Requirements Gathering, Storyboarding, and Psychology PDF

Requirements Gathering ,Storyboarding and Psychology Overview *Psychology is crucial in design and requirements gathering as it helps us understand user behavior, motivations, and cognitive processes. By applying psychological principles, designers can create intuitive interfaces that enhance user...

Requirements Gathering ,Storyboarding and Psychology Overview *Psychology is crucial in design and requirements gathering as it helps us understand user behavior, motivations, and cognitive processes. By applying psychological principles, designers can create intuitive interfaces that enhance user experience and satisfaction.* Requirements Gathering - **Requirements gathering** is the process of collecting, analyzing, and documenting the needs and expectations of stakeholders for a project **Role of Psychology in Understanding User Needs** 1. **Cognitive Processes -Helps designers understand how users perceive information and make decisions, enabling intuitive interface design.** 2. **Emotional Factors-Reveals how feelings and motivations influence behavior, guiding the creation of emotionally resonant experiences** 3. **Behavioral Patterns-Provides insights into user interactions, identifying common patterns and potential pain points for improved design.** 4. **User-Centered Design-Supports empathy and consideration of diverse user perspectives throughout the design process.** 5. **Usability Testing-Informs systematic methodologies for observing user interactions and gathering feedback, ensuring user-friendly products.** 6. **Motivation and Engagement-Understanding motivation theories helps design features that encourage user engagement and retention.** - Storyboarding is a visual technique used in design to outline and represent a sequence of interactions, actions, or events in a project - Visualizing User Journeys-Storyboarding helps designers visualize the user experience, capturing key interactions and emotional responses throughout the user journey. - Clarifying Concepts-It serves as a tool to clarify and communicate design ideas to stakeholders, ensuring everyone has a shared understanding of the proposed interactions and narrative flow. - Identifying Issues Early-By mapping out user interactions, storyboarding can highlight potential usability issues or gaps in the user experience early in the design process, allowing for timely adjustments. - Enhancing Collaboration-Storyboards facilitate collaboration among team members, enabling designers, developers, and stakeholders to discuss and iterate on ideas more effectively. - Guiding Development-They provide a reference point for development, helping teams stay aligned on the intended user experience and ensuring that design elements are implemented as planned. - Short-Term Memory (STM): This type holds a limited amount of information for a brief period, typically around 15 to 30 seconds. It is often used for tasks such as remembering a phone number just long enough to dial it.recalling a list of groceries while shopping, or retaining a person\'s name right after being introduced. These tasks typically involve holding information for a brief period, usually seconds to minutes. - Long-Term Memory (LTM): This type stores information for extended periods, ranging from hours to a lifetime. Long-term memory can be further divided into explicit (declarative) memory, which includes facts and events, and implicit (non-declarative) memory, which involves skills and conditioned responses.Examples of long-term memory include recalling your childhood memories, recognizing a familiar face years later, or remembering the plot of a favorite book. These memories can last from days to a lifetime and often involve skills, facts, and personal experiences. - Importance of memory in user interactions and design: 1. **User Experience (UX)**: Understanding how users remember information helps designers create interfaces that are intuitive and easy to navigate 2. **Information Retention**: Effective design helps users retain important information. 3. **Consistency**: Consistent design elements 4. **Cognitive Load**: Reducing cognitive load by presenting information in a manageable 5. **Feedback and Recognition**: Providing clear feedback when users perform actions reinforces memory through recognition. - **Sustained Attention** - **Alternating Attention** - **Selective Attention** - This approach involves hinging your decision solely on a single feature.\ \ **The Additive Feature Model** - This method involves taking into account all the important features of the possible choices and then systematically evaluating each option.  Perception - **Speech perception**\ How we process what others are saying - **Visual perception\ **How we see the physical world around us - Reading and writing processes\ \ Speech perception and production\ \ Bilingualism and multilingualism - Visual imagery is the most commonly studied form of mental imagery. It involves creating pictures in the mind, such as visualizing a familiar object or place. **THE MODEL OF HUMAN PROCESSOR** The designers of Human-Machine interfaces wish to base their work on science rather than a whimsical notion of what an interface should be like. They would like to be able to quantify why one interface is a better design than another one. They would like to make the interface fit perfectly the user\'s way of doing things. So where to start? The answer is *cognitive psychology*. This is the science of understanding how people think, perceive, remember and learn. A key part of cognitive psychology is to develop models of human behaviour. And one of the more useful models is what is called the \'Model Human Processor\'. This mini-web will discuss this topic and describe how it relates to human machine interface design. **Modelling a human** The concept is to consider a human being as if they were a computer, made up of input sensors, various kinds of memory storage, processing nodes and output actuators. How does an input result in an output? The diagram below shows a simplified model human processor as proposed by Card, Moran and Newell back in 1983. The model begins with the idea that our eyes and ears are input sensors. Ears provide audio information and our eyes provide visual information. The first thing that happens is that the information is stored in very short term (almost fleeting) memory. Memories decay very quickly at this stage, with visual information held for about 70-1000 milliseconds and the audio information held for about 1 - 4 seconds. Unless this information is processed further, it just decays away. For example, if you were fully occupied in a task and a very brief sound pipes up from the interface, unless you pay immediate attention to it, you will forget or even fail to notice it.. **Processing audio-visual** So the next stage in handling incoming information is to process it. Your brain has different processing centres for dealing with visual and audio information and these are represented as \'processor\' block in the model as shown above. The information flows out of short term memory into the processors. **Cognitive processing** Moving on with the model, outputs from the audio and visual processing is stored in a combined \'cognitive short term memory store\'. Remember, all this is happening within less than a second after the inputs have happened. The \'cognitive\' part means that we begin to combine multiple information streams in memory to form a more rounded view of what is happening. This is why an interface should not provide conflicting/jarring information such as a warning message popping up at the same time as a positive sound. The technical term is \'cognitive dissonance\', which means an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two conflicting ideas at the same time. Note that short term memory capacity is quite limited - you can usually hold up to about seven elements. For instance a 7 digit telephone number. So as an interface designer, keep the number of things to be remembered very low. **Time limitations** are also important. Unless a sequence of actions has been committed to long term memory, it will only be remembered for a short time, unless the HCI designer gives the user a reminder of what they need to do.   **Cognitive Processor** Once the fusion of information is combined in short term cognitive memory, it then feeds the cognitive processor. The cognitive processor takes another information feed from your long term cognitive memory and tries to combine the two streams to form a full understanding of what is happening at that instant. If the effort warrants it, then the new information is also stored back into long term memory. For example, you come across a slightly novel interface, it has many parts you already understand (which were retrieved from long term memory) but it also has a few novel items as well - perhaps a \'colour picker\' or a different type of calendar. After processing this new information so you understand it, you then decide that this is worth remembering for next time.. This is why creating a well understood interface is very efficient - the person has to do little new processing to understand what needs to be done. At the other extreme, if you know absolutely nothing about this new interface you will have to work (process) much harder and hence slower. It is likely errors will be made as well. A good measure of this processing effort is your reaction time to an event in the interface. For example, the time it takes you to click on the \'ok\' button in an alert. **Recognition vs Recall** Another well known feature of human cognition is that recognition is much faster than recall if you need to retrieve something from long term memory. **Recognition** You smell something or hear a song and a distant memory instantly gets triggered. You think about it for a moment and all of the emotions and feelings come flooding back.  The links you have made within your long term memory (LTM) helps you recognise the memories. This is the easiest way of retrieving memories. **Recall** Where were you at 5.25 pm 3 weeks ago? It is probably hard to come up with an instant answer. You can work your way back through the memories you have, making links as you go and eventually, you may recall where you were.  Trying to retrieve information from LTM without a specific stimuli is a much harder process. So include easily recognisable elements in an interface. ** Actually doing something** The final part of the model human processor is the \'doing\' part. It is the actions you actually carry out once you have processed the information. This is modelled as a \'Motor Processor\'. The interesting thing is you also have a kind of \'muscle memory\', modelled as the \'long term muscle memory\' box above. This simply means you are able to do something without having to think about it. For example, I am typing this sentence, I see the letters form on the screen and my fingers know exactly where to go to type the next word. For someone who has not learnt to type this can take a painfully long time, but for the experienced typist, it just flows naturally. Muscle memory is only achieved through much repetition. For example pianists, guitarists, typist or any other person with physical skill has to practice. As an example, consider a HCI designer who for some reason has decided to use a non standard keyboard layout - a non-QWERTY one. The user will now take much longer to input text. Typically a keypad laid out in alphabetic order seems to take much longer to deal with. **Summary** The 'Model Human Processor' was developed by Card, Moran and Newell in 1983.  They wanted to draw an analogy between the way humans perceive (process) and remember (store) things and the processing and storage of a computer. A model of how human's process information would allow HCI designers to predict what types of interface features would work The model focuses on three main processes when attempting to explain how humans perceive and remember things: - Perceptual store - Short term memory - Long term memory **Advancing simplistic theories** **\ \ Simplistic Theories ** - **Simplistic theories** in HCI are models that attempt to explain user interactions with computer systems in a straightforward manner. While they can be useful for initial understanding, they often face criticism for oversimplifying the complexities of human behavior and technology interactions. - **Advantages of Simplistic Theories:** 1. **Ease of Understanding**: Simplistic theories make complex interactions more accessible, aiding comprehension for beginners. By stripping down complex interactions to their core components, simplistic theories make it easier for people new to HCI to grasp basic principles. They provide a less intimidating introduction to the field, allowing beginners to understand key interactions without being overwhelmed by complexity. \. 2. **Initial Framework**: They provide a basic foundation for further exploration and research. Simplistic theories act as a foundational stepping stone. Once users or researchers are comfortable with basic concepts, they can build on this knowledge, exploring more sophisticated theories that account for the nuances of human-computer interaction. In this way, simplistic theories serve as a gateway to more advanced study and research.  3. **Communication**: Simplistic models are easier to communicate to a broader audience, making them useful in educational settings. Because simplistic theories are easier to understand and explain, they are ideal for educational contexts. They allow instructors and researchers to communicate HCI principles to audiences who may not have a background in the field, making them valuable for teaching, workshops, and introductory material. Simplistic theories can help translate complex ideas into relatable concepts, broadening access to HCI. - **Criticisms of Simplistic Theories:** 1. **Reductionism**: They may ignore the interplay of various factors such as cognitive, emotional, social, and biological influences. 2. **Neglect of Individual Differences**: Simplistic theories often fail to account for the variability among users. 3. **Lack of Empirical Support**: These theories can lack strong evidence backing their claims. 4. **Complexity of Human Behavior**: They may not fully capture the intricacies of human behavior and interactions. 5. **Static View of Behavior**: Tend to see behavior as fixed rather than dynamic. 6. **Misapplication Risks**: May lead to misguided design decisions and interventions. 7. **Ethical Concerns**: Can pathologize or stigmatize users. **Advancing Simplistic Theories ** **Advanced simplistic theories in hci refer to approaches that aim to streamline and simplify complex cognitive processes to make HCI more intuitive, user-friendly, and accessible without compromising depth or functionality. These theories focus on creating models and frameworks that prioritize ease of understanding and application for both users and designers, often leveraging basic principles of cognition, perception, and interaction.** - **Key Advanced Simplistic Theories:** - **1. Shneiderman's Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design** - **Strive for Consistency**: Use consistent sequences of actions and design elements. - **Enable Frequent Users to Use Shortcuts**: Provide accelerators for experienced users (e.g., keyboard shortcuts). - **Offer Informative Feedback**: Provide feedback for every action. - **Design Dialogs to Yield Closure**: Organize actions into groups with clear beginnings, middles, and ends. - **Offer Simple Error Handling**: Prevent errors and make recovery simple. - **Permit Easy Reversal of Actions**: Allow users to undo actions easily. - **Support Internal Locus of Control**: Make users feel in control of the system. - **Reduce Short-Term Memory Load**: Limit the amount of information users must remember. **2. Norman\'s Design Principles** - **Affordances**: Properties of an object suggesting how it should be used. - **Feedback**: Clear, immediate responses to user actions. - **Visibility**: Important elements should be easily visible. - **Mapping**: Intuitive relationship between controls a**n**d their effects. - **Constraints**: Guide user actions by limiting possible errors. **Importance of Nuanced Understanding in Design** - **User-Centric Solutions**: **Create effective and satisfying experiences**: Address diverse needs and preferences. - **Context Awareness**: **Develop relevant solutions**: Recognize and integrate cultural, social, and situational factors. - **Enhanced Usability**: **Improve designs**: Minimize cognitive load, improve accessibility, and facilitate intuitive interactions. - **Adaptability**: **Ensure long-term effectiveness**: Anticipate and accommodate changes in user behavior and expectations. - **Innovation**: **Encourage unique solutions**: Foster creativity by deeply understanding user needs. - **Ethical Considerations**: **Promote inclusivity and avoid harm**: Design solutions considering the potential impact on users.