Santosh Basapur — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:30:30 GMT

Hi John,
I really liked your article. Another angle that I wanted to bring attention to (from UI perspective) is that of the “The problem of Interaction Modality”. And how it changes the expectations and makes the problem of user expectations worse. I used to work with Voice User Interfaces a lot and I have seen this very same problem arise there. If the system sounded very human like and had some functions of search, lookup or shortcuts, people just assumed that the search commands or any other interaction commands would be very well executed with high competency. The modality affected their expectations very much. The fact that a system spoke back to them with replies (to queries) made people assign intelligence to it and when the system did not perform as expected they felt let down which is similar to a system failing the Turing test. So i think the modality of interaction will have a huge impact on the user expectations as well which is another thing the designer should account for when designing an interactive system.

Santosh Basapur — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:17:54 GMT

Good article paul. Thanks for the write up of tips. I particularly liked the fact that you put this statement in “Use Likert-style scales to get data if you need it, and rely less on task completion data ”. As a practitioner of QTUT one should realise that there are things more important than completion times or stats like that. QTUT is very useful in situations where one needs to summarize (as results) the usability problems that are out of reach of heuristic analysis and yet with in reach of a time restricted quick testing. So time data or error data might not be as useful as where exactly are the people getting lost or where exactly is the system failing to give status notification etc… In other words “wheres” and “whys” become more important than stats due to time contraints.
thanks again and waitin for part II

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Santosh Basapur