizontal display screen.

Watching the videos on the Surface site, Microsoft have obviously "got" the potential of the interface: the examples they show feature tasks that are intuitive, easy to understand, and execute flawlessly. It would be nice to think that the current paradigms of interaction with consumer electronics (not just computers) are about to be replaced. Certainly I'd like to live in a world where manipulation of data was as easy as they make it look.

I'm particularly impressed with the idea of assigning areas around storage devices such as phones and cameras that are placed on the table. Files are transferred to and from those devices by placing them within their area of influence. Of course, you'd want just about anything you use with Surface to have either WiFi or Bluetooth enabled; you still have to access data in the item's own memory. For everything else, you'd want an RFID chip embedded to tell Surface what it's dealing with. On the other hand, an inactive object with a particular distinctive shape could be used to trigger events; it depends how good the system will be at recognising the shape of objects placed on it. Interesting idea - I wonder what sort of applications we might see that use this approach? Whatever they turn out to be, I imagine that the potential for most applications hasn't even been thought of yet.

At present, Microsoft are aiming the device at business users, such as hotels, but I'd imagine as more people hear about the device, demand is going to grow very quickly. Well, I want one, anyway.

Interaction design

Wed, 23 May 2007 13:06:40 GMT

The best text book I've bought in the last ten years has to be Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge.

It presents a history of human-computer interaction, with interviews with most of the major players - in my view the book is worth it just for the section on Bill Verplank. There are more than 700 pages full of useful suggestions, design methodologies and photos of major design innovations, including the first mouse - a fetching number carved from wood with a very serious and threatening looking red button on the top. Great stuff.

As if that wasn't enough, the book also comes with a DVD that contains interviews with 30 or so of the main people featured in the text. Highly recommended.

First off...

Wed, 23 May 2007 12:53:09 GMT

I already have three separate blog spaces that I run with varying degrees of commitment, and a Flickr account. So why do I need another online identity?

The answer I've come up with (and it's got me convinced) is that I can use this blog for information and discussions about the sort of work that I do, and share things I discover with work colleagues in a way that's portable, easily accessible, and available in the office.

As for the other stuff, you can click on the following links to find my photos on Flickr, my MySpace page, MSN Spaces page, and my main blog, which gets updated pretty regularly.

Cheers!
Chris