Get Involved!
The more people we have, the more data we collect and this means that we have a higher chance of finding trends in interaction. These experiments are not about the individual or an individual's results (i.e. you!). Collecting a single person's data for our purposes is meaningless because we're trying to find better ways to make skins for different types of people (maybe even stereotypes of interaction). So...rest easy, even if we were able to look at your results they wouldn't mean anything to us - as you'll see, we don't know who you are because all you are to us is a randomly generated 8 character hexadecimal code in the database. We have no way of working out who you are from that. What we're after are how people interact differently by analysing the whole data set and looking to see which groups of people interact differently.
If we can find out how groups of people interact differently, we can then design skins for those groups - which would be specifically designed for people with the group characteristics (i.e. their interaction profile, hence the name ProSkin being a contracted version of Profiled Skins...user interface skins for people fitting a certain profile). We think that this would be so much better than having to use interfaces designed for everyone, or what the manufacturer thinks is a typical user.
So...get involved! We've chosen a WebRadio as the first ProSkin application for a number of reasons:
- Internet Radio is free and widely available to anyone, irrespective of bandwidth or internet connection
- Radio is broadcast to you, so there's no legal paranoia about the content you listen to. If we had made an MP3 player and some of the MP3s in your collection you nabbed from a file-sharing network, you might not be quite so willing to share you interaction data with us....and quite rightly so (we wouldn't either!). But the beauty of Internet Radio is that you can listen to whatever you like and we can log the station name, without worrying about legalities or paranoia.
- The interface options aren't too complex - there's enough interesting stuff to do with it, but not so much as to make the interaction data very confusing. For example, if we made a ProSkin calculator it might be really cool to reskin and try different button placement (though this would probably go down as the dumbest interaction experiment of all time) but the point is that with a basic calculator it only does very basic functions. At the other end of the scale, if we had made a ProSkin Word Processor, even programming very basic features would have meant that the interaction would have been much more complicated.
What Do I Get Out Of It?
Free WebRadio app: listen to free tunes with our lightweight and lovely WebRadio. Download new skins for it, or make your own. It's pretty easy to do - I'll write a tutorial on making skins (all you need is an image editor like Photoshop and to edit some xml files).
Free Personality Tests: You'll always receive the results from the questionnaires you answer, immediately! Plus they're fun :)
Loads of Feelgood Factor! - by participating in these experiments you'll be giving us data that we hope can be used to make the world a better place: a less frustrating, less badly designed, more personal and more appropriate. We are all individuals but we're having to use interfaces designed for us and everyone else - but we're not like everyone else! So give us your data and we hope to find better ways to do things. Best of all it takes so little effort on your behalf!! All you have to do is to use the WebRadio...listen to different radio stations and enjoy the good vibes. The questionnaires won't ever take more than 10 minutes MAXIMUM to complete and they're always worth it because you get to find out something interesting (and scientifically determined!) about yourself.
All this, for free - download WebRadio and get involved. Don't forget to check the Results Page or sign up to the mailing list to be kept updated on the experiment results. As soon as we know, we'll post them here for you all to see. Remember, this isn't about individuals, so the results posted will be trends that we found - different groups of people that interacted a certain way (e.g. Introverts didn't like flashing buttons, people under 25 prefer small/compact interfaces etc). Should be very interesting...so tell all your friends and family...the more data, the more chance we'll find something.
Note: You are free to leave the experiment at any time and are under no obligation to continue should you not want to. All you have to do is to uninstall the application and all ProSkin logging will be stopped. However, I would strongly encourage you to use the WebRadio for the four week period so that we can get the best data possible.