Human Computer Interaction (HCI): Important Things To Know

What are the goals for user requirements analysis?
1. Ascertain the user's needs
2. Ensure reliability
3. Promote standardization, integration, consistency, and portability
4. Complete projects on time and within budget

What does ascertaining the user's needs include?
1. Determining what tasks must be carried out
2. Include tasks that are only carried out occasionally
3. Functionality must match needs

What does ensure reliability include?
1. Actions must function as specified
2. Database data displayed must reflect the actual database
3. Appease the user's sense of mistrust
4. The system should be available as often as possible
5. The system must not introduce errors
6. Ensure the user's privacy and data security.

What does promote standardization, integration, consistency, and portability include?
1. Use pre-existing industry standards where they exist to aid learning and avoid errors
2. The product should be able to run across different software tools and packages

What are the 5 usability evaluation measures?
1. Time to learn
2. Speed of performance
3. Rate of errors by users
4. Retention over time
5. Subjective satisfaction

What is retention over time?
Retaining knowledge of how to use the interface

How is subjective satisfaction achieved?
By allowing for user feedback via interviews, free-form comments, and satisfaction scales.

What are the usability motivations for life-critical systems?
1. High costs, reliability, and effectiveness are expected
2. Length training periods are acceptable despite the financial cost to provide error-free performance
3. Subject satisfaction is less an issue due to well motivated users

What are the usability motivations for industrial and commercial uses?
1. Ease of learning is import to reduce training costs
2. Speed and error rates are relative to cost
3. Speed of performance is important because of the number of transactions
4. Subjective satisfaction is fairly important to limit operator burnout

What are the usability motivations for office, home, and entertainment applications?
1. Ease of learning, low error rates, and subjective satisfaction are paramount due to use is often discretionary and competition fierce
2. Infrequent use of some applications means interfaces must be intuitive and easy to use online help is important
3. Choosing functionality is difficult because the population has a wide range of both novice and expert users
4. Competition cause the need for low cost

What are the usability motivations for exploratory, creative, and cooperative systems?
1. Collaborative work
2. Benchmarks are hard to describe for exploratory tasks and device users
3. With these applications, the computer should be transparent so that the user can be absorbed in their task domain

What are the usability motivations for social-technical systems?
1. Trust, privacy, responsibility, and security are issues
2. Verifiable sources and status feedback are important
3. Ease of learning for novices and feedback to build trust
4. Administrators need tools to detect unusual patterns of usage

What is universal usability?
The ability for anyone to use the interface, regardless of disabilities.

What do explanatory theories involve?
1. Observing behavior
2. Describing activity
3. Conceiving of designs
4. Comparing high-level concepts of two designs
5. Training

What do predictive theories involve?
Enabling designers to compare proposed designs for execution time or error rates

What are Norman's 7 stages of action?
1. Forming the goal
2. Forming the intention
3. Specifying the action
4. Executing the action
5. Perceiving the system state
6. Interpreting the system state
7. Evaluating the outcome

What are Norman's contributions?
1. Context of cycles of action and evaluation
2. Gulf of execution
3. Gulf of evaluation

What is gulf of execution?
Mismatch between the user's intentions and the allowable actions

What is gulf of evaluation?
Mismatch between the system's representation and the user's expectations

What is the disappearance of syntax?
Syntactical knowledge that works across different systems.
Copy = CTRL+C, CMD+C
or familiar objects/actions representing a task

What are the 4 steps of ethnographic observation?
1. Preparation
2. Field Study
3. Analysis
4. Reporting

What is involved in the preparation of ethnographic observation?
1. Understand organization policies and work culture
2. Familiarize yourself with the system and its history
3. Set initial goals and prepare questions
4. Gain access and permission to observe/interview

What is involved in the field study of ethnographic observation?
1. Establish rapport with manager and users
2. Observe/interview users in their workplace and collect subjective/objective quantitative/qualitative data
3. Follow any leads that emerge from the visits

What is involved in the analysis of ethnographic observation?
1. Compile the collected data in numerical, textual, and multimedia databases
2. Quantify data and compile statistics
3. Reduce and interpret the data
4. Refine the goals and the process used

What is involved in the reporting of ethnographic observation?
1. Consider multiple audiences and goals
2. Prepare a report and present the findings

What is participatory design?
Involving the user in the design process. This increases user acceptable of the final system

What are the different types of usability testing?
1. Paper mockups
2. Discount usability testing
3. Competitive usability testing
4. Universal usability testing
5. Field test and portable labs
6. Remote usability testing
7. Can-you-break-this tests

What the types of expert review methods?
1. Heuristic evaluation
2. Guidelines review
3. Consistency inspection
4. Cognitive walkthrough
5. Metaphors of human thinking
6. Formal usability inspection

What is the difference between controlled experiments and usability testing?
Controlled experiments follow the scientific method, while usability testing observes the user

What are the special features of 3D interfaces?
1. Use occlusion, shadows, perspective, and other techniques carefully
2. Minimize number of navigation steps
3. Keep text readable
4. Avoid unnecessary visual clutter/distraction
5. Simplify user/object movement
6. Prevent errors
7. Organize groups of items to allow for rapid visual search

What are the special features of teleoperation?
1. Direct manipulation in personal computers and process control in complex environments
2. Physical operation is remote

What are the special features of virtual reality?
1. Breaks physical limitations of space, allowing users to act as though they were somewhere else
2. Show information about real world by tracking movements in a computer model

What are the special features of augmented reality?
1. Shows the real world with an overlay of additional interaction
2. Show information about real world by tracking movements in a computer model

What are the advantages of direct manipulation?
1. Visually presents task concepts
2. Allows easy learning
3. Allows easy retention
4. Allows errors to be avoided
5. Encourages exploration
6. Affords high subjective satisfaction

What are the disadvantages of direct manipulation?
1. Spatial/Visual representations can be too spread out
2. Designs may force valuable information off of the screen
3. Users must learn the graphical representations
4. The visual representation may be misleading
5. Typing commands with the keyboard may be faster

What technologies do successful visual environments depend on?
1. Visual display
2. Head-position sensing
3. Hand-position sensing
4. Force feedback
5. Sound input and output
6. Other sensations
7. Cooperative and competitive virtual reality