Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

• HCI combines knowledge and methods associated with professionals like psychologists, computer scientists, graphic designers, user experience designers, human factors specialists, anthropologists, and technical writers.

Individual User Level

• HCI is applicable at the individual level for routine processes like tax return preparation, decision support in healthcare, education, and leisure activities.

Other Applications

• It extends to user-generated content on social networking sites and internet-enabled devices used for communication, various communities, financial planning in business, industry-specific web resources, family entertainment, and globalization of language and culture.

Usability Goals and Measures for Designers

• Successful designers move past basic "user friendliness" by understanding diverse users and tasks, adhering to evidence-based guidelines.
• Great designers enhance user experience and acknowledge the importance of emotional responses and user surprise.

User Needs

• It is important to ascertain users' needs by determining necessary tasks and subtasks, including those performed occasionally.

Functionality

• Functionality must match the need to prevent product rejection or underutilization, and common tasks should be easily identifiable.

Reliability

• Designers should ensure reliability by making sure actions function as specified, database data reflects the actual database, and the system is consistently available and error-free to prevent mistrust.

Standardization

• Promoting standardization, integration, consistency, and portability aids learning and avoids errors through pre-existing industry standards.
• The product's integration allows it to run across software tools, maintaining compatibility.
• Consistency ensures compatibility across product versions via common action sequences and portability and allows data conversion across multiple environments.

Metrics in Useability

• Two important factors are being discussed as metrics for useability.

Human Factors for Community Evaluation

• There are 5 for community evaluation, including time to learn, speed of performance, rate of errors by users, retention over time, and subjective satisfaction with user feedback.

Design Considerations

• Trade-offs in design options can cause consistency issues with previous versions.
• Design alternatives are evaluated with mockups or high-fidelity prototypes.
• Many poorly designed interfaces exist across various domains.

Critical Systems Interfaces

• Interfaces in life-critical systems like air traffic control, nuclear reactors, and power utilities require high reliability.
• Lengthy, costly training is often needed to provide error-free performance.

Industrial and Commercial Uses

• Industrial and commercial applications in Banking and Insurance are relative to cost.
• Speed of performance is key due to transaction volume.

Exploratory Systems

• Exploratory, creative, and cooperative systems like web browsing and search engines also require collaborative work benchmarks.
• Defining benchmarks for exploratory tasks and device users can be challenging.
• Sketchbook is a design tool for digital artists from Autodesk.

Socio-Technical Systems

• Socio-technical systems complexity over long periods requires addressing issues of trust, privacy, responsibility, and security, with easy learning facilitating feedback to build trust.

Research Topics

• Potential research topics include reducing anxiety and fear of computer usage, graceful evolution, social media participation, input devices, and information exploration.

Goals for Professionals

• The goals include providing tools, techniques, and knowledge for system implementers via rapid prototyping, using feedback, and increasing computer awareness among the public.
• Good designs that help novices are clear and can alleviate the fears from poor product design.

Usability and Reliability

• In life-critical software, usability reduces errors and response times, while reliability ensures consistent, fail-safe performance, and both are important for preventing failures.

Physical Abilities

• Variations in physical abilities and workplaces: Basic data on human dimensions comes from anthropometric research.
• No average user exists; compromises or multiple system versions are needed because measurements don't account for dynamic measures.
• Designers provide a knob to enable user control of Screen-brightness preferences due to user variances.

Considerations for users

• Considerations for sense perception which include: vision, sensitivity, hearing.
• It is important to note that workplace design affects performance.
• The standard ANSI/HFES 100-2007 focuses on human factors engineering of computer workstations.

ANSI/HFES Concerns

• The concerns are adjustable heights and angles for chairs and work surfaces, posture support, and availability of armrests and footrests.

Cognitive and Perceptual Abilities

• Diverse cognitive and perceptual abilities: The human ability to interpret sensory input rapidly to initiate actions makes modern computer systems possible.
• Ergonomics Abstracts offers a classification of human cognitive processes.

Cognitive processes

• Cognitive processes include long-term and semantic memory, short-term and working memory, problem-solving, decision-making, language processing, sensory memory, and skill development.

Perceptual and Motor Performance Factors

• This includes arousal, fatigue, perceptual load, knowledge of results, and monotony/boredom.

Personality Differences

• There's no set taxonomy for personality types; designers must acknowledge varied responses.
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assesses personality.

MBTI Factors

• MBTI Factors included: extroversion, sensing vs. intuition, perceptive vs. judging, and feeling vs. thinking.

Cultural and International Diversity

• It is important to consider date/time, numeric/currency, weights/measures, telephone numbers, and names.
• Design for cell phones can increase access to developing countries with limited internet, literacy, and data.

Accommodating Users with Disabilites

• Designers must plan to accommodate users with disabilities.

Early Planning

• Early planning is more cost efficient, and businesses must comply with the "Americans With Disabilities Act".

Older age users

• Consider the elderly because including them is fairly easy and also benefits all users.
• Designers should account for variability within applications.
• Children need the usage of Digital Mysteries on a tablet.

Hardware and Software Diversity

• The main challenges are producing effective Internet interaction, enabling access from various displays, and supporting multi-language easy conversions.

Guidelines, Principles, and Theories

• Guidelines are low-level practices, principles are mid-level design strategies, and theories are high-level frameworks for design and evaluation.

Goals for guidelines

• Shared language and best practices promote consistency.
• Critics note that they sometimes may be too specific or incomplete, while proponents believe they encapsulate experience.

Interface Navigation

• Interface navigation includes standardizing tasks, ensuring descriptive links, using unique headings, using check boxes for binary choices, and developing printable pages.

Accessibility

• Accessibility includes providing text equivalents, synchronizing time-based multimedia alternatives, conveying color information additionally, and titling frames for easy identification.

Display Organization Factors

• Display consistency, efficient assimilation, minimal memory load, data display compatibility, and user control flexibility are important.

Mobile HCI Constraints

• Mobile HCI design has size constraints and touch data entry which can cause errors.

Mobile HCI Guidelines

• Mobile HCI requires less battery.
• Spatial consistency, high-level information, minimized taps and data entry, and more data download are optimal.

Data Entry Facilitation

• Data entry is facilitated by similar sequences, fewer input actions increase the productivity, and users shouldn't memorize long codes.
• The format of data-entry information needs to linked to data display.

Design Principles

• Principles are more fundamental than are guidelines but need more clarification.

Fundamental Design Principles

• Determine user's skill levels and identify the tasks

Interaction Styles

• The 5 interaction styles are: direct manipulation, menu selection, form fill-in, command, and natural language.

Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design

• Strive for consistency. Cater to universal usability. Offer informative feedback. Design dialogs to yield closure. Prevent errors. Permit easy reversal of actions. Keep users in control. Reduce short-term memory load.

Automation and Control

• Successful integration of automation avoids routine, tedious, and error-prone tasks.
• Users focus on: Making critical decisions, coping with unexpected situations.

Autonomous Agents

• Autonomous agents know user likes, makes inferences, responds, and competently performs.

Adaptive Interfaces

• For adaptive interfaces, user modelling keeps user performance track, adapts the behavior to suit, and automatically adapts the system.
• The system may make surprising changes and users may not be able to predict it.

Alternatives to Agents

• Alternatives to agents focus on user control, responsibility, accomplishment, and expand control panels.

Theories

• Theories extend guidelines.
• Principles develop theories that may be explanatory, prescriptive, or predictive.
• Some theories are based on human capacity like motor task, perceptual, and cognitive.

Explanatory Theories

• Explanatory theories involve observing behavior, describing activity, and conceiving designs.

Predictive Theories

• Predictive theories enable designers to compare designs for execution time.

Cognitive Subtasks Theories

• Evaluate reading times for text.

Motor-Task Performance

• Motor-Task Performance determines keystroking times.

Taxonomy

• Taxonomy orders phenomena, organization for new comers, and guides designers.

Model Types

• Important models are conceptual, semantic, syntactic, and lexical models.

Foley and Van Dam

• Foley and van Dam* outline the levels for approaching the interactive system in the mind of a user
• Conceptual level - user's mental model of the interactive system
• Semantic level- describes the meanings conveyed by user command input and by the computer's output display
• Syntactic level- defines how words that convey semantics are assembled into a complete sentence that instructs the computer to perform a certain task
• Lexical level- user specifies the syntax

Designer Friendly Approach

• A top-down nature approach matches architecture.
• There needs to be useful modularity.

Norman's Seven Stages of Action

1. Forming the goal.
2. Forming the intention.
3. Specifying the action.
4. Executing the action.
5. Perceiving the system state.
6. Interpreting the system state.
7. Evaluating the outcome.

Four Principles of Good Design

• State and action alternatives should be visible and have a good conceptual model with consistency.
• The interface should include mappings to illustrate relations.
• Users should get feedback.

Critical Points for User Failures

• Unclear goals, confusing interface, uncertain actions and misleading feedback.

Theories

• Micro-HCI focuses on measurable performance, levels, action stages, and consistency.
• Macro-HCI studies user experience over weeks and months in contextual and dynamic situations.

Timed User Actions

• User actions are situated by time and place.
• There may not be time to deal with shortcuts when hurried.
• Physical space will be a factor.

Taxonomy for Mobile Device Application

• Mobile device application monitors alerts, gathers info, participates, and locates / identifies.