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User Research Friday in San Francisco on 27th October

rashmi — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 02:29:11 +0000

Some of us are putting together an informal half-day conference focused on what’s new and innovative with user research methods. Its a free half-day conference. We chose a Friday afternoon to make it easy for you to come by. The location is Bolt & Peters office in downtown San Francisco. The setting will be informal (there will be food and drinks!). And this will be followed by a cocktail hour at 5.30 PM.

Talks are 20 minutes long and will cover a wide range of topics related to trends in User Research. Speakers include Wendy Castleman from Intuit, Ravit Lichtenberg from HP, Lane Becker from Adaptive Path and more. Go to the User Research Wiki if you want to learn more or want to sign up.

It should be a fun afternoon. Look forward to seeing you there!

The conference is being co-organized by Nate Bolt of Bolt & Peters, Steve August from KDA Research and myself (from Uzanto ).

Review of MindCanvas on UPA’s website

rashmi — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 06:33:29 +0000

The Usability Professionals’ Association has published a review of MindCanvas, based on the demo made by Rashmi at Philadelphia’s CHI chapter in August.

This is what Mike Madaio (Chief IA for QVC.com and the Secretary of PHICHI, the Philadelphia Chapter of the ACM SIGCHI) writes-

“Rashmi first showed off a brilliant flash-based card sorting game that supports complex features such as duplicate cards, groups within groups, and make-your-own card. By pulling the basics of traditional card sorting into this easily distributed format, MindCanvas can allow researchers to gather valid card-sorting data from a much larger audience. The flexible, detailed reporting tool ensures that this data can be used quickly and effectively”

You can read the entire review here.

MindCanvas and Ethnio at PhiChi

rashmi — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 20:16:29 +0000

The second presentation I am making jointly with Nate Bolt from Ethnio this week is at Phi Chi (it sounds like a Greek organization, but its really the Philadelphia CHI chapter!).

Below are the event details. You can learn more here on the PhiChi site.

What: PHICHI August Meeting - Remote UX Tools

When: Friday, August 18th; 6-6:30 Networking & Refreshments; 6:30-8ish Meeting

Where: UPenn Campus, Levine Hall 101 (Wu & Chen Auditorium)

Summary: Come to this exciting meeting to learn about two of the newest remote tools available to user experience professionals, Ethnio and MindCanvas!

Nate Bolt, Co-Founder and CEO of Bolt|Peters, will be presenting his companys remote usability tool, Ethnio. With Ethnio you can recruit users live from your website, securely observe a users desktop as they interact with any website or application, and automatically record video and audio of your session.

Rashmi Sinha, Founding Principal of Uzanto, will be presenting her companys remote user research tool, MindCanvas. With Mindcanvas you can remotely gather insights about your customers thoughts & feelings without requiring your users to complete boring HTML forms. MindCanvas uses Game-like Elicitation Methods (GEMs) to let online users participate in answering complex questions that you face in designing a product or service. MindCanvas is particularly useful for Information Architecture or Product Research.

Come and join other local UXers to network and try out these two great tools!

Playing games and cursing: MindCanvas and Ethnio at User Experience week

rashmi — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 19:58:51 +0000

Nate (from Ethnio) and I will be presenting at Adaptive Path’s User Experience week on the 16th. Below is the description of the session. What is this about cursing - you ask. Well, you will have to come to the session to find out (Nate has kept me in the dark as well, so I am looking forward to finding out :->

Playing Games and Cursing: The Truth About Remote User Research

In which Rashmi and Nate will share how their life has been changed by remote methods, and do a joint demo of MindCanvas and Ethnio, their respective products. MindCanvas is a gamelike platform for user research, while Ethnio is the first moderated remote usability application. Both are completely web-based. Both can be used independently, or you could use Ethnio to watch and record people play MindCanvas games and never leave your desk. Ever.

The rhythms of research with MindCanvas

rashmi — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 17:20:00 +0000

Since launching MindCanvas, just over six months ago, my life has kind of been overtaken by that (typical with startups I am told). You learn to live from crisis to crisis (sometimes the server crashes, sometimes a customer wants a...

MindCanvas at IA Summit

rashmi — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 23:07:13 +0000

At the IA Summit, recently Louis Rosenfeld and I informally showed a few people what we have been working on. Louis showed some things he is working for Rosenfeld Media and I showed MindCanvas. I realized during the demo that this was the first time I was showing MindCanvas in a public setting! It lead to many interesting conversations about how people forsee using MindCanvas in their own work (which methods, qualitative or quantitative, how often). As we take baby-steps towards becoming more public with MindCanvas service, this is the sort of feedack that helps us decide on direction and service model. I am personally thankful to everyone who gave us feedback.

If you have been looking at MindCanvas and have feedback, email me. I am interested in finding out how you would want to use it.

The ESP game for gathering image metadata: a similar approach as MindCanvas

rashmi — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 19:30:14 +0000

Luis Von Ahn has a brilliant idea - Improve image search by getting people to contribute image metadata. Question is - how to get people to contribute image metadata. Flickr has one approach. Motivating people to share their images by adding metadata. But that approach will not work for the majority of images that already exist on the web. So the challenge is to motivate large groups of users to add metadata to random images on the web. One way of doing that is by making the task fun. By making a game out of it - literally and figuratively.

The ESP game works something like this: You play with a partner - you are presented with an image and you have to agree on a label within a short amount of time. When an image appears, both people start typing words - you might or might not reach agreement within the time limit. Some people enjoy the game, some don’t think its that much fun as a collaborative game, but everyone agrees it makes a tedious task much less tedious.

We used the same type of reasoning with MindCanvas. Participating in online research is a tedious task - lets make it less tedious and more fun. We think we are at the very start in terms of exploring the fun aspect. Currently, MindCanvas methods borrows some game design principles, but they cannot be called games. However, MindCanvas methods are not like your typical survey as well. It is somewhere in between. As we grow and have more resources, I want to add a kick-ass game designer to our team to take the game-like aspect to the next level.

By the way, the ESP folks are out with a new game - Peekaboom. This time, the goal is to help computers see. Luis Von Ahn calls his games “A new approach to Artificial Intelligence”. Maybe we should call MindCanvas “A new approach to Psychology Research”. Actually, I think that would be a little vain. There are plenty of existing research paradigms that inspired MindCanvas. For example, economists often find game-like approaches to test their hypothesis.

GEM principles at work: Product advisor from American Express

rashmi — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 20:56:02 +0000

This Product Advisor from American Express (for finding an appropriate card) is a good example of an interactive, fluid interface. For one of the questions, you rank order your priorities by dragging to the right boxes. The questions are revealed progressively - you are not faced with a page full of questions when you arrive. Overall nicely done. It might be a stretch to call this one game-like, but it is a good example of some of the GEM principles at work.
(Thanks to Arnab on whose blog I found the link. Do you know of other similar interactive surveys? Send me a link.)

Yes, MindCanvas is currently available

rashmi — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 18:23:06 +0000

We have received a few emails asking if MindCanvas is currently available. I wanted to clarify that MindCanvas is currently available. We are using it for studies. If you are interested, then email me at rashmi at themindcanvas.com . Also, we are doing a lot of Live Demos of all our research methods (OpenSort, TreeSort, Divide-the-Dollar etc.) for companies / consultants. Contact me, and I will be happy to setup one for you. If you are in the Bay Area, we can come by your office, if you are geographically located elsewhere, then we will use Webex to show it to you.

Weightmaps: new visualization

jon — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 06:26:45 +0000

The elves at MindCanvas have been burning the midnight oil, and we’ve got another new visualization to show for it. This one is called a “WeightMap”, and it uses our favorite treemap paradigm to show the results from a Divide-The-Dollar exercise. It does more than show the summary data: it also lets you drill down into the data of individual participants. This is cool, because while we don’t want to see the individual data when we’re trying to understand the broader trends, often we want to drill down into the data later to understand certain patterns or anomolies (like people who put all there money on one feature, or spread their money as evenly as possible).

This is turning into a common theme in our visualizations: show broad trends, but give you access to the details of the data. This lets the analyst drill-down into the data as needed.

Cool!