Human-Computer Interaction and the Future of User Experience
Darby Siscoe explores how humans interact with technology and discusses how user experience applies to almost every industry.
“The key, is to empathize like you have never empathized before,” said Darby Siscoe, Master’s Candidate and Digital Corps UX Team Lead. Darby and her classmates in the Emerging Media Design and Development graduate program at Ball State University conducted research on how storytelling plays a larger role in the overall user experience. Through their research, they realized that the best approach to UX is placing yourself in the user’s shoes.
They will present their findings at the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) International Conference in July 2019. As the User Experience Team Lead with the Digital Corps, Darby is excited to bring her newly published findings to student employees for future projects.
In 2015, the Digital Corps created a new team of students to lead the office in understanding user experience, human-computer interaction and web accessibility standards. The User Experience Team regularly conducts research about how users interact with the products that the Digital Corps creates. The various evaluations and usability tests that the UX Team conducts ensures that Digital Corps products are ready for the client and will be understood by users.
While the Digital Corps explores user experience as it pertains to websites and mobile apps, it’s important to think about how users navigate tools and experiences beyond digital platforms. Creating human-centric products that place the consumer’s experience before anything else, is becoming the norm. Darby and other graduate students in her programs explored this concept.
Research Insights
Darby has been exploring user experience concepts as a part of an immersive learning class within her graduate program at Ball State University. Darby and her classmates conducted usability evaluations to learn more about how users can learn and use a product to achieve their goals. They worked to balance this experience with storytelling in a learning environment with technology.
“If you have a large collection of artifacts, how can you make a piece of technology simple enough to encourage exploration without intimidation?” said Darby.
Ideally, the insights they discovered will impact how interactive exhibits are designed for museums.
Darby and her classmates found some obvious (and some “not so obvious”) results from their research.
It was immediately clear that avoiding large blocks of text aided the user experience. But what if large amounts of text are required to provide accurate information about an artifact in a museum setting? Darby and her team hypothesized that a simple scrolling mechanic would work best. However, they found that most users didn’t understand this concept without instruction — there was a lack of design affordances.
Design affordances are clues that provide insight into how an object should be used. Affordances are typically provided by the object itself, rather than a set of written instructions. A great example is a door that can only be opened in one direction. If the door is lacking a handle, then it can’t be pulled — so we visually perceive it to be push-only. If the door has a fixed-handle, then most users understand that it should be grabbed and pulled.
So what did Darby and her team do? They determined that cutting off large blocks of text at the bottom of a page implied that there was more to see, encouraging the user to scroll… except, nobody scrolled.
But why?
After implementing visual affordances such as arrows with few results, the team determined that the size of the screen and the positioning of the user had a greater effect on the user experience than previously thought.
“Placement of key affordances and icons is really crucial, otherwise nobody knows how to use it! On a large screen like that, the design should really encourage exploration,” Darby said. “Encouraging exploration also encourages people to get engaged with the story.”
Relating Insights to the Digital Corps
Through her work with the Digital Corps, Darby focuses on leading a team of students to become skilled User Experience professionals. While the Corps itself tends to produce more digital products, such as websites and mobile apps, Darby knows that user experience applies to so much more.
In a recent User Experience Team training session, Darby challenged a group of students to design a layout for a cupcake shop. The students were forced to ask questions such as:
- How close is the counter to the entrance of the store?
- How tall is the display case? Is there a display case?
- How are tables laid out throughout the shop?
“The blueprint really made us think a lot about how a user, whether they’re an employee or customer, has to navigate that specific restaurant,” said Sydney Barber, an Apprentice on the User Experience Team. “We even talked about how we would display our advertising. Would we put posters in the window or outside the door?”
Asking these types of questions help user experience professionals create products with the user in mind. Through her graduate program and the Digital Corps, Darby sees how user experience research and design are becoming more acknowledged by other industries.
Darby believes that user experience will become a normal and important practice for large industries around the world. By creating a work environment that works to realize the importance of understanding audiences from different perspectives, user experience research can be adapted to any industry, not just web design. Through asking in-depth questions, exploring every possibility, and think about the user first, products will become more human-centric than ever.
