Week 3: Deep Dive

This week has been busy as I try to go deeper into the problem while narrowing my focus. At our weekly meeting, I showed Robin the use cases I was working on as well as the design examples of other pickers that I collected. She was quite interested in the examples and said that research will be good to keep. She asked that I look at creating four different design scenarios with a UI approach that makes each of the pickers nice to use but also relate to one another:

1. Single content item picker
2. Single container picker
3. Multiple content items picker
4. Multiple containers picker

She also asked that I look at making the process of picking flow from left to right in all instances, ending with the user clicking the "OK" button to commit the selections. I started trying to think about what these have in common so that I can abstract one process, one flow:

• User needs to select something
• User needs to know what s/he has selected
• This needs to be easy and similar regardless of what is being selected and regardless of how many items are being selected
• What are the various states? What does it look like when something has been selected?  What explicit notifications should the system give the user?

I started with exploring how the existing multiple content item picker works in detail. I think it is important to utilize and maintain existing controls and concepts so that the user doesn't have to think too much about what s/he is doing. I kept selecting items, one, then many, over and over, seeing what happens if I click on a row versus a checkbox, multiple checkboxes then a row, etc. It was easy to see how this paradigm of selecting items becomes transparent when implemented well. Where the current picker system seems to break down most is that the act of selecting an item doesn't really select it; the user must then click the "Add to Selections" button, then click "OK" to commit the selections.

The current multi-item content picker doesn't have a clear flow.

I think if the act of clicking a row or checkbox automatically adds the item to the list of selections and if confirmation of that action is made obvious through system notifications, this will become much easier to use. I came up with over a dozen changes I would make to this process flow alone, though many should abstract to a new general picker model. Over the next few days, I will perform the same analysis on the other three picker types.

This week, I also had a chance to hear what real, external customers think about the 8.0 UI. I was able to sit in on a customer gripe session with the WEM product manger and Tayna Payne, Senior User Experience Designer, who led the session (and who coincidentally attended the same PhD program at the University of New Mexico as my dad in the late '80s). She's hoping to set up a more technical session next week where we'll have a chance to discuss the pickers and their issues with these same customers in great detail. I am really looking forward to hearing some additional perspectives on this problem and, I hope, will get to see them actually using the pickers.

On a personal note, I am finding this project really puts me outside my comfort zone. I am anxious a lot and find myself waking up thinking about pickers! This type of project is hard for me for a couple of reasons, the first being that it is really undefined in a sense. I have to be creative and try to solve a problem that doesn't exactly have a right answer and that is very uncomfortable for me because I am used to doing very precise, specific tasks. The second reason is that the project is so spread out and it is hard to focus on it for only a few hours at a time amidst my other class and the three major work projects I'm engaged with too. The creative process is just different than most of the work I'm used to and it probably doesn't help that I have a low tolerance for ambiguity. I think as the project becomes more refined over the next couple of weeks that I will start to feel more comfortable. My first mile stone is at the end of week five when I should have a preliminary design ready for review.  By the second milestone at week 10, Robin is hoping to get my design user tested so that by the end of the project, I have had a chance to refine it and make changes based on outside user input.