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Chapter Summary:
Poorly designed technology is often the cause of poor sales, poor usability, and user confusion.
Many technologies for interacting with computers are available, including a mouse, a pen or stylus,
gaze systems, voice recognition, haptics and other input and output devices.
People bring a variety of personal factors to the technologies they use.
Designers should strive to create systems that discourage users from engaging in superstitious
behavior.
Humans have three levels of memory storage that designers should take into account: sensory
storage, short-term memory and long-term memory.
Although understanding psychology is important, it is not the only matter to take into account when
designing interfaces.
The design criteria for user interfaces are the quality of the experience, an understanding of users, an
effective design process, learn-ability, an aesthetic experience, changeability and manageability.
Three main goals of a user interface are: giving users control of the interface, reducing users memory
load, and aiming for consistency in the interface.
Programming for the Web is complicated because of the many different Web technologies end users
use.
Remember the basic rules for building effective Web pages, such as: Communicating a sites purpose
and organization, making links obvious and creating helpful navigation.
The user-centric design process starts with the end-user, not system needs. Its main phases are:
gathering and analyzing user information, designing the interface, constructing the interface and
testing the interface.
User interface design can be interactive rather than sequential, meaning steps can be revisited many
times in the process. Prototyping is a key component of interactive design.
Human emotional response is a new but growing area for designers to take into account when building
technology.
Key Terms:
Affect System (397)
Attitude (396)
Behavioral Thinking (399)
Design Criteria (385)
Effectiveness (396)
Gaze Systems (380)
Haptics technologies (381)
Learn-ability (396)
Long-term memory (384)
Natural Language Processing (381)
Test Yourself:
1.) What does a poorly designed door symbolize?
Users expecting excellent results from poorly designed technology, not very realistic
Understanding human activities is so complex that simply listing requirements, putting them into a
system and popping out the perfect technology for users needs is not possible. Finding the perfect
technology takes continuous evaluation.
Prototyping also takes continuous evaluation and is ever evolving not just an initial product that
needs to be tweaked and modified. A willingness to Chuck the product and start over maybe
necessary.
How effective is the design in terms of: usefulness, effectiveness, learn-ability and attitude.
3.) List three career paths that could be useful in creating a good design.
4.) What technology do many gaze systems use to track eye movement?
The technology that many gaze systems use to track eye movement is infrared sensors.
5.) Technology with inconsistent responses to use input often creates what kind of human behavior?
Superstitious Behavior
6.) What are the three levels of memory storage?
Sensory Memory (SM)
Short-Term (STM)
Long-Term (LTM)
7.) What two techniques help improve short-term memory?
If an interest is expressed in the topic. It usually has a tendency to move into Long-term memory.
Often repetition and chunking are also used to retain information.
8.) When might users prefer to use recall instead of recognition in using a technologys interface?
When functions are easy to recognize and access, keyboard entry errors are reduced, non-experts
can learn the application quickly, and menu selections are flexible with the use of shortcut keys.
9.) Describe five design criteria discussed in this chapter.
Quality of Experience: How does the design give people a satisfying experience? What does the
product satisfy?
An understanding of users: How well did the design team understand the needs, tasks and
environments of users? How well was this understanding reflected in the product?
An effective design process: Is the product a result of a well-thought-out and well-executed design
process? What design issues came up in the process, and what method was used to address them?
How were budgeting, scheduling and other practical issues managed to support the goals of the
design process?
Learn-ability: Is the product easy to learn and easy to remember how to use? Are the features
obvious to users? How well does the product support the different ways the people will approach
and use it, considering their varying levels of: experience, skills, mental models, and strategies for
problem solving?
An aesthetic experience: Is using the product aesthetically pleasing or satisfying? Does it show
consistency and operation? Does the design perform well within technological constraints?
10.) What is one major reason that designing for the Web is different from designing for other user
interfaces?
Client browsers allow users to customize how the content they will access will be displayed without
restriction. Therefore, this could or will pose significant problems for programmers and developers,
seeing how it is impossible to code for every browser setting. As a result, developers and
programmers are left with trying to program for the Lowest-Common-Denominator, which may
not even be possible.