CCT 333: Imagining the Audience in a Wired World

CCT 333: Imagining the Audience in a Wired World Class 3 : People, Activities, Context and Technologies

Norman’s Principles • (Continued from last week…see other two in last week notes) • Constraints • Mapping • Consistency • Affordances

Constraints • Does the system deliberately constrain the user’s potential? • Why would you want to constrain certain paths of action? • Physical, logical and cultural constraints

Mapping • Does the system mimic existing logical and cultural spatial/temporal relations? • Problems with arbitrary or random mapping

Consistency • Does a given action produce similar results every time? • Is the interface consistent with similar products?

Affordances • Does the design provide intuitive clues on what can or should be done? • An overused word?

PACT • People • Activities • Context • Technologies • Holistic, interdependent relations among these factors

People • Or, people come in different shapes and sizes • User groups are rarely monolithic or homogeneous - often a range of complexity to consider • Limits can be considered or maintained (and is often done - examples?) but should be done with utmost care

Physical differences • Height/weight • Strength and ability differences (coupled with age or training) • Use of senses • Physical abilities

Psychological/Social • Language variety and ability • Cultural, social and religious custom • Learning styles (e.g., multiple intelligences) • Attention and memory • Mental models

Use Differences • People of different sizes and backgrounds have different needs • Novice/experienced users • Lay/expert users • Irregular/Regular users • Organizational/Broad Social contexts - a range of abilities, skills, requirements

Activities • Or, people of different shapes and sizes need/want to do different things • Purpose of activity and what enables/constraints it • Also unintendend purposes and consequences - many of which you want to design against (esp. since people have a tendency to do what they want, not what they need, should or must do…)

Temporal Dimension • Regular vs. infrequent activity - e.g., twenty times a day vs. once every twenty yrs. • Time as pressure - does it work when necessary or under acute load? • Continuous vs. discrete action - one-off action vs. process, and how process is handled • Response time - does it react reliably as required? Synchronous vs. asynchronous

Cooperation and Complexity • Solo work or requires cooperation with others (if so, interdependencies and bottlenecks become critical variables) • Defined vs. vague tasks - defined can be programmed and controlled, vague requires a lot more flexibility

Safety and Error • Some tasks are mission-critical - failure is not an option • Handling error and unintended consequence - users behave in mysterious ways (and we shouldn’t be surprised by this…) • Error and unsafe use - not just user education, but also buy-in

Task and Mediation • Input methods • Data structures • Information Flow • Output methods • Feedback • Not just important in computing - physical examples?

Context • Or, different people do different things in a range of environments (some of which you can’t easily control) • Contextual factors may greatly impact people and what tools they use to deal with their tasks - or may be easily predictable and planned for…

Physical Context • Indoors? Outdoors? • Mobile? Stationary? (Implications to Access?) • Loud? Quiet? • Busy? Still? • Dangerous? Safe?

Social/Org Contexts • Access to assistance? • Social norms of use (and their evolution?) • Organizational - internal conflict between individual and collective goals? (CSCW examples?)

Technologies • The things that a range of diverse people use to accomplish an equally diverse range of tasks in particular contexts (getting confusing yet? It should be…) • Technology broadly defined - realization and formalization of technique (Ellul) • Design issues similar to #9 and #10 of “activity” section (task and mediation…)

Cui Bono? A slice of healthy skepticism • Two definitions and its sources • a) figurative/actual - to what good purpose? • b) literal - who benefits? • Technology is rarely the answer to all social or organizational problems • Esp. in environment of thoughtless technology hype, asking this question helps.

Design Cycles • Balancing these (often conflicting) principles is the whole point (and the whole problem • “There are no rules…and here they are.” (McCloud, 2006)

(Universal?) Elements of Design • Users and their Requirements • Conceptual Design • Physical Design • Protoyping/Evaluation • Evaluation and Testing

CCT 333: Imagining the Audience in a Wired World