w/ Clayton (Sept. 30, 2010)What are user preferences?- Includes the kind of stuff you already see around (e.g., BBC's accessibility) - Gives users the ability to specify high contrast presentations, big fonts, etc. - These are relatively simple presentation attributes - In the Access4All scheme, user preferences are settings that might be used to inform screen reader behavior - Also provided an outline mode (i.e., table of contents) - More interesting user preferences would include radical transformations of content - E.g., deliberate suppression of content - E.g., on the full web version of Amazon.com, you have hundreds of controls, especially below the fold, but on the iPhone version, you get a much simpler presentation - You'd never end up using most of the controls on the full web version - Would be good for users to have choice of presentation profile; e.g., use mobile presentation even if one isn't on a mobile device, simply for the ease of use Users and reading- A person's ability to read has more than one component to it, but a critical component is the ability to skim - E.g., with Google search results, users tend to do a lot of rapid non-reading, and then cognitively zoom into something of interest to read - A lot of people lack the ability to scan, and using the web is a completely different experience if you lack it; using the web becomes hardly possible. - Most people aren't even aware that the content is covered with other stuff--you just reject things that you're not interested in - People who can't skim: it's like being in a tar pit; you have to work through everything Suppression of content- We need to mark up the content to point out what's critical content - Need to differentiate between critical and non-critical content - With that, we could: - Suppress non-critical content entirely, or - Split it into multiple pages (e.g., first page for critical, second page for non-critical), or - Introduce controls on non-critical content - This means two things: - Content providers/authors need to be able to assign content priority - The presentation must be able to adapt to different content priority requirements - This would also be really useful to automagically create mobile sites - Heading structure isn't enough for prioritization of content - For typical users, you want to put as much as you can on the same page, prevent splitting it and having to look for it - For users who have difficulty reading/scanning, it's the opposite Preferences of user preferences- Users need to have more than one set of preferences because of: - Situational differences - Privacy concerns - Anonymous profiles that aren't linked to traceable identity; but also preferences that need to be linked to identity if they want to bring it with them Preference control- In the field of low-vision, fine-grained control is necessary - Different levels and options of colour control are especially important (some combinations are more readable to some than others) - But supporting a portfolio of "starter profiles" is a great idea - Suspect that some people won't do much tuning w/ Gary (Sept. 30, 2010)The idea behind UI options- Represent user's preferences across different applications - Make customizations on one, apply across different applications - Context from which this arose: web portals; one overarching application, but pulls in different applications from outside; apply preferences to those applications too - Allow more than just the ability to do "simple" things - Influenced by BBC's display options, Transformable, and TILE History of UI options- Two major design iterations - Driven by conversations at Fluid all-hands meeting and conversations with Jutta and Clayton - Design was informed by Jutta, Clayton, all-hands meeting, and other best practices - No users were interviews - No user testing was done - Why were tweaks chosen over presets? - Started with presets, taking a cue from BBC's display options interface - But too difficult to determine a good preset, or how many you would need; so reverted to just tweaks - Users have to decipher the package of a preset--there's a cognitive burden of having to pick a package first Design considerations- Took care about how to present the options to users to make - Problem is with how to categorize preferences and options, with plain language - Also, some things overlap, so it's not easy to stick it in box or another - Many controls are possible; need to balance between having enough controls to change the interface vs. having so many controls - In the current design, only showed one type of control at a time, instead of an intimidating mass of controls - But sometimes changes to one preference in one area impacted another - Live preview was introduced to see the impact - If you change preferences of the active interface, it might adversely affect usability of the current interface - Why not preview on the page actual? Because controls take up too much space, and you can't see the original content - But it's difficult to represent every kind of interface element in one preview window - Text size is a popular adjustment - Wanted to give users ability to freeform change, but not see the changes until saved/applied - Should users be able to go backward in history? Be able to undo? - Should a reset bring you to the initial point you came into, or to the previous setting? - What is a default setting? Where/how is it set? Is it based on a theme, or user's own stylesheet setting, or an accepted standard? - If a user can't read text below 32 pt, how can you use UI options to make changes? - Struggled with level of detail of options (e.g., serif vs sans-serif; pt size; line height; etc.) - Can we reduce the number of controls? - In choosing a preset, and tweaking it, and choosing another, does the user lose everything they just tweaked? - Would social presets be useful? - No guarantee that the things the users pick is the best thing - We're giving users the ability to make poor design decisions - What if the user makes the interface unusable? Where the designs left off- More chats needed with SMEs - User testing |