wendy house

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WES©™:  Wendy Experience Scale*

What is this?

This is a tool for assessing product and services experiences.  The tool uses a questionnaire developed with the help of Excel and 84 pots of tea.  The WES ©™ can be administered to any Wendy that uses a product or service that you want to assess.  The WES ©™ will tell you whether that product or service meets the stringent, to be published, Wendy International Standard of Experiences (WISE).  Unlike assessment tools such as the SUS which focuses merely on usability with Likert scales**,  the WES©™  focusses on product and service relevant experiences including usability with 9 semantic differential scales*** .   The scales tap into the following experiences:

1. Fabulousness
2. Aesthetics – Visuals
3. Fitness for purpose
4. Financial value
5. Aesthetics – Tactility
6. Usability
7. Complexity
8. Engagement
9. Predictability****

 Also known as ‘ FAFFAUCEP’  (pronounced faff-Oh-sep)

The WES ©™ is currently in a Beta release stage and is available for use* by product and service developers on condition that they ask advance permission and provide me with a full report of the product, service, assessment conducted including the results which will be used to build the WISE standards.

 

Administering the WES ©™

Let a common all garden Wendy use your product or service to complete a common task that it was designed to enable.  Provide a unbroken supply of tea during use.  Observe the Wendy complete the task collecting usability style observational data.  When the Wendy has completed the task,  or given up provide her with a copy of the WES©™ and ask her to mark an X on the line between each pair of experience descriptors that indicates her experience on this continuum.  There is a practice item that you should encourage the Wendy to complete then discuss her answer to make sure that she understands how to use the scale.   As the Wendy completes the scale ask her to describe examples that have lead to her reporting this experience.  This information will be extremely useful for either developing marketting materials or deciding what to change to improve the experience.

Below is an example of a WES©™ completed by my marking X’s on each scale item describing my experience of my wireless radio.  You can make your own practice scale that covers some dimension of the Wendys or the product being assessed.  In the example below the practice item asks about whether the Wendy considers the product a worthy conversation piece.

 

Practice by identifying where you are on this scale:

never talk about it

————-X——

tell the whole  world about it

 

Where is the Wireless Radio on these scales?:

Absolutely Fabulous	–X—————–	Crappy
Cover-it-with-a-brown-bag ugly	———–X——–	purrrrrrr-rity
Just what I need	——X————-	Don’t see why I’d want to use it
You’d have to pay ME to use it	———–X——–	Take all my cash, and credit, NOW!
Squeeze, stroke, and lickable	——–X———–	Cooties, don’t touch IT!
Did I brake it or what?	—————-X—	Works a treat
I can use it first time	—-X—————	training-required nightmare
Snore, Snore, Snore	————-X——	Fun, Fun, Fun
Its obvious what it was going to do	—–X————–	it was full of surprises

 

Analysing WES©™ Results:

Allocate the location maked on the line with a weighting number between 1 and 10.  

For even number questions the weightings increase towards the left,  for odd number questions the weightings increase towards the right.   Sum all the weightings.    The total possible score is 90.  Higher scores indicate better Experiences. 

Coding the example provided above looks like this

Fabulousness	–X—————–	9 from right
Aesthetics – Visuals	———–X——–	6 from left
Fitness for purpose	——X————-	6 from right
Financial value	———–X——–	6 from left
Aesthetics – Tactility	——–X———–	5 from right
Usability	—————-X—	8 from left
Complexity	—-X—————	7 from right
Engagement	————-X——	7 from left
Predictability	—–X————–	8 from right

 Total score = 62/90 = 69%

The average of multiple WES©™ scores can be used to provide overall Experience score for the product. 

The  normalisation data to enable comparision across different products and services and  indicate the value of the score relative to a benchmark will be published as part of WISE.  Note that without the normalisation data it is possible that all procucts receive scores in the 80’s (a roof effect) or below 20 (a floor effect).   Our expert, on-site, Wendy (me) recommends that prior to the publication of WISE we should assume that any score under 60 is at best a mediocre product or service and any score under 45 is an experience that should be avoided.

For in depth analysis each item should be verified with the observational measures taking during the use phase and the comments made by the Wendy’s when completing the questionnaire. 

In this example we can clearly see that the tactile aesthetics (score = 5) provided the biggest opportunity for improving Wendy’s experience.  Wendy talked about the radio being a bit too big to put in her pocket,  she liked the bouncy rubber bits but all the little buttons were a bit too small and pointy to enjoy pressing them,  she prefers rubber-buttons (who doesn’t?!) and the industrial-safety feel for portable.  

 

Next Steps

The WES©™ development team haven’t decided whether to gather normalisation data on the vo version, refine the item labels before collecting normalisation data or just chuck the semantic differential format and develop WES©™ (v1) based on a creatively cunning perverison of Kelly’s Repertory Grid technique. 

 

* Use is permitted by prior agreement with the inventor (me,  Wendy!)

** the linguistically pedantic should note that Likert scales tend to use split infinitives such as ’strongly agree’ which can irritate those completing the scale undermining its efficacy in cases where people choose not to select any options that include split infinitives for purely curmudgeonly reasons.  This makes the scale unreliable for responses from educated people from Yorskhire.

*** The semantic differential is based on the assumption that everyone interprests the scales in the same way.  Unfortunately,  this assumption is not true rendering the WES©™ useless to anyone other than Wendy.

**** For some products or services predicatability is not a positive experience quality (e.g. games).  Administrators are advised to either scope the item to refer to the service or product controls. 

 

When returning an assessed cousework essay on UK history in the 19th century to a 17yr old me…

 

Tory School teacher (TST):  you are very Machiavellian

Wendy:  is that a good or a bad thing?

TST: let me know when you find out

 

Within a couple of hours I’d read a copy of ‘The Prince’ .  It was fascinating, written beautifully, based on multiple case study research to provide a pragmatic set of behavioural recommendations for a leader (Prince) occupying a recently acquired territory to maintain effective control.  In the 1960’s psychology used the term ‘Machiavellianism’ to label a personality ‘Disorder’ with the core theme of deceiving others for personal gain.   I wish I’d kept the essay that prompted the TST’s comment.    

 

You can self-assess yourself for 1960’s style psychology Machiavellianism here.

Today I scored as a ‘Low Mach’.  The results say that I ‘reject’ Machiavelli’s opinions.  Indeed, I am not and have never aspired to be a prince, princess or banker.  Alternatively, I could have lied here and on the questionnaire….

I vote that we rename Machiavellianism with the more topical outbreak of:

 

Chief Executive Bankerism

was I going to tell you something?

can you remind me what it was?

<Essay warning>

Not distributed within the mind, distributed across people and other things.  The work of Yvonne Rogers in the 1990’s introduced me to the idea of distributed cognition.  Here are some examples from my everyday life:

• placing my empty bottles by the front door to remind me to take them to the bottle-bank when I leave the house (memory distributed between bottles and Wendy’s absent mind)
• going upstairs to get my passport,  when I get upstairs I’ve forgotten why I went there,  going back downstairs and seeing the holiday (excitement level: Amber) details on Darling I remember why I went upstairs. (memory distributed between holiday details on Darling and Wendy’s absent mind)
• At the pub quiz,  trying to name a song title from hearing a snippit of the tune,  I can only hum the continuation of the tune,  another team member can sings the lyrics to my hummed tune,  a third team member can now name the band then the fourth team member can remember the song title (memory socially distributed between team members). 
• I can’t remember my password as letters and numbers,  I can’t remember the layout of a keyboard,   when infront of Darlings keyboard I can reliably produce my password (memory distributed between keyboard layout and Wendy’s absent mind).  The recent move from US to UK keyboards has been a bit password-disruptive.
• I can’t remember how to get from St Nicolas’s market to Clifton,  but when I am in Bristol I can walk the route directly with no trouble whatsoever,  very pleasant it is too  (Memory distributed between the city-scape and Wendy’s absent mind).  Note that the Schrocks recently experienced the way that St. Nicholas market can suprise you by turning out to be exactly where you are wandering.

People, sensibly, strategically delegate the effort involved in constructing some memories to post-it notes,  lists, calendars, address books,  mobile phones, bag-contents, places, blogs, photoalbums, family and friends. 

A die-hard cognitivist might say this is just context-cued recall.  Both paradigms provide the means to describe human behaviour,  but the approaches to psychological  theory building and research are radically different.  The cognitivist would attempt to identify the specific cues that work most effectively and assess them in a lab,  one specific unusual context, rather than analyse everyday activities in commonly meaningful contexts.  These different research techniques would yield different practical,  application, recommendations.

The cognitivists make the research language and approach to understanding human behaviour their domain as specialists,  ‘everyday’ approaches enable results to be readily recognisable, understandable and communicable to people outside of a specialist discourse.  They also afford more meaningful pragmatic applications. 

<Essay warning over>

My next essay will probably be on Reading’s buses…

also known as:  Remembering what to remember

I first encountered the currently popular (in Psychology of memory circles) ‘prospective memory’ as a term to describe remembering what to remember through Baddeley & Wilkin’s 1984 article ‘Taking memory out of the laboratory’ .  The Laboratory, Lab, was typically where British psychologists studied human memory using rigourous exprimental methodologies.  The lab was normally a windowless, beige, unadroned room lest participants, then ’subjects’,  be distracted or inadvertantly influenced by non-experimental phenomena that might undermine the effect of the experimental manipulation.  

I liked Baddeleys work because he’d systematically estabished the positive impact of re-instating memorising context on recall levels through various studies including the influence of alcohol (Vodka) or physically being under water (diving) when memorising,  and recalling.  Both these experimental studies sounded fun,  were themselves memorable, and were even repeatable* in less rigorous forms with colleagues at University during normal studenty nocturnal activities. 

‘Taking memory out of the laboratory’ was published in a book called ‘Everyday memory, actions and absentmindedness’ .  This was ground breaking news to me in 1984.  There I was in the middle of a degree course, approved as official content and jargon by the British Psychological Society, where I had focussed my study on memory research.  I had just about got the hang of the technically specific language of psychological memory research such as retro-interference, auditory-loop, digit-span, recognition vs recall and much more.  Then,  THEN!  Those gosh-darn leading memory researchers sprang some non-technical terms that made sense and weren’t part of the current disciplin jargon.  How cheeky is that?

Absentmindedness? 

Cognitive psychologists study the absense of mind.  It was too much, I had a couple of vodkas and fell in a local canal with my miss spelt revision notes to celebrate. 

 

PS:  If I remember I’ll tell you why I’m telling you about prospective memory in a later post…

* Actually conducting the experiements makes them more memorable and easier to understand an evaluate than just reading or thinking about them over a cup of tea.

According to get Reading:

“She then fled downstairs and tried to call 999, but he grabbed the phone off her and punched her twice in the face.  She began screaming so he put his arms around her neck so she couldn’t breath“  she was “in fear of her life” and “honestly believed she might die”,

This behaviour is reported as ‘out of his normal character’ and he says

“He is dreadfully upset about what has happened,”

Whether ‘in’ or ‘out’ of character he chose to stop her seeking social support (calling the police),  punch her in the face two times and throttle her when she tries to get support locally by screaming.  He could have chosen to ignore her or do a silly dance.  It was his choice and he did choose extreme violence.  Evidently he ‘lost it’ (self-control?).  Lost it appears to be part of a socially acceptable storyline to excuse violence.  Psychologists label loss of control as a psychological disorder and use it to explain the curiously termed domestic violence.  

“perpetrators of domestic violence rarely receive adequate psychological treatment, because they are viewed as criminals, rather than individuals with psychological problems.“

In the above case the offender got a suspended sentence and fined the cost of a good night out,  60 quid.  No requirement for a psychological assessment or treatment with the fine hardly touching the actual expense of the social services his behaviour drew upon (e.g. Police, NHS). 

How safe do I feel in a society where the legal system thinks I can be justifiably (for 60 quid) be repeatedly punched in the face and throttled when I try to call for assistance if the agressor claims its not habitual and they regret it?    

Since moving to Reading I’ve found lots of familiar strangers,  I see them on the bus everyday during my commute,  in the local cooperative store when I’m picking up milk for my tea,  behind the counters in Jacksons,  in the local internet cafe.

During my 1986 final year degree course Environmental Psychology classes I learned that people are more likely to exhibit altruistic behaviours to familiar strangers (than complete strangers) when meeting those familiar strangers outside of the normal context.  Each will recognise the other easily but have difficulty placing the source of this familiarity. 

This means that when I meet someone who normally rides on the same bus as me everyday,  in Jacksons,  I will think I know them and be nicer than I would be to someone totally unrecognisable.  

Excellent. 

More familiar strangers means more oportunities to be squishy.  Given my natural curmudgeonist tendencies this can only be a good thang. 

I have trouble keeping my categories stable.  Evolving categories.  By using mini-series such as ‘cute accent’ and ‘dreamy cheese’ I’ve tried to curb my tendancies to create categories and re-assign posts.  The Wordpress categories are painfully insufficiently fuzzy for my taste.

The new version of Wordpress (2.3) has support for tagging and tag-clouds.  Tags could easily evolve to replace my categories because they support the natural emergent and fuzzy quality of both my categories and interests.  Hoorah! 

Replacing my categories with tags could clean-up the Wendy House archive navigation for you and me. Tags do not yet offer some of the useful properties of the category system such as hierarchical relationships and hence similarity groupings.   I’m starting to use tags on my new posts but old posts are not tagged. 

Will adding tags to old-posts spam your RSS readers?  I’ve asked the Wordpress support forum to clarify before I start wrecklessly adding tags to past-posts to while away the long winter evenings. 

Waffle Warning

dichotomy in the universe of closed questions

a ‘closed question’ is a question that has a specific answer,  answers like:

• yes please!
• Oskaloosa in Kansas
• 43
• 2 pints of real Ale
• Bling

Lets suppose that in the universe of possible questions there are an infinitie number of closed questions. 

What is the dichotomy in the universe of closed questions?  The dichotomy is between questions that can be answered ‘no’ such as  ‘Wendy,  do you live in an igloo?’,  and questions that can be answered ‘yes’ such as “Wendy do you live in a wooden house?”  Tonight’s beer-induced Wendy-epiphany is that this dichotomy of closed questions may not be equally populated.  I suspect that there are more possible questions to which the answer is ‘no’ than there are questions to which the answer is ‘yes’.  This suspicion is based on the following preliminary analysis:

Take this question structure as an example:  “Wendy, do you live in a  [insert word here]?”

If the inserted word is a physical home-type without counting all possible insertions I am estimating that the answer is more often No than Yes. 

Example physical home-type:  house, bungalo, igloo, TeePee, tent, hotel, skyscraper, apartment, condominium, flat, tree, bath, lake, road 

If the inserted word is some other plausible descriptor of living conditions I suspect there is still an obvious weighting towards no over yes.   

Example plausible descriptor:  mess, illusion, happy place, circus, bubble, dream, fantasy

If the inserted word is not plausible the answer is most likely to be no

Example not-plausible words: pin, parrot, toe-nail, bling, 43

There are more no than yes answers in the range of possible answers.  People tend to produce ‘yes’ answers,  it’s been studied by psychologists so that they can create and understand the results of questionnaires.  Since people tend (bias?) to agree, to provide ‘yes’ answers,  the tendancy has been given the fancy name of  ‘acquiescence bias’.    

People, not psychonlogists, use skill and prior knowledge to help raise the baseline for the production of ‘yes’ answers above that which would be predicted by either a

• model that assumes the answers produced are a proportionally representative subset of all possible answers (More ‘No’ responses), or 
• counter-balanced  (half no, half yes) answers approach normally used in questionnaire design to ‘control’ the bias.  

Some people, and psychologists, are so cunning they minimize asking questions that can be answered no and can effectively use this acquiescence bias to move towards, and gain, a concensus.  People are wonderfully clever like that;  giving each other the opportunity to say yes.

I really like questions where the answer is ‘yes’,  I’ll leave you with this example:

“Wendy would you like another beer?”

Waffle warning over 

thirty-sixth post in a Wednesday series detailing the frightening truth’s behind Wendy’s singleness.

Reason # 36: fear of failure

Friend:  Did you know [Name]* wanted to go-out-with** you?

Wendy: No.  Why didn’t he let me know?

Friend:  he thought he wasn’t good enough for you

Wendy:  a self fulfilling prophecy if ever I heard one

According to Psychology Today corporate Amercia, which employs most of the boys I meet, focuses on rewarding actual success rather than the type of activities that lead to innovation and success, including effectively dealing with inevitable failures.  This puts the social forces in place that enhance fear of failure. 

*Names have been changed to protect the wussy.

** ‘go out with’ is a British euphamism for girlfriend-boyfriend specific type activities.

is not only Premenstrual tension,  its also Periodic Male Tension.  According to The Guardian online:

A study by psychologists from the University of Derby, England, suggests that men may experience cyclical symptoms similar to, or even worse than, those suffered by pre-menstrual women, including moodiness, discomfort and loss of concentration.  Everything, it appears, apart from the bloat.

 The study is based on ’self report’,  they asked people to report experience of symptoms traditionally associated with pre-menstruation.  They asked the women on 3 separate occassions and men just once.  There is no mention of the likely differences between men an women when self-reporting symptoms (example scientific study of gender bias in self-reporting symptoms).

Gosh,  and there’s me thinking girls had a unique experience around menstrual cycles based on hormones and physiological differences.  Silly me,  its just the bloating.  Boys clearly know what it’s like because the experience has been adequately described in answerable questions and measured by someone in Derby. 

The next grumpy boy I encounter will be asked “is it your time of the month then?‘