Ch1: Usability of Interactive Systems

1. Usability Goals and Measures

Successful designers
Great designers
Ascertain the user’s needs
Ensure reliability
Promote standardization, integration, consistency, and portability
Define the target user community and class of tasks associated with the interface

2. Usability Motivations

3. Goals for Our Profession

1. Potential research topics
Reducing anxiety and fear of computer usage - Graceful evolution
Social media participation - Input devices - Information exploration

2. Providing tools, techniques, and knowledge for system implementers

a. Rapid prototyping is easy when using contemporary tools
b. Use general or self-determined guideline documents written for specific audiences
c. To refine systems, use feedback from individual or groups of users

3. Raising the computer consciousness of the general public

a. Some novice users are fearful due to experience with poor product design
b. Good designs help novices through these fears by being clear, competent, and non-threatening

Ch2: Universal Usability

1. Variations in physical abilities and physical workplaces
2. Diverse cognitive and perceptual abilities
a. Classification of human cognitive processes:
Long-term and semantic memory
Short-term and working memory
Problem solving and reasoning
Decision making and risk assessment
Language communication and comprehension
Search, imagery, and sensory memory
Learning, skill development, knowledge acquisition, and concept attainment

b. Factors affecting perceptual and motor performance:

Arousal and vigilance
Fatigue and sleep deprivation
Perceptual (mental) load
Knowledge of results and feedback
Monotony and boredom
Sensory deprivation
Nutrition and diet
Fear, anxiety, mood, and emotion
Drugs, smoking, and alcohol
Physiological rhythms
 3. Personality differences
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI):
extraversion vs. introversion
sensing vs. intuition
perceptive vs. judging
feeling vs. thinking
4. Cultural and international diversity
Designing for cell phones can open the door to a wider audience, in developing countries
where:
-feature phones often are the only way to access the internet
-literacy may be an issue
-users have very low monthly limits on the data volume they can use
5. Users with disabilities
-Designers must plan early to accommodate users with disabilities
-Early planning is more cost-efficient than adding on later
-Businesses must comply with the "Americans With Disabilities Act” for some applications
6. Older adult users
Designers should allow for variability within their applications via settings for sound, color,
brightness, font sizes, etc. with less distracting animation
7. Children
8. Accommodating hardware and software diversity
Three of the main technical challenges will be:
1. Producing satisfying and effective Internet interaction on high-speed (broadband) and slower
(dial-up and some wireless) connections
2. Responsive design enabling access to web services from large displays (3200 × 2400 pixels or
larger) and smaller mobile devices (1024 × 768 pixels and smaller)
3. Supporting easy maintenance of or automatic conversion to multiple languages

Ch3: Guidelines, Principles, and Theories

Guidelines: Low-level focused advice
about good practices and cautions
against dangers.
Shared language to promote
consistency among multiple designers
in terminology usage, appearance, and
action sequences
Based on best practices
DisAd/Critics: Too specific, incomplete,
hard to apply, and sometimes wrong
Ad/Proponents: Encapsulate experience
Principles: Mid-level strategies or rules to
analyze and compare design alternatives.
More fundamental, widely applicable, and
enduring than guidelines
Need more clarification
Fundamental principles
Determine user’s skill levels
Identify the tasks
5 primary interaction styles
8 golden rules of interface design
Prevent errors
Automation and human control
Theories: High-level widely
applicable frameworks to
draw on during design and
evaluation, as well as to
support communication
and teaching.
Theories can also be
predictive, such as those
for pointing times by
individuals or posting rates
for community discussions.

Getting the user’s attention:

Intensity – Marking – Size - Choice of fonts - Inverse video – Blinking – Color - Audio

Guidelines: Five high-level goals

Consistency of data display - Efficient information assimilation by the user - Minimal memory load on the user
Compatibility of data display with data entry - Flexibility for user control of data display
The 8 Golden Rules of Interface Design: Strive for consistency - Cater to universal usability
Offer informative feedback - Design dialogs to yield closure - Prevent errors - Permit easy reversal of actions
Keep users in control - Reduce short-term memory load

Prevent Errors: -Make error messages specific, positive in tone, and constructive
-Correct actions Gray out inappropriate actions. Selection rather than freestyle typing. Automatic completion
-Complete sequences: Single abstract commands. Macros and subroutines

Stages of action models(Norman's seven stages of action):

Forming the goal
Forming the intention
Specifying the action
Executing the action
Perceiving the system state
Interpreting the system state
Evaluating the outcome

Norman's contributions:
Context of cycles of action and evaluation.
Gulf of execution: Mismatch between the user's intentions and the allowable actions
Gulf of evaluation: Mismatch between the system's representation and the user’s expectations

Four principles of good design:

State and the action alternatives should be visible
Should be a good conceptual model with a consistent system image
The interface should include good mappings that reveal the relationships between stages
User should receive continuous feedback

Four critical points where user failures can occur:

Users can form an inadequate goal
Might not find the correct interface object because of an incomprehensible label or icon
May not know how to specify or execute a desired action
May receive inappropriate or misleading feedback

Contextual/Consistency/Consistent 33-35

Ch4: Design
1. Organizational Support for Design
2. The Design Process
3. Design Frameworks
4. Design Methods (Ethnographic Observation, Storyboarding, Prototyping)
5. Design Tools, Practices, and Patterns
6. Social Impact Analysis
Address concerns and potential barriers....
Outline the development process....

7. Legal Issues
Ch5 Evaluation and the User Experience
1. Expert Reviews and Heuristics
Expert reviews: a design review in which a UX expert inspects a system (such as a website or
application, or a section therein) with the goal of identifying usability problems and strengths.
There are expert review methods/types:
Heuristic evaluation
Guidelines review
Consistency inspection
Cognitive walkthrough
Formal usability inspection
2. Usability Testing and Laboratories
Participants should be chosen to represent the intended user communities, with attention to:
a. background in computing and experience with the task
b. motivation, education, and ability with the natural language used in the interface.
3. Survey Instruments
Survey : is a research method used for collecting data from a predefined group of respondents by
asking questions to gain information from the answers.
Goals slide 5-16: to collect information about the behaviors, needs, and opinions
Ad: easy to develop - High representativeness - Online surveys have low costs - Good statistical
significance - Precise results.
DisAd: Customized surveys can run the risk of containing certain types of errors - Respondents may not
feel encouraged to provide accurate, honest answers - Not ideal for controversial issues.
4. Acceptance Tests
Measurable criteria for the user interface:
Time to learn specific functions
Speed of task performance
Rate of errors by users
Human retention of commands over time
Subjective user satisfaction
5. Evaluation During Active Use and Beyond
6. Controlled Psychologically Oriented Experiments
Ad: it helps fine-tuning the human-computer interface of actively used systems
The outline of the scientific method as applied to human-computer interaction might comprise these
tasks:….. slide 5-25

Ch6: Design Case Studies

Ch7: Direct Manipulation and Immersive Environments

Positive feelings associated with good user interfaces:
Mastery of the interface - Competence in performing tasks
Ease in learning the system originally and in assimilating advanced features
Confidence in the capacity to retain mastery over time - Enjoyment in using the system
Eagerness to show the system off to novices - Desire to explore more powerful aspects of the system
1. Direct Manipulation
2. 2D and 3D Interfaces
3. Teleoperation and Presence
4. Augmented and Virtual Reality
Direct Manipulation: Principles / Attributes slide 4 , 5 Problems slide 11