Chapter 3 Understanding users Francisco Arcediano Simon Bowen

Chapter 3 Understanding users Francisco Arcediano Simon Bowen Nicole Burrell Charles Carter

Introduction • Design with the user’s capabilities and the demands of the activity in mind. • Goal: Examine some of the core cognitive aspects of interaction design to both extend human capabilities and compensate for their weaknesses.

What is cognition? • Cognitive processes: thinking, daydreaming, talking, seeing … • Categories of cognition (Norman 1993) – Experiential cognition: perceive, act, and react to events around us – Reflective cognition: think, comparing, and decision-making • Discussion Question: Do you think one cognitive category is exercised more than the other when it comes to: 1) Planning an interface with the customer 2) Designing the interface 3) Reviewing progress of the interface with the customer 4) Evaluating interface effectiveness with actual user

What is cognition? • Specific kinds of cognitive processes 1) Attention 2) Perception and recognition 3) Memory 4) Learning 5) Reading, Speaking, and Listening 6) Problem solving, Planning, Reasoning, Decision Making • Many of these cognitive processes are interdependent • Discussion Questions: 1) Can you think of activities related to interface design that involves at lest two of these processes? 2) Are there any activities that require only one of these processes?

What is cognition? • Reading, Speaking, and Listening: forms of language processing • Similarity: Meaning of sentences or phrases is same in all modes • Differences: 1) Written language is permanent, listening is transient 2) Reader can be quicker than speaking or listening 3) Listening requires less cognitive effort • There are differences between people’s ability to use language • Discussion Questions: 1) How might these differences affect the way you design your interface?

Applying Knowledge from the physical world from the Digital World • "A well known approach to applying knowledge about everyday psychology to interaction design is to emulate, in the digital world, the strategies and methods people commonly use in the physical world. “ • Picking task that are familiar to people and using them in the digital world, allows users to master the implementation. • It makes using the design implementation more enjoyable and less frustrating.

Applying Knowledge from the physical world from the Digital World • Direct mapping from the physical world to digital world is not always successful. • It can turn out to be "counter-productive, forcing users to do things in bizarre, inefficient, or inappropriate ways". • This happens when the activity being emulated is more complex than assumed. • The designers need to think through how and whether this design will work in the new context (that being the digital context). • Questions: Do you know any good mappings from the real world to the Digital? Any Bad?

Informing design: from theory to practice • Theories, models, and conceptual frameworks provide abstractions for thinking about how people interact with products, but they are difficult to apprehend. • Thus, researchers have tried to make theory more accessible and practical translating into: – Design principles and concepts – Design rules – Analytic methods – Design and evaluation methods E. g. , GOMS (Goals, Operators, Methods, and Selection rules) GOMS allows quantitative predictions of how people interact with products.

Informing design: from theory to practice • Discussion questions: 1. Dilemma faced with interface design: Keep the same structure adding more functions or design a new model of interaction? (Evolutionary versus Revolutionary upgrading) 2. The ultimate goal is to extend human capabilities and compensate for their weaknesses. How far should we take this goal? Could we become too dependent on technologies?