Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Computer Science, founder and director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/), and member of the UM Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. UMIACS) at the University of Maryland. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, IEEE, NAI and SIGCHI Academy and a member of the. He is a member of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) and director of the Computational Journalism Lab, where he conducts research on algorithmic accountability, narrative data visualization, and social computing in news.
This first set of chapters provides a broad introduction to user interface design and interactive systems. At the end of the chapter, a rich set of resources is provided, listing important books, guidelines, and relevant journals and experts.
Usability Motivations
- Sociotechnical systems
This increased motivation comes from consumer electronics designers and managers who produce mobile devices, e-commerce websites and social media that are excellent users. Strong motivations for usability quality come from high-functioning professionals who demand excellence in environments such as life-critical systems, industrial facilities, legal offices, etc. User experience designers have played a key role in the dramatic growth of consumer electronics by delivering effective and satisfying designs that are generally accepted for personal use.
Similarly, famous musicians, supermodels and other celebrities contribute to the media buzz by making everyone aware of the latest designs, attractive features and necessary skills. Heroes like Apple's Chief Design Officer Jony Ive have become celebrities, knighted by the Queen of England and pestered by interviewers to reveal the secrets of the next product release. Most consumer electronics users also benefit from interfaces in professional environments from supermarkets to space stations.
Long training periods are acceptable to achieve fast, error-free performance, even when users are under stress. Performance speed is key in most of these applications due to the high volume of transactions, but operator fatigue, stress and burnout are legitimate concerns. In these exploratory, creative, and collaborative environments, users may be knowledgeable in the task domains but novices in the underlying computing concepts.
This goal seems to be achieved most effectively when the computer provides a direct manipulative representation of the world of action (Chapter 7), supplemented with keyboard shortcuts.
Goals for Our Profession
- Providing tools, techniques, and knowledge for commercial
- Raising the user-interface consciousness of the general
Researchers in human-computer interaction are prolific as they produce more than 10,000 papers per year. The combination of methods often leads to a deeper understanding of the fundamental principles of human interaction with computers. Furthermore, anecdotal evidence or researcher insights may be underemphasized due to the authoritative influence of statistics.
Within computer science and information studies, there is a growing awareness of the need for more attention to usability issues. Some undergraduate degrees require courses in human-computer interaction, and many curricula add interface design issues. There is a great opportunity to apply the knowledge and techniques of traditional psychology (and of subfields such as cognitive and social psychology) to the study of human-computer interaction.
Fear of fraud and frustration with email spam can also be reduced by improved designs that promote security and privacy while increasing users' control over their experiences. Most projects take the productive route of writing their own guidelines that are tied to the issues of their application environments and users. As designers improve the user experience, some users' fears will subside and the positive experiences of their competence, mastery, and satisfaction will flow in.
There are so many interesting, important and feasible projects that it can be difficult to choose a direction.
World Wide Web Resources
Variations in Physical Abilities and Physical Workplaces
Thousands of measurements of hundreds of human characteristics – male and female, young and mature, European and Asian, underweight and overweight, tall and short – provide data to construct design ranges from 5 to 95 percentile. The great diversity in these static measures reminds us that no picture of an “average” user can exist and that compromises must be made or multiple versions of a system must be built. When a single design cannot accommodate a large portion of the population, multiple versions or adjustment checks are useful.
Measures of dynamic actions—such as reach while sitting, speed of finger pressure, or strength when lifting—are also needed. Since so much of the work is related to perception, designers must be aware of the range of human perceptual abilities, especially with regard to vision (Ware, 2012). Designers must study flicker, contrast, motion sensitivity and depth perception, as well as the effects of glare and visual fatigue.
Other senses are also important: for example, touch for keyboard or touchscreen access and hearing for audible cues, tone, and speech input or output (Chapter 10. The most elegant screen design can be compromised by a noisy environment, poor lighting, or a stuffy room , and that compromise will ultimately decrease performance, increase error rates, and even discourage motivated users. Thoughtful designs, such as workstations that offer wheelchair access and good lighting, will be even more so.
Mobile devices are increasingly used while walking or driving and in public spaces, such as restaurants or trains where lighting, noise, movement and vibration are part of the user experience.
Diverse Cognitive and Perceptual Abilities
These key issues are not discussed in depth in this book, but they have a profound impact on the design of user interfaces.
Personality Differences
The plan calls for apps to be "accessible to all, affordable, adapted to local needs in language and culture, and [to] support sustainable development." The UN Sustainable Development Goals include the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger; reduce child mortality; the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; and ensure environmental sustainability. The same video caption used by hearing-impaired users is also used by users watching videos in noisy places, such as gyms, bars, and airports. Even when guidelines like WCAG 2.0 are used properly, it's a good idea to evaluate for success through usability testing with people with disabilities, peer reviews, and automated accessibility testing.
Lawsuits such as those against Target, Netflix, Harvard University and MIT highlight the growing importance and expectations of digital accessibility. Before EU mandate 376, many European countries, such as the United Kingdom, Italy and Germany, and other countries around the world, including Australia and Canada, also did. Networking projects, such as the San Francisco-based SeniorNet, provide adults over 50 with access to and education about computers and the Internet "to improve their lives and enable them to share their knowledge and wisdom" (http:// .www.seniornet.org/).
Computer games are attractive to older adults, as shown by the surprising success of Nintendo's Wii, because they stimulate social interaction, provide practice in sensory-motor skills such as hand-eye coordination, improve. Using Digital Mysteries on a tablet, two elementary school children work together to read the information sheets, group them, and create a sequence to answer the question "Who Killed King Ted?" The blue pop-up pie menu allows the selection of tools. Providing programming tools such as the Scratch project (https:// . scratch.mit.edu/) and simulation building tools enables older children to tackle complex cognitive challenges and build ambitious objects for others to they use them.
These and other possibilities have motivated efforts (such as One Laptop Per Child, http:// . one.laptop.org/) to bring low-cost computers to children around the world.
Accommodating Hardware and Software Diversity
Software tools such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allow designers to define their content in a way that allows automatic conversions for an increasing range of screen sizes. Börjesson, P., Barendregt, W., Eriksson, E., and Torgersson, O., Designing technology for and with developmentally diverse children: a systematic literature review, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Interaction Design and Children Conference, ACM Press, New York. Bruckman, Amy, Bandlow, Alisa, Dimond, Jill and Forte, Andrea, Human-Computer Interaction for Children, in Jacko, Julie (editor), The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook, 3rd Edition, CRC Press.
Chisnell, Dana E., Redish, Janice C., and Lee, Amy, New heuristics for understanding older adults as web users, Tech. Foss, E., and Druin, A., Children's Internet Search: Using Roles to Understand Youth Search Behavior, Morgan & Claypool. Lazar, Jonathan, Goldstein, Daniel F., and Taylor, Anne, Ensuring Digital Accessibility Through Process and Policy, Morgan.
Medhi, I., Patnaik, S., Brunskill, E., Gautama, N., Thies, W., and Toyama, K., Design of mobile interface vir novice and lae literacy users, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human. Quesenbery, Whitney and Szuc, Daniel, Global UX: Design and Research in a Connected World, Morgan Kaufmann (2011). Ware, Colin, Information Visualization: Perception for Design, 3rd ed., Morgan Kaufmann Publ., San Francisco, CA (2012).
Wentz, B., Jaeger, P., and Lazar, J., Retrofitting Accessibility: The Inequality of Retrospective Access for Persons with Disabilities in the United States, First Monday.
Guidelines, Principles, and Theories
- Introduction
- Guidelines
- Navigating the interface
- Organizing the display
- Getting the user’s attention
- Facilitating data entry
- Principles
- Identify the tasks
- Choose an interaction style
We want principles not only developed—the work of creation—but applied, which is the work of life. Critics complain that guidelines can be too specific, incomplete, difficult to apply and sometimes wrong. The following four sections provide examples of guidelines, and section 4.3 discusses how they can be integrated into the design process.
Provide text alternatives for all non-text content so that it can be changed to other forms that people need, such as large print, Braille, speech, symbols, or simpler language. Data entry tasks can take up a substantial portion of users' time and can be the source of frustrating and potentially dangerous errors. Typical user personas, such as nurses, doctors, shopkeepers, high school students, or children, can be expected to have different characters.
In addition to these personas, an understanding of users' skills with interfaces and with the application domain is important. Beginners can be taught a minimal subset of objects and actions to start with. When designers can create a visual representation of the world of action, the users' tasks can be greatly simplified because direct manipulation of familiar objects is possible.
Speech recognition can be helpful for familiar phrases like "Tell Catherine I'll be back in ten minutes," but in new situations users can be disappointed with the results (see Chapter 9).
