WUD 2014 - World Usability Day

On November 22, the 9th conference devoted to the World Usability Day was held in the Moscow office of Mail.ru. Especially for the Crystal Service, this conference was made by my participation in it as a speaker with a story about the self-service checkout.


Self-checkout is a cashier where customers can scan and pay for their purchases themselves. She is indeed worthy of a report - while working on it we had to solve a number of difficult tasks and we really wanted to share our experience with the world. That is why we wrote an article on Habré in September .
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The article was received with interest, and after a while the organizers of wud.ru contacted us and offered to talk about the checkout at the conference. Our company and I personally, of course, agreed. And from that moment, preparation began, which I would like to tell you about.

Stage 1: Theme Selection.
I didn’t really like to talk about a self-service checkout at a half-hour report. First, because I often present such stories to potential clients, and secondly, the product approach taught me a very important principle - everything should have a focus, including a speech. I mostly wanted to share my knowledge of interface design, which I acquired during my work on the project. A couple of weeks thinking about the exact topic and the thought, as always, came rather suddenly - during my trip to 404fest (and to be exact - during the Afterparty =)))). In the conversation, I mentioned that mental models are far from an abstract psychological concept, that we actively used their analysis in our work. I caught myself on this phrase and decided that this topic could be interesting to the public. Why didn't this thought come to me earlier? When you do something for more than a year, you perceive all your actions and methods as something completely natural. As a result, the topic sounded a bit long, but it caught on all sides: “Mental models in designing the interface for the self-service cashier”.

Stage 2: material selection
Now, in fact, had to do flash-back. Again search through those articles on which I was based at work, find their authors, pick up a lot of data and figures according to our research. Any story is always a rethinking of the past. We had a lot of research, but I decided to put the greatest emphasis on eytracking testing - it’s still the most revealing and can most clearly present our data.
But I wanted to start with a theoretical material. Mental models are an important psychological concept, so without some references to research, it would be easy for me to get into the psychological depth without some references to research.

I will explain in more detail. In fact, the modeling of the surrounding world is a normal process for our psyche, and often it happens completely unnoticed by us. Let me give an example of one of the experiments I mentioned: in 1984, Donald Broadbent and his student Diane Berry conducted an experiment on the example of a simple gameplay of a computer game. The subjects had to manage the sugar factory, and they could only influence one parameter - the number of workers at each iteration, but the amount of sugar depended on both the number of workers on this iteration and the amount of sugar in the past, and by a rather complicated formula. However, after 15-20 iterations, more than 80 percent of the subjects coped with the task better than the level that the experimenters themselves considered a successful level of the task. But when it came to the questionnaires, only 15 percent were able to answer a sufficient number of questions correctly. And those who coped best answered questions even worse than others. What does this mean? Some models are implicit, i.e. hidden from our consciousness, the process of their creation in the psyche is called implicit learning. In our daily life, these are guidelines for iOS and Android, principles for building websites. They cannot be told about them, but people act precisely in accordance with these rules, because they have learned them during the time of interaction with other systems.

Stage 3: preparation for the performance
This is the first experience for me to speak at the conference. There was no big fear: nevertheless, I was lucky to have a quite well-delivered speech, but this does not mean at all that I did not need to prepare. As a result, I had 4 test presentations: 3 days before the presentation I showed it inside the company, the next day at home, and the last 2 times I trained at the hotel one evening and in the morning before the performance. And in the last 2 times I have already used the stopwatch to assess my time. This turned out to be a very good practice - for almost every topic at the time of the conference I knew how much to tell.

Stage 4: the conference itself
My performance was scheduled for 15:30 in the small hall, which means it was more than 5 hours to prepare. I did not spend them in vain, in the best traditions of speeches having corrected the presentation a couple of hours before the speech. At the organizers of the WUD, everything is serious - the voice is written on the microphone, which is attached to the clothes, and the performance itself is filmed on a video that will be posted on the website wud.ru.
I will say a few words about the style of the report: taking into account the fact that there were many scientists in it and references to theoretical material, I wanted to dilute it with humor so that the audience would not have a chance to get bored. The idea is not mine, in fact, Lesha Ivanovsky has long been advocating this style, with which many could get acquainted at 404fest or ICR. In general, I think everything worked out and I received an almost full audience of attentive listeners and questions on the case.

Speaking at specialized conferences is an important step for any company. As it seems to me, only when you move from the consumption of content to its production, is it possible to make a truly serious breakthrough in everything you do. This is similar to usability testing, which often puts everything in its place, only it is not a solution that is demonstrated, but an approach. And it is at the conferences that one can hear a useful comment or a question that this approach will improve.