Human Computer Interaction

CS-425
Credit Hours 3 (2-1)
 Contents to be Covered
• Introduction to HCI
• Goals and Evaluation of Human computer interaction
• Discipline of Human computer interaction
• Cognitive frameworks
• Human Input- output channels
• Cognitive Process
• The psychology of actions
• Design Principles
• Computer devices
• Interaction framework and styles
• HCI process models and methodologies
• User Reserch
 Textbooks
• Human Computer Interaction by Alan Dix ,
Janet Finlay, Gregory Abowd, and Russell
Beale. Prentice Hall, 2004.
• Designing the User Interface: Strategies for
Effective Human-Computer Interaction, by
Ben Shneiderman, Published by Addison-
Wesley
Human Computer Interaction (HCI)
• Human–computer Interaction (HCI) involves the
study, planning, and design of the interaction
between people (users) and computers. Interaction
between users and computers occurs at the user
interface (or simply interface), which includes both
software and hardware.
• Human-computer interaction is a discipline
concerned with the design, evaluation and
implementation of interactive computing systems for
human use and with the study of major phenomena
surrounding them.
Human Computer Interaction (HCI)
• Because human–computer interaction studies a human
and a machine in conjunction, it draws from supporting
knowledge on both the machine and the human side.

• On the machine side, techniques in computer graphics,

operating systems, programming languages, and
development environments are relevant.

• On the human side, communication theory, graphic and

industrial design disciplines, linguistics, social sciences,
cognitive psychology, and human factors such as
computer user satisfaction are relevant.
 HCI What? HCI Why?
• What happens when a human and a computer
system interact to perform a task?
– task - write document, calculate budget, solve equation, learn about
Bosnia, drive home, make a reservation, land a plane...

• Why is this important?

1. Computer systems affect every person
2. Safety, satisfaction, utility is critical
3. Product success depends on ease of use
 Interfaces in the Real World
• Not just computers!
– VCR
– Wristwatch
– Phone
– Copier
– Car
– Plane cockpit
– Airline reservation
– Air traffic control
 Goals of HCI
• Allow users to carry out tasks
– Safely
– Effectively
– Efficiently
– Enjoyably
 Usability
• Combination of
– Ease of learning
– High speed of user task performance
– Low user error rate
– Subjective user satisfaction
– User retention over time
 HCI How?
• How do we improve interfaces?
1. Educate software professionals
2. Draw upon fast accumulating body of
knowledge regarding H-C interface design
3. Integrate UI design methods & techniques
into standard software development
methodologies now in place
 UI Design/Develop Process
• Priciple of User-Centered Design
– Analyze user’s goals & tasks
– Create design alternatives
– Evaluate options
– Implement prototype
– Test
– Refine
 Above All Else…
• Know the User!
– Physical & cognitive abilities (& special needs)
– Personality & culture
– Knowledge & skills
– Motivation

• Two Fatal Mistakes:

1. Assume all users are alike
2. Assume all users are like the designer
 Design Evaluation
• “Looks good to me” isn’t good enough!
• Some things we can measure
– Time to learn
– Speed of performance
– Rate of errors by user
– Retention over time
– Subjective satisfaction
 Goal of HCI
• A basic goal of HCI is to improve the interactions
between users and computers by making computers
more usable and receptive to the user's needs.
Specifically, HCI is concerned with:
– Methodologies and processes for designing interfaces
(i.e., given a task and a class of users, design the best
possible interface within given constraints, optimizing for a
desired property such as learnability or efficiency of use).
– Methods for implementing interfaces (e.g. software
toolkits and libraries; efficient algorithms).
– Techniques for evaluating and comparing interfaces.
– Developing new interfaces and interaction techniques.
– Developing descriptive and predictive models and
theories of interaction.
 Disciplines that Contribute to HCI
▪ Computer Science
• Application design and engineering of human-
computer Interfaces
▪ Psychology
• The application of theories of cognitive processes and
the empirical analysis of user behavior
▪ Sociology and Anthropology
• Interactions between technology, work, and
organization
▪ Design and Industrial Design
• Creating interactive products
 Goals of interaction design
Develop usable products
• Usability means:
– easy to learn
– effective to use
– enjoyable experience

Usable products = successful products?

Involve users in the design process

 Utility, Usability, Likeability
▪ Utility
• a product can be used to reach a certain goal or to
perform a certain task. This is essential!
▪ Usability
• relates to the question of quality and efficiency. E.g.
how well does a product support the user to reach a
certain goal or to perform a certain task.
▪ Likeability
• this may be related to utility and usability but not
necessarily. People may like a product for any other
reason…
 What is Usability
• Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy
user interfaces are to use. The word ‘usability’ also
refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the
design process.

Usability has five quality components:

✓ Learn ability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks

• the first time they encounter the design?
✓ Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly
• can they perform tasks?
✓ Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of
• not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?
✓ Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these
• errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
✓ Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?
 Why is Usability Important?
• Improving usability can
• increase productivity of users
• reduce costs (support, efficiency)
• increase sales/revenue (web shop)
• enhance customer loyalty
• win new customers
 Principles to support usability
Flexibility
the multiplicity of ways the user and system
exchange information

Robustness
the level of support provided the user in
determining successful achievement and
assessment of goal-directed behaviour
Predictability
– determining effect of future actions based on
past interaction history
 Cognitive Frameworks
• Understand the importance of Cognition
• Understand different cognitive frameworks in
HCI
• Imagine trying to drive a car
by using just a computer keyboard. The four arrow keys
are used for steering, the space bar for braking, and the
return key for accelerating. To indicate left you need
to press the F1 key and to indicate right the F2 key. To
sound your horn you need
to press the F3 key. To switch the headlights on you need
to use
the F4 key and, to switch the windscreen wipers on, the F5
key. Now imagine as you
are driving along a road a ball is suddenly kicked in front of
you.

• What would you do?

Bash the arrow keys and the space bar madly while pressing
the F4 key? How would rate your chance of missing the ball
• Most of us would bald at the very idea of driving a
car this way. Many early videogames, however, were
designed along these lines: the user had to press an
arbitrary
combination of function keys to drive or navigate
through the game. More recently,
computer consoles have been designed with the user's ca
pabilities and demands of the
activity in mind. Much better way of controlling and
interacting, such as through
using joysticks and steering wheels, are provided that ma
p much better onto the
physical and cognitive aspects of driving and navigation
We have to understand the limitations of the people to e
ase them. Let us see what is
cognitive psychology and how it helps us.
 Cognition
• Cognition is what goes on in our heads when
we carry out our everyday activities.
• Cognition refers to the processes by which we
become familiar with things.
• In other words, how we gain knowledge.
These include
• Understanding
• Remembering
• Reasoning
• Attending
• Being aware
• Acquiring skills and creating new
 Cognition
• Cognition has also been described in terms
of specific kinds of processes. These include:
• Attention
• Perception and Recognition
• Memory
• Learning
• Reading, speaking, and listening
• Problem solving, planning, reasoning
and decision-making
 Modes of Cognition
• Experiential cognition
• Reflective cognition
 Experiential cognition
• It is the state of mind in which we
perceive, act, and react to events around us
effectively and effortlessly.
• It requires reaching a certain level of
expertise and engagement.
• Examples include driving car, reading a book, h
aving a conversation,
and playing a video game
 Reflective cognition
• Reflective cognition involves thinking,
comparing, and decision-making
• This kind of cognition is what lead
to new ideas and creativity.
• Examples include designing, learning, and
writing a book
 Information processing
• During the 1960s and 1970s the main paradigm
in cognitive psychology was to characterize
humans as information processors.
• Everything that is sensed (sight,
hearing, touch, smell, and taste) was considered
to be information, which the mind processes.
• Information is thought to enter and exit the min
d through a series of ordered processing stages
 Information processing
• As shown in figure, within these stages, various
processes are assumed to
act upon mental representations.
• Processes include comparing and matching.
• Mental representations are assumed to comprise
images, mental models, rules, and other forms of
knowledge
 Information processing
• In the extended model, cognition is viewed in
terms of
• how information is perceptual processors
• how that information is attended to, and
• how that information is processed and stored
in memory.
 Attention
• Attention is the process of selecting things to
concentrate on, at a point in time, from the range of
possibilities available
• Attention involves our auditory and/or visual senses.
• Attention allows us to focus on information that is
relevant to what we are doing.
• The extent to which this process is easy or difficult
depends on whether
– We have clear goals
– Whether the information we need is prominent in the
environment.
• If we know exactly what we want to find out, we try to
match this with the information that is available.
 Attention
• When we are not sure exactly what we are looking for
we may browse through information, allowing it to
guide our attention to interesting or salient items.
• For example, when we go to restaurant we may have
the general goal of eating a meal but only a vague idea
of what we want to eat. We peruse the menu to find
things that what our appetite, letting our attention be
drawn to the imaginative descriptions of various
dishes. After scanning through the possibilities and
imagining what each dish might be like (plus taking into
account other factors, such as cost, who we are with,
what the specials are, what the waiter recommends,
whether we want a two-or- three-course meal, and so
on.), we may then make a decision.
 Memory
• Indeed, much of our everyday activities rely
on memory.
• As well as storing all our factual knowledge,
our memory contains our knowledge of
actions or procedures.
• It allows us to repeat actions, to use language,
and to use new information received via our
senses.
• It also gives us our sense of identity, by
preserving information from our past
experiences.
 Memory
• Memory Model
– It is generally agreed that there are three types of
memory or memory functions, sensory buffers,
short-term memory or working memory and long-
term memory.
– Sensory buffer
• modality-specific, hold information for a very brief
period of time (a few tenth of a second)
• The sensory memories act as buffer for stimuli received
through the senses.
• A sensory memory exists for each sensory channel:
iconic memory for visual stimuli, echoic memory for
aural stimuli and haptic memory for touch.
• These memories are constantly overwritten by new
information coming in on these channels
 Memory
• Short term memory
– Short-term memory or working memory acts as a
scratch pad for temporary recall of information.
– For example, calculate the multiplication 35 * 6 in
your head. The chances are that you will have
done this calculation in staged, perhaps 5 * 6 and
then 3 * 6 and added the results.
– To perform calculations such as this we need to
store the intermediate stages for use later.
– Short-term memory also has a limited capacity.
There are two basic methods for measuring
memory capacity.
 Memory
• The first involves determining the length of a
sequence, which can be remembered in order.
– The average person can remember 7±2 digits.
– Try it look at the following number sequence:
54988319814237
• The second allows items to be freely recalled
in any order.
– Now try the following sequence:
22 55 36 8998 30
 Memory
• Long Term Memory
– long-term memory is our main resource.
– Here we store factual information, experiential
knowledge, and procedural rules of behavior.
– it has a huge, if not unlimited, capacity.
– Secondly, it has a relatively slow access time of
approximately a tenth of a second.
– Thirdly, forgetting occurs more slowly in long-term
memory
 Memory
• Long-term memory structure
– Episodic memory
• Episodic memory represents our memory of events and
experiences in a serial form.
• It is from this memory that we can reconstruct the actual
events that took place at a given period of our lives
– Semantic memory
• Semantic memory is structured record of facts, concepts and
skills that we have acquired.
• The information in semantic memory is derived from that in
our episodic memory, such that we can learn new facts or
concepts from our experience.
 Learning
• Learning can be considered in two terms:
– Procedural
• According to procedural learning we come to any
object with questions like
• how to use it?
• How to do something?
• For example, how to use a computer-based
application?
– Declarative
• According to declarative learning we try to find the
facts about something.
• For example, using a computer-based application to
understand a given topic.
 Reading, Speaking and Listening
• These three forms of language processing have
both similar and different properties.
– One similarity is that the meaning of sentences or
phrases is the same regardless of the mode in which it
is conveyed.
– For example, the sentence “Computer is a wonderful
invention” essentially has the same meaning whether
one reads it, speaks it, or hears it.
• However, the ease with which people can read,
listen, or speak differs depending on the person,
task, and context.
– For example, many people find listening much easier
than reading.
 Problem Solving, Planning, Reasoning
and Decision making
• All cognitive processes involving reflective
cognition.
• They include thinking about what to do, what the
options are, and what the consequences might
be of carrying out a given action.
• They often involve conscious processing (being
aware of what one is thinking about), discussion
with others, and the use of various kinds of
artifacts, (e.g., maps, books, and pen and paper).
– For example, when planning the best route to get
somewhere, say a foreign city, we may ask others use
a map, get instructions from the web, or a
combination of these.
 Problem Solving, Planning, Reasoning
and Decision making
• Reasoning also involves working through different
scenarios and deciding which is the best option
or solution to a given problem
– In the route-planning activity we may be aware of
alternative routes and reason through the advantages
and disadvantages of each route before deciding on
the best one.
– Many family arguments have come about because
one member thinks he or she knows the best route
while another thinks otherwise
– experts have much more knowledge and experience
and are able to select optimal strategies for carrying
out their tasks. They are likely to able to think ahead
more, considering what the consequences might be of
opting for a particular move or solution
 Reasoning
• Reasoning is the process by which we use the
knowledge we have to draw conclusions or
infer something new about the domain of
interest.
• There are a number of different types of
reasoning:
• Deductive reasoning
• Inductive reasoning
• Abdicative reasoning
 Deductive reasoning
• Deductive reasoning derives the logically
necessary conclusion from the given premises.
• For example,
– It is Friday then she will go to work
– It is Friday
– Therefore she will go to work
 Inductive reasoning
• Induction is generalizing from cases we have
seen to infer information about cases we have
not seen.
– For example, if every elephant we have ever seen
has a trunk,
– we infer that all elephants have trunks.
• Of course, this inference is unreliable and
cannot be proved to be true; it can only be
proved to be false.
 Abdicative reasoning
• Abduction reasons from a fact to the action or
state that caused it.
• This is the method we use to derive
explanations for the events we observe.
• For example, suppose we know that Sam
always drives too fast when she has been
drunk.
– If we see Sam driving too fast we may infer that
she has been drunk. Of course, this too is
unreliable since there may be another reason why
she is driving fast
 Problem solving
• Problem solving is the process of finding a
solution to an unfamiliar task, using the
knowledge we have.
• Human problem solving is characterized by the
ability to adapt the information we have to deal
with new situations.
• Problem solving is a matter of reproducing known
responses or trial and error.
• problem solving is both productive and
reproductive.
– Reproductive problem solving draws on previous
experience,
– Productive problem solving involves insight and
restructuring of the problem.
 Human Processor model
• The information processing model provides a
basis from which to make predictions about
human performance.
• The information processing approach is based
on modeling mental activities that
happen exclusively inside the head.
• However, most cognitive activities involve
people interacting with external kinds of
representations, like books, documents, and
computers.
 Human Processor model
• For example, when we go home from
wherever we have been we do not need to
remember the details of the route because
• we rely on cues in the environment (e.g., we
know to turn left at the red house, right
when the road comes to a U-Turns, and so on.)
• Similarly, when we are at home we
do not have to remember where everything is
because information is "out there.
 GOMS
• Card et al. have abstracted further family of m
odels, known as GOMS
• Goals
• Operations
• Methods
• Selection rules
• that translate the qualitative descriptions into
quantitative measures.
 GOMS
• The reason for developing a family of models
is that it enables various qualitative
and quantitative predictions
be made about user performance.
• Goals
– These are the user's goals, describing what the user
wants to achieve.
– In GOMS the goals are taken to represent
a `memory point' for the user, from which he
can evaluate what should be done and to which
he may return if any errors occur.
 GOMS
• Operators
– They are the basic actions that the user must
perform in order to use the system.
– They may affect the system (e.g., press the `X‘
key) or only the user's mental state (e.g., read the
dialogue box).
• Methods
– Typically several ways in which a goal can be
split into sub goals
 GOMS
• Selection
– Selection means of choosing between competing
methods
– One of the problems of abstracting a quantitative
model from a qualitative description
of user performance is ensuring that two are conn
ected.
• Knowledge Representation Models
• Mental Models
• User Interaction Learning Models
• Conceptual Models
 Human Input-Output Channels
• Understand role of input-output channels
• Describe human eye physiology
• Discuss the visual perception
• Understand role of color theory
• Discuss hearing perception
• Discuss haptic perception
• Understand movement
 The Psychology of Actions
• Mental model
– A well-known definition, in the context of HCI, is
provided by Donald Norman:
• ‘The model, people have of themselves,
others, the environment, and the things with
which they interact. People form mental
models through experience, training and
instruction’.
• Mental models are usually constructed when
we are required to make an conclusion or a
prediction about a particular state of affairs.
 Mental model
• Having developed a mental model of an interactive
product, it is assumed that people will use it to make
inferences about how to carry out tasks when using the
interactive product.
• Mental models are also used to understand what to do
when something unexpected happens with a system
and when encountering unfamiliar systems.
• The more someone learns about a system and how it
functions, the more their mental model develops.
– For example, TV engineers have a deep mental model of
how TVs work that allows them to work out how to fix
them. In contrast, an average citizen is likely to have a
reasonably good mental model of how to operate a TV but
a shallow mental model of how it worked.
 Mental model
• Using incorrect mental models to guide behavior
is surprisingly common.
• Just watch people at a pedestrian crossing or
waiting for an elevator (lift).
• How many times do they press the button? A lot
of people will press it at least twice. When asked
why, a common reason given is that they think it
will make it lights change faster or ensure the
elevator arrives. This seems to do another
example of following the “more is more”
philosophy: it is believed that the more times you
press the button; the more likely it is to result in
he desire effect
 Mental model
• Another common example of an erroneous
mental model is what people do when the
cursor freeze on their computer screen. Most
people will bash away at all manner of keys in
the vain hope that this will make it work again.
However, ask them how this will help and
their explanations are rather vague.
 Mental model
• On the other hand, if people could develop better
mental models of interactive systems, they would
be in a better position to know how to carry out
their tasks efficiently and what to do if the system
started acting up.
• One suggestion is to educate them better,
however, many people are resistant to spending
much time learning about how things work,
especially if it involves reading manuals and other
documentation. An alternative proposal is to
design systems to be more transparent, so that
they are easier to understand.
 Design Principles
“The most important thing to design is the
user’s conceptual model. Every thing else
should be subordinated to making that model
clear, obvious, and substantial. That is almost
exactly the opposite of how most software are
designed”
 Conceptual Model
• A description of the proposed system in terms of
a set of integrated ideas and concepts about
– what it should do,
– behave and look like,
– will be understandable by the users
• To develop a conceptual model involves
envisioning the proposed product, based on the
user’s needs and other requirements identified.
• To ensure that it is designed to be
understandable in the manner intended requires
doing iterative testing of the product as it is
developed.
 Conceptual Model
• A key aspect of design process is initially to
decide what the user will be doing when
carrying out their tasks.
• For example, will they be primarily searching
for information, creating documents,
communicating with other users, recording
events, or some other activity.
 Conceptual Model
• Another way of designing an appropriate conceptual
model is to interface metaphor.
• This can provide a basic structure for the conceptual
model that is couched in knowledge users are familiar
with.
• The closer the represented model comes to the user’s
mental model, the easier he will find the program to
use and to understand.
• Generally, offering a represented model that follows
the implementation model too closely significantly
reduces the user’s ability to learn and use the program
• Assuming that the user’s mental model of his tasks
differs from the implementation model of the
software.
 Conceptual Model
• Another important thing is that there are
several gulfs that separate mental states from
physical ones.
• Each gulf reflects one aspect of the distance
between the mental representation of the
person and the physical components and
states of the environment.
• And these gulfs present major problems for
users.
 Action
• Start with goal (goal formation)
• You have to do something (execution)
• Check to see that goal is made (evaluation)
 Action Cycle
• Human action has two aspects,
• Execution
– Execution involves doing something.
– Start at the top with the goal.(The state that is to be
achieved),
– The goal is translated into an intention to do some
action.
– The intention must be translated into a set of internal
commands.
– An action sequence that can be performed to satisfy
the intention.
– The action sequence is still a mental event: noting
happens until it is executed, performed upon the
world.
 Evaluation
• Evaluation is the comparison of what
happened in the world with what we wanted
to happen
• Evaluation starts with our perception of the
world.
• This perception must then be interpreted
according to our expectations
• Then compared with respect to both our
intentions and our goals
 Errors
• Human capability for interpreting and
manipulating information is quite impressive.
However, we do make mistake.
• Some are trivial, resulting in no more than
temporary inconvenience or annoyance. Other
may be more serious, requiring substantial effort
to correct.
– Mistakes
• Mistakes occur through conscious deliberation. An incorrect
action is taken based on an incorrect decision.
– Slips
• Slips are unintentional. They happen by accident, such as
making typos by pressing the wrong key or selecting wrong
menu item.
 Stages of Action
• What makes something difficult to do?
• What are you trying to do?
• What ways can you achieve it?
• How do you execute one of those ways?
• What happened as a result?
 Seven stages of action
• The stages of execution
– Intentions
– action sequence
– execution
are coupled with the
stages of evaluation
– Perception
– Interpretation
– Evaluation
with goals common to
both stages
 What are Gulfs
• The distance between the mental
representations of the person and the physical
components and states of the environment
• Illustrates difficulty in deriving relationships
between mental intentions and
interpretations and the physical actions and
states
 The Gulf of Execution
• Does the system provide actions that
correspond to the intentions of the person?
• The difference between the intentions and
allowable actions is the gulf of execution.
• One measure of this gulf is how well the
system
– allows the person to do the intended actions
directly,
– without extra effort:
– do the action provided by the system match those
intended by the person?
 The Gulf of Evaluation
• The Gulf of evaluation reflects the amount of
effort that the person must exert to interpret
the physical state of the system and to
determine how well the expectations and
intentions have been met.
• The gulf is small when the system provides
information about its state in a form that is
easy to get, is easy to interpret, and matches
the way the person thinks of the system.
 Design Principles
• A number of design principles have been
promoted.
• The best known are concerned with how to
determine what users should see and do
when carrying out their tasks using an
interactive product
 Design Principles
• Here we briefly describe the most common
ones
– Visibility
– Affordance
– Constraints
– Mapping
– Consistency
– Feedback
 Visibility
• The more visible functions are, the more likely users
will be able to know what to do next.
• In contrast, when functions are “out of sight,” it makes
them more difficult to find and knows how to use.
• Norman describes the controls of a car to emphasize
this point.
• The controls for different operations are clearly visible
(e.g., indicator, headlights, horn, hazard warning
lights), indicating what can be done. The relationship
between the way the controls have been positioned in
the car and what they do makes it easy for the driver to
find the appropriate control for the task at hand.
 Affordance
• Affordance is a term used to refer to an attribute
of an object that allows people to know how to
use it.
• For example, a door handle affords pulling, a cup
handle affords grasping, and a mouse button
affords pushing.
• Graphical elements like button, icon, links, and
scroll bars are talked about with respect to how
to make it appear obvious how they should be
used: icons should be designed to afford clicking,
scroll bars to afford moving up and down, buttons
to afford pushing.
 Constraints
• The design concept of constraining refers to
determining ways of restricting the kind of user
interaction that can take place at a given
moment.
• A common design practice in graphical user
interfaces is to deactivate certain menu options
by shading them, thereby restricting the user to
only actions permissible at that stage of the
activity
• One of the advantages of this form of
constraining is it prevents the user from selecting
incorrect options and thereby refuses the
chances of making a mistake.
 categories of constraints
• Physical
– Physical constraints refer to the way physical objects
restrict the movement of things.
– For example, the way a external disk can be placed
into a disk drive is physically constrained by its shape
and size
• Logical
– Logical constraints rely on people’s understanding of
the way. They rely on people’s common-sense
reasoning about actions and their consequences.
– Disabling menu options when not appropriate for the
task in hand provides logical constraining. It allows
users to reason why (or why not) they have been
designed this way and what options are available
 categories of constraints
• Cultural
– Culture constraints rely on learned conventions, like
the use of red for warning, the use of certain kinds of
signals for danger, and the use of the smiley face to
represent happy emotions.
– Most cultural constraints are arbitrary in the sense
that their relationship with what is being represented
is abstract, and could have equally evolved to be
represented in another form (e.g., the use of yellow
instead of red for warning).
– Accordingly, they have to be learned. Once learned
and accepted by a cultural group, they become
universally accepted conventions.
– Two universally accepted interface conventions are
the use of windowing for displaying information and
the use icons on the desktop to represent operations
and documents.
 Mapping
• This refers to the relationship between
controls and their effects in the world.
• Nearly all artifacts need some kind of
mapping between controls and effects,
whether it is a flashlight, car, power plant, or
cockpit.
• An example of a good mapping between
controls is effect is the up and down arrows
used to represent the up and down
movement of the cursor, respectively, on a
computer keyboard.
 Mapping
• Consider the various musical playing devices.
How are the controls of playing rewinding and
fast forward mapped onto the desired effects?
They usually follow a common convention of
providing a sequence of buttons, with the play
button in the middle, the rewind button on
the left and the fast-forward on the right. This
configuration maps directly onto the
directionality of the actions
 Consistency
• This refers to designing interfaces to have similar
operations and use similar elements for achieving
similar tasks.
• In particular, a consistent interface is one that follows
rules, such as using the same operation to select all
objects.
• A much more effective design solution is to create
categories of commands that can be mapped into
subsets of operations. For the word-processing
application, the hundreds of operation available are
categorized into subsets of different menus. All
commands that are concerned with file operations are
placed together in the same file menu.
 Feedback
• Feedback is about sending back information
about what action has been done and what has
been accomplished, allowing the person to
continue with the activity.
• Various kinds of feedback are available for
interaction design—audio, physical, verbal, visual,
and combinations of these.
• Deciding which combinations are appropriate for
different kinds of activities and interactivities is
central.
• Using feedback in the right way can also provide
the necessary visibility for user interaction.
 The Computer
• Input devices
– Keyboard
– Positioning, Pointing and Drawing
• Mouse • Touch pad • Track ball • Joystick • Touch
screen • Eye gaze
– Display devices
• Cathode ray tube
• Liquid Crystal Display
• Light Emitting Diodes
– Touch, feel and smell
– Physical controls
– Environment and bio sensing
 Interaction
• In the previous lectures we have studied the
detailed introduction of human side and
computer side.
• There are a number of ways in which human can
communicate with the system.
• If we look at the beginning, batch input system
was used, in which the user provides all the
information to the computer in form of batch.
• Now a day it is the age of virtual reality and
ubiquitous computing. Here user constantly
interacts with computers in his surroundings.
• Today there is richer interaction
 The terms of Interaction
• Domain
– A domain defines an area of expertise and knowledge
in some real-world activity. Some examples of
domains are graphic design, Software Engineering,
Image Processing etc.
– In a graphic design domain, some of the important
concepts are geometric shapes, a drawing surface and
a drawing utensil.
• Task
– Tasks are the operation to manipulate the concepts of
a domain.
– For example, one task within the graphic design
domain is the construction of a specific geometric
shape with particular attributes on the drawing
surface.
 The terms of Interaction
• Goal
– A goal is the desired output from a performed
task.
– A related goal would be to produce a solid red
triangle centered on the canvas.
– So, goal is ultimate result, which you want to
achieve after performing some specific tasks.
 Donald Norman’s Model
• We have already studied Donald Norman’s
Model of interaction. In which user chooses a
goal, formulate a plan of action, which is then
executed at the computer interface. When the
plan, or part of the plan has been executed,
the user observes the computer interface to
evaluate the result of the execution plan, and
to determine further actions.
 Donald Norman’s Model
• Four main components as
shown in figure
– System
– User
– Input
– Output
 Donald Norman’s Model
• Each component has its own language.
• The system’s language is referred as the core
language
• User’s language is referred as the task language.
• The core language describes computational
attributes of the domain relevant to the system
state
• whereas the task language describes
psychological attributes of the domain relevant to
the user state.
• There are also languages for both the input and
output components.
• Input and output together form the interface.
 Example
• Imagine you are sitting reading as evening falls.
You decide you need more light; that is you
establish the goal to get lighter. There you form
an intention to switch on the desk lamp, and you
specify the actions required to reach over and
press the lamp switch. If some one else is closer,
the intention may be different-you may ask them
to switch on the light for you. Your goal is the
same but the intention and actions are different.
When you have executed the action you perceive
the result, either the light is on or it isn’t and you
interpret this, based on your knowledge of the
world
 Example
• For example, if the light does not come on
you may interpret this as indicating the bulb
has blown or the lamp is not plugged into the
mains, you will formulate the new state
according to the original goals – is there is
now enough light? It so, the cycle is
completed. It not, you may formulate a new
intention to switch on the main ceiling light as
well.
 Ergonomics
• Ergonomics (or human factors) is traditionally
the study of the physical characteristic of the
interaction.
• how the controls are designed, the physical
environment in which the interaction takes
place and the layout and physical qualities of
the screen.
• A primary focus is on user performance and
how the interface enhances or detracts from
this.
 Physical Characteristics
• Physical aspects of Interface are as follow.
• Arrangement of controls and displays
• The physical environment
• Health issues
• Use of colors
 Arrangement of controls and displays
• The user should group sets of controls and
parts of the display logically to allow rapid
access.
• This may not seem so important when we are
considering a single user on a PC.
• But it becomes vital we turn to safety-critical
applications such as plant control, aviation
and air traffic control.
 The physical environment of the
interaction
• As well as addressing physical issues in the
layout and arrangement of the machine
interface.
• Ergonomics is concerned with the design of
the work environment itself.
• Where will the system be used? By whom will
it be used? Will users be sitting, standing or
moving about?
 Health issues
• We should bear in mind possible
consequences of our designs on the health
and safety of users.
• There are a number of factors that may affect
the use of more general computers.
• Again these are factors in the physical
environment that directly affect the quality of
the interaction and the user’s performance:
– Physical position
• users should be able to reach all controls comfortably
and see all displays. Users should not be expected to
stand for long periods and, if sitting, should be provided
with back support.
 Health issues
• Temperature
– most users can adapt to slight changes in
temperature without adverse effect, extremes of
hot or cold will affect performance
• Lighting
– The lighting level will again depend on the work
environment. However, adequate lighting should
be provided to allow users to see the computer
screen without discomfort or eyestrain
• Noise
– Excessive noise can be harmful to health, causing
the user pain, and in acute cases, loss of hearing.
 Health issues
• Time
– The time users spend using the system should also be
controlled.
• The use of color
– Ergonomics has a close relationship to human
psychology in that it is also concerned with the
perceptual limitations of humans.
– For example, the use of color in displays is an
ergonomics issue. The human visual system has some
limitations with regard to color.
– The colors used should also correspond to common
conventions and user expectation. However, we
should remember that color conventions are culturally
determined.
 Interaction styles
• Interaction is communication between computer
and human (user). For a successful enjoyable
communication interface style has its own
importance.
• There are a number of common interface styles
including
– Command line interface
– Menus
– Natural language
• Question/answer and query dialog
– Form fills and spreadsheets
– WIMP
– Point and click
– Three-dimensional interfaces.
 Command line interface
• Command line interface was the first
interactive dialog style to be commonly used.
• It provides a means of expressing instructions
to the computer directly, using some function
keys, single characters, abbreviations or
whole-word commands.
• Command line interface are powerful in that
they offer direct access to system
functionality.
 Menu
• In the menu-driven interface, the set of options
available to the user is displayed on the screen
and selected using the mouse, or numeric or
alphabetic keys.
• Since the options are visible they are less
demanding of the user, relying on recognition
rather than recall.
• Menus are hierarchically ordered and the option
required is not available at the top layer of the
hierarchy.
• The grouping and naming of menu options then
provides the only cue for the user to find the
required option.
 Menu
• Such systems either can be purely text based,
with the menu options being presented as
numbered choices, or may have a graphical
component.
• In which the menu appears within a rectangular
box and choices are made, perhaps by typing the
initial letter of the desired selection, or by
entering the associated number, or by moving
around the menu with the arrow keys.
 Natural Language
• Perhaps the most attractive means of
communicating with computers, at least at
first glance, is by natural language.
• Users unable to remember a command or lost
in a hierarchy of menus, may long for the
computer that is able to understand
instructions expressed in everyday words.
 Question/answer and query dialog
• A simple mechanism for providing input to an
application in a specific domain.
• The user is asked a series of questions and so
is led through the interaction step by step.
• These interfaces are easy to learn and use, but
are limited in functionality and power.
• Query languages, on the other hand, are used
to construct queries to retrieve information
from a database.
Question/answer and query dialog
• Queries usually require the user to specify an
attribute or attributes for which to search the
database, as well as the attributes of interest to
be displayed.
• This is straightforward where there is a single
attribute, but becomes complex when multiple
attributes are involved, particularly of the user is
interested in attribute A or attribute B, or
attribute A and not attribute B, or where values
of attributes are to be compared.
 Form-fills and spreadsheets
• Form-filling interfaces are used primarily for
data entry but can be useful in data retrieval
applications.
• The user is presented with a display
resembling a paper form, with slots to fill in.
• Most form-filling interfaces allow easy
movement around the form and allow some
fields to be left blank.
• They also require correction facilities, as users
may change their minds or make a mistake
about the value that belongs in each field.
 Form-fills and spreadsheets
• Spreadsheets are sophisticated variation of
form filling.
• The spreadsheet comprises a grid of cells,
each of which can contain a value or a
formula.
• The formula can involve the value of other
cells.
 Point and Click interface
• In most multimedia systems and in web
browsers, virtually all actions take only a
single click of the mouse button.
• You may point at a city on a map and when
you click a window opens, showing you tourist
information about the city.
• You may point at a word in some text and
when you click you see a definition of the
word.
• You may point at a recognizable iconic button
and when you click some action is performed.
 Three-dimensional interfaces
• There is an increasing use of three dimensional
effects in user interfaces.
• The most obvious example is virtual reality and
augmented reality.
 The WIMP Interfaces
• Currently many common environments for
interactive computing are examples of the WIMP
interface style, often simply called windowing
systems.
• WIMP stands for windows, icons, menus, and
pointers, and is default interface style for the
majority of interactive computer systems.
• There are also many additional interaction
objects and techniques commonly used in WIMP
interfaces, some designed for specific purposes
and others more general.
• Our discussion will cover the toolbars, menus,
buttons, palettes and dialog boxes. Together,
these elements of the WIMP interfaces are called
widgets.
 Windows
• A window can usually contain text or graphics,
and can be moved or resized.
• More than one window can be on a screen at
once, allowing separate tasks to be visible at
the same time.
• Users can direct their attention to the
different windows as they switch from one
thread of work to another.
 Windows
• Usually windows have various things
associated with them that increase their
usefulness.
• Scrollbars are one such attachment, allowing
the user to move the contents of the window
up and down, or from side to side.
• There is usually a title bar attached to the top
of a window, identifying it to the user, and
there may be special boxes in the corners of
the window to aid resizing, closing, or making
as large as possible.
 Icons
• A small picture is used to represent a closed
window, and this representation is known as
an icon.
• By allowing icons, many windows can be
available on the screen at the same time,
ready to be expanded to their full size by
clicking on the icon.
• Icons can also be used to represent other
aspects of the system, such as a wastebasket
for throwing unwanted files into, programs or
functions, that are accessible to the user.
 Pointers
• The mouse provides an input device capable
of such tasks, although joysticks and trackballs
are other alternatives.
• The user is presented with a cursor on the
screen that is controlled by the input device.
• Cursors are also used to tell the user about
system activity.
 Menus
• The last main feature of the windowing system is
the menu, an interaction technique that is
common across many non-windowing systems as
well.
• A menu presents a choice of operations or
services that can be performed by the system at a
given time.
• The pointing device is used to indicate the
desired option. As the pointer moves to the
position of a menu item, the item is usually
highlighted to indicate that it is the potential
candidate for selection
 Menus
• The main menu can be visible to the user all the time,
as a menu bar and submenus can be pulled down or
across from it upon request.
• Menu bars are often placed at the top of the screen or
at the top of each window
• Pop-up menus are often used to present context-
sensitive options, for example allowing one to examine
properties of particular on-screen objects.
• Pull-down menus are dragged down from the title at
the top of the screen, by moving the mouse pointer
into the title par area and pressing the button.
• Fall-down menus are similar, except that the menu
automatically appears when the mouse pointer enters
the title bar, without the user having to press the
button.
• Buttons
– individual and isolated regions within display, that
can be selected by the user to invoke specific
operations.
• Radio Buttons
– Buttons can also be used to toggle between two
states, Such toggle buttons can be grouped
together to allow a user to select one feature form
a set of mutually exclusive options.
• Check boxes
– It is a set of options not mutually exclusive, a set
of toggle buttons can be used to indicate the
on/off status of the options.
• Toolbars
– Many systems have a collection of small buttons, each
with icons, placed at the top or side of the window
and offering commonly used functions.
– The function of this toolbar is similar to a menu bar,
but as the icons are smaller than the equivalent text
more functions can be simultaneously displayed
• Dialog boxes
– Dialog boxes are information used by the system to
bring the user’s attention to some important
information. Possibly an error or a warning used to
prevent a possible error.
– Alternatively, they are used to invoke a sub dialog
between user and system for a very specific task that
will normally be embedded within some larger task.
 HCI Process and Models
• Understand the need of new software
development models
• Understand the importance of user
experience and usability in design
• Consider a scenario: a website is developed of
commerce system. The site is aesthetically
very beautiful, technically it has no flaw and it
has wonderful animated content on it. But if
user is unable to find its desired information
about the products or even he is unable to
find the product out of thousands of products,
so what of it’s use. It is useless from the
business point of view
• Users can only find information 42% of the
time
• 62% of web shoppers give up looking for the
item they want to buy online
• 50% of the potential sales from a site are lost
because people cannot find the item they are
looking for
• 40% of the users who do not return to a site
do so because their first visit resulted in a
negative experience
• 80% of software lifecycle costs occur after the
product is released, in the maintenance phase of
that work, 80 % is due to unmet or unforeseen
user requirements; only 20 % is due to bugs or
reliability problems.
• Around 63% of software projects exceed their
cost estimates. The top four reasons for this are:
– Frequent requests for changes from users
– Overlooked tasks
– Users' lack of understanding of their own
requirements
– Insufficient user-analyst communication and
understanding
 Make the user happy, and your
products will be a success.
• Developers, instead of planning and executing
with their users in mind, end up creating
technological solutions over which they
ultimately have little control.
 Ignorance about users
• It is a sad truth that the digital technology
industry doesn’t have a good understanding of
what it takes to make users happy.
• In fact, most technology products get built
without much understanding of the users.
• We might know what market segment our
users are in. how much money they make,
how much money they like to spend on
weekends, and what sort of cars they buy.
May be we even having a vague idea what
kind of jobs they have and some of the major
tasks that they regularly perform?
 Conflict of Interest
• A second problem affects the ability of vendors
and manufacturers to make users happy.
• There is an important conflict of interest in the
world of digital product development.
• Programmers are often required to choose
between ease of coding and ease of use.
• Because programmers’ performance is typically
judged by their ability to code efficiently.
• It simply isn’t possible for a programmer to
advocate for the user, the business, and the
technology at the same time.
 How can you achieve success
• The third reason that digital technology industry isn’t
cranking out successful products is that it has no
reliable process for doing so.
• Engineering departments follow—or should follow—
rigorous engineering methods that ensure the
feasibility and quality of the technology.
• Similarly, marketing, sales, and other business units
follow their own well-established methods for ensuring
the commercial viability of new products.
• Users although might be able to articulate the
problems with an interaction, are not often capable of
visualizing the solutions to those problems.
• Design is a specialized skill, just like programming.
Programmer would never ask users to help them code;
design problems should be treated differently.
 HCI Process and Methodologies
• Describe the advantages and disadvantages of
different Software Development Lifecycles
• Look at different design models used for
development of software and we also
consider their flaws
 Goal-Directed Design Model
• Underlying the goal-directed approach to
design is the premise that product must
balance business and engineering concerns
with user concerns.
• Goal-Directed Design combines techniques of
ethnography, stakeholder interviews, market
research, product/literature reviews, detailed
user model, scenario-based design, and a core
set of interaction principles and patterns.
• It provides solutions that meet the needs and
goals of users, while also addressing
business/organizational and technical
imperatives. This process can be roughly
divided into five phases.
• Research
• Modeling
• Requirements Definition
• Framework Definition
• Refinement
• These phases follow the five component
activities of interaction design
• Understanding
• Abstracting
• Structuring
• Representing
• Detailing
• with a greater emphasis on modeling user
behaviors and defining system behaviors
 Research
• The research phase employs ethnographic
field study techniques (observation and
contextual interviews) to provide qualitative
data about potential and/or actual users of
the product.
• It also includes competitive product audits,
reviews of market research and technology
white papers, as well as one-on-one
interviews with stakeholders, developers,
subject matter experts (SMEs), and technology
experts as suits the particular domain.
• One of the principles out comes of field
observation and user interviews are an
emergent set of usage patterns
• Identifiable behaviors that help categorize
modes of use of a potential or existing
product.
• These patterns suggest goals and motivations
(specific and general desired outcomes of
using the product).
• In business and technical domains, these
behavior patterns tend to map to professional
roles; for consumer product, they tend to
correspond to lifestyle choices.
• Usage patterns and the goals associated with
them drive the creation of personas in the
modeling phase.
• Market search helps select and filter for valid
persons that fit corporate business models.
• Stakeholder interviews, literature reviews, and
product audits deepen the designers’
understanding of the domain and clarify the
business goals and technical constraints that
the design must support.
 Modeling
• During the modeling phase, usage and
workflow patterns discovered through analysis
of the field research and interviews are
synthesized into domain and user models.
• Domain models can include information flow
and workflow diagrams.
• User models, or personas, are detailed
composite user models that represent distinct
groupings of behavior patterns, goals, and
motivations observed and identified during
the research phase
• Personas serves as the main characters in a
narrative scenario-based approach to design
that iterative generates design concepts in the
framework definition phase.
• Provides feedback that enforces design
consistency and appropriateness in the
refinement phase.
• And represents a powerful communication
tool that helps developers and managers to
understand design basis and to prioritize
features based on user needs.
 Persona type
• Primary: the persona’s needs are sufficiently
unique to require a distinct interface form and
behavior
• Secondary: primary interface serves the needs of
the persona with a minor modification or
addition
• Supplement: the persona’s needs are fully
satisfied by a primary interface
• Served: the persona is not an actual user of the
product, but is indirectly affected by it and its use
• Negative: the persona is created as an explicit,
symbolic example of whom not to design for
 Requirements definition
• Design methods employed by teams during
the requirements definition phase provides
the much-needed connection between user
and other models and the framework of the
design.
• This phase employs scenario-based design
methods, with the important innovation of
focusing the scenarios not on user tasks in the
abstract, but first and foremost of meeting the
goals and needs of specific user personas.
• Personas provide and understanding of which
tasks are truly important and why.
• Leading to an interface that minimize necessary
tasks while maximizing return.
• Personas become the main characters of these
scenarios, and the designers explore the design
space via a form of role-playing.
• For each interface/primary persona the process
of design in the requirements definition phase
involves an analysis of persona data and
functional needs, prioritized and informed by
persona goals, behaviors, and interactions with
other personas in various contexts
• This analysis is accomplished through an
iteratively refined context scenario that start
with a “day in the life” of the persona using
the product
• Describing high-level product touch points,
and thereafter successively defining detail at
ever-deepening levels.
• As this iteration occurs, both business goals
and technical constraints are also considered
and balanced with personas goals and needs.
• The output of this process is a requirements
definition that balances user, business, and
technical requirements of the design to follow.
 Framework definition
• In the framework definition phase, teams
synthesize an interaction framework by
employing two other critical methodological
tools in conjunction with context scenarios.
• The first is a set of general interaction design
principles that, like their visual design
counterparts, provide guidance in determining
appropriate system behavior in a variety of
contexts.
• The second critical methodological tool is a set
of interaction design patterns that encode
general solutions (with variations dependent
on context) to classes of previously analyzed
problems.
• Interaction design patterns are hierarchically
organized and continuously evolve as new
contexts arise.
• Interaction design patterns are hierarchically
organized and continuously evolve as new
contexts arise.
• After data and functional needs are described at
this high level, they are translated into design
elements according to interaction principles and
then organized using patterns and principles into
design sketches and behavior descriptions.
• The output of this process is an interaction
framework definition, a stable design concept
that provides the logical and gross formal
structure for the detail to come.
• Successive iterations of more narrowly focused
scenarios provide this detail in refinement phase.
The approach is often a balance of top-down
design and bottom-up design.
 Refinement
• The refinement phase proceeds similarly to
the framework definition phase, but with
greater focus on task coherence, using key
path and validation scenarios focused on
storyboarding paths through the interface in
high detail.
• The conclusion of the refinement phase is the
detailed documentation of the design, a form
and behavior specification, delivered in either
paper or interactive media as context dictates.
 User Research
• Understand the difference in qualitative and
quantitative research
• Discuss in detail qualitative research
technique
 Qualitative versus Quantitative
Research
• Research is a word that most people associate
with science and objectivity.
• This association isn’t incorrect, but it biases
many people towards the notion that the only
valid sort of research is the kind that yields the
supposed ultimate in objectivity
• Quantitative data
• Data gathered by the hard sciences like physics is
simply different from that gathered on human
activities
• Electrons don’t have moods that vary from
minute to minute.
• Quantitative research can only answer questions
about how much or how many along a few
reductive axes.
• Qualitative research can tell you about what, how
and why.
• Social scientists have long realized that human
behaviors are too complex and subject to too
many variables to rely solely on quantitative data
to understand them.
 The value of qualitative research
• Qualitative research helps us understand the
domain, context and constraints of a product
in different, more useful ways than
quantitative research do.
• It also quickly helps us identify patterns of
behavior among users and potential users of a
product much more quickly and easily than
would be possible with quantitative
approaches.
 qualitative research helps us
understand
• Existing products and how they are used.
• Potential users of new or existing products,
and how they currently approach activities
and problems the new product design hopes
to address
• Technical, business, and environmental
contexts—the domain—of the product to be
designed
• Vocabulary and other social aspects of the
domain in question
• It is the experienced that qualitative method, in
addition to the benefits described above, tend to
be faster, less expensive, more flexible, and more
likely than their quantitative counterparts to
provide useful answers to importent questions
that leads to superior design.
• What problems are people encountering with
their current ways of doing what the product
hopes to do?
• Into what broader contexts in people’s lives does
the product fit and how?
• What are the basic goals people have in using the
product, and what basic tasks help people
accomplish them?
 Types of Qualitative research
• Social science and usability texts are full of
methods and techniques for conducting
qualitative research
• Stakeholder interviews
• Subject matter expert (SME) interviews
• User and customer interviews
• User observation/ethnographic field studies
• Literature review
• Product/prototype and competitive audits
• Stakeholder interviews
– Stakeholders are any key members of the organization
commissioning the design work, and typically include
managers and key contributors from engineering, sales,
product marketing, marketing communications, customer
support, and usability.
– They may also include similar people from other
organizations in business partnership with the
commissioning organization, and executives. Interviews
with stakeholders should occur before any user research
begins
• What is the preliminary vision of the product from
each stakeholder perspective?
• What is the budget and schedule?
• What are the business drivers
• What are the stakeholders’ perceptions of the user?
 Subject matter expert (SME)
interviews
• Experts on the domain within which the product
you are designing will operate. Most SMEs were
users of the product or its predecessors at one
time, and may now be trainers, managers, or
consultants
• SMEs are expert users
• SMEs are knowledgeable
• SMEs are necessary in complex or specialized
domains such as medical, scientific, or financial
services
• You will want access to SMEs throughout the
design process
 User and customer interviews
• It is easy to confuse users with customers. For
consumer products, customers are often the
same as users
• Customers of a product are those people who
make the decision to purchase it
• In the case of most enterprise or technical
products, the customer is someone very
different from the user—often an IT
manager—with distinct goals and needs
• When interviewing customers, you will want
to understand:
• Their goals in purchasing the product
• Their frustrations with current solutions
• Their decision process for purchasing a
product of the type you’re designing
• Their role in installation, maintenance, and
management of the product
• Domain related issues and vocabulary
 User observation
• Most people are incapable of accurately assessing
their own behaviors, especially outside of the
context of their activities.
• It then follows that interviews performed outside
the context of the situations the designer hopes
to document will yield less complete and less
accurate data
• Perhaps the most effective technique for
gathering qualitative user data combines
interviews and observation, allowing the designer
to ask clarifying questions and direct inquiries
about situations and behaviors they observe in
real-time.
 Literature review
• In parallel with stakeholder interviews, the design
team should review any literature pertaining to
the product or its domain.
• This can and should include product marketing
plans, market research, technology specifications
and white papers, business and technical journal
articles in the domain, competitive studies
• The design team should collect this literature, use
it as a basis for developing questions to ask
stakeholders and SMEs, and later use it to supply
addition domain knowledge and vocabulary, and
to check against compiled user data.
 Product and competitive audits
• Also in parallel to stakeholder and SME
interviews, it is often quite helpful for the
design team to examine any existing version
or prototype of the product, as well as its chief
competitors.
• This procedure both familiarizes the team with
the strengths and limitations of what is
currently available to users, and provides a
general idea of the current functional scope of
the product.
 User-Centered Approach
• The user-centered approach means that the real
users and their goals, not just technology, should
be the driving force behind development of a
product
• three key characteristics of interaction design.
• Early focus on users and tasks:
– This means first understanding who the users will be
by directly studying their cognitive, behavioral,
anthropomorphic, and attitudinal characteristics. This
required observing users doing their normal tasks,
studying the nature of those tasks, and then involving
users in the design process.
• Empirical measurement: early in development,
the reactions and performance of intended users
to printed scenarios, manuals, etc, is observed
and measured. Later on, users interact with
simulations and prototypes and their
performance and reactions are observed,
recorded and analyzed.
• Iterative design: when problems are found in user
testing, they are fixed and then more tests and
observations are carried out to see the effects of
the fixes. This means that design and
development is iterative, with cycles of “design,
test, measure, and redesign” being repeated as
often as necessary.
 Applying ethnography in design
• Ethnography is a method that comes originally
from anthropology and literally means “writing
the culture”.
• It has been used in the social sciences to display
the social organization of activities, and hence to
understand work.
• It aims to find the order within an activity rather
than impose any framework of interpretation on
it
• It is a broad-based approach in which users are
observed as they go about their normal activities.
The observers immerse themselves in the users’
environment and participate in their day-today
work, joining in conversations, attending
meetings, reading documents, and so on.
• Preparing for ethnographic interviews
– Identifying candidates
– The personal hypothesis
• What different sorts of people might use this product?
• How might their needs and behaviors vary?
• What ranges of behavior and types of environments
need to be explored?
– Roles in business and customer domains
• People who search for content on the portal
• People who upload and update content on the portal
• People who technically administer the portal
 – Behavioral and demographic variables
• Frequency of shopping (frequent--infrequent)
• Desire to shop (loves to shop—hates to shop)
• Motivation to shop (bargain hunting—searching for just
the right item)
• Putting a plan together
• After you have created a persona hypothesis, complete
with potential roles, behavioral, demographic, and
environmental variables, you then need to create an
interview plan that can be communicated to the person
in charge of providing access to users.
 Contents to be Covered
• User modelling
• Requirements
• Framework and Refinements
• Design Synthesis
• Software Postures and Excise
• Evaluation
• Behaviour and Form
• Users
• Information Retrieval
• Emerging paradigms
 User modelling
• The user models, which we call personas are
based on the behaviors and motivations of real
people and represent them throughout the
design process.
• They are composite prototypes based on
behavioral data gathered from many actual users
through ethnographic interviews.
• We discover out personas during the Research
phase and formalize them in the Modeling phase,
• By understanding our personas, we achieve and
understanding of our users’ goals in specific
context
• A critical tool for translating user data into design
framework.
 Why Model
• Models are used extensively in design,
development, and the sciences.
• They are powerful tools for representing
complex structures and relationships for the
purpose of better understanding or visualizing
them.
• Because we are designing for users, it is
important that we can understand and
visualize the salient aspects of their
relationships with each other, with their social
and physical environment and of course, with
the products we hope to design
• To create a product that must satisfy a broad
audience of users, logic tells you to make it as
broad in its functionality as possible to
accommodate the most people.
• This logic, however, is flawed. The best way to
successfully accommodate a variety of users is
to design for specific types of individuals with
specific needs.
• When you broadly and arbitrarily extend a
product’s functionality to include many
constituencies, you increase the cognitive load
and navigational overhead for all users.
• A simple example of how personas are useful is
shown in figure below, if you try to design an
automobile that pleases every possible driver,
you end up with a car with every possible
feature, but which pleases nobody.
• Software today is too often designed to please
to many users, resulting in low user satisfaction
• But by designing different cars for different
people with different specific goals, as shown
in figure below, we are able to create designs
that other people with similar needs to our
target drivers also find satisfying.
• The same hold true for the design of digital
products and software.
 Strengths of personas as a design tool
• Determine what a product should do and how it should
behave. Persona goals and tasks provide the basis for the
design effort.
• Communicate with stakeholders, developers, and other
designers.
• Personas provide a common language for discussing design
decisions, and also help keep the design centered on users
at every step in the process.
• Build consensus and commitment to the design. With a
common language comes a common understanding.
• Personas reduce the need for elaborate diagrammatic
models because, as it is found, it is easier to understand the
many nuance of user behavior through the narrative
structures that personas employ.
• Measure the design’s effectiveness. Design choices can be
tested on a persona in the same way that they can be show
to a real user during the formative process.
• Although this doesn’t replace the need to test on real
users. It provides a powerful reality check tool for
designers trying to solve design problems. This allows
design iteration to occur rapidly and inexpensively
• Contribute to other product-related efforts such as
marketing and sales plan. It has been seen that clients
repurpose personas across their organization,
informing marketing campaigns, organizational
structure, and other strategic planning activities.
• Business units outside of product development desire
sophisticated knowledge of a product’s users and
typically view personas with great interest.
• Goals motivate usage patterns
– People’s or personas’ goals motivate them to
behave the way they do. Thus, goals provide not
only answer to why and how personas desire to
use a product, but can also serve as a shorthand in
the designer’s mind for the sometimes complex
behaviors in which a persona engages and,
therefore, for the tasks as well.
• Goals must be inferred from qualitative data
– You can’t ask a person what his goals are directly:
Either he won’t be able to articulate them, or he
won’t be accurate or even perfectly honest.
– People simply aren’t well prepared to answer such
questions accurately. Therefore, designers and
researchers need to carefully reconstruct goals from
observed behaviors, answers to other questions,
nonverbal cues, and clues from the environment such
as book titles on shelves.
– One of the most critical tasks in the modeling of
personas is identifying goals and expressing them
briefly: each goal should be expressed as a simple
sentence.
 Goals
• If personas provide the context for sets of
observed behaviors, goals are the drivers behind
those behaviors.
• A persona without goals can still serve as a useful
communication tool, but it remains useless as a
design tools.
• User goals serve as a lens through which
designers must consider the functions of a
product.
• The function and behavior of the product must
address goals via tasks—typically as few tasks as
absolutely necessary.
 User goals
• User personas have user goals. These range
from broad aspirations to highly realistic
product expectations.
• User goals fall into three basic categories
– Life goals
• Life goals represent personal aspirations of the user
that typically go beyond the context of the product
being designed.
• These goals represent deep drives and motivations that
help explain why the user is trying to accomplish the
end goals.
• Be the best at what I do
• Get onto the fast track and win that big promotion
• Learn all there is to know about this field
• Be a paragon of ethics, modesty and trust
– Experience goals
• Experience goals are simple, universal, and personal.
• Experience goals express how someone wants to feel
while using a product or the quality of their interaction
• Don’t make mistakes
• Feel competent and confident
• Have fun
– End goals
• End goals represent the user’s expectations of the
tangible outcomes of using specific product.
• Find the best price
• Process the customer’s order
• Create a numerical model of the business
 Non-user goals
• Customer goals
– Customers, as already discussed, have different
goals than users. The exact nature of these goals
varies quite a bit between consumer and
interprise products.
– Consumer customers are often parents, relatives,
or friends who often have concerns about the
safety and happiness of the persons for whom
they are purchasing the product.
• Corporate goals
– Business and other organizations have their own
requirements for software, and they are as high
level as the personal goals of the individual.
– “To increase our profit” is pretty fundamental to
the broad of directors or the stockholders.
• Increase profit
• Increase market share
• Defeat the competition
• Use resources more efficiently
• Offer more products or services
• Technical goals
– Most of the software-based products we use
everyday are created with technical goals in mind.
Many of these goals ease the task of software
creation, which is a programmer’s goal.
• Save money
• Run in a browser
• Safeguard data integrity
• Increase program execution efficiency
 Constructing personas
• Creating believable and useful personas requires
an equal measure of detailed analysis and
creative synthesis.
• A standardized process aids both of these
activities significantly.
• Process of constructing personas involve
following steps:
– Revisit the persona hypothesis
– Map interview subjects to behavioral variables
– Identify significant behavior patterns
– Synthesize characteristics and relevant goals.
– Check for completeness.
– Develop narratives
– Designate persona types
 Revisit the persona hypothesis
• After you have completed your research and
performed a superficial organization of the data,
you next compare patterns identified in the data
to the assumptions make in the persona
hypothesis.
• If your data is at variance with your assumptions,
you need to add, subtract, or modify the roles
and behaviors you anticipated.
• If the variance is significant enough, you may
consider additional interviews to cover any gaps
in the new behavioral ranges that you’ve
discovered.
 Map interview subjects to behavioral
variables
• After you are satisfied that
you have identified the
entire set of behavioral
variables exhibited by your
interview subjects, the next
step is to map each
interviewee against each
variable range that applies.
 Identify significant behavior patterns
• After you have mapped your interview
subjects, you see clusters of particular
subjects that occur across multiple ranges or
variables.
• A set of subjects who cluster in six to eight
different variables will likely represent a
significant behavior patterns that will form the
basis of a persona
Synthesize characteristic and relevant goals
• For each significant behavior pattern you identify,
you must produce details from your data.
• Describe the potential use environment, typical
workday, current solutions and frustrations, and
relevant relationships with other.
• Goals are the most critical detail to synthesize
from your interviews and observations of
behaviors.
• Goals are best derived from an analysis of the
group of behaviors comprising each persona. By
identifying the logical connections between each
persona’s behaviors, you can begin to assume the
goals that lead to those behaviors.
 Develop narratives
• A narrative should not be longer than one or
two pages of prose.
• The narrative must be natural, contain some
fictional events and reactions, but not a short
story.
• The best narrative quickly introduces the
persona in terms of his job or lifestyle, and
briefly sketches a day in his life, including
irritations, concerns, and interests that have
direct bearing on the product.
 Designate persona types
• By now your personas should feel very much like
a set of real people that you feel you know.
• The final step in persona construction finishes the
process of turning your qualitative research into a
powerful set of design tools.
• Primary
• Secondary
• Supplemental
• Served
• Negative
 Requirements
• Define requirements using persona-based
design
 Requirements
• The Requirement Definition phase determines
the what of the design: what functions our
personas need to use and what kind of
information they must access to accomplish
their goals.
• The following five steps comprise this process:
– Creating problem and vision statement
– Brainstorming
– Identifying persona expectations
– Constructing the context scenario
– Identifying needs
Creating problem and vision statement
• Before beginning any process of ideation, it’s important
for designers to have a clear mandate for moving
forward, even if it is a rather high-level mandate.
• Problem and vision statements provide just such a
mandate and are extremely helpful in building
consensus among stakeholders before the design
process moves forward.
• the problem statement defines the objective of the
design. A design
• Problem statement should concisely reflect a situation
that needs changing, for both the personas and for the
business providing the product to the personas.
• The vision statement is an inversion of the
problem statement that serves as a high-level
design vision or mandate.
• In the vision statement, you lead with the
user’s needs, and transition from those to
how business goals are met by the design
vision.
• For example:
– Company X’s customer satisfaction ratings are low
and market share has diminished by 10% over the
past year because users don’t have adequate tools
to perform X, Y and Z tasks that would help them
meet their goal of G.
• The new design of Product X will help users
achieve G by giving them the ability to perform X,
Y and Z with greater [accuracy, efficiency, and so
on], and without problems A, B, C that they
currently experience. This will dramatically
improve Company X’s customer satisfaction
ratings and leads to increased market share.
• The content of both the problem and vision
statement should come directly from research
and user models.
• User goals and needs should derive from the
primary and secondary personas, and business
goals should be extracted from stakeholder
interviews.
 Brainstorming
• Brainstorming performed at this earlier stage of
Requirements Definition assumes a somewhat ironic
purpose.
• As designers, you may have been researching and
modeling users and the domain for days or even weeks. It
is almost impossible that you have not had design ideas
percolating in your head.
• The reason of brainstorming at this point in the process
is to get these ideas out our heads so we can “let them
go” at least for the time being.
• This serves a primary purpose of eliminating as much
designer bias as possible before launching into scenarios,
preparing the designers to take on the roles of the
primary personas during the scenario process.
 Identifying persona expectations
• The expectations that your persona has for a
product and its context of use is, collectively, that
persona’s mental model of the product.
• It is important that the representation model of
the interface
– how the design behaves and presents itself
– should match the user’s mental model as closely as
possible,
• rather than reflecting the implementation model
of how the product is actually constructed
internally
 Constructing context scenarios
• Scenarios are stories about people and their
activities. Context scenarios are, in fact, the most
story-like of the three types of scenario we
employ, focus is very much on the persona, her
mental models, goals, and activities.
• Context scenarios describe the broad context in
which usage patterns are exhibited and include
environmental and organizational considerations.
• Context scenarios establish the primary touch-
points that each primary and secondary persona
has with the system over the course of a day,
orsome other meaningful length of time that
illuminates modes of frequent and regular use.
• Context scenarios address questions such as the
following
– What is the setting in which the product will be used?
– Will it be used for extended amounts or time?
– Is the persona frequently interrupted?
– Are there multiple users on a single
workstation/device?
– What other products is it used with?
– How much complexity is permissible, based on
persona skill and frequency of use?
– What primary activities does the persona need to
accomplish to meet her goals?
– What is the expected end result of using the product?
 Identifying needs
• After you are satisfied with an initial draft of
your context scenario, you can begin to analyze
it to extract the persona’ needs. These needs
consist of objects and actions as well as
contexts
• Data needs
– Persons’ data needs are the objects and
information that must be represented in the
system. Charts, graphs, status markers, document
types, attributes to be sorted, filtered, or
manipulated, and graphical object types to be
directly manipulated are examples of data needs.
• Functional needs
– Functional needs are the operations that need to be
performed on the objects of the system and which are
eventually translated into interface controls.
Functional needs also define places or containers
where objects or information in the interface must be
displayed.
• Contextual needs and requirements
– Contextual needs describe relationships between sets
of objects or sets of controls, as well as possible
relationship between objects and controls.
– This can include which types of objects to display
together to make sense for workflow or to meet
specific persona goals, as well as how certain objects
must interact with other objects and the skills and
capabilities of the personas using the product.
• Business requirements can include
development timelines, regulations, pricing,
structures, and business models.
• Technical requirements an include weight,
size, form-factor, display, power constraints,
and software platform choices.
• Customer and partner requirements can
include ease of installation, maintenance,
configuration, support costs, and licensing
agreements.
 Framework and Refinements
• Discuss how to build an interaction
framework?
• Discuss how to refine the form and behavior?
 Defining the interaction framework
• The Requirements Definition phase sets the
stage for the core of the design effort:
• defining the interaction framework of the
product.
• The interaction framework defines not only
the skeleton of the interaction
– its structure
– but also the flow and behavior of the product
• The following six steps describe the process of
defining the interaction framework:
1. Defining form factor and input methods
2. Defining views
3. Defining functional and data elements
4. Determining functional groups and hierarchy
5. Sketching the interaction framework
6. Constructing key path scenarios
 DEFINING FORM FACTOR AND INPUT
METHODS
• The first step in creating a framework is defining the
form factor of the product you'll be designing.
– Is it a Web application that will be viewed on a high-
resolution computer screen?
– Is it a phone that must be small, light, low-resolution, and
visible in the dark and as well as in bright sunlight?
– Is it a kiosk that must be rugged to withstand a public
environment with thousands of distracted, novice users?
• What are the constraints that each of these imply for
any design?
• Answering these questions sets the stage for all
subsequent design efforts.
• After you have defined this basic posture of
the product, you should then determine the
valid input methods for the system: Keyboard,
mouse, keypad, thumb-board, touch screen,
voice, game controller, remote control and
many other possibilities exist Which
combination is appropriate for your primary
and secondary personas?
• What is the primary input method for the
product?
 DEFINING VIEWS
• The next step, after basic form factor and
input methods are defined, is to consider
which primary screens or states the product
can be in.
• Initial context scenarios give you a feel for
what these might be:
• They may change or rearrange somewhat as
the design evolves (particularly in step 4), but
it is often helpful to put an initial stake in the
ground to serve as a means for organizing
your thoughts.
• If you know that a user has several end goals
• and needs that don't closely relate to each
other in terms of data overlap, it might be
reasonable to define separate views to
address them.
• On the other hand, if you see a cluster of
related needs (for example, to make an
appointment, you need to see a calendar and
possibly contacts), you might consider
defining a view that incorporates all these
together, assuming the form factor allows it.
 DEFINING FUNCTIONAL AND DATA
ELEMENTS
• Functional and data elements are the visible
representations of functions and data in the
interface.
• They are the concrete manifestations of the
functional and data needs identified during the
Requirements Definition phase.
• Where those needs were purposely described
in terms of real-world objects and actions,
 – Panes, frames, and other containers on screen
Groupings of on-screen and physical controls
– Individual on-screen controls
– Individual buttons, knobs, and other physical
affordances on a device
– Data objects (icons, listed items, images, graphs)
and associated attributes
• Use persona goals, design principles, and
patterns, as well as business and technical
constraints to your list of elements for
meeting particular needs.
 DETERMINING FUNCTIONAL GROUPS
AND HIERARCHY
• After you have a good list of top-level functional and
data elements, you can begin to group them into
functional units and determine their hierarchy.
• Because these elements facilitate specific tasks, the
idea is to group elements to best facilitate the persona
both within a task and between related tasks.
– Which elements are containers for other elements?
– How should containers be arranged to optimize flow?
– Which elements are used together and which aren't?
– In what sequence will a set of related elements be used?
– What interaction patterns and principles apply?
– How do the personas' mental models affect organization?
 SKETCHING THE INTERACTION
FRAMEWORK
• Sketching the framework is an iterative
process that is best performed with a small,
collaborative group of one or two interaction
designers and a visual or industrial designer.
• This visualization of the interface should be
extremely simple at first: boxes representing
each functional group and/or container with
names and descriptions of the relationships
between the different areas
CONSTRUCTING KEY PATH SCENARIOS
• Key path scenarios describe at the task level the primary
actions and pathways through the interface that the
persona takes with the greatest frequency, often on a daily
basis.
• In an e-mail application, for example, viewing and
composing mail are key path activities.
• Key path scenarios generally require the greatest
interaction support.
• New users must master key path interactions and functions
quickly, so they need to be supported by built-in pedagogy.
• However, because these functions are used frequently,
users do not remain dependent on that pedagogy for long:
They will rapidly demand shortcuts.
• In addition, as users become very experienced, they will
want to customize daily use interactions so that they
conform to their individual work styles and preferences.
 Prototyping
• A prototype can be a paper-based outline of a screen
or set screens, an electronic "picture," a video
simulation of a task, a three-dimension paper and
cardboard mockup of a whole workstation, or a simple
stack of hyper-linked screen shots, among other things.
• In fact, a prototype can be anything from a paper-
based storyboard through to a complex piece of
software, and from a cardboard mockup to a molded
or pressed piece of metal.
• A prototype allows stakeholders to interact with an
envisioned product, to gain some experience of using it
in a realistic setting, and to explore imagined uses.
• Prototypes answer questions and support
designers in choosing between alternatives.
• Hence, they serve a variety of purposes: for
example, to test out the technical feasibility of
an idea, to clarify some vague requirements, to
do some user testing and evaluation, or to
check that a certain design direction is
compatible with the rest of the system
development
 Low-fidelity prototyping
• A low-fidelity prototype is one that does not look very
much like the final product.
• For example, it uses materials that are very different
from the intended final version, such as paper and
cardboard rather than electronic screens and metal.
• Low-fidelity prototypes are useful because they tend
to be simple, cheap, and quick to produce.
• This also means that they are simple, cheap, and quick
to modify so they support the exploration of
alternative designs and ideas.
• Low-fidelity prototypes are never intended to be kept
and integrated into the final product. They are for
exploration only.
• Storyboarding
– Storyboarding is one example of low-fidelity prototyping
that is often used in conjunction with scenarios.
– A storyboard consists of a series of sketches showing how
a user might progress through a task using the device
being developed, it can be a series of sketched screens for
a GUI-based software system
• Sketching
– Low-fidelity prototyping often relies on sketching, and
many people find it difficult to engage in this activity
because they are inhibited about the quality of their
drawing.
– Elements you might require in a storyboard sketch, for
example, include "things" such as people, parts of a
computer, desks, books, etc., and actions such as give,
find, transfer, and write. If you are sketching an interface
design, then you might need to draw various icons, dialog
boxes, and so on.
 High-fidelity prototyping
• High-fidelity prototyping uses materials that you
would expect to be in the final product
• Produces a prototype that looks much more like
the final thing. For example, a prototype of a
software system developed in Visual Basic is
higher fidelity than a paper based mockup
• A molded piece of plastic with a dummy keyboard
is a higher-fidelity prototype
• If you are to build a prototype in software, then
clearly you need a software tool to support this.
• Common prototyping tools include Macromedia
Director, Visual Basic, and Smalltalk.
• These are also full-fledged development
environments, so they are powerful tools,
 Design Synthesis
• Understand the design principles
• Discuss the design patterns and design
imperatives
 Interaction Design Principles
• Interaction design principles are generally applicable
guidelines that address issues of behavior, form, and
content.
• They represent characteristics of product behavior
that help users better accomplish their goals and feel
competent and confident while doing so.
• One of the primary purposes principles serve is to
optimize the experience of the user when he
engages with the system.
• In the case of productivity tools and other non-
entertainment oriented products, this optimization
of experience means the minimization of work.
• Kinds of work to be minimized include:
• Logical work
– comprehension of text and organizational structures
• Perceptual work
– decoding visual layouts and semantics of shape,
size, color and representation
• Mnemonic work
– recall of passwords, command vectors, names and
locations of data objects and controls, and other
relationships between objects
• Physical/motor work
– Number of keystrokes, degree of mouse
movement, use of gestures (click, drag, double-
click), switching between input modes, extent of
required navigation
 Design Principles
• Design Principles (Norman)
– Visibility
– Affordance
– Constraints
– Mapping
– Consistency
– Feedback
• Nielsen's design principles:
• Design Principles (Simpson, 1985)
• Design Principles (Shneiderman, 1992)
• Design Principles (Dumas, 1988)
 Software Postures and Excise
• Software Posture
– A program's behavioral stance, the way it presents
itself to the user is its posture.
– The posture of your interface tells you much
about its behavioral stance, which, in turn,
dictates many of the important guidelines for the
rest of the design.
– As an interaction designer, one of your first design
concerns should be ensuring that your interface
presents the posture that is most appropriate for
its behavior and that of your users.
 Postures for the Desktop
• Desktop applications fit into four categories of
posture:
– sovereign,
– transient,
– daemonic,
– Auxiliary
• Each describes a different set of behavioral
attributes, each also describes a different type
of user interaction.
 Sovereign posture
• Programs that are best used full-screen,
monopolizing the user's attention for long
periods of time, are sovereign posture
application.
• Sovereign applications offer a large set of
related functions and features, and users tend
to keep them up and running continuously.
• Good examples of this type of application are
word processors, spreadsheets, and e-mail
applications.
• Users working with sovereign programs often
find themselves in a state of flow.
• Sovereign programs are usually used maximized.
For example, it is hard to imagine using Outlook
in a 3x4 inch window — at that size it's not really
appropriate for its main job, creating and viewing
e-mail and appointments.
• Sovereign programs similarly benefit from rich
input.
• Every frequently used aspect of the program
should be controllable in several ways.
• Direct manipulation, dialog boxes, keyboard
mnemonics, and keyboard accelerators are all
appropriate.
 Transient posture
• A transient posture program comes and goes,
presenting a single, high-relief function with a tightly
restricted set of accompanying controls.
• The program is called when needed, appears, performs
its job, and then quickly leaves, letting the user
continue his more normal activity, usually with a
sovereign application.
• Although a transient program can certainly operate
alone on your desktop, it usually acts in a supporting
role to a sovereign application. For example, calling up
the Explorer to locate and open a file while editing
another with Word is a typical transient scenario.
• So is setting your speaker volume.
• After the user summons a transient program, all
the information and facilities he needs should be
right there on the surface of the program's single
window.
• Keep the user's focus of attention on that
window and never force him into supporting sub
windows or dialog boxes to take care of the main
function of the program.
• It is vital to keep the amount of management'
overhead as low as possible with transient
programs.
• All the user wants to do is call the program up,
request a function, and then end the program.
 Daemonic posture
• Programs that do not normally interact with the
user are daemonic posture programs.
• These programs serve quietly and invisibly in the
background, performing possibly vital tasks
without the need for human intervention.
• A device driver is an excellent example.
• Where a transient program controls the execution
of a function, daemonic programs usually manage
processes.
• daemonic programs generally remain completely
invisible, competently performing their process as
long as your computer is turned on.
 Auxiliary posture
• Programs that blend the characteristics of
sovereign and transient programs exhibit
auxiliary posture.
• The auxiliary program is continuously present like
a sovereign, but it performs only a supporting
role. It is small and is usually superimposed on
another application the way a transient is.
• The Windows taskbar, clock programs,
performance monitors on many Unix platforms,
and Sticky notes on the Mac are all good
examples of auxiliary programs.
 Postures for the Web
• Designers may be tempted to think that the
Web is, by necessity, different from desktop
applications in terms of posture.
• Although there are variations that exhibit
combinations of these postures, the basic four
stances really do cover the needs of most Web
sites and Web.
• Information-oriented sites
– Sites that are purely informational, which require
no complex transactions to take place beyond
navigating from page to page and limited search,
must balance two forces:
– The need to display a reasonable density of useful
information,
– and the need to allow first time and infrequent
users to easily learn and navigate the site.
– This implies a tension between sovereign and
transient attributes in informational sites. Which
stance is more dominant depends largely on who
the target personas are and what their behavior
patterns are when using the site:
– The frequency at which content can be updated
on a site does, in some respects, influence this
behavior:
– Informational sites with daily-updated
information will naturally attract repeat users
more than a monthly-updated site.
– Infrequently updated sites may be used more as
occasional reference (assuming the information is
not too topical) rather than heavy repeat use and
should then be given more of a transient stance
than a sovereign one.
• SOVEREIGN ATTRIBUTES
– Detailed information display is best accomplished by
assuming a sovereign stance. By assuming full-screen
use, designers can take advantage of all the possible
space available to clearly present both the
information itself and the navigational tools and cues
to keep users oriented
– The only difference between the desktop and the Web
from resolution point of view is that Web sites have
little leverage in influencing what screen resolution
users will have.
– Users, however, who are spending money on
expensive desktop productivity applications, will
probably make sure that they have the right hardware
to support the needs of the software.
 TRANSIENT ATTRIBUTES
• The less frequently your primary personas access
the site, the more transient a stance the site
needs to take.
• Sites used for infrequent reference might be
bookmarked by users: You should make it
possible for them to bookmark any page of
information so that they can reliably return to it
at any later time.
• If the site can retain information about past user
actions via cookies or server-side methods and
present information that is organized based on
what interested them previously, this could
dramatically help less frequent users find what
they need with minimal navigation
 Transactional sites and Web
applications
• Transactional Web sites and Web applications have
many of the same tensions between sovereign and
transient stances that informational sites do.
• This is a particular challenge because the level of
interaction can be significantly more complex.
• A good guide is the goals and needs of the primary
personas:
– Are they consumers,
– who will use the site at their discretion, perhaps on a
weekly or monthly basis,
– or are they employees who (for an enterprise or B2B Web
application) must use the site as part of their job on a
daily basis?
• Transactional sites that are used for a significant
part of an employee's job should be considered
full sovereign applications.
• On the other hand, e-commerce, online banking,
and other consumer-oriented transactional sites
must, like informational sites, balance between
sovereign and transient stances very similarly to
informational sites.
• In fact, many consumer transactional sites have a
heavy informational aspect because users like to
research and compare products, investments,
and other items to be transacted upon.
• For these types of sites, navigational clarity is
very important, as is access to supporting
information and the streamlining of transactions
• Amazon.com has addressed many of these
issues quite well, via one-click ordering, good
search and browsing capability, online reviews
of items, recommendation lists, persistent
shopping cart, and tracking of recently viewed
items.
• If Amazon has a fault, it may be that it tries to
do a bit too much: Some of the navigational
links near the bottom of the pages likely don't
get hit very often.
 Postures for Other Platforms
• Web portals
• Kiosks
• Handheld devices
• Appliances
 Excise
• Eliminating Excise
– When we decide to drive to the office, we must open
the garage door, get in, start the motor, back out, and
close the garage door before we even begin the
forward motion that will take us to our destination.
– All these actions are in support of the automobile
rather than in support of getting to the destination
– Excise tasks, on the other hand, don't contribute
directly to reaching the goal, but are necessary to
accomplishing it just the same.
– Such tasks include opening and closing the garage
door, starting the engine, and stopping at traffic lights,
in addition to putting oil and gas in the car and
performing periodic maintenance.
 What Is Excise
• Excise is the extra work that satisfies either the
needs of our tools or those of outside agents as
we try to achieve our objectives.
• The distinction is sometimes hard to see because
we get so used to the excise being part of our
tasks.
• Software, too, has a pretty clear dividing line
between goal-directed tasks and excise tasks.
• The problem with excise tasks is that the effort
we expend in doing them doesn’t go directly
towards accomplishing our goals.
• Where we can eliminate the need for excise
tasks, we make the user more effective and
productive and improve the usability of the
software.
• The most important thing to realize about
navigation is that, in almost all cases, it
represents pure excise, or something close to
it.
• Except in games where the goal is to navigate
successfully through a maze of obstacles,
navigating through software does not meet
user goals, needs, or desires.
• Unnecessary or difficult navigation thus
becomes a major frustration to users.
 Evaluation
• Understand what evaluation is in the
development process
• Understand different evaluation paradigms
and technique
 What to evaluate
• There is a huge variety of interactive products
with a vast array of features that need to be
evaluated.
• Evaluation is needed to check that users can use
the product and like it.
• Furthermore, nowadays users look for much
more than just a usable system.
• "User experience" encompasses all aspects of the
end-user's interaction ... The first requirement for
an exemplary user experience is to meet the
exact needs of the customer, without fuss or
bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that
produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to
use.
 When to evaluate
• The product being developed may be a
brand-new product or an upgrade of an
existing product.
• If the product is new, then considerable time
is usually invested in market research.
• Designers often support this process by
developing mockups of the potential product
that are used to elicit reactions from
potential users.
• As well as helping to assess market need, this
activity contributes to understanding users'
needs and early requirements.
• In the case of an upgrade, there is limited
scope for change and attention is focused on
improving the overall product.
• This type of design is well suited to usability
engineering in which evaluations compare
user performance and attitudes with those for
previous versions.
• Some products, such as office systems, go
through many versions, and successful
products may reach double-digit version
numbers.
• Evaluations done during design to check that the
product continues to meet users' needs are
known as formative evaluations.
• Evaluations that are done to assess the success of
a finished product, such as those to satisfy a
sponsoring agency or to check that a standard is
being upheld, are known as summative
evaluation.
• Agencies such as National Institute of Standards
and Technology (NIST) in the USA, the
International Standards Organization (ISO) and
the British Standards Institute (BSI) set standards
by which products produced by others are
evaluated.
 Evaluation paradigms and techniques
• Any kind of evaluation, whether it is a user
study or not, is guided either explicitly or
implicitly by a set of beliefs that may also he
supported by a theory.
• These beliefs and the practices (i.e., the
methods or techniques) associated with them
are known as an evaluation paradigm,
• we identify four core evaluation paradigms:
– quick and dirty evaluations
– usability testing
– field studies
– predictive evaluation.
 "Quick and dirty" evaluation
• A "quick and dirty" evaluation is a common
practice in which designers informally get
feedback from users or consultants to confirm
that their ideas are in line with users" needs and
are liked.
• "Quick and dirty" evaluations can be done at any
stage and the emphasis is on fast input rather
than carefully documented findings.
• For example, early in design developers may
meet informally with users to get feedback on
ideas.
• This approach is often called "quick and dirty"
because it is meant to be done in a short space of
time. Getting this kind of feedback is an essential
ingredient of successful design.
 Usability testing
• Usability testing involves measuring typical users’
performance on carefully prepared tasks that are
typical of those for which the system was
designed.
• Users’ performance is generally measured in
terms of number of errors and time to complete
the task.
• As the users perform these tasks, they are
watched and recorded on video and by logging
their interactions with software.
• This observational data is used to calculate
performance times, identify errors, and help
explain why the users did what they did.
• User satisfaction questionnaires and interviews
are also used to elicit users’ opinions.
• Typically tests take place in laboratory-like
conditions that are controlled.
• Casual visitors are not allowed and telephone
calls are stopped, and there is no possibility of
talking to colleagues, checking email, or doing
any of the other tasks that most of us rapidly
switch among in our normal lives.
• Everything that the participant does is
recorded. every key press, comment, pause,
expression, etc., so that it can be used as data.
• Some evaluators then summarize this data in a
usability specification so that developers can
use it to test future prototypes or versions of
the product against it.
• Optimal performance levels and minimal
levels of acceptance are often specified and
current levels noted.
• Changes in the design can then be agreed and
engineered.
 Field studies
• The distinguishing feature of field studies is
that they are done in natural settings with the
aim of increasing understanding about what
users do naturally and how technology
impacts them.
• In product design, field studies can be used to
– help identify opportunities for new technology
– determine requirements for design
– facilitate the introduction of technology
– evaluate technology
• There are two overall approaches to field
studies.
• The first involves observing explicitly and
recording what is happening, as an outsider
looking on.
• Qualitative techniques are used to collect the
data, which may then he analyzed
qualitatively or quantitatively.
• For example, the number of times a particular
event is observed may be presented in a bar
graph with means and standard deviations.
• In some field studies the evaluator may be an
insider or even a participant.
• Ethnography is a particular type of insider
evaluation in which the aim is to explore the
details of what happens in a particular social
setting.
 Predictive evaluation
• In predictive evaluations experts apply their
knowledge of typical users, often guided by
heuristics, to predict usability problems.
• Another approach involves theoretically based
• models.
• The key feature of predictive evaluation is that
users need not be present, which makes the
process quick, relatively inexpensive, and thus
attractive to companies.
• but it has limitations.
• In recent years heuristic evaluation in which
experts review the software product guided by
tried and tested heuristics has become popular
• New sets of heuristics are also needed that are
aimed at evaluating different classes of
interactive products.
• In particular, specific heuristics are needed that
are tailored to evaluating web based products,
mobile devices, collaborative technologies,
computerized toys, etc.
• These should be based on a combination of
usability and user experience goals, new research
findings and market research.
 DECIDE: A framework to guide
evaluation
• Determine the overall goals that the
evaluation addresses.
• Explore the specific questions to be answered.
• Choose the evaluation paradigm and
techniques to answer the questions.
• Identify the practical issues that must be
addressed, such as selecting participants.
• Decide how to deal with the ethical issues.
• Evaluate, interpret, and present the data
 Determine the goals
• Goals should guide an evaluation, so determining
what these goals are is the first step in planning
an evaluation.
• For example, we can restate the general goal
statements just mentioned more clearly as:
– Check that the evaluators have understood the users’
needs.
– Identify the metaphor on which to base the design.
– Check to ensure that the final interface is consistent.
– Investigate the degree to which technology influences
working practices.
– Identify how the interface of an existing product could
be engineered to improve its usability.
 Explore the questions
• In order to make goals operational, questions that
must be answered to satisfy them have to be
identified.
• For example, the goal of finding out why many
customers prefer to purchase paper airline tickets over
the counter rather than e-tickets can he broken down
into a number of relevant questions for investigation.
– What are customers’ attitudes to these new tickets?
– Perhaps they don't trust the system and are not sure that
they will actually get on the flight without a ticket in their
hand.
– Do customers have adequate access to computers to
make bookings?
– Are they concerned about security? Does this electronic
system have a bad reputation?
– Is the user interface to the ticketing system so poor that
they can't use it?
• Questions can be broken down into very
specific sub-questions to make the evaluation
even more specific.
– For example, what does it mean to ask, "Is the
user interface poor?":
– Is the system difficult to navigate?
– Is the terminology confusing because it is
inconsistent?
– Is response time too slow?
– Is the feedback confusing or maybe insufficient?
 Choose the evaluation paradigm and
techniques
• Having identified the goals and main questions,
the next step is to choose the evaluation
paradigm and techniques.
• the evaluation paradigm determines the kinds of
techniques that are used.
• Practical and ethical issues must also be
considered and trade-offs made.
• For example, what seems to be the most
appropriate set of techniques may be too
expensive, or may take too long, or may require
equipment or expertise that is not available, so
compromises are needed.
 Identify the practical issues
• There are many practical issues to consider
when doing any kind of evaluation
• it is important to identify them before
starting.
• Some issues that should be considered include
– users, facilities and equipment, schedules and
budgets, and evaluators' expertise.
• Depending on the availability of resources,
compromises may involve adapting or
substituting techniques
 Decide how to deal with the ethical
issues
• The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
and many other professional organizations
provide ethical codes that they expect their
members to uphold, particularly if their activities
involve other human beings.
• For example, people's privacy should be
protected, which means that their name should
not be associated with data collected about them
or disclosed in written reports (unless they give
permission).
• Personal records containing details about health,
employment, education, financial status, and
where participants live should be confidential.
 Evaluate, interpret, and present the
data
• Choosing the evaluation paradigm and
techniques to answer the questions that
satisfy the evaluation goal is an important
step.
• So is identifying the practical and ethical
issues to be resolved.
• However, decisions are also needed about
what data to collect, how to analyze it, and
how to present the findings to the
development team.
• To a great extent the technique used
determines the type of data collected, but
there are still some choices.
– For example, should the data be treated
statistically?
– If qualitative data is collected, how should it be
analyzed and represented?
– Is the technique reliable?
– Will the approach measure what is intended, i.e.,
what is its validity?
– Are biases creeping in that will distort the results?
– Are the results generalizable, i.e., what is their
scope?
 Behavior & Form
• Understand the significance of undo
• Discuss file and save
• Discuss Unified Document Management
• Understand considerate and smart software
• Understand the Principles of visual interface
design
 Observing User
• Discuss the benefits and challenges of
different types of observation.
• Discuss how to collect, analyze and present
data from observational evaluation.
 What and when to observe
• Observing is useful at any time during product
development.
• Early in design, observation helps designers
understand users' needs.
• Other types of observation are done later to
examine whether the developing prototype
meets users' needs.
• Depending on the type of study, evaluators
may be onlookers, participant observers, or
ethnographers.
 How to observe
• The same basic data-collection tools are used
for laboratory and field studies (i.e., direct
observation, taking notes, collecting video,
etc.)
• but the way in which they are used is
different.
• In the laboratory the emphasis is on the
details of what individuals do,
• While in the field the context is important and
the focus is on how people interact with each
other, the technology, and their environment.
• Furthermore, the equipment in the laboratory
is usually set up in advance and is relatively
static whereas in the field it usually must be
moved around.
• In controlled environments
– The role of the observer is to first collect and then
make sense of the stream of data on video,
audiotapes, or notes made while watching users
in a controlled environment.
– One camera might record facial expressions,
another might focus on mouse and keyboard
activity, and another might record a broad view of
the participant and capture body language.
• The stream of data from the cameras is fed into a video
editing and analysis suite where it is interpreted and
partially edited.
• Another form of data that can be collected is an
interaction log. This records all the user's key presses.
• Mobile usability laboratories, can also be used as the
name suggests, are intended to be moved around
• Usually it is taken to a customer's site where a
temporary laboratory environment is created.
• An informed consent form should be available for users
to read and sign at the beginning of the study.
• A script is also needed to guide how users are greeted,
and to tell them the goals of the study, how long it will
last, and to explain their rights.
• It is also important to make users feel comfortable and
at ease
 In the field
• Whether the observer sets out to be an outsider
or an insider, events in the field can be complex
and rapidly changing.
• There is a lot for evaluators to think about, so
many experts have a framework to structure and
focus their observation.
• For example, this is a practitioner's framework
that focuses on just three easy to remember
items to look for:
– The Person. Who is using the technology at any
particular time?
– The Place. Where are they using it?
– The Thing. What are they doing with it?
• Frameworks like the one above help observers
to keep their goals and questions in sight.
• Experienced observers may, however, prefer
more detailed frame works such as the one
below, which encourages observers to pay
greater attention to the context of events, the
people and the technology:
• Who is present?
• How would you characterize them?
• What is their role?
• What is happening?
• What are people doing and saying and how are they
behaving?
• Does any of this behavior appear routine?
• What is their tone and body language?
• When does the activity occur? How is it related to
other activities?
• Where is it happening? Do physical conditions play a
role?
• What precipitated the event or interaction? Do people
have different perspectives?
• How is the activity organized? What rules or norms
influence behavior?
• These frameworks are useful not only for
providing focus but also for organizing the
observation and data-collection activity.
• Below is a checklist of things to plan before going
into the field.
– State the initial study goal and questions clearly.
– Select a framework to guide your activity in the field.
– Decide how to record events—i.e., as notes, on audio,
or on video, or using a combination of all three.
– Be prepared to go through your notes and other
records as soon as possible
– after each evaluation session to flesh out detail and
check ambiguities with other observers or with the
people being observed.
• As you make and review your notes, try to
highlight and separate personal opinion from what
happens.
• Be prepared to re focus your study as you analyze
and reflect upon what you see.
• Having observed for a while, you will start to
identify interesting phenomena that seem
relevant.
• Think about how you will gain the acceptance and
trust of those you observe.
• Adopting a similar style of dress and finding out
what interests the group and showing enthusiasm
for what they do will help.
 Asking Users: Interviews
• Interviews can be thought of as a "conversation with a
purpose”
• How like an ordinary conversation the interview is
depends on the '' questions to be answered and the
type of interview method used.
• There are four main types of interviews:
– open-ended or unstructured, structured, semi-structured,
and group interviews.
• The first three types are named according to how much
control the interviewer imposes on the conversation by
following a predetermined set of questions.
• The fourth involves a small group guided by an
interviewer who facilitates discussion of a specified set
of topics.
• Unstructured interviews
– Open-ended or unstructured interviews are at one
end of a spectrum of how much control the
interviewer has on the process.
– They are more like conversations that focus on a
particular topic and may often go into considerable
depth
– Both interviewer and interviewee can maneuver
the interview. Thus one of the skills necessary for
this type of interviewing is to make sure that
answers to relevant questions are obtained.
– It is therefore advisable to be organized and have a
plan of the main things to be covered.
• Structured interviews
– Structured interviews pose predetermined
questions similar to those in a questionnaire.
– Structured interviews are useful when the study's
goals are clearly understood and specific questions
can be identified.
– Responses may involve selecting from a set of
options that are read aloud or presented on paper.
– The questions should be refined by asking another
evaluator to review them
• Semi-structured interviews
– Semi-structured interviews combine features of
structured and unstructured interviews and use
both closed and open questions.
– For consistency the interviewer has a basic script
for guidance, so that the same topics are covered
with each interviewee.
– The interviewer starts with preplanned questions
and then probes the interviewee to say more until
no new relevant information is forthcoming.
• Group interviews
– One form of group interview is the focus group that
is frequently used in marketing, political
campaigning, and social sciences research.
– Normally three to 10 people are involved.
– Participants are selected to provide a
representative sample of typical users; they
normally share certain characteristics.
– For example, in an evaluation of a university
website, a group of administrators, faculty, and
students may be called to form three separate
focus groups because they use the web for
different purposes.
 questionnaires
• Questionnaires are a well-established technique
for collecting demographic data and users'
opinions.
• Questionnaires can be used on their own or in
• conjunction with other methods to clarify or
deepen understanding.
• One advantage of questionnaires is that they can
be distributed to a large number of people. Used
in this way, they provide evidence of wide general
opinion.
• On the other hand, structured interviews are easy
and quick to conduct in situations in which people
will not stop to complete a questionnaire
 walkthroughs
• Walkthroughs are an alternative approach to
heuristic evaluation for predicting users’
problems without doing user testing.
• As the name suggests, they involve walking
through a task with the system and noting
problematic usability features.
• Most walkthrough techniques do not involve
users. Others, such as pluralistic walkthroughs,
involve a team that includes users, developers,
and usability specialists.
• Cognitive walkthroughs
– Cognitive walkthroughs involve simulating a user's
problem-solving process at each step in the
human-computer dialog, checking to see if the
user's goals and memory for actions can be
assumed to lead to the next correct action.“
• Pluralistic walkthroughs
– "Pluralistic walkthroughs are another type of
walkthrough in which users, developers and
usability experts work together to step through a
[task] scenario, discussing usability issues
associated with dialog elements involved in the
scenario steps"
– Each group of experts is asked to assume the role
of typical users.
 Information Retrieval
• Discuss how to communicate
• Learn how to retrieve the information
 Audible feedback
• In data-entry environments, clerks sit for hours in
front of computer screens entering data.
• These users may well he examining source
documents and typing by touch instead of
looking at the screen.
• If a clerk enters something erroneous, he needs
to be informed of it via both auditory and visual
feedback.
• The clerk can then use his sense of hearing to
monitor the success of his inputs while he keeps
his eyes on the document.
 NEGATIVE AUDIBLE FEEDBACK:
• People frequently counter the idea of audible
feedback with arguments that users don't like it.
• Users are offended by the sounds that computers
make, and they don't like to have their computer
beeping at them.
• This is likely true based on how computer sounds
are widely used today people have been
conditioned by these unfortunate facts:
– Computers have always accompanied error messages
with alarming noises.
– Computer noises have always been loud,
monotonous and unpleasant.
• Emitting noise when something bad happens is
called negative audible feedback.
 POSITIVE AUDIBLE FEEDBACK
• When success with our tools yields a sound, it is
called positive audible feedback.
• Our software tools are mostly silent; all we hear
is the quiet click of the keyboard.
• The effectiveness of positive audible feedback
originates in human sensitivity. Nobody likes to
be told that they have failed.
• Error message boxes are negative feedback,
telling the user that he has done something
wrong.
• Silence can ensure that the user knows this
without actually being told of the failure.
• Of course, the audible feedback must be at the
right volume for the situation
 Improving Data Retrieval
• In the physical world, storing and retrieving are
inevitably linked; putting an item on a shelf
(storing it) also gives us the means to find it later
(retrieving it}.
• A storage system is a method for safekeeping
goods in a repository.
• It is a physical system composed of a container
and the tools necessary to put objects in and take
them back out again.
• A retrieval system is a method for finding goods
in a repository. It is a logical system that allows
the; goods to be located according to some
abstract value, like name, position or some
aspect of the; contents
 Indexed retrieval
• This system of everything in its proper place
sounds pretty good, but it has a flaw:
• It is limited in scale by human memory.
Although it works for the books, hammers,
and spoons in your house,
• it doesn't work at all for the volumes stored,
for example, in the Library.
• The solution was an index, a collection of
records that allows you to find the location of
an item by looking up an attribute of the item,
such as its name.
 Storage and Retrieval in the Digital
World
• In most of today's computer systems, there is no
retrieval system other than the storage system.
• If you want to find a file on disk you need to
know its name and its place.
• Although our desktop computers can handle
hundreds of different indices, we ignore this
capability and have no indices at all pointing into
the files stored on our disks.
• Instead, we have to remember where we put our
files and what we called them in order to find
them again.
 Retrieval methods
• There are three fundamental ways to find a
document on a computer.
– You can find it by remembering where you left it
in the file structure, by positional retrieval.
– You can find it by remembering its identifying
name, by identity retrieval.
– The third method, associative or attributed-based
retrieval, is based on the ability to search for a
document based on some inherent quality of the
document itself.
• For example
– if you want to find a book with a red cover, or one
that discusses light rail transit systems,
– or one that contains photographs of steam train,
– or one that mentions Theodore Judah.
• Both positional and identity retrieval are
methods that also function as storage
systems, and on computers, which can sort
reasonably well by name, they are practically
one and the same.
• An attribute-based retrieval system would enable
us to find our documents by their contents.
• For example, we could find all documents that
contain the text string "super elevation".
• For such a search system to really be effective, it
should know where all documents can be found,
• so the user doesn't have to say "Go look in such-
and-such a directory and find all documents that
mention "super elevation.“
• A well-crafted, attribute-based retrieval system
would also enable the user to browse by
synonym or related topics or by assigning
attributes to individual documents.
• The user can then & dynamically define sets of
documents having these overlapping attributes.
 Emerging Paradigms
• Understand the role of information architecture
• Understand the importance of accessibility
 Metadata
• When it comes to definitions, metadata is a slippery
fish. Describing it as "data about data" isn't very
helpful.
• In data processing, meta-data is definitional data that
provides information about or documentation of other
data managed within an application or environment.
• For example, meta-data would document data about
data elements or attributes (name, size, data type,
• etc) and data about records or data structures (length,
fields, columns, etc) and data about data (where it is
located, how it is associated, ownership, etc.).
• Meta-data may include descriptive information about
the context, quality and condition, or characteristics of
the data.
• Metadata tags are used to describe
documents, pages, images, software, video
and audio
• files, and other content objects for the
purposes of improved navigation and
retrieval.
• Many companies today are using metadata in
more sophisticated ways.
• Leveraging content management software and
controlled vocabularies, they create dynamic
meta data-driven web sites that support
distributed authoring and powerful
navigation.
 Controlled Vocabularies
• A controlled vocabulary is an organized
arrangement of words and phrases used to index
content and/or to retrieve content through
browsing or searching.
• It typically includes preferred and variant terms
and has a defined scope or describes a specific
domain.
• Vocabulary control comes in many shapes and
sizes.
• At its most vague, a controlled vocabulary is any
defined subset of natural language.
• At its simplest, a controlled vocabulary is a list of
equivalent terms in the form of a synonym ring,
or a list of preferred terms in the form of an
authority file.
 Thesauri
• Dictionary.com defines thesaurus as a "book
of synonyms, often including related and
contrasting words and antonyms.“
• Like the reference book, thesaurus is a
semantic network of concepts, connecting
words to their synonyms, homonyms,
antonyms, broader and narrower terms, and
related terms.
 Accessibility
• Accessibility is a general term used to describe
the degree to which a system is usable by as
many people as possible without modification.
• It is not to be confused with usability which is
used to describe how easily a thing can be
used by any type of user.
• One meaning of accessibility specifically
focuses on people with disabilities and their
use of assistive devices such as screen reading
web browsers or wheelchairs.
 Web Accessibility
• Most people today can hardly conceive of life
without the Internet.
• It provides access to information, news, email,
shopping, and entertainment.
• The Internet, with its ability to serve out
information at any hour of the day or night
about practically any topic conceivable, has
become a way of life for an impatient,
information-hungry generation.
• Now, at the click of a mouse, the world can be "at
your fingertips“
– that is, if you can use a mouse...
– and if you can see the screen...
– and if you can hear the audio
– in other words, if you don't have a disability of any
kind.
• Before focusing on the challenges that people
with disabilities face when trying to access web
content,
• it makes more sense to discuss the ways in which
the Internet offers incredible opportunities to
people with disabilities that were never before
possible.
 Web Offers Unprecedented
Opportunities
• With the advent of the World Wide Web, many
newspapers now publish their content
electronically in a format that can be read by text-
to-speech synthesizer software programs (often
called "screen readers") used by the blind.
• the use of eye-tracking software that allows
people to use a computer with nothing more
than eye movements.
• People with tremors may use a special keyboard
with raised ridges in-between the keys so that
they can place their hand down on the keyboard
and then type the letters, rather than risk typing
the wrong keys.
• people with cognitive disabilities benefit from
illustrations and graphics, as well as from
properly-organized content with headings, lists,
and visual cues in the navigation.
• Web developers must implement
accommodations that are more specific to people
with disabilities.
• For example, developers can add links that allow
blind users or people with motor disabilities who
cannot use a mouse to skip past the navigational
links at the top of the page.
• People without disabilities may choose to use
this feature as well, but they will usually ignore it.