HCI revision lecture

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
 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
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
 Design Creativity
• Understand and be able to use different
approaches
– Brainstorming
– Matrix
– Impossible combinations
– Future envisaging
– Inspiration tray
 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
 Ethnography
• What is it?
• What does it give you?
• What tools does it use?
– E.g. cultural probes
 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
 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”
 Prototyping
• Approaches
– Low-fi
• Paper sketches
• Post-its
– Med-fi
• Powerpoint
• Web pages
• Screenshots
– Hi-fi
• Reduced functionality systems
• Animation systems
 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
 Guidelines
• Why have them?
• What are some typical ones?
– With examples
• Web and interface
 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
 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