Usability

In light of Apple’s launch of Siri, the mobile personal assistant for the new iPhone 4S, I thought I’d take a brief look at why voice control has, to date, never managed to truly hit the mainstream. There have been automated speech recognition tools for longer than you’d think. Bell Labs developed a system that could recognise numbers in the 1950s. By the 1980s there were systems capable of recognising a small vocabulary of words, with the vocabularies increasing to the size of human vocabularies (10,000 to 150,000 words) by the early nineties. In the early noughties Orange had a system called Wildfire, which did many of the same things that Siri will do. Wildfire, however was ahead of its time and was discontinued (upsetting many customers with disabilities who had come to rely upon it).

One problem that has prevented this technology from widespread adoption is the rate of errors. There are a number of factors that contribute to this, particularly noise, diction and accent. Background noise is a real problem in speech recognition systems to this day. Equally challenging is the issue of how a user speaks. Strong accents or indistinct diction has continually caused issues with recognition accuracy. Anyone who has used automated customer service lines will be only too aware of these problems.

One way in which speech recognition systems used to achieve higher rates of accuracy was through learning the user’s voice (Dragon Naturally Speaking for example) and thereby becoming better at understanding what a user was saying. However, not all systems have this opportunity, although Siri will.

There are two other issues that are likely to have affected how willing people are to use speech recognition systems; the interaction and the context. Tackling interaction first. In the past, systems that permit voice control have tended to shy away from natural language style interaction, as technically it’s very challenging. This results in users having to adopt a more machinelike style of interaction, such as “Search, restaurants, submit”. This feels unnatural and makes the sequence of interaction harder to remember. You also sound pretty odd talking like that in public.

This brings us onto the second issue, context. Just how comfortable are people talking to a machine in public? Speech recognition customer service lines are ok until you reach the “I’m sorry…” moment, at which point the repetition and frustration often result in a level of embarrassment. If the language you use is more natural, then tasks become more like a conversation, which in turn makes it more comfortable to use the system in a public place. Even so, I suspect it will be a while before people are comfortable picking up their phone and demanding it to give them information like they’re an extra in Star Trek.

However, if any company can convince people to change their behaviour it’s Apple.

If Siri does succeed and developers have the opportunity to take advantage of the functionality it offers, they should consider the following aspects of their users’ interaction:

• Appropriateness of task: is your task suitable for voice command use? Shorter spoken interactions are likely to be more successful (and satisfying).
• Context: where are your users likely to be when they interact with your product? This will influence the types of phrase they use and the brevity of those phrases.
• Privacy: what information will your users need to speak out loud? Will they be comfortable broadcasting this information? Are there points at which you’ll need to switch to a different type of input mechanism?
• Triggers: what is likely to cause a user to begin a specific command or information request? This will govern how the interaction should flow.
• Mental models: if you’re replicating a real world interaction, make sure that you do so accurately as any mismatches will be jarring and confuse users.
• Errors: ensure that recognition or interaction errors are handled gracefully so that the illusion of a conversation is not broken.

Voice control has, and has always had, a lot of promise. It will be interesting to see if Apple can help to embed this style of interaction into our daily lives.

Wireframes are boring. I’ve seen many examples of sloppy, poorly presented, poorly rationalised wireframes (not in Foviance mind you) that it just begs the question: if we design user experiences for the platforms we’re working on, why don’t we make more use of this term called “design” and use it in the presentation of documents we produce?
Read more about: Passion for wireframes

By Shilpi Dahele

As a gaming consultant, I often have to register to an abundance of gaming websites for client work. At the time of writing this blog post I am due to conduct a project for a well-known gaming client, so one of my tasks was to register to a range of betting websites.

The thought of filling out lot’s of forms is certainly not an exciting one and the experience can be a fairly mundane one. Anyhow, I began filling in the registration form fields for one such site and as expected (and hoped) it was a straightforward and standard process. Read more about: Online form registration bringing you a smile

To mark this year’s World Usability Day, Foviance has been discussing the topic of communication with the ‘man on the street’ and today, every hour we will be uploading short Vodcasts. These short videos will concentrate on people’s stories about their good and bad experiences of communicating with others and their views on how they see communication changing their lives in the future.

It will also come as no surprise that the favourite way of communicating for most people is face-to-face. Through this exercise, Foviance would like to discover how people actually use technology and other services to communicate and how these experiences really impact everyday life.

Video questions asked – please feel free to comment below with your own views!

• Favourite form of communication
• A good experience (related to communication)
• A bad experience (related to communication)
• How communicaiton has changed in the past 10 years
• How communication will change in the next 10 years

Video interview #9

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9_FvTZ8ieE

Read more about: Happy World Usability Day

I have owned an espresso machine for close to 10 years now, and until recently did not find the ordering process for capsules that tedious. However this has now changed, in part due sto a site redesign (gone wrong, in my opinion) to the point where when my machine finally clonks out, I will be getting a Lavazza.

The other day, when landing on the nespresso.com website, I was greeted by a large “welcome to your new website” banner. Well, to start with it’s not my website, it’s Nespresso’s. And although the photos are extremely high quality (the coffee cup here for example  the back-lit look and fade out when mousing over the selection at the bottom is not great – the whole site is quite dark too. But, let’s get over it and try to order some capsules, the reason I was there in the first place. Read more about: Nespresso nightmare

I walk past a Gap store everyday on my way to and from work. Usually I don’t have time to go in, because I have to get home for the kids, but I do see the advertising board they put out on the pavement promoting their “Best fit” jeans. Having lived in New York some years ago, at a time Gap already had a US transactional website – which I used – I thought it would be interesting to see how the newly launched UK (sorry, European!) version stacked up. Read more about: Usability and expectations, looking at Gap

I first subscribed to the Which? website a few years ago, when purchasing many appliances – fridge, cooker, oven, dish-washer, washer and dryer – for our new place. I remained subscribed through the baby years – selecting a car seat, a buggy, a high chair and countless other paraphernalia – and have remained subscribed, because there is always something you want a trusted opinion on: a new TV, or kettle, or a vacuum cleaner! Having just received an e-mail inviting me to “Check out the new Which.co.uk”, I thought it would be a good time to go look up slow cookers. Read more about: The new Which? website

Just to be clear, I still stand by my earlier posts. But as with any relationship, at some point, the honeymoon is over…

This morning, I was reading on the Tube – Bill Bryson’s Short History. I reached a page that referred to an experiment, and the line reads “Schrödinger… blah blah… (see here)”; I rapidly clicked a few times on the 5-way controller to move the cursor up to that line – and lo and behold, the screen flickered, went blank, then showed an amazon background image (a silhouette reading under a tree) with a progress bar slowly filling across the bottom. Uh oh. The device seemed to have shut down. I “woke” it up, which showed the home page, and opened up the Bryson book from the list. Annoyingly, it did not take me to the place where it had rudely cut me off but to a much earlier page. Read more about: Kindle niggles