HCI Evolution

These web pages are designed to instruct the viewer on evaluation techniques used in HCI research.

What is Evaluation?

Evaluation is concerned with gathering data about the usability of a design or product by a specific group of users for a particular activity within a specified environment or context.

Why is Evaluation Important?

Evaluation of designs is important for many reasons. The obvious is that you want to make sure your design is adequate for installment. If the Evaluation process of HCI research were cut out, there woudld be no checks and balances for designs.

What are the Goals of Evaluation?

1) Assess the effect of the interaction on the user

Check the systems Usability (efficiency, effectiveness, satisfaction)

2)Assess the extent of the systems functionality 3)Identify specific problems in the design

What are the Types of Evaluation?

Formative:

Designs are evaluated as the project progresses

Summative:

Conducting full evaluation at end of design or project

CITED AT http://www.students.stedwards.edu/crowntr/project3.html

Decide is a framework for evaluating the User design.

• Determine
  
• Explore
  
• Choose
  
• Identify
  
• Decide
  
• Evaluate
  

Lecture 5: UCD: Requirements

Uptill now our focus was on understanding the users now we are moving towards the generation of the requirements. At first a contextual inquiry is done by an expert being playing the role of a user. An interview is done by the designer at the work space of the expert. This kind of an interview is a step towards generating the data for the designer.

After understanding the user and their characteristics their possible interaction with the system is being studied. Functional, non-functional requirements are gathered. Some fictions users are being created naming Personas a sample persona is attached here. This persona is the part of the evaluation study of the evaluation of the Brighton and Hove City Wildlife website. (http://www.citywildlife.org.uk ).

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Babar

Babar is a graduate student at Sussex University. He has been a great adventurous in his life. He has a keen interest in preserving wild life but being a Engg. Student he found a less time to gather information about his interest. He is 25 and living in Seaford sharing a flat with his country fellows who also study in different departments at Sussex. He is new in UK and has to travel daily from seaford to Falmer. He is really impressed by the landscape of the area. He takes classes on Mon-Tue and Friday and rest of his days are free and he really want some activity in those days. Different fish types whom he never came across in a superstore increased his anxiety about the wildlife in the surrounding areas of Brighton.

Studying wildlife and getting information about the local life take him to the local website for the wildlife and now he is a permanent visitor of this site. He is a regular internet users and have a sound knowledge of latest technologies. Following is the list of annoyances he sight at the site.

Scenario

On his way back home he came across to see an owl with a tag. He is now curious to know about this particular specie. Approaching flat back he logged into the site and start searching the site for this particular specie. He ends up with a frustrating look at the website because there is no easy way of finding the details about any particular specie.

 

 

List of annoyances  

• Sign in buttons too short to read
  
• Long wait to get his details verified
  
• Site navigation buttons too small
  
• How to guides in Getting Started section are in downloadable pdf format it should be in html format.
  
• the new post and reply buttons were enabled to guests but they lead to signin page they should be disabled for guests.
  
• Within forum thrs no navigation to the main website
  
• There was no indication in Events section of the forum that which events are upcoming and which have been passed in the past
  
• Don't show which posts are pinned(cant be replied)
  
• No Announcement section
  
• No member introductory section
  
• Instead of having one section for news main page has separate section for each news item that sounds odd
  
• Special places have long horizontal thumbnails
  
• UK BAP links not working but they are still on the Special specie page
  
• In mozila FireFox menu items are really mixing with each other and hard to pick
  
• Manus look like hyperlinks
  
• Site navigation is so poor
  

  
   

Above is the Persona a scenario and a list of annoyances he felt about the webpage. Another way of presenting the system is via Use cases. Use cases have their roots in OOP and software development.

Above is a use case diagram of the famous go game online software. And below is the use case diagram for ATM machines. Both developed by me. There can be a technical problem with them but for the time being I developed these diagrams for the purpose of this writing.

Prototyping Overview

Prototyping is a way of managing and setting the expectations about the final system. It is the process of building a model of the proposed system. Mostly its the part of the analysis phase but its also a way of telling and asking the user that what the final system should be. For generating ideas IDEO was a new thing for me. It really helped me alot.

In website layout design a CRAP is a new thing for me. CRAP is

CRAP

•Contrast

•Repetition

•Alignment

•Proximity

Below is the image of a site developed in OpenLaszlo a new framework for the web pages. This site is a Demo site put on the webpage www.openlaszlo.org. A very bad idea is implemented here having the menus right corner negating our F-pattern for the Eye-tracking. CRAP could only help to set a new layout

Among the advantages of the prototypes are the following Some Advantages of Prototyping: cited at http://www.umsl.edu/~sauterv/analysis/prototyping/proto.html

• Reduces development time.
  

• Reduces development costs.
  

• Requires user involvement.
  

• Developers receive quantifiable user feedback.
  

• Facilitates system implementation since users know what to expect.
  

• Results in higher user satisfaction.
  

• Exposes developers to potential future system enhancements.
  

In my previous writing I made a use case for the Go Game. Below is its prototype. Its not fully functional as one can see that white has just commit a suicide and there is no indication of it visually though an exception was thrown.

 

UCD: Understanding users.

Why evaluating users is important. The one line answer is "Users are not you". So far we have looked at the two approaches to the development of the design process e.g. involving users and experts. But now the important thing is to understand users. What they really are and why to understand them? so that we could better get them involved in the whole process.

Understanding the user needs can be achieved via cognitive walkthrough (user characteristics) or via the user research. It involves the research how humans attend to any thing whats the limitation of human perception and Memory. The important questions are what users can do and what they cannot. The Eye Tracking study have mentioned the F pattern visualization of humans. In previous section I have talked about it.

The above image is the curtsy of http://www.enquiroresearch.com/eyetracking-report.aspx equiro research group.

Along with that one should be very selective in choosing the visual affect of the systems. It should be easily perceivable. One more limitation of the humans is that they cant remember more than 7/+-2. This scenario was even demonstrated in our multimedia class when the students were asked to try to memorize the digits. The system design should be such that no more than 5-7 things a users should be memorizing in their short term memory.

Now that we have recognized the limitations of the humans now how can we extract information from the users?

• Observations
  
• Interviews
  
• Quaternaries
  

Interacting with the users is the only way to interact and encounter the real time requirements.

``Ethnography is a culture-studying culture.'' (Spradley, 1979)

Observing users in their real perspective helps better understanding them.

Interviews can be structured or unstructured. In the first kind only a predefined set of questions are asked. And in unstructured a general discussion is held. But semi structured interviews are the most successful ones in order to better understand the users. Interviewing a focus group is another way of interviewing in this way we can involve users in a debate where they can negate each other views and you can get a better idea of the things going on. As compared to Observations interviews can take lesser time. Questionnaires or surveys are another way of involving users. But problem with the surveys is that you should know in advance what exactly to know. Surveys narrow down the domain by your own knowledge because your are the one who are arranging the questions.

UCD: Evaluating Existing Technologies

Uptill now we have approached at the point where we really started considering users into the action. UCD (User Cantered Design). This week we talked about the technologies which are based upon the proven facts. Testing with users and experts.

First we should look at the cognitive walk through or testing by the experts its generally called Heuristic Evolution or HE. Normally a group of 5-6 experts takes the role of the user and try to find out the user requirements or evaluate a given system. Its a cheap and quick way of approaching the solution but it has a drop back. Users are not the experts so sometime experts tend to be the users but they can wash out the technology awareness factor.

At first I would like to present the ten heuristic guidelines for user interface design. Cited at http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html (Nielsen's Heuristics)

• Visibility of system status
  
  • The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.
    
• Match between system and the real world
  
  • The system should speak the users' language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.
    
• User control and freedom
  
  • Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked "emergency exit" to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo.
    
• Consistency and standards
  
  • Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions.
    
• Error prevention
  
  • Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.
    
• Recognition rather than recall
  
  • Minimize the user's memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.
    
• Flexibility and efficiency of use
  
  • Accelerators -- unseen by the novice user -- may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions.
    
• Aesthetic and minimalist design
  
  • Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.
    
• Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
  
  • Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
    
• Help and documentation
  
  • Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user's task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.
    

Let me give an example try switching off javascript from the browser and go to gmail it shows a message like "JavaScript must be enabled in order for you to use Google Mail in standard view. However, it seems JavaScript is either disabled or not supported by your browser. To use standard view, enable JavaScript by changing your browser options, then try again." A novice user can easily be trembled by the word Java script?

Testing with users is another complete research area. The F pattern is more common among the users.

http://www.enquiroresearch.com/search-results-2010-thankyou.aspx equiro research white paper is a very good example of such a pattern. The above image is the curtsey of the webpage mentioned earlier. User tasks and goals are the driving force. Presenting the user with the web page such that the most important thing is at the top left corner can help better design.

HCI Background: Design Principles & Conceptual Models

In the first lecture we just visited definition of HCI and tried to find out what exactly is the HCI and what role it can play in our daily life. And now in this lecture I would try to quote something which can easily describe the background of Design principles and Conceptual Models. Among the Design principles one is Visibility. Look at the laptop image its Toshiba A200 series.

The brown circle here is the audio input pin normally I'm used to work in the dark. There are two issues with this design one is in the dark u really have to find out where to insert the pin and the second is that if your using this laptop keeping it in your lap then the pins really irritate you. It should be sideways.

Your searching for bad design? Microsoft is at your service. Have you tried Windows Vista? Try it. They say its far more reliable. Every minute or so you're stuck with one of your programs Visa show a message "Some Error has occurred Windows is trying to find out the solution of it" or something like that but question what caused my program to crash what exactly is the problem? Its the example of a bad feedback. One way to minimize the error rate is to make your users restricted in their actions it prevents them to make errors and also your design should be consistent throughout the product. www.dontclick.it is also rich with the consistency problem every now on the whole page changes its layout making it difficult to memorize where exactly is you. And finally comes the affordance of your design. "The term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. ... Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. ... When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, label, or instruction is required." (Norman, 1988, 9, original emphasis) http://www.hcirn.com/atoz/atoza/afford.php

Conceptual Model

A conceptual model is a visual method (diagram) of representing a set of causal relationships between factors that are believed to impact one or more biodiversity targets. A good model should explicitly link the biodiversity targets to the direct threats impacting them, the factors (indirect threats and opportunities) influencing the direct threats, and the strategic activities being taken to affect those factors. It will also usually indicate the points at which monitoring should take place, assumptions that have been made about causal relationships, and paths along which strategic activities can be used to change or positively influence these relationships. A conceptual model should be accompanied by a textual description that verbally explains the conceptual model. In summary, a conceptual model portrays graphically the situation at your site and provides the basis for determining where you can intervene with your strategic activities. Note that conceptual models are designed primarily for projects, but can be applied to programmes, though complexity can be a concern with larger systems or complex project sites. Both conceptual models and logical . "Basic Guidance for Cross-Cutting Tools: Conceptual Models" October 2005 Written by: Alexis Morgan, WWF Canada

Conceptual model is a very broad idea there are a lot many ways of classifying it. But breaking it up in activities and objects is a nice way. Activities may include giving instructions, interacting with the system as its having a conversation with the user, interacting with object and navigating. It increases the interactivity but due to high expectation by the users it lacks the intelligence factor. Exploring and browsing is the activity which is most common now a days among the users of the web. Information is presented in a structured format in order to get easy searching and browsing.

On the other hands Objects are a way to express the word in the form of objects with each one having its own characteristics and responsibilities to play.

http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~tcm/ TCM is a tool kit for developing CM. Following is the list of requirements for developing CM cited at http://www.sil.org/cellar/ach94/ach94.html

 

• (1) The data are multilingual; conceptual models must therefore be able to keep track of what language each datum is in.
  
• (2) The data in a text unfold sequentially; conceptual models must therefore be able to represent text in proper sequence.
  
• (3) The data are hierarchically structured; conceptual models must therefore be able to express hierarchical structures of arbitrary depth.
  
• (4) The data elements bear information in many simultaneous dimensions; conceptual models must therefore be able to vest data objects with many simultaneous attributes.
  
• (5) The data are highly interrelated; conceptual models must therefore be able to encode associative links between related pieces of data.
  

HCI (Human Computer Interaction) Introduction

I must quote here the definition of Dix

[Dix et al, p3]

"A discipline concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and with the study of the major phenomena surrounding them"

 

So it all begins here at Sussex and more importantly I'm again in a student status. The first day at a new class with a new instructor comes good. Being a Microsoft products consumer ignoring the annoying things while working on PC or laptop had become my habits. Some referring to this quote that "When simple things have signs then there is a design problem" is really enough to make one really have a kick start in thinking in the design making domain. Right now I'm typing in Microsoft Office Word but the new design really decreases my productivity. The new file menu button (the only menu which it has right now) is so much confusing that after 2 weeks I figure out what exactly is this?

www.baddesign.com is a very good resource to see the blunders made by designers.

But it's better to look at a good design-example. The guys at www.dontclick.it are trying to research on a new design era of webpage design where one doesn't need to click at any stage of the navigation. I like the idea it really speeds up the whole process but Is it too fast? The end product after a good design implementation should be Efficient, Effective, Safe, Usable, Learanable and Memorable. I personally think that dontclick is a good idea to adventure but it just doesn't have the potential to break the traditional designing issues. The thing is people currently are adapted to clicking instead of rolling over mouse. Time to time even useless clicking have become the habit of most people. One more thing which annoys me is the finding of William Buxton appear in "An abridged version of this article appears is: Buxton, W. (2001). Less is More (More or Less), in P. Denning (Ed.), The Invisible Future: The seamless integration of technology in everyday life. New York: McGraw Hill, 145 - 179."
It says that the human capacity of learning is constant and the functionality is increasing monotonically but my personal view is that human capacity also increases with the usage of technology. More and more people are adapting the new things day by day. Buxton at his webpage http://www.billbuxton.com/brighton.html says "Why," they ask, "can't we design computers like cars,? I totally agreed and recommends his readings and findings. Sometimes the conventions are all set for us just to take them as they are.