CIT 3441: HUMAN COMPUTER

INTERFACE

Lecture PowerPoints

1
 INTRODUCTION

Usability of Interactive Systems

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 Topics Covered

• Introduction
• Usability Requirements
• Usability Measures
• Usability Motivations
• Universal Usability
• Goals for Our Profession
• Practitioner's Summary
• Researcher's Agenda

3
 Introduction

• The Interdisciplinary Design Science of Human-

Computer Interaction (HCI) combines knowledge and
methods associated with professionals including:
– Psychologists (incl. Experimental, Educational, Social and
Industrial Psychologists)
– Computer Scientists
– Instructional and Graphic Designers
– Technical Writers
– Human Factors and Ergonomics Experts
– Anthropologists and Sociologists

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 Introduction (continued)

• What are the Ramifications?

– Success Stories: Microsoft, Linux, Amazon.com, Google
– Competition: Firefox vs. Internet Explorer
– Copyright Infringement Suits - Apple vs. Microsoft (Windows)
and Napster vs. The music industry
– Mergers: AOL and Time Warner
– Corporate Takeovers: IBM's seizure of Lotus
– Privacy and Security issues: identification theft, medical
information, viruses, spam, pornography, national security

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 Introduction (continued)
• Individual User Level
– Routine processes: tax return preparation
– Decision support: a doctor’s diagnosis and treatment
– Education and training: encyclopedias, drill-and-practice
exercises, simulations
– Leisure: music and sports information
– User generated content: social networking web sites, photo and
video share sites, user communities
– Internet-enabled devices and communication

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 Introduction (continued)

• Communities
– Business use: financial planning, publishing applications
– Industries and professions: web resources for journals, and
career opportunities
– Family use: entertainment, games and communication
– Globalization: language and culture

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 Introduction (continued)
• The new “look and feel” of computers (Mac)

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 Introduction (continued)
• The new “look and feel” of computers (Vista)

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 Introduction (concluded)
• And smaller devices doing more…

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 Usability requirements

• Synonyms for “user-friendly” in Microsoft Word

2002 are easy to use; accessible;
comprehensible; intelligible; idiot proof;
available; and ready
• But a “friend” also seeks to help and be
valuable. A friend is not only understandable,
but understands. A friend is reliable and doesn’t
hurt. A friend is pleasant to be with.
• These measures are still subjective and vague,
so a systematic process is necessary to develop
usable systems for specific users in a specific
context

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 Usability requirements (cont.)
• The U.S. Human Engineering Design Criteria for Military
Systems (1999) states these purposes:
– Achieve required performance by operator, control, and
maintenance personnel
– Minimize skill and personnel requirements and training time
– Achieve required reliability of personnel-equipment/software
combinations
– Foster design standardization within and among systems
• Should improving the user’s quality of life and the
community also be objectives?
• Usability requires project management and careful
attention to requirements analysis and testing for clearly
defined objectives

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 Goals for requirements analysis

• Ascertain the user’s needs

– Determine what tasks and subtasks must be carried out
– Include tasks which are only performed occasionally.
Common tasks are easy to identify.
– Functionality must match need or else users will reject or
underutilize the product

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 Goals for requirements analysis

• Ensure reliability
– Actions must function as specified
– Database data displayed must reflect the actual database
– Appease the user's sense of mistrust
– The system should be available as often as possible
– The system must not introduce errors
– Ensure the user's privacy and data security by protecting
against unwarranted access, destruction of data, and
malicious tampering

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 Goals for requirements analysis
• Promote standardization, integration, consistency,
and portability
– Standardization: use pre-existing industry standards where
they exist to aid learning and avoid errors (e.g. the W3C and
ISO standards)
– Integration: the product should be able to run across different
software tools and packages (e.g. Unix)
– Consistency:
• compatibility across different product versions
• compatibility with related paper and other non-computer based
systems
• use common action sequences, terms, units, colors, etc. within
the program
– Portability: allow for the user to convert data across multiple
software and hardware environments

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 Goals for requirements analysis

• Complete projects on time and within budget

– Late or over budget products can create serious pressure
within a company and potentially mean dissatisfied customers
and loss of business to competitors

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 Usability measures
• Define the target user community and class of tasks associated with
the interface
• Communities evolve and change (e.g. the interface to information
services for the U.S. Library of Congress)
• 5 human factors central to community evaluation:
– Time to learn
How long does it take for typical members of the community to learn
relevant task?
– Speed of performance
How long does it take to perform relevant benchmarks?
– Rate of errors by users
How many and what kinds of errors are made during benchmark tasks?
– Retention over time
Frequency of use and ease of learning help make for better user
retention
– Subjective satisfaction
Allow for user feedback via interviews, free-form comments and
satisfaction scales

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 Usability measures (cont.)

• Trade-offs in design options frequently occur.

– Changes to the interface in a new version may create
consistency problems with the previous version, but the changes
may improve the interface in other ways or introduce new
needed functionality.
• Design alternatives can be evaluated by
designers and users via mockups or high-fidelity
prototypes.
– The basic tradeoff is getting feedback early and perhaps less
expensively in the development process versus having a more
authentic interface evaluated.

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 Usability motivations

Many interfaces are poorly designed and this is

true across domains:
• Life-critical systems
– Air traffic control, nuclear reactors, power utilities, police & fire
dispatch systems, medical equipment
– High costs, reliability and effectiveness are expected
– Length training periods are acceptable despite the financial cost
to provide error-free performance and avoid the low frequency
but high cost errors
– Subject satisfaction is less an issue due to well motivated users

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 Usability motivations (cont.)

• Industrial and commercial uses

– Banking, insurance, order entry, inventory management,
reservation, billing, and point-of-sales systems
– Ease of learning is important to reduce training costs
– Speed and error rates are relative to cost
– Speed of performance is important because of the number of
transactions
– Subjective satisfaction is fairly important to limit operator
burnout

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 Usability motivations (cont.)

• Office, home, and entertainment applications

– Word processing, electronic mail, computer conferencing, and
video game systems, educational packages, search engines,
mobile device, etc.
– Ease of learning, low error rates, and subjective satisfaction
are paramount due to use is often discretionary and
competition fierce
– Infrequent use of some applications means interfaces must be
intuitive and easy to use online help is important
– Choosing functionality is difficult because the population has a
wide range of both novice and expert users
– Competition cause the need for low cost
– New games and gaming devices!
• For example, Nintendo Wii

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 Usability motivations (cont.)

• Exploratory, creative, and cooperative systems

– Web browsing, search engines, artist toolkits, architectural
design, software development, music composition, and
scientific modeling systems
– Collaborative work
– Benchmarks are hard to describe for exploratory tasks and
device users
– With these applications, the computer should be transparent so
that the user can be absorbed in their task domain

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 Usability motivations (cont.)

• Social-technical systems
– Complex systems that involve many people over long time
periods
– Voting, health support, identity verification, crime reporting
– Trust, privacy, responsibility, and security are issues
– Verifiable sources and status feedback are important
– Ease of learning for novices and feedback to build trust
– Administrators need tools to detect unusual patterns of usage

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 Universal Usability
• The ultimate goal in Usability is addressing the needs of
all users.
• Experience shows that that rethinking interface designs
for differing situations often results in a better product for
all users.

• Physical abilities and physical workplaces

– Accommodating diverse human perceptual, cognitive, and motor
abilities is a challenge to every designer.
– Basic data about human dimensions comes from research in
anthropometry
– There is no average user, either compromises must be made or
multiple versions of a system must be created
– Physical measurement of human dimensions are not enough,
take into account dyna1m -24ic measures such as reach, strength or
 Universal Usability (cont.)
– Screen-brightness preferences vary substantially, designers
customarily provide a knob to enable user control
– Account for variances of the user population's sense perception
– Vision: depth, contrast, color blindness, and motion sensitivity
– Touch: keyboard and touchscreen sensitivity
– Hearing: audio clues must be distinct
– Workplace design can both help and hinder work performance

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 Universal Usability (cont.)

• The standard ANSI/HFES 100-2007 Human Factors

Engineering of Computer Workstations (2007) lists these
concerns:
– Work-surface and display-support height
– Clearance under work surface for legs
– Work-surface width and depth
– Adjustability of heights and angles for chairs and work surfaces
– Posture - seating depth and angle; back-rest height and lumbar
support
– Availability of armrests, footrests, and palmrests

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 Universal Usability (cont.)

• Cognitive and perceptual abilities

– A vital foundation for interactive-system designers is an
understanding of the cognitive and perceptual abilities of users.
– The human ability to interpret sensory input rapidly and to initiate
complex actions makes modern computer systems possible
– The journal Ergonomics Abstracts offers this classification of
human cognitive processes:
• Long-term and semantic memory
• Short-term and working memory
• Problem solving and reasoning
• Decision making and risk assessment
• Language communication and comprehension
• Search, imagery, and sensory memory
• Learning, skill development, knowledge acquisition, and
concept attainment

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 Universal Usability (cont.)
– They also suggest this set of factors affecting perceptual and
motor performance:
• Arousal and vigilance
• Fatigue and sleep deprivation
• Perceptual (mental) load
• Knowledge of results and feedback
• Monotony and boredom
• Sensory deprivation
• Nutrition and diet
• Fear, anxiety, mood, and emotion
• Drugs, smoking, and alcohol
• Physiological rhythms
– These factors have a profound influence on the quality of the
design of most interactive systems.
– But note, in any application, background experience and
knowledge in the task domain and the interface domain play key
roles in learning and performance
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 Universal Usability (cont.)
• Personality differences
– Some people dislike computers or are made anxious by them
– Others are attracted to or are eager to use computers
– A clear understanding of personality and cognitive styles can be
helpful in designing interfaces for a specific community of users
– Unfortunately, there is no set taxonomy for identifying user
personality types
– Designers must be aware that populations are subdivided and
that these subdivisions have various responses to different
stimuli
– A popular technique is Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
• extroversion versus introversion
• sensing versus intuition
• perceptive versus judging
• feeling versus thinking
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 Universal Usability (cont.)
• Cultural and international diversity
– Another perspective on individual differences has to do with
cultural, ethnic, racial, or linguistic background
– Designers are still struggling to establish guidelines for designing
for multiple languages and cultures
– User design concerns for internationalization include the following
• Characters, numerals, special characters, and diacriticals
• Left-to-right versus right-to-left versus vertical input and reading
• Date and time formats
• Numeric and currency formats
• Weights and measures
• Telephone numbers and addresses
• Names and titles (Mr., Ms., Mme.)
• Social-security, national identification, and passport numbers
• Capitalization and punctuation
• Sorting sequences
• Icons, buttons, colors
• Pluralization, grammar, spelling
• Etiquette, policies, tone, formality, metaphors
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 Universal Usability (cont.)

• Users with physical challenges

– Designers must plan early to accommodate users with
disabilities
– Early planning is more cost efficient than adding on later
– Businesses must comply with the "Americans With Disabilities"
Act for some applications

• Older Adult Users

– Including the elderly is fairly easy
• Designers should allow for variability within their applications
via settings for sound, color, brightness, font sizes, etc. with
less distracting animation

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 Universal Usability (cont.)

• Younger users
– Uses emphasize entertainment and education

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 Universal Usability (concluded)

• Accomodating hardware and software diversity

– Designers need to support a wide range of hardware and
software platforms.
– The rapid progress in technology means newer systems may
have many times greater storage capacity, faster processors,
and higher bandwidth networks
– The challenge of accommodating diverse hardware is coupled
with the need to ensure access through many generations of
software. Backward compatibility should be provided in user
interface design and file structures.
– For the next decade, three main technical challenges are
• Producing satisfying and effective Internet interaction on high-speed
(broadband) and slower (dial-up and some wireless) connections.
• Enabling access to web services from large displays (1200 x 1600
pixels or larger) and smaller mobile devices (640 x 480 and smaller)
• Supporting easy maintenance of or automatic conversion to multiple
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 Goals for our Profession

• Influencing academic and industrial researchers

– The scientific method for interface research, based on controlled
experimentation, has this basic outline:
• Understanding of a practical problem and related theory
• Lucid statement of a testable hypothesis
• Manipulation of a small number of independent variables
• Measurement of specific dependent variables
• Careful selection and assignment of subjects
• Control for bias in subjects, procedures, and materials
• Application of statistical tests
• Interpretation of results, refinement of theory, and guidance for
experimenters

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 Goals for our Profession (cont.)

• There are many directions for research, for example:

– Reducing anxiety and fear of computer usage
– Graceful evolution
– Specification and implementation of interaction
– Direct manipulation
– Social media participation
– Input devices
– Online assistance
– Information exploration

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 Goals for our profession (concluded)
• Providing tools, techniques, and knowledge for
system implementers
– Rapid prototyping is easy when using contemporary tools
– Use general or self-determined guideline documents written for
specific audiences
– To refine systems, use feedback from individual or groups of
users
• Raising the computer consciousness of the general
public
– Many novice users are fearful due to experience with poor
product design
– Good designs help novices through these fears by being clear,
competent, and nonthreatening

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 Practitioner's Summary

• If you are designing an interactive system, thorough user

and task analyses can provide the information for a
proper functional design.
• A positive outcome is more likely if you pay attention to
– reliability, availability, security, integrity, standardization,
portability, integration, and the administrative issues of
schedules and budgets.
• As design alternatives are proposed,
– they can be evaluated for their role in providing short learning
times, rapid task performance, low error rates, ease of retention,
and high user satisfaction.
• Designs that accommodate the needs of
– children, older adults, and users with disabilities can improve the
quality for all users.
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 Practitioner's Summary (concluded)

• As your design is refined and implemented,

– evaluation by pilot studies, expert reviews, usability tests, user
observations, and acceptance tests can accelerate
improvement.
• The rapidly growing literature and sets of design
guidelines may be of assistance in
– developing your project standards and practices and in
accommodating the increasingly diverse and growing community
of users.
• The criteria for success in product development are
shifting from testimonials by a few enthusiastic users
– to hard evidence that universal usability is being attained.

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 Researcher's Agenda

• The criteria for success in research are shifting to

innovations that work for broad communities of users
performing useful tasks over longer time periods.
• At the same time, researchers are struggling to
understand what kinds of imaginative consumer products
will attract, engage, and satisfy diverse populations.
• The opportunities for researchers are unlimited.
– There are so many interesting, important, and doable projects
that it may be hard to choose a direction.
• The goal of universal usability through plasticity of
interface designs will keep researchers busy for years.
• Getting past vague promises and measuring user
performance with alternate interfaces will be central to
rapid progress.
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 Researcher's Agenda (concluded)

• Each experiment has two parents:

– the practical problems facing designers,
– and the fundamental theories based on principles of human
behavior and interface design.
• Begin by proposing a lucid, testable hypothesis.
• Then consider the appropriate research methodology,
conduct the experiment, collect the data, and analyze
the results.
• Each experiment also has three children:
– specific recommendations for the practical problem,
– refinements of theories,
– and guidance to future experimenters.

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