Bathtub control

• User’s goals: – Warm bath – Right amount of water • Psychological variables – Temperature & water depth • Physical variables – Cold water flow rate – Warm water flow rate

Design exercise

Design the perfect bathtub control.

1. Assume you have unlimited budget 2. Bath control only… no shower.

3. Think about mapping controls to the users goals (physical variables).

HCI Design Step 1

• Knowing the user – Users are distinct individuals – They have similar architectures • Learning and memory for items is similar • Motor, visual and hearing performance is similar • HCI design is user-center Design – Changing the system to fit the user.

– Not the other way around.

What do we need to know about people?

• Perception • Memory • Vision • Information Processing • Mental Models • Learning • Skill • Individual Differences

Don’t make me think?

Same or Different?

A A A A A a A A A a A B

Even simple decisions require thought and depend on context

Things that make us think

Jobs Employment Opportunities Job-o-Rama

The Model of Human Processor

• The Perceptual System – Seeing, hearing, touching, (smelling, tasting) • The Motor System – Movement • The Cognitive System – learning, reasoning, and problem solving,

What we need to know about users • They forget • They make mistakes • Behavior is guided by prior knowledge

They forget

• Short Term Memory – limited duration (200ms - 30 sec) – limited capacity (7 ± 2 chunks) • Design implications – Misinterpreted and overused (e.g. menu size) – Use to watch for memory demands of the UI – it is hard to remember much information from one step in a process to another (leave information on the screen) – Task chunking leads to “closure”

Pay Attention ….

5476926264

What is the number?

5476926264

Pay Attention ….

505 646 6222

What is the number?

505 646 6222

• Information can be grouped into chunked so that we can increase our short-term memory to 7 +/- 2 chunks

Another Example

T HEC ATR ANU PTH ETR EE

What is the String?

• THE CAT RAN UP THE TREE • T HEC ATR ANU PTH ETR EE • Patterns and meanings helps to increase capacity of short-term memory.

They forget

• Long Term Memory – is organized and associative but imperfect – recognition is easier than recall • Design implications – provide meaningful retrieval cues – visibility is important (e.g. menus) • but it has to make sense – cues must be easily discriminated • e.g. is it “options” or “properties”

• Half of you close your eyes.

• Now, the other half close your eyes.

How many saw

• Bagel • Coffee • Newspaper • -------------- • Freeway • Traffic • Jam

Memory

• Involves first encoding and then retrieving knowledge • We don’t remember everything - involves filtering and processing what is attended to • Context is important in affecting our memory (i.e., where, when) • Well known fact that we recognize things much better than being able to recall things – Better at remembering images than words – Why interfaces are largely visual

Processing in memory

• Encoding is first stage of memory – determines which information is attended to in the environment and how it is interpreted • The more attention paid to something, • And the more it is processed in terms of thinking about it and comparing it with other knowledge, • The more likely it is to be remembered – e.g., when learning about HCI, it is much better to reflect upon it, carry out exercises, have discussions with others about it, and write notes than just passively read a book, listen to a lecture or watch a video about it

Context is important

• Context affects the extent to which information can be subsequently retrieved • Sometimes it can be difficult for people to recall information that was encoded in a different context – e.g., You are on a train and someone comes up to you and says hello. You don’t recognize him for a few moments but then realize it is one of your neighbors. You are only used to seeing your neighbor in the hallway of your apartment block and seeing him out of context makes him difficult to recognize initially

Activity

• Try to remember the dates of your grandparents’ birthday • Try to remember the cover of the last two DVDs or you bought or rented • Which was easiest? Why?

• People are very good at remembering visual cues about things – e.g., the color of items, the location of objects and marks on an object • They find it more difficult to learn and remember arbitrary material – e.g., birthdays and phone numbers

Recognition versus recall

• Command-based interfaces require users to recall from memory a name from a possible set of 100s • GUIs provide visually-based options that users need only browse through until they recognize one • Web browsers, MP3 players, etc., provide lists of visited URLs, song titles etc., that support recognition memory

The problem with the classic ‘7



2’

• George Miller’s theory of how much information people can remember • People’s immediate memory capacity is very limited • Many designers have been led to believe that this is useful finding for interaction design

What some designers get up to… • Present only 7 options on a menu • Display only 7 icons on a tool bar • Have no more than 7 bullets in a list • Place only 7 items on a pull down menu • Place only 7 tabs on the top of a website page – But this is wrong? Why?

Why?

• Inappropriate application of the theory • People can scan lists of bullets, tabs, menu items till they see the one they want • They don’t have to recall them from memory having only briefly heard or seen them • Sometimes a small number of items is good design • But it depends on task and available screen estate

Personal information management • Personal information management (PIM) is a growing problem for most users – Who have vast numbers of documents, images, music files, video clips, emails, attachments, bookmarks, etc., – Major problem is deciding where and how to save them all, then remembering what they were called and where to find them again – Naming most common means of encoding them – Trying to remember a name of a file created some time back can be very difficult, especially when have 1000s and 1000s – How might such a process be facilitated taking into account people’s memory abilities?

Personal information

processes

management

• Memory involves 2 processes – recall-directed and recognition-based scanning • File management systems should be designed to optimize both kinds of memory – e.g., Search box and history list • Help users encode files in richer ways – Provide them with ways of saving files using colour, flagging, image, flexible text, time stamping, etc

Design implications

• Don’t overload users’ memories with complicated procedures for carrying out tasks • Design interfaces that promote recognition rather than recall • Provide users with a variety of ways of encoding digital information to help them remember where they have stored them – e.g., categories, color, flagging, time stamping

What we need to know about users • They forget • They make mistakes • Behavior is guided by prior knowledge

The Stoop Effect Tells Us • People have a hard time overcoming well practiced skills (like reading) • We need to design applications that match acquired skills and work habits • User testing is a good way of determining if our designs violate over learned skills

Mental models

• Users develop an understanding of a system through learning and using it • Knowledge is often described as a mental model – How to use the system (what to do next) – What to do with unfamiliar systems or unexpected situations (how the system works) • People make inferences using mental models of how to carry out tasks

Mental models

• Craik (1943) described mental models as internal constructions of some aspect of the external world enabling predictions to be made • Involves unconscious and conscious processes, where images and analogies are activated • Deep versus shallow models (e.g. how to drive a car and how it works)

Everyday reasoning and mental models (a) You arrive home on a cold winter’s night to a cold house. How do you get the house to warm up as quickly as possible? Set the thermostat to be at its highest or to the desired temperature?

(b) You arrive home starving hungry. You look in the fridge and find all that is left is an uncooked pizza. You have an electric oven. Do you warm it up to 375 degrees first and then put it in (as specified by the instructions) or turn the oven up higher to try to warm it up quicker?

Heating up a room or oven that is thermostat-controlled • Many people have erroneous mental models (Kempton, 1996) • Why?

– General valve theory, where ‘more is more’ principle is generalised to different settings (e.g. gas pedal, gas cooker, tap, radio volume) – Thermostats based on model of on-off switch model

Heating up a room or oven that is thermostat-controlled • Same is often true for understanding how interactive devices and computers work: – Poor, often incomplete, easily confusable, based on inappropriate analogies and superstition (Norman, 1983) – e.g. elevators and pedestrian crossings - lot of people hit the button at least twice – Why? Think it will make the lights change faster or ensure the elevator arrives!

Exercise: ATMs

• Write down how an ATM works – How much money are you allowed to take out?

– What denominations?

– If you went to another machine and tried the same what would happen?

– What information is on the strip on your card? How is this used?

– What happens if you enter the wrong number?

– Why are there pauses between the steps of a transaction? What happens if you try to type during them?

– Why does the card stay inside the machine?

– Do you count the money? Why?

How did you fare?

• Your mental model – How accurate?

– How similar?

– How shallow?

• Payne (1991) did a similar study and found that people frequently resort to analogies to explain how they work • People’s accounts greatly varied and were often ad hoc

Just enough Psychology

• People make mistakes because they can easily get distracted by changes in the task context.

The Model of Human Processor

• The Perceptual System – Seeing, hearing, touching, (smelling, tasting) • The Motor System – Movement • The Cognitive System – learning, reasoning, and problem solving,

Perceptual Processor

• Human Visual Performance Arguments – important items stand out by varying properties of items, e.g., color, shape – user search guided by organization of screen elements, e.g., user’s eye navigates from left to right and top to bottom

Perceptual Processor

• Anything that is seen by our eyes has to be processed • The processing difficulty depends the complexity of the visual scene and on our previous memory of the scene

Visual Processing Speed

• Images that we already are familiar with simply match to images stored in our memory – the processing time is fast – the processing effort is low

Pay Attention!

I am going to show the next slide as fast as I can

M

Take out a pencil and draw the character you just saw

Pay Attention!

I am going to show the next slide as fast as I can

Take out a pencil and draw the character you just saw

Visual Processing Speed

• For native English readers, the character on top right is processed faster A • For native Chinese readers, the character on the bottom right is processed faster

Visual Processing Speed

• English character has same complexity as Chinese character.

• Because the English character simply needs to be mapped to a similar character in our memory, the visual understanding speed is much shorter • Chinese students will, of course, be faster with the Chinese characters

Design implication

• Provide external representations at the interface that reduce memory load and facilitate computational offloading e.g. Information visualizations have been designed to allow people to make sense and rapid decisions about masses of data

Galitz: Graphical Design Principles

• Principles come from the way the human visual system works • Principles relate to; – HOW HARD IT IS TO PROCESS VISUAL SCENE – HOW MUCH OF SCENE CAN BE MATCHED TO MEMORY

Organization of Screen Elements

• Balance • Symmetry • Regularity • Predictability • Sequentiality • Economy • Unity • Proportion • Simplicity • Groupings

The Model of Human Processor

• The Perceptual System – Seeing, hearing, touching, (smelling, tasting) • The Motor System – Movement • The Cognitive System – learning, reasoning, and problem solving,

Motor Processor

• Human Motor Performance Arguments – items that are co-selected should be close – small items are hard to select – selection while holding the mouse button down is a harder motor task

Geometry and Movement

• Small targets are harder (and slower) to hit with a mouse than big target • long mouse movements are slower than short ones • icons pack differently from text strings • more keystrokes take longer to type • switching between mouse and keyboard is slow

Fitt’s Law MT = a + b log2(2A/W) where MT = movement time a,b = regression coefficients A = distance of movement from start to target center W = width of the target

Cognitive Processor

• Problem-Solving Arguments – problems can be hard to solve if represented poorly – if the user has to map their problem representation into a different one on the screen, the problem will be harder to do • Learning Arguments – Automatic learning

Problem-Solving

• it should be possible to select operations relevant to goals • it should be possible to know what an operation has actually done

The dog is facing west. Make him face east by changing the positions of just two matches.

His tail must remain up!

Solution!

Assumptions can make easy things hard.

We don’t always know what our user’s assumptions are.

And/Or questions

Student Homestate Bill Arizona ???

Frank Henry ???

???

???

Texas

Colorado Arizona

New Mexico Texas New Mexico

Who is from New Mexico and Texas?

Who is from New Mexico or Texas?

And/Or Method

• Thirty-six participants from a temporary agency – Word processing but no database experience – Were asked to test a new database program which used English.

• Forty problems – Equal numbers of And (Intersection) and Or (Union) divided between one or two database attributes

And/Or Results

Actual use And Or Neither OR .30

Correct use AND .99

.60

.10

.01

.00

Attention

• big changes are more noticeable • information presented close to where the user is looking is more likely to be read • auditory signals cannot be ignored as easily as visual signals

What we need to know about users • They forget • They make mistakes • Behavior is guided by prior knowledge