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

2. 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

3. 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)

4. 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…)

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

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

7. 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

8. 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!

9. 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!

10. 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

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

12. 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)