1. Imran Hussain University of Management and Technology (UMT)
Virtual University Human-Computer Interaction
Lecture 42 Communicating with Users
Imran Hussain
University of Management and Technology (UMT) 1

2. In Last Lecture … How to ask user? How to ask experts? Asking users
Interviews
Questionnaires
Asking experts
Inspections
walkthroughs

3. In Today’s Lecture … How to communicate with users?
How to eliminate errors messages?
Process of notification and confirmation
Other communication with users

4. How we can eliminating errors?

5. Errors are abused Users never want error messages
Users want to avoid consequences of making errors
Users will often not complain about error messages

6. Why we have so many error messages
Early days of computers, computers were operated by very technical minded people
Early operators of computers were sympathetic to needs of CPU
Didn’t mind error messages
Abort, retry, fail? FU
FU stands for file unavailable

7. What’s wrong with error messages
What programmers think of error messages
What users think of error messages
Inability of a program to perform a certain function

8. People hate error messages
Humans have emotions
Get angry if they are told they are wrong
Computers don’t have emotions
Programmer’s therefore, have wrong assumption
They think people like to be told when they do something wrong
Software is interactive being

9. Whose mistake is it, anyway?
What is conventional wisdom about error messages?
They tell user when he has made a mistake
What actually happens
Example
You are trying to enter in the date
you don’t enter the date in the precise format that is required by the user
What should be done then?
Maybe the sequence of number is not valid
Store and remind user later on – do not stop proceedings
Clerk handed slightly incomplete form
Error messages come from failure of software to behave reasonably
Programmers don’t want to think of ways of accommodating imperfect human behaviors

10. Do the error messages really perform a useful task?
Human makes mistakes
Do the error messages really perform a useful task?

11. Error messages don’t work
Error messages are not preventing human beings from getting into trouble
They prevent program from getting into trouble

12. Making errors impossible
Error messages are post facto reports of failure

13. Positive feedback
Software should learn to give positive feedback

14. Improving error messages: The last resort
Requirements for error message box
Be polite
Be illuminating
Be helpful

15. 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 Text in box 1 is not required, plz remove it
Zoom 2 ,3,4,5,6,7 … 2,3,4,5,6 should be zoom enough to readable 7 1

16. Notifying and Confirming

17. Alert dialogs Confirmation dialogs

18. Alerts and confirmations
notifies the user of the program’s action
Confirmation
gives user authority to override that action

19. Alerts: Announcing the obvious
Alerts announce the obvious things
Gives impression that they are not confident
Also, makes user go to another place
Example
We delete a file
Do we need to be told about it?

20. An example …

21. Alerts: flow-breaking behavior
Alerts boxes exhibits flow-breaking behavior
They causes interruptions in the flow of users tasks

22. 1 2
Zoom 1, and then 2 ….2 should be readable

23. Why are alerts so common?
They are easy to create
Most programming languages offer a message box facility in a single line of code
Building an animated status display into face of program might require thousands of line of code
So, programmers have a conflict of interest

24. So what should be done?
Software should have visual indicators

25. 2
Data in box 1 is not required…2 should be readable 1

26. Confirmations Confirmation
If program is not confident, it asks for approval with dialog box

27. Why do we get confirmations?
Confirmations come from program, not user
They are a reflection of implementation model

28. 1
Zoom, it should be readable

29. The confirmation process
Confirmations pass the buck
User issues command to the computer
Program detects command of the user
Program doesn’t want to take responsibility for the actions and the command issued by the user
Issues a confirmation

30. The dialog that cried, “wolf!”
Users start dismissing confirmations as a matter of routine
Some guidelines
Should only be provided if user will click ‘no’ or ‘cancel’
Should never be provided if user will click ‘yes’ or ‘ok’

31. 1 2 3
Zoom 1,2, 3 ….3 should be readable

32. Eliminating confirmation
Three approaches
Do, don’t ask
Make all actions reversible
Provide mode-less feedback to help users avoid mistakes

33. some examples …

34. 2 1
Remove text in box 1 ….zoom 2 it should be readable---- zoom 3 it should also be readable 3

35. Replacing dialogs: Rich mode-less feedback
Gives in-depth information about the status or attributes of a process or object in the current application
Visual
Making use of pixels on screen (often dynamically)
Mode-less
Information is always readily displayed, requiring no special action or mode shift on part of the user to view and make sense of feedback

36. 1
Zoom point 1

37. Zoom point 1 1

38. Zoom point 1 1