Overview of the course Mid-Term March 2th 2010 (Olivier Georgeon, I think)

Pulling it all together Book Reading (ABCS) Preface Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 16 Appendix 1, 3 Other readings Example exam Barnes et al 1996 (team information seeking ) Byrne et al 1999 (web users’ task ) Other Class lectures Labs

Overall Imagine you are a professional in charge of creating/specifying an interface. Know about: Justification for studying the users Good practice for Interface design Basic concepts of psychology Studying your specific users (write good reports)

Why/when study the user? Technology doesn't make the difference. Users are not like us Users are even different from one another! We need to know their previous mental model Need to anticipate user behavior (when lives are at risk, high costs, etc…)

Good practice for interface design Consistency Transparency Visual clarity Flexibility and control User guidance and support Right level of automation Error prevention and recovery

Tradeoffs in interface design Show/hide dependencies Level of viscosity Premature commitment Level of feedback/warnings to provide Level of mental operations

Basic concepts of psychology Perception Perception requires effort What we perceive is framed by our senses Behavior Follow patterns, sequences, procedures Bottom-up or top-down driven

Basic concepts of psychology Cognition People learn Declarative memory / procedural memory Implicit knowledge / explicit knowledge Top-down Bottom-up learning Support learning! People solve problems Short term memory / working memory They apply strategies They often hate that!

Basic concepts of psychology Cognition Models of cognition ACT model Rasmussen model It helps you think about your users! People make decisions There are biases They can't fully predict/compute the consequences They are driven by emotions Exploit it!

Study your specific users Why? They have specific tasks/activities They have specific mental models They make specific errors How? Observe them (time/performance) Log their activity Refer to previous studies Adapt your system to them

(Write good reports) Why? How? Your reader is your user Organize the reading Make it eye-friendly Users hate solving problems!

Overall Imagine you are a professional in charge of creating/specifying an interface. Know about: Justification for studying the users Good practice for Interface design Basic concepts of psychology Studying your specific users (write good reports)