So you’re a researcher and you want to get your cool new idea out there. You want other researchers to adopt it and promote it further for you. What do you do? (Hint: if you’re as cool as your idea, you probably mention The Web, Facebook (or Google+, if you prefer), and Twitter at this point, even if you secretly wonder what they are and what the point of them is.)

In the past…

Traditionally, you would probably publish papers about your idea in peer-reviewed academic journals so that people interested in that area would read about it and think “that’s a cool idea; I must adopt that approach too”. Similarly, you might present about it at conferences where your audience of like-minded people would listen and think “that’s a cool idea; I must adopt that approach too”. If you had teaching responsibilities, you likely also taught your students about your new approach, explaining the weaknesses of the old approach and why this new approach is better so that when they come to doing their own research projects they think “that’s a cool idea; I must adopt that approach too”.

Except (I’m guessing here) it probably doesn’t always work like that. Especially if your cool new research idea is a statistical method. Especially if your new statistical method requires its users to sit down with a calculator and manually work through an equation instead of just opening a data file and pressing some buttons in SPSS, the statistics package popular with psychologists, marketing people, and others.

I work in usability and user experience in my non-student life. But it doesn’t take a usability expert to work out that if your audience is made up of people who most likely have just GCSE-level (high school) Maths (like me) and often (I’ve noticed) The Fear of all things mathematical, you’re not going to get far in convincing them to use your new statistical method, even if it’s what they really need to use and they would actually quite like to use it. I don’t really have The Fear myself but I do glaze over when presented with less-than-simple equations and strange clusters of weird characters because I just don’t know how to read them.

The unfortunate upshot is that your cool new statistical approach just doesn’t really get off the ground, no one else writes about using it (so you don’t get the all-important citations in other people’s publications), and it just slides quietly away into the ether.

In the 21st C…

If you are as cool as your cool new research idea, you might also embrace the wonders of the world of social media and online communications. Obviously, publishing in peer-reviewed journals, presenting at conferences, and teaching your students are all good and necessary things to do. But they’re probably not enough in some cases–and I’d guess that statistical methods is probably one of those cases.

I don’t know whether Hayes & Preacher (or Preacher & Hayes) went through that exact thought process when thinking about how to promote their cool new statistical methods to psychologists and other social scientists, but it seems that usability was one of their aims (for example, Andrew Hayes suggests that people have tended to stick with the older methods, rather than adopt the newer and better methods, because the old ones are “simple and widely understood”; Hayes, 2009, p 411).

So Hayes & Preacher have done two things:

• Written macros to extend SPSS
  Users can use the macros to (fairly) easily run the tests using SPSS, an environment they’re already familiar with. Macros are a bit fiddly to work with so, for one of their tests, they’ve even written a custom dialog that you can install in SPSS which adds a new entry to the Analyze menu so that you can just open a standard-looking dialog box to select the appropriate variables names and run the test. All this is available for free download from their website.
• Created a Facebook group to answer questions
  You can start a new topic (thread) to ask a question or describe a problem, or you can browse the existing 1636 (and rapidly rising) topics (at least, I’ve been able to before but today it seems the back/forward links have gone walkabout). You can also use Google to search for specific topics. Both Preacher and Hayes typically respond to questions and problems within a day. When I was having some technical problems, they asked for a my data file and ran the test on their own machines to check whether it was just my installation of SPSS that was the problem (it was).

Benefits for users

As a student trying to understand the statistical procedures by reading and re-reading their journal papers multiple times, it was invaluable to be able to ask the authors themselves (via Facebook no less) to clarify specific details as they applied to my particular experimental design. Browsing the 1000+ topics of discussion was also very educational as I came across answers to questions that I hadn’t even thought to ask yet.

Benefits for them

The benefits for them are surely great too. Obviously they have to spend time writing, testing, and supporting their macros etc, and they also have to spend time responding to help requests on Facebook. In return, though, they vastly improve the ease of using their statistical procedures, while also giving you (the user) a warm and fuzzy feeling about the procedures (the power of positive affect) and that there are many other people out there trying to use the procedure too (the power of social norms), all in all making you (I would guess) more likely to keep trying and to talk about the procedures to others. Those are the intangible and difficult-to-measure benefits of a good user experience.

In addition, they’re getting loads and loads of feedback from their users on where their procedures or explanations are difficult to understand, or where users commonly have problems, so that when they write a book on it, they’ve got valuable material to respond to and include which should make the book incredibly useful to users. We’ll see if that’s true when their book, and accompanying new macro, comes out next year. And there’s another thing, while they’ve got you in a discussion on Facebook, it’s practical (but also good promotion) for them to refer you to one or other of their papers, or to mention the book coming out next year. And there’s a list of up-coming events at which they’ll be conducting workshops on these statistical procedures. It all helps to boost citations.

Everyone wins

I think it’s brilliant. Not just because they helped me by answering a question within a day and diagnosing the problems I was having running their macros. But because they’re tapping into resources that are free and much of their target audience already use. And by doing this, they’re making their cool ideas as accessible as possible, which can only really be a good thing for everyone concerned.

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References

Hayes, A. (2009). Beyond Baron and Kenny: Statistical Mediation Analysis in the New Millennium. Communication Monographs, 76(4), 408-420. doi:10.1080/03637750903310360

Disclosure

I work for IBM, who own SPSS.

I started a PhD last October. It’s part-time (I still have to pay the mortgage and cat food bills afterall!) so I aim to finish it sometime around 2015. I enrolled at the University of Surrey in the Psychology department where there is an Environmental Psychology research group, which struck me as just perfect because I wanted to research how people understand energy use and how to reduce it.

Like some of my IBM Hursley colleagues, I’ve been playing with a Current Cost electricity monitor for the past couple of years.

Like many of them, I’ve played with the technology, got my real-time electricity readings publishing to a server on the Internet, and looked at the data in graphs. I also learnt how to use my Arduino to take those readings and make Christmas lights flash.

I’m a User Experience Specialist in my day-job, it probably won’t be a surprise that I’m interested in understanding how people use the technology as much as the technology itself. My first degree was in Psychology and my Masters in Human-Computer Interaction, so while design itself is interesting to me, I’m more interested in how users understand what’s going on, what they want to do, what motivates them, and so on.

One of the reasons for my Christmas lights project (aside from learning to program) was to make build a kind of ambient, emotional connection between my house and my parents’, 250 miles away. My original intention (though it didn’t quite work out technologically) was to display my electricity readings on one colour of the lights and their electricity readings on another colour. So as well as having a kind of ambient indicator of our own current rate of electricity usage, I can see little things about their lives too: when their lights flash faster for a couple of minutes I can see they’re making a cup of tea.

Emotional connections to the technology around us (which uses energy of some kind) is hugely important to our global use of natural resources. For example, think about when you last bought a car. Usually there’s some kind of emotional factor involved, whether it’s the model of the car and the personal image or status you’d like to project, or the aesthetics of the car, or its comfort, or the way you feel it gives you your freedom.

One thing I’m interested in looking at is how ordinary people understand energy and their use of it (at home, at work, when travelling). Having a technology day-job, I’d also like to combine that with understanding how people perceive and think about technology in relation to energy-saving.

When I decided to do a PhD, I figured the Psychology of Energy Use would be pretty specific as an area of interest. And it kindof is, but it also kindof isn’t. Within that, there are just soooooo many approaches I could take; eg looking at people’s attitudes, their values and beliefs, their behaviours, their emotional experience of the technology and energy use, their perceptions of risk and control of technology, how other people’s attitudes and behaviours influence their own, how their local environment (eg where they live, where they work) influences or constrains their ability to manage their use of energy (electricity, gas, oil, petrol, etc).

So far, I’ve mostly done lots of reading and thinking but aware that there’s so much more I need to do before I can even decide on my exact research question. I decided doing some writing about it might help me organise my thoughts and ideas a bit. So here’s my first stab at that.

One thing that I often debate with developers is why the error message  “An unexpected error has occurred.” isn’t a good message. Afterall, to the developer, the error *is* unexpected; otherwise, they’d have created a better error message for it.

From the user’s perspective (who the software is written for, after all), they don’t want to know that the error was not expected by the people who wrote the code. The user wants to know that the software (especially when it’s important to their job/finances/life) is in control and knows *exactly* what’s going to happen when you press a certain button. The user has to be able to trust the software and trust that the developer(s) of that software knew what they were doing when they wrote it.

So it gets difficult for the developer/designer when they have to make a call that potentially risks breaking that trust. For instance, supposing you (as a developer) were to provide a new feature that is really beneficial to the target user but there is a small risk that something will go wrong in a big way for that user if they try to use that feature. As developer, what do you do?

Typically, I’d predict, you would make the feature optional so that you aren’t forcing the user to use a feature that could potentially (however unlikely) cause them serious problems. If the user does try to use the feature, you provide scary warnings of what could occur in certain circumstances. Hopefully, that will put them off unless they really know what they’re doing.

Okay, that’s the developer’s perspective. And it’s entirely understandable and even laudable that the developer is doing what they can to keep the user safe.

So, switch now to the user’s perspective. The target user is computer literate but had no knowledge of the development of this feature or who developed it. This user could benefit greatly from this new feature but when they attempt to use it, they get a scary warning message which, as intended, makes them think twice about whether to use the feature or not.

Now what does the user decide? Granted, risk is all about weighing up the costs and benefits, and to one person the relative benefit will outweigh the possible cost. To make a decision, however, a person needs as much information as they can possibly get. In this case, the only (and therefore critical) information is provided by the developer; that is, how informative and/or scary the warning message is.

If the developer provides a lot of information that makes the feature look useful, the user might just choose to use it. But if the developer makes the warning message as scary as possible, the user will probably opt not to use it.

The developer wants users to use the new feature because they’ve made the effort to develop it and it really could benefit many users. The developer, however, doesn’t (understandably) want the responsibility of trashing someone else’s laptop in some way. So the result is that the developer pushes that responsibility off on to the user, when in fact the developer has far more information available to help them make that decision than the user has.

If you’re the user, though, how are you supposed to make that call?

For example…

Computer Janitor is a utility that was introduced in Ubuntu Intrepid (I think) so that you could run it to clean up old kernels that are no longer needed, and other bits and pieces of packages that are no longer used. When I first tried to use it, I raised this bug, which, it turned out, had this duplicate.

Essentially, CJ could potentially remove packages that you might need. So when you try to use it tries to scare you into deciding whether you really really want to risk it. I raised the bug because the scary words don’t actually help you decide – in that, if you aren’t easily scared by such things, the scary message only determines how scared you are – not how well-informed you are to make a decision…and isn’t going to help when you break your computer.

What would maybe be more helpful is if CJ used a stricter set of criteria when selecting which files to remove. In this case, CJ might leave on your system  some files or packages that could be removed, instead of the reverse where it might incorrectly remove files or packages you need. The former is surely the preferably outcome for the majority of users (who would rather have a few unneeded files on their machine than a broken machine).

It would also be possible then, for the minority of users who really really know what they’re doing, to selectively delete the files that probably can be removed but CJ isn’t certain about. In this case, users are only presented with a decision to make if they actually seek it out but the majority of users are still able to benefit from the safer (if slightly less effective) behaviour. In fact, it would be better overall if CJ ran automatically during an Ubuntu upgrade so that the user really doesn’t have to care about it (unless they really really want to).

This is not intended as a dig at Computer Janitor as I think it’s a useful feature in general and I’m kindof surprised that this kind of clean-up wasn’t being done already whenever you do an upgrade of Ubuntu. Also, I think the bugs I’ve linked to above have caused a bit of a headache for the developers.

This issue of forcing users to make ill-informed decisions is a very common occurrence throughout software development and is certainly not specific to Ubuntu; it’s just that Ubuntu is a public development effort and provides examples that are relatively easy to explain. So please don’t be offended if you are part of the development teams for either Computer Janitor or Ubuntu!

So, if you, as developer/designer, find that you’re having to give scary messages to make a user *really* decide if they want to continue, consider stepping back from it, thinking about the possible decisions the user could make and what the consequences of those decisions are. Even talk to some of your target users and find out what decisions they’d make. Just because you can successfully scare them off doesn’t make it a successful feature – if the feature is potentially useful to the user, they should be able to safely use it (no matter what level of fear you instill in them). Then look at the bigger picture, think about it in a different way, and see if the decision can be made for the user, or the decision can even be removed altogether.

I’m sure that it’s not as easy as it might sound. And it’s not always easy to recognise situations like this. I’m hoping, though, that, having thought this through while writing this post, I’ll actually remember it in future the next time a similar issue occurs for me.

It’s taken me a while but I’ve finally got round to installing and trying out Gallery 3 beta 2. It’s still all shiny and new and I’m still looking forward to it being released (and hoping Dreamhost adopt it immediately).

It took me a bit of effort to get it installed because between beta 1 and beta 2, I reinstalled my laptop. Which meant that I’d none of the dependencies installed still. One thing I would suggest to the development team is a good set of installation instructions to help beta testers along. I did, of course, miss out on the beta upgrade option which would probably have seen me nicely on my way. Instead, though I was condemned to wrestle with Apache2 and, not normally having any contact with such things, I had to wait until Tony was around to debug my problem.

Anyway, all installed, I successfully uploaded my holiday pictures and, unlike in beta 1, I could actually view them:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see in the screenshot above, when you hover over a photo, a small toolbar appears with commonly required actions on it (I think this toolbar is a fantastic idea). This was there in beta 1 but I think there are more options now. You can now:

• Edit this photo
• Rotate 90 degrees counter-clockwise (which is perfect because this is usually the first thing I need to do…)
• Rotate 90 degrees clockwise (…or this)
• Move this photo to another album
• Choose this photo as the album cover
• Additional options > Delete this photo (This one is a drop-down rather than just a button – does this mean that there are other ‘additional options’ to come? On the single-photo view pages, this option is just a wastebin button, which is easier if there are no other options to fit on.)

So, what else has changed…?

Well tagging seems to be much the same. As I replied to a comment on my previous post, you can only add tags (on the single-photo page or on the album page) or delete tags (Contents > Tags). It would be good if we could ‘manage’ tags by merging two tags or renaming tags. Renaming would be useful (saves you deleting and having to re-tag all those photos with a new tag). Merging maybe less so but if you’re talking huge numbers of photos and you find you’ve used inconsistent tag names, merging can be useful.

If you’re in the album view and you click the slideshow button (top-right), you get a rather slick-looking slideshow appearing…all Web2.0-y. If you’re in the single-photo view, the slideshow button doesn’t seem to work – it thinks there are no photos to show. I’d expect it to start a slideshow of the album to which the photo belongs, or the tag group..hmmm not sure which. Maybe you should be able to select from a drop-down menu button which…

One other thing about single-photo view: there’s a button that says ‘full size’ but I’m not convinced (though I’ve not checked) that it is actually full size that it displays at when you click it.

Other things that I played with:

• Dashboard lets you edit what widgets are displayed, portal-style. Either the wide version in the centre, or the narrow version on the right-hand side.
• Clicked Settings > Start translating and threw me back to album view and no obvious way to translate. I assume it’s not implemented yet.
• I like the hiding of the scary-looking settings in Settings > Advanced and the scary message. I’m not touchin’ nothin’!
• Content > Tags lets you manage tags – delete them only so far it seems.

And that’s it for now. I’ve just run out of time right now and wanted to post my feedback so far. In general – still looks great!

P.S. The permissions UI hasn’t been updated in beta 2 but a comment on my previous post asked what I thought of the proposed UI for the permissions (http://codex.gallery2.org/Gallery3:Permissions_UX). I think that looks way way better. I like the shortcut of just pressing preset buttons. That’s probably as much as I’ll ever need. You do get the nice shiny way to do advanced permissions if you so need it still so no one is left out.

Generally, all good.

So, a bit back, I wrote a post about how Gallery have been focusing on making Gallery 3 easier to use.  So when Beta 1 came out, I gave it a go on my laptop.

Uploading images (first things first!)

After installation (which was a reasonably slick experience, although I was slightly confused by having to install apache2, php, and mysql first), Gallery neatly leads me through installing the first photos to my gallery. The browse dialog in which you select the photos you want to upload is slightly odd because as soon as you’ve selected the photos in the window, they start uploading. There is a ‘Done’ button but that seems to refer to having ‘done’ the upload, as opposed to having ‘done’ the selection of photos ready to upload – which is what I expected and was slightly surprised by the uploading starting before I expected it to. Wonder if this is intentional…cos it’s a little bit weird?

When the images have uploaded, they’re displayed in a tiled layout on the page (although, at the moment, the photos themselves don’t display – I guess that’s the joy of betas   ). The cool thing is that when you hover over a thumbnail, a small toolbar containing the most common tasks (edit, move to another album, set the photo as the highlight photo for the album, delete) appears over it. I did just try to take a screenshot but sadly I’ve forgotten my password so I can’t log back in…and the password reset function hasn’t been implemented yet…

Update: turns out I took some screenshots when I was playing:

Tags

Oo, can add tagz! (That *is* actually what I wrote in the notes I made.) You just enter a tag, one at a time, then press ‘enter’. Tags were the reason I was looking at Zen Photo when I became despairing of Gallery 2 (and wanted cool tags like I have in WordPress and Delicious, instead of just sorting by albums). It’s easy to manage the tags you’ve created from the menus (Admin > Content > Tags).

Album permissions

And then we get to album permissions. On Gallery 1, the permissions were slightly clunky but most could cope with them. On Gallery 2, the permissions were incomprehensible and when I googled for help I found other people who were similarly baffled and no actual answer to my problems. On Gallery 3, they’ve rightly got rid of the obviously UNIX-style permissions.

You can create different users and groups for your gallery. A reason for creating other users (who aren’t administrators) is so that you can section off albums so they can be selectively seen, for example, by family members, by friends, by work colleagues). When you create a user, you get the option to check the box ‘admin’ which presumably gives the user administrative access to the gallery. The users makes sense but I’m slightly confused as to the groups. I’ve nothing against the groups per se (I can see they might be useful for administrators of massive gallery sites) but I think groups should be an ‘advanced’ option that is not required for use by most people.

I can’t quite work out the ‘Registered Users’ group – it seems to get everything added to it apart from ‘guest’. I added TestGroup group and created two users (TestUser and test2) which I dragged and dropped to the TestGroup group. Worked nicely.

You set who can access each album by clicking Options > Permissions when that album is open, which opens the Edit Permissions dialog box. You then indicate the permissions that each group has on the current album. I like that you work by album but I’m not so sure about dealing with groups. I feel that it’s a bit of a ‘power user’ task to be working with groups – you have to have planned and organised your groups to be able to use this dialog effectively; it also adds a layer of complexity to understanding what permissions an individual user has.

Thinking of my friend who uses a gallery we host, she (and I) would find it a lot easier to work with the users themselves – maybe with a power user tab option to switch to working with groups. I’d much rather say that user ‘family’ can access this album, rather than set up a group called ‘family’ with a user called ‘family’ in it (there’d be little point, typically, to separate out different parts of the family to be multiple different users within the group). I agree that groups can be useful but I just don’t think they should be the default.

Slideshow

And finally, the slideshow facility (for viewers of your gallery rather than for you a gallery owner/administrator)  is provided by a third-party Gallery plug-in which is a little slow to load but you get the option to install a browser plug-in that gives you some client-side loveliness.

Overall impressions

Looking good.