INFO3315

HCI
Human-Computer Interaction
Introduction

Part 2

What is HCI?
Why does it matter?

What is it? What will you be doing

this semester? Where is the
technology?

The user interface was once the last part of a system to be

designed. Now it is the first. It is recognized as being primary
because, to novices and professionals alike, what is presented
to ones senses is ones computer.

Kay, A. (1984). Computer

software. Scientific American,
251(3), 41-47.

Exercise
What is the cost of a minor usability
error in a large organisation? eg.
5000 employees,
task done 10 times on average working
day
Mean time to complete is 1 minute,
compared to ideal of 10 seconds
About 10% of the time, people get stuck
and take 10 minutes or more, have to
ask for help, become frustrated, give
poor service

Introduction
What is usability?
What isnt it?
What will you be aiming to achieve?
How does the text present this?

Hartson and Pyla:

1.3: From usability to user experience
1.3.1-5, pp 9-12,
1.3.9 pp 19-21

What is usability?

What is Usability?

ISO standards
Learnability
Efficiency
Memorability
Errors
Satisfaction

Performance
Affect
2013 - Brad Myers

What is usability?
Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish
basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how
quickly can they perform tasks?
Memorability: When users return to the design after
a period of not using it, how easily can they
reestablish proficiency?
Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe
are these errors, and how easily can they recover from
the errors?
Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?

Usability 101: Introduction to Usability

by Jakob Nielsen on January 4, 2012
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-101-introduction-to-usabi

Is there more than

usability?

Utility
Usability and utility are equally important and together
determine whether something is useful
Easy but useless?
Hard, but potentially valuable?

Definition: Utility = whether it provides the features you

need.
Definition: Usability = how easy & pleasant these features
are to use.
Definition: Useful = usability + utility.

Usability 101: Introduction to Usability

by Jakob Nielsen on January 4, 2012
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-101-introduction-to-usability/

User Experience (UX)

Even more than usability
Usability focuses on performance

User Experience

Emotion, Heritage
Fun, Style, Art
Branding, Reputation
Political, social personal connections
Beyond just the device itself Service Design

Blends: usability engineering, software

engineering, ergonomics, hardware engineering,
marketing, graphic design
2013 - Brad Myers

11

User experience goals

Desirable aspects
satisfying
helpful
fun
enjoyable
motivating
provocative
engaging
challenging
surprising
pleasurable
enhancing sociability rewarding
exciting
supporting creativity emotionally fulfilling
entertaining
cognitively stimulating
Undesirable aspects
boring
unpleasant
frustrating
patronizing
making one feel guilty
making one feel stupid
annoying
cutesy
childish
gimmicky

12

www.id-book.com

This is a visceral response

What makes it hard to create usable

interfaces that provide a delightful user
experience?

It is hard to think like the

users

May need to understand the domain

And the context of use
And what the user knows
And what they have experienced
And how they will interpret the
interface elements, what they will
see

Specifications are always wrong

"Only slightly more than 30% of the
code developed in application
software development ever gets
used as intended by end-users. The
reason for this statistic may be a
result of developers not
understanding what their users
need."
-- Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt, "Contextual
Design: A Customer-Centric Approach to Systems
Design,
ACM Interactions, Sep+Oct, 1997, iv.5, p. 62.
2013 - Brad Myers

16

More reasons why it is

difficult.

Tasks and domains are complex

Word 1 (100 commands) vs. Word 2013
(>2000)
MacDraw 1 vs. Illustrator
BMW iDrive adjusts over 700 functions

Existing theories and guidelines are not

sufficient
Too specific and/or too general
Standard does not address all issues.

Adding graphics can make worse

Pretty Easy to use
2013 - Brad Myers

17

More reasons why it is

difficult.
All UI design involves tradeoffs:

Standards (style guides, related products)

Graphic design (artistic)
Technical writing (Documentation)
Internationalization
Performance
Multiple platforms (hardware, browsers, etc.)
High-level and low-level details
External factors (social issues)
Legal issues
Time to develop and test (time to market)
2013 - Brad Myers

18

Misconceptions about usability

Doing usability sometimes thought of as
equivalent to usability testing
Diagnostic view

Or sometimes usability is seen to be about

dressing it up
After the software is built, I want the usability
people to make it look pretty

19

Copyright MKP. All rights

reserved.

Interaction design is not about software

UI software
component:
Code that
implements the
interaction
component

Interaction
component:
How a UI works,
its look and
feel and
behavior

20

Copyright MKP. All rights

reserved.

Two distinct roles

Interaction designer and UI software

designer
Premise: Describing interaction from
users view should result in more usable
design than describing it from software or
programmer view
Inherent conflict of interest: Whats best for
the user is seldom easiest for the software
developer!
21

Copyright MKP. All rights

reserved.

Objectives of this course

Applying a usability engineering life

cycle

Contextual inquiry and analysis

Requirements extraction and designinforming models
Conceptual and detailed design
Iterative prototyping and evaluation

Understanding and applying

interaction design guidelines
22

Copyright MKP. All rights

reserved.

Why are User Interfaces

Difficult to Implement?

23 Myers
2013 - Brad

Why Are User Interfaces Hard to

Implement?
They are hard to design, requiring iterative
implementation
Not the waterfall model: specify, design,
implement, test, deliver

They are reactive and are programmed from

the "inside-out"
Event based programming
More difficult to modularize

2013 - Brad Myers

24

Why Hard to Implement? cont.

They generally require multi-processing

To deal with user typing; aborts

Window refresh
Window system as a different process
Multiple input devices

There are real-time requirements for handling

input events
Output 60 times a second
Keep up with mouse tracking
Video, sound, multi-media

2013 - Brad Myers

25

Why Hard to Implement? cont.

Need for robustness

No crashing, on any input

Helpful error messages and recover gracefully
Aborts
Undo

Lower testability
Few tools for regression testing

2013 - Brad Myers

26

Why Hard to Implement? cont.

Little language support
Primitives in computer languages make bad user
interfaces
Enormous, complex libraries
Features like object-oriented, constraints, multiprocessing

Complexity of the tools

Full bookshelf for documentation of user interface
frameworks
MFC, Java Swing, VB .Net, etc.

Difficulty of Modularization

2013 - Brad Myers

27

Overview of the approach

H&P Chapter 2: The Wheel
2.2,pp53-5

H&P Chapter
2, p53

H&P Chapter
2, p54

HCI matters
and is hard to do well
In general, interfaces are a very large part of effort
of system
Financial impact
Make or break

Creating good user experiences with systems is

hard achieve
Major lessons:
1: You cannot rely on intuition
2: HCI techniques can really help
3: Hard work, using established techniques, is the
secret (not brilliant insight by the gifted lazy)
4: Iterative nature of creating interfaces