Frustration and the OWL by Tanner Heffner

Have you ever been so frustrated with a computer that you wanted to scream at the screen? Not in the angry teenage gamer way, but in the what I want to happen isn’t happening way. The article “Determining Causes and Severity of End-User Frustration” discusses user frustration during computer use. While many errors come from popups and computer crashes, the largest amount of frustration when dealing with computers comes from web use. In another article, "Help! I’m Lost: User Frustration in Web Navigation" lists users not being able to find the content they are seeking in the description of web use frustration.

We all have examples of using a website for a specific purpose and have difficulties completing our goals. Whether the goal be finding a particular article or using virtual tools, using the web can be an extremely frustrating experience. Personally, when I encounter frustrations with a website, unless is imperative that I use that particular site, I will try to find a different website to use instead. The data below from “Determining the Causes and Severity of End-User Frustration” shows that many users just give up, move on, or find an alternative method when faced with computer difficulties.

Figure 1

Looking at the graph above, we can see how users react when faced with a problem. While the graph shows that the majority of users have seen the error before and from previous experience know how to solve the problem, the next most used solution is "I was unable to solve it." This means that when users are unable to quickly find a way to solve their problem without having to look at manuals or third-party help, they give up and move on. To design a website for the future, we have to assume that users are used to instant gratification and don't want to spend a lot of time navigating to find the information they are seeking. When they can't find it quickly and easily, we can infer from the graph above that a large majority of users are going to give up and move on to another resource.

The OWL has a huge amount of information that can be extremely beneficial to the users. However, if the users encounter difficulties and frustrations when searching for the information they want, they are likely to disconnect and try finding the information on a different website. I believe that we should begin analyzing how users are interacting with the OWL and from that, determine where users are getting frustrated and disconnecting. By determining where users are experiencing frustration with the OWL, we can make start to make changes about that will potentially increase the amount of time users spend on our site and the amount of resources that they read. Reducing user frustration is a key component in user centered design.

Citation:

Ceaparu, Irina, Jonathan Lazar, Katie Bessiere, John Robinson, and Ben Shneiderman. "Determining Causes and Severity of End-User Frustration." International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction 17.3 (2004): 333-56. Taylor & Francis. Web. 5 Nov. 2014. <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327590ijhc1703_3#.VHDUAPldXHQ>.

Windowless Airplanes by Carly Harmon

Figure 1

I read an article recently that talked about the development of air travel within the next ten years. According to this article, the concept design of “windowless planes” is the work of the Teesside-based Centre for Process Innovation (CPI). It was reported that the windows of the aircraft would be replaced with full-length OLED screens that would display panoramic views that are captured by cameras on the outside of the plane, along with in-flight entertainment and Wi-Fi (although, I’m not so sure how I could concentrate on watching a movie when I could watch the panoramic view from 30,000 feet, but that’s just me.) Not only does this new design offer very unique, albeit terrifying, view for passengers, but it also reduces the weight of the plane, thus lowering the cost for both the passenger and airline, according to CPI.

Figure 2

When we think of air travel today, a lot of flyers have many things to complain about. One guy doesn't have enough leg room between him and the seat in front of him, so he feels too cramped. A woman's wifi isn't working, so she can't get any work done during her flight. Another guy doesn't like who he's sitting next to. The list can go on and on because, let's face it, users will always find something to complain about. But that's where UxD comes in. It's our job to give users little to complain about.

I think it's interesting to compare air travel from the 50s and 60s to now. Back in "The Golden Age," as some call it, air travel was considered a luxury. Based on the pictures and movies I've seen, hopping aboard an airplane in 1960 would provide passengers with bigger seats, more open space, gourmet meals, the freedom to light up a cigarette, and tons of booze. By looking at these depictions of 1960s air travel, I can only assume that flying was a basically a massive cocktail party at 30,000 feet. 

Figure 3

In the 21st century, air travel is anything but that. When you purchase a plane ticket, you get to look forward to a cramped couple of hours staring at the back of a chair with some headphones in. WiFi probably will be available, but it's most likely going to cost you some extra money.

A user's experience is very important. After all, that is the whole point of UxD. The whole idea behind designing things for air travel is to make it a great experience for the flyer, from the moment they purchase the ticket to when they land and collect their luggage. The better the experience the flyer has, the more they will keep coming back. Part of making the flyer's experience a great one is pushing the boundaries in order to stay innovative. This new design for air crafts is certainly pushing the boundaries to normal air travel. Talk about an experience! Having WiFi on a plane would suffice for a simple minded person like me. This panoramic in flight view in place of regular windows goes above and beyond. But boy, would I feel bad for a passenger who has a fear of flying!

Figure 4

I think it's interesting to see designers channeling their ideas to bring back the air travel experience to that of the 50s and 60s. Designers are making air travel a luxury again. Although, still no smoking!

The way designers think of innovative ideas that go above and beyond regular air travel that users are used to is the same way we should be thinking about redesigning the Purdue OWL. If you think about it, we should want our users to have some of the same experiences that passengers on airplanes have:

1) We don't want users to feel cramped when searching through the Purdue OWL, which they will get if so many pages and resources available are just scattered randomly throughout the website. 

2) We don't want users to come across pages and resources that don't work, even though they seem easily available, much like having WiFi on an airplane that doesn't work how it should.

3) Lastly and most importantly, we want our users to come back for more. If we create new ideas for the Purdue OWL that are innovative as well as reliable, then we will have more users who want to keep using the website as well as suggest the OWL to other users. 

I think that’s important for us to keep in mind when we are recreating the Purdue OWL. It’s important for us to think above and beyond on what we can do. Of course, there are limitations, but having extravagant and creative ideas from the get go can get us closer to where we want the Purdue OWL to be.

Below you can watch the full CPI clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ga3PMsrHpjU

Ubiquity, Testing, Experience

Ubiquity: that is perhaps the one word contrast between the context of the previous generation of OWL testing and this new iteration. In my last post, I wrote about designing the students' experience of the class. This blog is perhaps clearest evidence of the transition from an OWL redesign project dedicated to Usability and one meant to focus on UxD. In 2006-2007, there were elementary blog hosting services, but now these template-driven hosting services (like this blogger site) are quite sophisticated. The design and function are "good enough" to support our class needs, as well as the demands of documenting and recording the project itself. I think about all the time saved both by students and me, and that time can be spent on reading more recent research as well in articulating this content. The blogging tools are ubiquitous. They're simply here: free, useful, and most importantly, usable.

Just as the resources available on the OWL and the different methods of accessing the information are changing, the methods we use for analysis need to change too. —Kaitlyn

I would be wasting my energy and students' time if we spent this class concentrating on usability to the exclusion of experience architecture. There are limits to the utility of revisiting usability precisely because usability has been so successful. In the middle 1990s, we were making arguments about including usability precisely because so many emergent designs were unusable, either pet projects not meant for widespread adoption or examples of what Norman refers to as "next bench" design, the design solutions engineers come up with that prove a concept at their workbenches but really aren't meant for general, mass use. Usability has broken that scheme and practice, and moved from emergent design (as Bjiker named it) and towards recognizable genres (which Spinuzzi has traced for some time in his work). Bob Johnson has recognized this Ubiquity Paradox and questions insistence on older usability, user-centered, and participatory lexical fixations. 

The OWL needs to make sense. Not just for me, a tech-savvy college student, but also my mom, a middle aged music teacher who does not work with a lot of technologies on a daily basis. It shouldn't make users wonder why they must take certain steps, it should be self-evident. —Jessica

Blogger is a tool we are employing to help create the communication environment of the OWL UxD project. Similarly, Purdue provides access to a sophisticated survey tool, Qualtrics. Other similar tools exist, some at low or no cost for educational use. I've been asked if I might be making students dependent on this tool: what happens when their first professional position requires data gathering and there is no access to Qualtrics? Putting aside whether this or another tool might be better to address the need, it seems silly to deny students use of a powerful tool for fear it might not be available at some unknown future point. Further, comparison with free tools allows students to decide: perhaps Survey Monkey has all the power and flexibility they need. Or perhaps they can then begin the challenging but necessary task of articulating need and gathering materials. 

What makes the Purdue OWL a great tool/resource is that it can be accessed by anyone with a computer and reliable Internet connection. Not only is it easily accessible, it's free. And while it contains the overarching theme of guidelines for writing, many different people access the site for different reasons. How the user experiences the site and his or her satisfaction with it depends heavily on whether or not the site helps in achieving there goals. Therefore, by redesigning the site, we are redesigning the user experience of the site so that it fulfills their needs and helps them achieve their goals. —Kristin

Besides blogging and surveying tools, students have numerous computing devices they carry with them to class, including a variety of smartphones, tablets, phablets, netbooks, laptops, and other writing tools. Most students log on to the classroom computers—which are last-generation iMacs with gigantic integrated screens. But many students rarely if ever log on to these computers, and by extension, also eschew resources like software and storage space available through the wired campus network. Students access materials through the less robust but more flexible wireless connectivity available just about everywhere on campus. WiFi is like oxygen on campus: everywhere and seemingly free, and only noticed in its absence. That is, ubiquitous.

There will be a wide range of things we have to consider while we are creating the user experience to accommodate all OWL users because they have so many different types of users with different access to certain technologies. —Kira

Behavior surrounding the campus network and computing resources has convinced me that one response to ubiquity needs to be a reconfiguration of campus computing facilities. I favor replacing the 20+ student machines with 5 or 6 higher end machines capable of and equipped for HD video editing, 3D sound editing and recording, and student- as well as teacher- controlled image projection. This is how we are reimagining our multimedia production space. And have proposed for our main technology rich classrooms. But I digress. 

The purpose of redesigning the Purdue OWL has shifted from usability to UXD design. I find it interesting ... that usability has come so far and that this is a major reason why we focus more on UXD design... I agree that some major changes could be made to the room. On our redesign of the room, we included more tables and more computers, which will definitely help shape a user's experience. —Andrew

Blogging and surveying tools are part of this new age of ubiquity. Similarly, students' own mobile technologies are part of a literate context that seems to define this new era. That these technologies can be seamlessly accessed and used interchangeably—that they are useful and usable—are part as well of the environmental dimension of technology. That WiFi is not only present but robust, but more importantly expected. In this context, usability testing is much less pressing than attention to the users' experience within this techno-cultural space and place.

We need to begin taking into account all of the different devices that were mentioned in this post. Looking at some of the network statistics from the OWL, very few hits are actually coming from the mobile devices that students carry with them everywhere. While this could be that the content may only be relevant when they are working on an actual computer, I think we need to begin considering how users would interact with a mobile app and what information they may need access to from a device that fits in their hand. Rather than just re-sizing the OWL to pocket form, we need to start thinking ahead to what the needs of the users are. —Tanner

Blogger and other Google docs; email and instant messaging; Qualtrics; the physical classroom itself with its installed computers and full suite of software; campus WiFi; mobile and laptop computers: this mix of devices, software, services, and places all contribute to the instructional technology—they are available to students but can become invisible, transparent—as technologies. These technologies are for the most part looked through to the work at hand precisely because usability as a movement has been so effective. These things just work. So what's at stake?

There are many systems that "just work" without a second thought for me. But as I read this post, I began to wonder whether technologies truly "just work" or if I, as a user, have adapted my interaction with a technology so that it can work. —Jessica

Well, the continued invention and design of new services, and of new categories of devices (I did mention phablets above, which are certainly evolutionary and not revolutionary, but still, a new micro-category). These are important. But I think the bigger rewards lie in taking successful processes and knowledge making from the software and web worlds and putting them to work in new contexts: from workplaces to architecture to manufacturing, there are innumerable contexts where knowledge and core competencies developed in the service of creating these now-ubiquitous technologies and literacy practices make training in technical communication very valuable. In an age of ubiquity, experience architecture is an important and valuable specialty in a wide variety of workplaces.

So, my question is: as different tools for increasing/measurability usability increase, does the assumption that these users immediately know how to use them increase as well? And how do we negotiate these kinds of expectations? How do we need to think more critically about accessibility and, indeed, willingness, to work with and learn from these types of technologies? — Mary

This classroom is the experience of UxD for these students. I have designed it in order to teach these students about usability, user-centered design theory, as well as involve them in ongoing research. I also ask them to think with me, and sometime struggle to make clear what we are doing ... precisely because  I do not yet know. But that's what I take to be my responsibility in this class: I share with students what I know (what I think I know) at this moment about UxD, offer access to ongoing discussions as well as a balanced mix of new, groundbreaking, and foundational research. I bring with me the expectation that their other teachers and the curriculum have prepared them to move from what they have been taught to  the challenges that lie ahead of them. As these quotes I've pulled from their responses show, they have prepared themselves not just to respond to the challenges of Purdue's OWL and its user experience needs, but to address a wider range of challenges posed by valuing user-involved research.

International Students and ESL Resources by Andrew Yim

I have been shadowing tutors in the Purdue Writing Lab for a class this semester.   Freshmen have come in frantically looking for help with documents like their English 106 papers.  Many freshmen feel overwhelmed since many have never written an essay for college before.  Freshman year, I struggled with English 106 papers because I did not develop a strong foundation for writing.   Staring at a blank page for hours, I struggled to come up with ideas, but thank heavens that I had an extraordinary English 106 professor.  His class improved my writing immensely by teaching principles that I could use for future papers.  After taking his class, I realized that speaking fluent English has always made me feel more confident about my writing. I have observed many international students come into the Writing Lab looking for help on their essays.
 
Observing these sessions were eye-opening as many international students lack confidence in their work; however, I have observed many students formulating great ideas for their papers.  However, they believe that their language skills are not up to par and this mentality has made it hard for them to communicate their ideas.

Figure 1

As a native English speaker, writing in English is second-nature to me.  I could only imagine how international students feel when they are trying to write an English paper.    As they begin to formulate ideas, they might struggle with communicating these ideas onto paper leaving  them feeling frustrated.  If I tried to write a paper in Chinese or Korean, I would definitely feel lost.  This previous summer, I served as a Boiler Gold Rush Team Leader and I had quite a few international students from other countries shown in the photo above. Also, I am currently a part of an international ministry and have become friends with many international students.  For many, this is their first time visiting the United States.  Many believed that they would struggle with their classes because they struggled to understand English.  Some asked me to slow down my talking or to help them with their English papers   Students who come to the United States  have to demonstrate foreign language proficiency, but students still struggle even after demonstrating minimal proficiency in understanding English.

Figure 2

A few months ago, I was not sure how I could help them; however, working on redesigning the OWL has provided me with a clearer answer.  As seen in Figure 2, the English as a Second Language pages provides more clarity to international students who want to write more efficient essays. These pages contain a wealth of information about ESL resources.  However, international students are not aware of the many resources out there for them.  These pages also have resources for tutors wanting to learn strategies to help international students learn English. Furthermore, they cover a variety of grammar topics like adjectives, adverbs, verbs, prepositions, pronouns, and other resources.    As our class are redesigning these pages, we need to target our audience and I believe that many of my friends will benefit from our redesigns.

Throughout my experiences in the Writing Lab, many international students have negative expectations of their own writing.  They are so focused on correcting their grammar that they doubt their own ideas.  As non-native English speakers, they will often feel frustrated and seek out resources that will help them improve their English.  Through my observations, I have seen many non-English students struggle with understanding certain phrases in English.  Many phrases that are common to native English speakers are completely foreign to non-native speakers.     This disconnect in language makes it hard for them to write essays in English.

With many of my international friends, I have practiced speaking in English with them.  I speak quite fast so I have learned to slow down my talking.  In return,  I see them improve their English through conversation.  Thus a great resource that international students can take advantage of is ESL conservation groups.   I believe that the OWL Staff needs to be aware that these conservation groups can help improve students' writing.  Posting the hours of these conversation groups will be immensely beneficial to students looking to improve their language skills.    I believe that helping international students learn the basics of the English language can lead to better developed essays. This will can improve their self-confidence and help them become better writers.

Thus the OWL staff should make non-native speakers more aware of these resources when international students first arrive at Purdue.  The OWL Staff needs to find ways to help direct users, especially non-native speakers of English,  to information that will be most helpful to them.  Students in 515 need to be aware of this audience as they are proposing suggestions to help redesign the website especially for the pages about ESL.   I believe that it is crucial to use certain words on these pages to help international students understand certain concepts.  If there is too much text, international students will feel overwhelmed reading these posts.  Thus students in 515 should suggest a way to redesign these pages through observations of international students.

I believe that an ethnography will be helpful for gathering data to help redesign the ESL pages.  An ethnography is the study of people and culture and studying international students will help the OWL staff and students in 515 understand how to tailor these pages for international students.   Some ways to study international students would be to set up a Qualtrics survey interviewing international students about how they view the English language and if they believe that the ESL pages help them learn more about the English language.  Also, doing in-depth interviews with international students can be beneficial.  All of this data can be used to help effectively redesign the ESL pages.    I will definitely be advertising the ESL Pages to all of my international friends and to students who I meet in the future.

Purdue OWL Usability – September/October Update

A lot of work has happened in recent weeks connected with the usability study. In early September Tammy, Michael, Cait, and I sat down for a meeting to discuss potential areas for the students in Michael’s Advanced Professional Writing course. There were a number of concerns that were brought to the table: concerns relating to navigation, the splash page, connecting users to resources, presenting resources to users, and the functionality of our contact forms. What was beneficial was having two members of the research team from the last round of usability studies present, as they could speak to what we’ve done before, what we chose to address at that time, and what might be worth reexamining. Having the technical coordinator present also opened up new areas for discussion, as she deals most often with the OWL’s innards—the code that keeps it soaring, ready to swoop in and assist users in need. One issue that was brought up was how users experience the OWL. Currently, we have what some have derided as a 1990’s-esque splash page, and certainly its actual usefulness is something that ought to be questioned. But, during the course of our discussions that day it was pointed out that perhaps the splash is even less effective than we had hoped. One of the meeting members pointed out that we need data on how people actually use the OWL, perhaps many people bypass the splash page all together. Here’s an anecdote for illustrative purposes: 

I use the OWL a lot for my own personal reference as I write for publication and the job market, activities not even remotely related to my position as the OWL coordinator. Now, when I’m looking for information on Academic Cover Letters—for those increasingly rare tenure-track jobs—I don’t go to owl.english.purdue.edu. Rather, I go to Google and I type in, “ ‘Purdue OWL’ + ‘Academic Cover Letters’”. The very first hit is the opening page for the Academic Cover Letters resource on the OWL. Then I start to click, click, click away. To be honest, there are some days that I completely forget that the splash page exists. The argument for it being there is that the OWL isn’t just the collection of writing resources; it’s not just the Orange OWL. It’s the Purdue OWL Family of Sites; it’s the Orange OWL, it’s the Purdue Writing Lab site (green pages), it’s the Purdue OWL News Service (purple pages). 

We also discussed the intersections of content development and usability. The Purdue OWL, over the years, has developed its own written identity. This is something that has been passed down orally from one content coordinator to another during training and on-boarding sessions. It is then something that is highly negotiated during between content coordinator and their developers during the content development process. The discussion with the students in Michael’s course became, what can we do to crystalize certain elements of our style into a Purdue OWL Style guide, a document that will help to streamline certain elements of the development process and that will also concretize institutional memory and best practices? At a meeting of members of the usability teams and Purdue OWL leadership, I was given a list of areas in which the student-team working on the Purdue OWL style guide would like to focus their work. I must admit that I’m both impressed by the thought that is going into this document and hopeful for the lasting contribution that it can make to the Purdue OWL—and perhaps to OWL designers and content developers working in other contexts. The student-team plans on not only solidifying the most salient points of OWL style, but also on redesigning the current OWL content developers manual to be more effective in transmitting information to the content development team members. During the course of the various meetings and conversations that have been had at the OWL about usability in the past two months, another key item has arisen. Designing and implementing usability studies can take time. We’re making plans that will carry use well into the 2015-2016 academic year. 

However, when you’re working with graduate staff this can present new challenges. Both myself and Cait are likely to complete our Ph.Ds. before the start of the next school year. This means that two individuals that have played some role in this round of testing will be exiting Purdue before it’s over. This means that we must consider how we will hand this project off to the incoming content and technical coordinators. This is a key consideration when working in any context that has this kind of turnover. Ensuring continuity becomes important in order to maintain quality and to provide the best service to our end-users. For us, we will rely heavily on the experiences of both Tammy and Michael—this is their second round of usability studies on the OWL, and we will also allot additional time to bring the new coordinators up to speed regarding the usability study, how it impacts their work at the OWL, and how they might contribute to this intensive practical and scholarly endeavor.. This will likely include a healthy stack of documents and intermediate reports, but it will help us to ensure that the new coordinators will be adequately prepared not only to join the OWL family, but also to continue to contribute to our usability studies and eventual revisions.

Going Down by Jessica Schwingendorf

Yesterday I had to think.

I was in Young Hall for a job interview which was held on the 2nd floor. I used the elevator to get to the room with no problem. I stepped in, pressed the "2" button and exited per usual.

Elevators are pretty self-explanatory. It shouldn't take much thought to operate one, and I've had hardly any issues with them in the past.

However, upon exiting the 2nd floor post-interview, I was forced to think.

I walked in the elevator alone and went to reach for the button. I wanted to return to the main ground floor, which is often labelled as different things, depending on the building. Sometimes it's a "1". Other times it's an "L" for lobby, "G" for ground or "M" for main floor, and so on.

Whatever the label may be though, it's standard for the ground or first floor button to be accompanied by a star for clarity.

When I went to reach for the "G", "L", "M" or "1" I automatically just looked for the star since I don't often go into Young Hall and was unfamiliar with how its ground floor is labelled in the elevators.

But there was no star!

A wave of panic went through my body and stood there dumbfounded for about 2-3 seconds, which doesn't seem long, but in my state I had no idea how to get where I was going.

Did I want the basement? Where is the "1" button? What does "M" stand for? Mezzanine? Main?

I actually had to read the buttons and think about what floor I was going to and how it was

labelled. It wasn't the automatic process of reaching for the starred button like I usually experience.

I found this experience to be an excellent example of how we as humans are conditioned to follow a routine or standard, and when that routine is interrupted due to poor or variant designs, we panic and have to think.

This elevator, in general, follows logical signifiers that aided in my determination of the ground floor (after a few moments of thinking, of course). During my time abroad last semester I had to get used to the idea of the ground floor not being the "first" floor. In France, the ground floor was simply that, the "ground" floor. The floor above the ground was then the "first floor". I lived on the 8th floor of a
a French apartment building, but by North American story standards, I lived on the 7th floor.

Knowing this standard information, and the fact that I was in a North American building, I then had two choices: "B" or "M". This conclusion was reached because the floor numbers are laid logically starting with the bottom floors as the bottom buttons and the top floors as the top buttons. However, the "B" and "M" were on the same line of buttons.

So I continued to think.

Even if I did not know the definition of the "B" and "M’ floors, I could conclude that the "M" was the main entry floor above the basement because the lower floors on each line are located to the left. Thus, "B" was the lowest floor and I needed to press the "M" button.

After some research into the topic, I discovered that the five-pointed star I so longed for stems from the 2010 ADA Standard for Accessible Design. The star indicates the floor with the quickest available exit in case of emergency. This is namely the ground floor, where the main entry and exit way is located. This is the same standard that requires brail numbering on the buttons.

I am not familiar with the history of this specific building on campus, or why it does not follow this standard, but it nonetheless illustrates how standards and logical signifiers play such a large role in our daily activities.

It is important, therefore, to keep designs streamlined and consistent so that users don't need to figure things out for themselves. It is up to the designers to adhere to modern standards and follow the guidelines laws and logic law out for them. When designers deviate from the standards, people are lost and in other cases may not find a solution as quickly as I was able to do.

The signifiers, and therefore the instructions, should always be obvious. Users shouldn’t have to think referring to principles seen in Steve Krug's Don’t make me think, revisited: A common sense approach to web and mobile usability.

References

Krug, Steve. (2014).  Don’t make me think, revisited: A common sense approach to web and mobile usability.  San Francisco, CA: New Riders

　

Waging War on a Machine by Kaitlyn Neis

I got in an epic fight with my washing machine this week.

It seems a simple enough process, right? The user adds two things to the machine (soap and clothes), pushes a couple of buttons, and ends up with clean clothes. 

Not in this case.

There is no standard set for washing machines, meaning that manufacturers are able to take whatever liberties they like with them. Somehow these liberties never seem to extend to leopard print paint jobs or buttons with weird shapes. No, it's always the controls. Even though people will often say they find one setting they like and use it over and over again (see The Design of Everyday Things), manufacturers like to make it complicated.

I like having the option to wash my clothes in the appropriate temperature, or to do a gentle wash if I have nice clothes, but generally I don't need 60+ combinations I can use. Last time I did laundry, I discovered that the dial must be pulled instead of pushed to activate the chosen cycle. Not only is the pulling action not intuitive, but the button doesn’t recede inward once the previous cycle has ended. This results in the user pushing the dial and expecting it to start, user frustration as they attempt to reset the machine, and only then success as they try pushing the button in again out of frustration.

My issue this week arose when I set the machine to ‘extra spin’ which I understood to mean that the cycle would include an extra spin cycle after washing. Jeans don’t dry well if not spun extra, and I had several pairs of jeans. I added soap, closed the lid, and started the cycle. Simple, right? I heard the machine start and figured it was fine to walk away.

When I returned, I found that my clothes were entirely dry. No, the machine didn’t spin well enough to do that, the clothes were never washed in the first place.

Cue frustration. 

Of course, I assumed that I was wrong, that I had failed to turn the machine on at all. I was in the middle of homework, and it’s not unheard of for me to do absentminded things when I’m focusing on something else. I grumbled, reset the machine, and started it. This time, I stayed around and listened to it start.

I returned later to find that…my clothes were still dry.

What?

Whatever this was, I knew I had heard the washer start. Why hadn’t it washed?

Long story short, I eventually discovered that I had set the machine to spin…without washing the clothes first. In the end, I used the setting I'd previously discovered worked.

Why was the machine designed to allow users to do that at all? Perhaps if you felt that your clothes hadn’t been spun enough in the first place, you might add an extra cycle, but otherwise it only serves to confuse the users of an already counter-intuitive machine.

My experience brought a number of ideas to light in response to the work we've been doing on navigation. I knew how to do one cycle on the washing machine, and I was essentially punished for attempting to use a different pathway. Interestingly, this is one issue that could be faced with the OWL. The changing of known pathways and users' understanding of the website will have a serious impact on our initial decisions as we look at the current OWL design and determine what most needs to be changed.

On the current website, people may know one way of getting the result they want, but when they attempt to get the result in a different way they are unable to access the materials they need. Design should not only be intuitive, it should also allow the user to access what they need through multiple easily-discoverable means. With the redesign in mind, we need to take both returning and new users into account. 

For the OWL, this could mean on the webpage, such as being able to access things through the search bar as well as by using the typically prescribed path. It could also mean accessibility through different devices, ones that are fairly outdated or the most recent smartphone. There are a number of considerations when redesigning a webpage for usability, and I think that our class is finally reaching the point of digging into the meat of the matter.