HCI revision lecture

1. HCI revision lecture

2. Main points • Understanding • Applying knowledge • Knowing key points • Knowing relationship between things • If you’ve done the group project work from start to finish then you’re quite well prepared for the exam

3. Exam format • All four questions • 1.5 hours • Mixture of structured questions and essay-style answers • 100% in 90 mins • Spend 54 secs per % • Gives guidance as to how much I expect in an answer

4. User-centered design • Definition - target audience, user needs etc. • Task analysis - identify user’s goals, tasks, strategies, current tools, problems and thoughts on future • Design • Prototype - create alternative solutions (usually low-fi) • Test - walk-through with users, get feedback, choose design • Redesign • Build - in stages, soliciting user feedback on key issues and problems - iterate the design cycle, evaluating the system in-situ, looking at task working, errors, etc • Acceptance testing, benchmark assessment: run final tests and evaluation to uncover remaining issues. Run benchmarks against competitors to show solution meets objectives

5. Design Creativity • Understand and be able to use different approaches • Brainstorming • Matrix • Impossible combinations • Future envisaging • Inspiration tray

6. Personas • What are they? • What are they used for? • Design guidance • Communication • Characteristics • Overview, day in life, work, leisure, goals, skills, impact, demography, technological awareness, communications, international,quotes, references

7. Ethnography • What is it? • What does it give you? • What tools does it use? • E.g. cultural probes

8. Questionnaires • What are they used for? • What are the main points to consider in the design? • Objectives, sampling, writing, administering, interpreting • How to write questionnaire • Subjective vs objective, qualitative vs quantitative

9. How to ask questions • Open vs closed • Clarity • Leading questions • Ambiguity • Multiple part questions • Embarrasing questions • Hypothetical questions • Prestige bias • Dealing with “don’t know”

10. Prototyping • Approaches • Low-fi • Paper sketches • Post-its • Med-fi • Powerpoint • Web pages • Screenshots • Hi-fi • Reduced functionality systems • Animation systems

11. Prototyping: why? • Easy and fast to do • Focuses on the critical elements • Allows high-level concepts to be quickly explored • Easy for designers and users to modify • Rapid iteration • Focus for discussion • Cheap

12. Guidelines • Why have them? • What are some typical ones? • With examples • Web and interface

13. Evaluation • Think-aloud • user-driven usage, verbally identifying usability or confusion problems through actions • Cooperative evaluation • User and designer discussing issues, answering questions, exploring interface • Heuristic evaluation • basic guidelines plus domain-specific ones, expert eval to see if site conforms or does not. • And heuristics….. • Cognitive walkthrough • detailed set of actions and screens from programmers, expert assessment to see if actions obvious, visible, and achievable • Expect to identify usability problems, comprehension issues, confusions, possibly speed/performance issues

14. Other issues covered • Your project • Know what you did, why, how you worked with users, what impact that had • UCD in practice • Ethics • What are ethical considerations, examples