CSC 341 Human-Computer Interaction

1. CSC 341Human-Computer Interaction Lecture 2 PACT Analysis

2. Announcements • Attendance sheet • Please turn in HW1 • Course website • Project ideas • Deadline for requirements analysis Oct. 1st.

3. Components of Good Design http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/7150/1/7150.pdf

4. Components of Good Design http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/7150/1/7150.pdf

5. Past PC • Not considering users who used the PC • Systems developed by programmers who used computers for everyday work • Designers played computer games for years Forgetting how difficult and obscure some of their designs can be to people who have not had these experience Dr Ayman Ezzat modified version of Dr, Frank Kriwaczek

6. Now PC • Web and mobile dramatically changed the age of HCI • E-commerce • E-Guiding • E-Learning • E…………. • Before the immediacy of e-commerce, usability problems were only discovered after purchase. • If you bought a nice looking MP3 player and brought it home only to find it was difficult to use, you could not take it back! • The shop would say that it delivers its functions, all you had to do was to learn how to operate it properly. (read the manual!) Dr Ayman Ezzat modified version of Dr, Frank Kriwaczek

7. The era of HCI Usability • People are trying to accomplish their tasks in life. (system independent) • Ex: Call a friend to make dinner plans (iOS or Android doesn’t matter) • Introduce a system: User Interface should maximize their ability. task person system

8. Why usability? • “A central concern of interaction design is to develop interactive products that are usable.” • “By this is generally meant: • easyto learn, • effectiveto use, • and providing an enjoyable user experience.” • A good place to start thinking about how to design usable interactive products is to compare examples of well-and poorly-designed ones. Through identifying the specific weaknesses and strengths of different interactive systems, we can begin to understand what it means for something to be usable or not.” [Section 1.2]

9. Example: hotel voice mail system • You read the instructions: • ‘1. Touch 41.’ • The system responds: ‘You have reached the Sunny Hotel voice message center. Please enter the room number for which you would like to leave a message.’ • You wait to hear how to listen to a recorded message. But there are no further instructions from the phone. You look down at the instruction sheet again and read: • ‘2. Touch*, your room number, and #.’ • You do so and the system replies: ‘You have reached the mailbox for room 106. To leave a message, type in your password.’

10. Example: hotel voice mail system • You call hotel reception. They explain the process • You realize it takes 5 steps to record a message and 6 steps to retrieve it • You go out and buy a cell phone!

11. What went wrong?

12. What went wrong? • Inefficient: the system requires too many steps to perform basic tasks • Difficult to learn: instructions were not clear • Unintuitive: you cannot see at a glance what needs to be done • Confusing: with many options and it is unclear how to reach the desired one • Difficult to use.

13. Example 1: hotel voice mail system

14. What makes it better?

15. What makes it better? • Efficient: the system requires only one step to perform basic tasks • Easy to learn: simple but elegant design • Intuitive: you can see at a glance what needs to be done • Easy to use. • Aesthetically pleasing and enjoyable to use

16. … but there’s a problem!

17. … but there’s a problem! • No way to authenticate: anyone can listen to messages • Marbles can get lost • Hotel guests can take marbles as a souvenir • Not suitable for the context of use • Maybe useful at a house with no young children.

18. PACT analysis • People • Activity • Context • Technology

19. PACT analysis • People undertake activities, in contexts using technologies. • A student uses a phone to send a text message whilst sitting on a bus • Air traffic controllers work together using computers and flight strips to ensure smooth running of an airport in the air traffic control center. • A 70-year-old woman presses various buttons to set the intruder alarm in her house. • It is the variety in each of the PACT elements and their combination that makes interactive systems design so challenging and interesting.

20. PACT analysis • People • Activity • Context • Technology

21. People • Physical differences • Height, weight, different capabilities in sight, hearing, touch,… • Psychological differences • Different ways of working; different memory abilities, spatial ability; different amounts of attention at different times; ability to recognize things or remember things. Different ‘mental models’ • Usage differences • Experts versus novices, discretionary users of technologies, differences in designing for a heterogeneous group or a homogeneous group

22. Psychological differences • Differences in perception and attention • Differences in memory - short term and long term • Differences in mental models

23. Mental models • Also known as conceptual models… • …mental models describe the ways in which we think about things - about how we conceptualize things. • a key aspect of the design of technologies is to provide people with a clear model, … so that they will develop a clear mental model • … but of course that depends on what they know already, their background, experiences, etc. etc.

24. Anna is the online sales agent, designed to be subtly different for UK and US customers • Does she meet users’ expectations in both countries? • How would you envision an interface like this in Egypt?

25. PACT analysis • People • Activity • Context • Technology

26. Activities • Designers need to understand the kind of activities people are doing when interacting with products. • The appropriateness of different kinds of interfaces and arrangements of input and output devices depends on what kinds of activities are to be supported. • For example, if the activity is to enable people to bank online, then an interface that is secure, trustworthy, and easy to navigate is essential. • The world is full of technologies that support increasingly diverse activities: send messages, gather information, write essays, control power plants, program, draw, plan, calculate, monitor others, play games – to name but a few.

27. Example: Gpstv in car Need to characterize user activities and prioritize them. Which ones are safe? Which ones are crucial?

28. Characteristics of activities • Temporal aspects (frequent or infrequent): • Making a call versus changing phone battery • Safety-critical or not: • Controlling car brakes versus turning up the volume for the ratio • Data-intensive or not • Filling forms versus swiping a card • Vague or well-defined • Online shopping or browsing versus searching a specific item

29. PACT analysis • People • Activity • Context • Technology

30. Context • ‘Context’ sometimes means things that surround an activity and sometimes what glues an activity together • Physical environment is one sort of context • ATM or ticket machine versus computer at home • Social context is important • Help from others, acceptability of certain designs • Organizational context • Management structure, differing work environments, etc.

31. PACT analysis • People • Activity • Context • Technology

32. technology • Hardware and software to consider • Suitability of medium for different contexts/activities • • Input • How to enter data and commands into the system: point and click versus typing, etc. • • Output • Characteristics of display, content, and feedback

33. Which technology? • Multitouch, • speech, • graphical user interface, • head-mounted display,  • augmented reality, • gesture-based

34. That was a trick question! • If you make a decision about technology without being aware of the people, activities, and context of a specific problem, you end up overlooking crucial requirements

35. 5 minutes break

36. From PACT to Requirements

37. From pact to Requirements • Activities (and the contexts in which they occur) establish requirementsfor technologies • Technologiesoffer opportunities to undertake activities in different ways • Designers try to design technologies within some domain (a ‘sphere of activity’) to meet requirements • In designing technology (which may be hardware, or software, or both), they may also change people’s activities Dr Ayman Ezzat modified version of Dr, Frank Kriwaczek

38. What are requirements? • A requirement is a statement about an intended product that specifies what it should do or how it should perform. • For example, a requirement for a website might be that the time to download any complete page is less than 5 seconds.  • We need to make sure that the requirements are as clear as possible and that we understand how to tell when they have been fulfilled.

39. The process of interaction design • The process of interaction design involves four basic activities: • Establishing requirements • Designing alternatives • Prototyping • Evaluating.

40. The process of interaction design Reqs Analysis Design Evaluate Develop A process for HCI production to ensure usability goals are met

41. The process of interaction design Reqs Analysis Design Evaluate Develop many iterations

42. Example: • Imagine you have been asked to design an application to enable people to share their photos, movies, music, chats, documents, and so on in an efficient, safe, and enjoyable way. • What would you do? • How would you start?

43. How would you start? • Sketching out how the interface might look? • Work out how the system architecture should be structured? • Simply start coding? • Ask users about their current experiences of sharing files? • Look at existing tools, e.g. Dropbox, and, based on this, begin thinking about why and how you were going to design the application?

44. How would you start? • Sketching out how the interface might look? • Work out how the system architecture should be structured? • Simply start coding? • Ask users about their current experiences of sharing files? • Look at existing tools, e.g. Dropbox, and, based on this, begin thinking about why and how you were going to design the application?

45. Think.. Understand.. conceptualize • Having a clear understanding of why and how you are going to design something, before writing any code, can save enormous amounts of time, effort, and money later on in the design process. • Once ideas are realized into code, it becomes a lot harder to throw them away

46. Establishing requirements • Whatever the aim of the project, the users' needs, requirements, aspirations, and expectations have to be discussed, refined, clarified, and probably re-scoped. • This requires an understanding of the users and their capabilities, their current tasks and goals, the conditions under which the product will be used, and constraints on the product's performance. • We seek a stable set of requirements that forms the basis for the design phase

48. Usability is hard • People (users) are all different • People are unpredictable • Design skill isn’t enough • Evaluation with users is required • Designer’s pride • New ways to think, break out of the box • Programmers stink at Usability

49. Usability is hard Programmers stink at Usability • don’t think like ‘normal’ people • know the software internals, technology first • enjoy systems more than people • arrogant (my software!)

50. Principles of Co-Design • The user  rather than being a passive recipient of a product or service, becomes an active co-designer of the product or service