Interaction Design

Impossible

• Do you want to show learners things that no longer exist? (e.g. Past Civilisations?) • Do you want to show learners things that no human could ever see (e.g. outer space?).

Expensive / Rare

• Does the training require access to expensive equipment / personnel? • Is the training to prepare people for a one off occurrence so they could not practice in real life?

Some Guidelines to Reduce Cognitive Load

• Ensure consistency and predictability. • Reuse common user interface design patterns. • Redesign with care. • Remove clutter that competes for attention. • Chunk content. • Eliminate unnecessary steps.

Interaction Design

"Designing interactive products to support the way people communicate and interact in their everyday and working lives" "Is concerned with developing high quality interactive systems and products that fit with people and their ways of living"

5 ways to reduce cognitive load and keeping your UX lean and mean

1. Adhere To Time-Tested Conventions While your creativity urges you to go crazy and design something incredibly novel, you really need to stay rooted and adhere to popular practices that the larger part of your user base has gotten comfortable with over the years. For instance, the home button should always look like a tiny home. The back button — which is also the most used button on the web by the way — should always be some form of a backward pointing arrow. A cross should always mean 'close'. Stick to the standard formats popular in your industry because that is what your users expect. Do not try to reinvent the wheel because your users don't want another driving lesson. 2. Eliminate Unnecessary Steps The amount of work a user needs to do must be kept minimal. Google places a cursor in the search box as a default, so you can begin typing your query instantly. What if you had to first click inside the search box every single time you got on Google? Every step, no matter how small, makes a difference. 3. Understand How People Scan Pages Online A comprehensive eye-tracking study by the Nielsen Norman Group found that when scanning pages online, users tend to follow the F-Pattern. This means that they first read the headline, then scan a few points below and then read the first sub-heading after which they barely scan the content in downward direction, to see if there's anything useful there. 4. Declutter Be brutal when it comes to minimizing visual distractions. Overstimulating users with graphics, animations, flashy text, flickering logos and a barrage of other elements can cause discomfort that is almost physical and incredibly repulsive. Minimalism is definitely in when it comes to UX design. 5. Help them decide Paradoxically, too many options are crippling, rather than liberating. They tend to overwhelm users and increase cognitive load immeasurably. Instead of giving your users a world of options to choose from, give them a few relevant options. You can use smart analytics for deciding what options work best, or personalize as you go, based on user behavior.

Gestalt rule of proximity

The Gestalt rule of proximity indicates that items close together are perceived as being related/associated:

What steps should take place before starting development a voice product?

There are five steps should take place before starting development a voice product: Research Define Create Test Refine The great thing about this process is that it can be applied to all types of voice interfaces, whether it is a voice-enabled, voice-only or voice-first. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/05/future-design-voice-prototypes/ Define Key Scenarios Of Interaction # Scenarios come before specific ideas for app — they're a way to think about the reasons someone might have to use a VUI. You need design scenarios that have high value for your target users. If you have many scenarios and do not know which ones are important and which are not, create use case matrix to evaluate each individual scenario. The matrix will tell you what scenarios are primary, what are secondary what are nice-to-haves. Make Sure Key Scenarios Work With Voice # There should be a compelling reason to use voice. Users should be able to solve the problem faster or more efficiently using voice than any of the alternative experiences. A few common cases when voice interaction might be preferable for users: When user's hands are busy (while driving or cooking); 3. CREATE # With voice prototypes, it's important to start at the drawing board. The first step is to tackle the voice user flows of your experience, which is the basis from which all user interaction will map back to. Use Storyboards # Storyboards visualize interactions and flows in context and make them feel more realistic. Write Dialogues # Dialogues are the building blocks of voice user flows. For each key scenario that the voice app will support, start creating conversational dialogues between the user and the app. Strive to make interacting with the app as familiar as having a regular conversation with a real person. Human conversation is complex; it often has many twists and turns. It will be important to take this into account when working through your scenarios and writing dialogues. A few general recommendations for creating great dialogues: Reduce the number of steps it takes to complete a task.Try to eliminate unnecessary information and questions wherever possible. Design should solve the user's problem with the minimum number of steps. Remember that the longer it takes to complete the task, the less enjoyable the experience becomes. No one likes products that drain on their valuable time, and this is especially true for repetitive tasks. Your app should provide a delightful user experience whether it's the first time a user completes the task, or it's the 100th time this month. Don't teach "commands".Given how hard discovery can be in voice, some designers try to teach users commands so they know what to say. Don't do that. Phrasing should be natural and intuitive, so users will know what to say in particular situations. Be brief with your questions and responses.It's relatively easy to overload users with too much information when you use long sentences. Try to simplify messages to their essence wherever possible. Users enjoy concise and well-defined information from VUI. Think about what information is primary, and what information is secondary. Follow the principle of Maximum of Quantity which says that a speaker provides the listener as much information as is necessary to advance the perceived purpose of the interaction but not too much. The dialogue tries to present all options in a single turn. It's better to try to narrow down the list by asking a clarifying question: User: "Where's a good place to go for pizza?"System: "There are several pizza restaurants in the area — would you like to walk, or drive?" MisspellingsSome users can mispronounce words and the natural language processing system won't understand the request. AmbiguityEven between humans, speech is sometimes ambiguous. For example, someone might say "Good" and that could be defined as 'Yes, I agree' or just be an indication that they're listening. (also accents it might not know!) Reflect Your Unique Identity # All voices project a persona whether you plan for one or not. Don't leave your VUI persona to chance, reflect your unique brand and identity in dialogues you write. Imagine how your ideal employee should interact with customers and try to reflect it in the wording of your dialogues. Use explicit confirmation for important actions and implicit for routine tasks. For example, if you ask your Alexa to send money to your friend, a user probably wants to hear "The [amount of money] was sent to [name of the person]" rather than just "OK." At the same time, when you ask Alexa to turn off the lights in a garage, hearing "The lights in the garage are off" all the time might be too much, so be sure to test confirmations carefully to find out what confirmations your users feel is critical in order to feel successful with the VUI. For example, when a user orders pizza, the system might remind them about their previous order: User: "I want to order a pizza."System: "Last time you ordered Quattro Formaggio from Pizza & Pasta. Do you want to order it again?"User: "Yay, I do!" Test Your Dialogues # Now when you have all your dialogues written, it's time to start testing them. Why? Because the way we speak is far less formal than the way we write. To make sure you design dialogues that sound natural, it's vital to test them before moving to prototyping. Two simple techniques will help you do it: Record and play audio with your dialogs. You'll hear nuances of words and sentences that just aren't natural. Role play conversations to make sure they're natural and intuitive. A technique called 'Wizard of Oz' will help you quickly identify the problems in your dialogues. If you're Mac user, you can use a tool called Say Wizard to make things easier. Prototype Your App # Now that we've written, mapped and tested our dialogues we can finally move on to designing and prototyping the experience. Adobe XD makes it easy for designers to create a working prototype for voice-enabled Amazon or Google apps and test it with real users. The tool allows you to prototype the actual voice inputs and outputs for the app. A typical interaction consists of user input and system responses: To design user requests, we need to create voice triggers. To add a new voice trigger, drag a connector from an element in one artboard to another. When the attributes menu opens, select Voice from Trigger menu and add your utterance in the Command field. Speech Playback will simulate the response of the voice app. To add Speech Playback, you need to select Time as the Trigger and set the action to Speech Playback.

CRAP

On detailed level: remember CRAP ▪ Contrast ▪ Ensure good contrast between what you want people to pay attention to and other noise around it E.g. use colour contrast, image contrast, text size, image size. ▪ Repetition ▪ Keep consistency by repeating the same style across the design. E.g. text size, link style, heading style, containers. ▪ Alignment ▪ Make sure everything is aligned and organised. E.g. Text, images, form fields, bullet points ▪ Proximity ▪ What belongs together stays together. Group elements which are related to each other (and put elements not related away from each other)

Virtual Reality - Types of VR Hardware

• CAVE VR - Room scale VR experiences where environment is projected onto walls around the users. • Tethered VR Headsets - High quality VR headsets running off of high powered PC's or Games Console. Tethered by cables or dedicated wireless. (HTC Vive Pro 2, Valve Index, PSVR) • Standalone VR Headsets - Medium Quality VR headsets running VR independent of any other devices. (Meta Quest Pro, Pico 4) • Phone Based VR - Low / medium quality VR experience requiring users phones to be placed into a headset and act as the screen. No longer really used. (Samsung Gear VR, Google Cardboard etc).

Attractive things work better.

In the early days of the personal computer, all the display screens were black and white. When color screens were first introduced, I did not understand their popularity. In those days, color was primarily used either to highlight text or to add superfluous screen decoration. From a cognitive point of view, color added no value that could not be provided with the appropriate use of shading. But despite the fact that the interface community could find no scientific benefit, businesses insisted on buying color monitors. Obviously, color was fulfilling some need, but one we could not measure. In order to understand this phenomenon, I borrowed a color display to use with my computer. After the allocated time, I was convinced that my assessment had been correct -- color added no discernible value for everyday work. However, I refused to give up the color display. Although my reasoning told me that color was unimportant, my emotional reaction told me otherwise. Take a simple example -- trying to escape a hazardous situation. Suppose that fleeing people encounter a door that won't open. The anxiety-produced response is to try again harder. When the first push doesn't open the door, press harder, kick, and even throw the body against it. In less stressful situations people might recognize that the correct solution is to pull instead of push, but not in high-anxiety producing ones. Designs intended for stressful situations have to pay special attention to matching the needs of the users, to making appropriate actions salient and easy to apply. In other words, the principles of good human-centered design are especially important in stressful situations. Now consider tools meant for neutral or positive situations. Here, any pleasure derivable from the appearance or functioning of the tool increases positive affect, broadening the creativity and increasing the tolerance for minor difficulties and blockages. Minor problems in the design are overlooked. The changes in processing style released by positive affect aids in creative problem solving that is apt to overcome both difficulties encountered in the activity as well as those created by the interface design. In other words, when we feel good, we overlook design faults. Use a pleasing design, one that looks good and feels, well, sexy, and the behavior seems to go along more smoothly, more easily, and better. Attractive things work better. Good design means that beauty and usability are in balance. An object that is beautiful to the core is no better than one that is only pretty if they both lack usability. In a clever set of experiments, Alice Isen has shown that if people are given small, unexpected gifts, afterwards they are able to solve problems that require creative thought better than people who were not given gifts. The positive affective system seems to change the cognitive parameters of problem solving to emphasize breadth-first thinking, and the examination of multiple alternatives. It also has the side effect of making people more distractible.

Persona

Personas are archetypical users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users. Usually, a persona is presented in a one or two-page document (like the one you can see in the example below). Such 1-2-page descriptions include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and background information, as well as the environment in which a persona operates. Designers usually add a few fictional personal details in a description to make the persona a realistic character (e.g. quotes of real users), as well as context-specific details (for example, for a banking app it makes sense to include a persona's financial sophistication and major expenses). Personas reflect real user patterns, not different user roles. Personas aren't a fictional guesses at what a target user thinks. Every aspect of a persona's description should be tied back to real data (observed and researched). Personas aren't a reflection of roles within a system. A persona focuses on the current state (how users interact with a product), not the future (how users will interact with a product). A persona is context-specific (it's focused on the behaviors and goals related to the specific domain of a product). Why It's Important? Deep understanding of a target audience is fundamental to creating exceptional products. Personas help a product team find the answer to one of their most important questions, "Who are we designing for?" By understanding the expectations, concerns and motivations of target users, it's possible to design a product that will satisfy users needs and therefore be successful. Build Empathy Empathy is a core value if designers want to make something that is good for the people who are going to use it. Personas help designers to create understanding and empathy with the end users. Provide Direction For Making Design Decisions They can also help settle arguments around design decisions - instead of saying, "I think the 'Send' button should be bigger in our email app," a designer might say, "Since our primary persona, Carolyn, is always on the go she needs bigger tap targets in the app to be able to send the email without eye strain." Communicate Research Findings with team mambers designers often start creating personas during the second phase, the Define phase. Step 3. Remove the focus from demography Too much demography makes designers think stereotypically and attribute wrong traits to people (here's more on representativeness heuristic bias). As a result, you make assumptions about people's emotions and thoughts instead of real-life behaviors, which you can observe — not just guess. Step 5. Add more needs, wants, and fears How many goals and needs have you written? Three? Four? Try finding more, and don't forget about the fears and wants people might have mentioned during the interviews. This will help to understand not only business concerns but also personal perspectives. Step 6. Describe the relevant experience If you are designing, for example, a software product, try listing the solutions a persona already uses and note how enjoyable that experience was. This section gives insights into people's habits, things that don't need fixing at all, and niches for something new.

Jakob's Law of the Internet User Experience

Users spend most of their time on websites other than yours.

Cognitive Load

coined in 1988 by John Sweller, suggests that our working memory is only able to hold a small amount of information at any one time and that instructional methods should avoid overloading it in order to maximise learning

User-Centred Design

• User Research: Understand users, needs, goals and opportunities • Conceptual Design: Explore alternative designs • Detailed Design: Build interactive prototypes that can be communicated and assessed • Evaluate: what is being created throughout the process.

Empathy Mapping

Definition: An empathy map is a collaborative visualization used to articulate what we know about a particular type of user. It externalizes knowledge about users in order to 1) create a shared understanding of user needs, and 2) aid in decision making. - Says - Thinks - Does - Feels An Empathy map will help you understand your user's needs while you develop a deeper understanding of the persons you are designing for. Consult all five layers in Maslow's Pyramid to help you define which needs your user is primarily focused on fulfilling. Start reflecting on how your product or service can help fulfill some of those needs. The Says quadrant contains what the user says out loud in an interview or some other usability study. Ideally, it contains verbatim and direct quotes from research. "I am allegiant to Delta because I never have a bad experience." "I want something reliable." "I don't understand what to do from here." The Thinks quadrant captures what the user is thinking throughout the experience. Ask yourself (from the qualitative research gathered): what occupies the user's thoughts? What matters to the user? It is possible to have the same content in both Says and Thinks. However, pay special attention to what users think, but may not be willing to vocalize. Try to understand why they are reluctant to share — are they unsure, self-conscious, polite, or afraid to tell others something? "This is really annoying." "Am I dumb for not understanding this?" The Does quadrant encloses the actions the user takes. From the research, what does the user physically do? How does the user go about doing it? Refreshes page several times. Shops around to compare prices. The Feels quadrant is the user's emotional state, often represented as an adjective plus a short sentence for context. Ask yourself: what worries the user? What does the user get excited about? How does the user feel about the experience? Impatient: pages load too slowly Confused: too many contradictory prices Worried: they are doing something wrong An empathy map consists of four quadrants laid out on a board, paper or table, which reflect the four key traits that the users demonstrated/possessed during the observation stage. The four quadrants refer to what the users: Said, Did, Thought, and Felt. Determining what the users said and did are relatively easy; however, determining what they thought and felt is based on careful observation of how they behaved and responded to certain activities, suggestions, conversations etc. (including subtle cues such as body language displayed and the tone of voice used). The 4 quadrants exist only to push our knowledge about users and to ensure we don't leave out any important dimension. (If you don't have anything to put into a certain quadrant, it's a strong signal that you need more user research before proceeding in the design process.) Empathy maps can capture one particular user or can reflect an aggregation of multiple users: One-user (individual) empathy maps are usually based on a user interview or a user's log from a diary study. Aggregated empathy maps represent a user segment, rather than one particular user. They are usually created by combining multiple individual empathy maps from users who exhibit similar behaviors and can be grouped into one segment. The aggregated empathy map synthesizes themes seen throughout that user group and can be a first step in the creation of personas. (However, empathy maps are not a replacement for personas. But they can be one way to visualize what we know about a persona in an organized, empathetic way.)

Embodiment Illusion

Embodiment illusion works on making the user believe that the body they have in the virtual world belongs to them, unlike the other two illusions where they focus more on making the environment more realistic. Position and rotation tracking is extremely important for this type of illusion because the body in the virtual world needs to be able to imitate your movements in the real world to make it seem realistic in the virtual one.

The the Three Illusions In VR

Place Illusion Feeling of being in a virtual place even when you know you're not there Plausibility How real do I take the events to be. You can feel like you're really in a place but you don't believe it to be happening (Card word cut out of a dog to scare away birds) Body ownership When you look down you see a virtual body substituting your own body Illusion that that body is your body. The shape of that body can have a consequence for your understanding. https://www.coursera.org/lecture/introduction-virtual-reality/introduction-to-the-three-illusions-AeyX9

Point Of View - Problem Statement

Your POV captures your design vision by defining the RIGHT challenge to address in the ideation sessions. A POV involves reframing a design challenge into an actionable problem statement. You articulate a POV by combining your knowledge about the user you are designing for, his or her needs and the insights which you've come to know in your research or Empathise mode. Your POV should be an actionable problem statement that will drive the rest of your design work. You articulate a POV by combining these three elements - user, need, and insight. You can articulate your POV by inserting your information about your user, the needs and your insights in the following sentence: [User . . . (descriptive)] needs [need . . . (verb)] because [insight. . . (compelling)]

DICE Dangerous

Dangerous VR is a useful way to create training and practice scenarios that are too dangerous to practice in the physical world. Among the earliest VR-based training modules were things like flight simulators. Pilots can practice for many hours in an environment that mimics what they'll experience. But if they make mistakes that damage or crash the virtual plane, no one gets hurt. The possibilities for safety training are myriad. Firefighters practice in realistic scenarios, gaining experience and confidence in choosing the right approach to fighting a dangerous fire—and also practicing and improving their emotional and behavioral responses, becoming more effective firefighters.

Why-How Laddering

"As a general rule, asking 'why' yields more abstract statements and asking 'how'yields specific statements. Often times abstract statements are more meaningful but not as directly actionable, and the opposite is true of more specific statements."- d.school, Method Card, Why-How Laddering For this reason, during the Define stage designers seek to define the problem, and will generally ask why. Designers will use why to progress to the top of the so-called Why-How Ladder where the ultimate aim is to find out how you can solve one or more problems. Your How Might We questions will help you move from the Define stage and into the next stage in Design Thinking, the Ideation stage, where you start looking for specific innovative solutions. In other words you could say that the Why-How Laddering starts with asking Why to work out How they can solve the specific problem or design challenge.

First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users

A spinning logo might look pretty cool if you don't need to accomplish anything on the page. Another example is the drop-down menu. Users always love the idea: finally a standard user interface widget that they understand and that stays the same on every page. However, while they offer users a sense of power over the design, drop-down menus often have low usability and either confuse users or lead them to unintended parts of the site. To discover which designs work best, watch users as they attempt to perform tasks with the user interface. This method is so simple that many people overlook it, assuming that there must be something more to usability testing. - Watch what people actually do. - Do not believe what people say they do. - Definitely don't believe what people predict they may do in the future. Say, for example, that 50% of survey respondents claim they would buy more from ecommerce sites that offer 3-D product views. Does this mean you should rush to implement 3-D on your site? No. It means that "3-D" sounds cool. When should you collect preference data from users? Only after they have used a design and have a real feeling for how well it supports them. Jonathan Levy and I analyzed data from 113 pairwise comparisons of user interfaces designed to support the same task and found a 0.44 correlation between users' measured performance and their stated preference. The more a design supports users in easily and efficiently doing what they want to do, the more they like the design. Very understandable. However, when collecting preference data, you must take human nature into account. When talking about past behavior, users' self-reported data is typically 3 steps removed from the truth: In answering questions (particularly in a focus group), people bend the truth to be closer to what they think you want to hear or what's socially acceptable. In telling you what they do, people are really telling you what they remember doing. Human memory is very fallible, especially regarding the small details that are crucial for interface design. Users cannot remember some details at all, such as interface elements that they didn't see. In reporting what they do remember, people rationalize their behavior. Countless times I have heard statements like "I would have seen the button if it had been bigger." Maybe. All we know is that the user didn't see the button. One question that does work well in a website survey is "Why are you visiting our site today?" This question goes to users' motivation and they can answer it as soon as they arrive. Your best bet in soliciting reliable feedback is to have a captive audience: Conduct formal testing and ask users to fill out a survey at the end. With techniques like paper prototyping, you can test designs and question users without implementing a thing.

when and why it might make sense to consider VR-based training?

DICE Dangerous, Impossible, Counterintuitive, or Expensive and rare

Types of User Observation

Controlled Observation Controlled observation tends to take place in a laboratory environment. It is focused on revealing quantitative data though it may also yield qualitative observations. The advantages of this approach include: Easy to reproduce. If you use a quantitative approach - it should be easy to get similar results by repeating the research. This may be important if the results are challenged at a high level in an organization. Easy to analyze. Quantitative data requires less effort to analyze than qualitative data. Quick to conduct. While recruitment may take a little time a lab conducted controlled observation is fairly fast to run. There is a possible drawback to this approach too: The Hawthorne Effect. This is an understanding that the act of observation of how someone does something can change their approach to carrying out the task. Naturalistic Observation A naturalistic observation involves studying the user "in the wild" and tends to be less structured (though a structured approach is certainly possible to a "in the wild" observation - it's really just a repeat of a controlled observation but outside of the lab). This means spending time with a user or group of users and observing their behavior with the product as they use it in day-to-day life. The observer records their observations as they see fit. This is very much an approach which leads to qualitative outputs. The advantages of this approach include: More reliable. When people use a product in real life - they are much more likely to encounter the frustrations (and benefits) of real life use than they are in a lab following a set of instructions. More useful for ideation. Qualitative research can generate lots of ideas for product improvement as it opens up possibilities that aren't found in quantitative research. However, there are some disadvantages to using this method too: It's difficult to include a representative sample. This kind of research is more expensive and time consuming to conduct than controlled observations and that limits the reach of the research. It's better to use this kind of research to create ideas and then test those ideas with other forms of research than to rely on the output of the research as gospel. It's difficult to make them replicable. Because of the problem with sample sizes - you are going to find very different results if you repeat the research. This is doubly true if you use a different observer (as observers will see different things in even identical situations). It's hard to manipulate external variables. For example, if it's raining when you observe your users working on a smartphone - their behavior is likely to be different to when it's sunny. You have no control over the weather "in the wild". What to Look for During User Observation It can help, when it comes to qualitative observation, to have some touch points to examine: What are users actually doing? As opposed to what you expected they might do. What routines do users have with the product? How are they integrating it into their lives? Record details - adding granularity and specificity to an observation can make it much more meaningful Ensure you're examining activities in their whole; look at how the product is used in context with their device and the flow of their lives and not just at the product itself. Don't be afraid to get quantitative. If you see an example of behavior that you think may be repeated - make a note of it and look for it in future observations.

DICE Impossible

Impossible VR makes the impossible possible. A VR simulation allows learners to take on a new identity and experience a situation from multiple perspectives that are otherwise unavailable to them. VHIL studies have placed participants in avatar bodies that are of different genders or races to test the potential for increasing empathy or encouraging openness to diversity. Men can experience harassing behavior while in the body of a woman; anyone can experience racism and other forms of harassment and discrimination while in the body of an avatar of a different race. The visceral experience can feel real enough to change the learner's behavior toward others. Time travel is another impossibility, but using VR to experience a historical site as it might have looked and felt 100 or 1,000 years ago is a feasible and exciting educational use of VR.

Mental Models / Conceptual Models

Mental models are representations of the external world that people construct in their minds to help them understand how things work and what to do in current and future situations Norman defines a mental model as: "The model people have of themselves, others, the environment and the things with which they interact. People form mental models through experience, training and instructions." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shSCUNxtn18&feature=youtu.be

Paper Prototyping

Paper prototyping is the process of developing ideas and designing user flows using hand-sketched "screens" that represent a digital product. Paper prototypes test on a high-level user experience rather than interaction design. Paper prototypes are low-fidelity because they don't have any functionality. For this reason, paper prototypes designers rarely share paper prototypes outside of the department. The primary goal of paper prototyping is to map our information architecture and visualize user flows. Design teams often lay paper screens on a desk or flow and imagine how real users would navigate to reach an end goal. The designs are rudimentary and usually sketched in black and white. Content is limited, with only headlines and call to action links displaying any legible text. Sometimes, teams will build a mock iPhone or Android device using a piece of cardboard to simulate swipes, scrolls, and other basic functionality. These mock devices also allow designers to see how their designs might look within the confines of a mobile phone—especially useful if you're designing a mobile app! While the main benefit of paper prototyping is speed, some designers use tools like UI Stencils to design accurate, aesthetically pleasing screen layouts—vital if you plan to present paper prototypes to stakeholders or testing participants. Advantages: Rapid iteration — It's easier to discard a paper design that took 5 minutes vs. a digital mockup that you spent more than an hour perfecting. Low cost — Paper is cheap, and even additional tools and kits won't break the bank. Increased creativity — The freedom of pencil and paper fosters experimentation and new ideas. Design tools have their place in the design process but can stifle creativity in the early design stages. Team-building — Paper prototyping is a rare opportunity where teams get together in a creative environment. Working with pen and paper brings out child-like energy, which can help form bonds and strengthen coworker relationships. Minimal learning curve — Everyone can sketch ideas, making paper prototyping a great way to involve other departments like marketing, development, and stakeholders. Documentation — Paper prototypes serve as excellent documentation. Designers can make notes and outline ideas to reference throughout the project. Disadvantages: Inaccurate feedback — Outside of UX teams, paper prototypes might be challenging to interpret, limiting any accurate or meaningful feedback. Potentially unnecessary — With rapid prototyping tools like UXPin, paper prototyping might add additional, unnecessary steps to the design process. UXPin comes with pre-made design systems, so designers can quickly drag-and-drop high-fidelity elements to design and edit working prototypes quickly. Once you move from paper to digital, there's no reason to return. Some designers might return to paper prototyping for new features or a product redesign. But even then, returning to paper prototyping might be unnecessary. https://library.gv.com/paper-prototyping-is-a-waste-of-time-353076395187#.8lzusb9y3

Basic Elements of Visual Design

The basic elements that combine to create visual designs include the following: Lines connect two points and can be used to help define shapes, make divisions, and create textures. All lines, if they're straight, have a length, width, and direction. Shapes are self-contained areas. To define the area, the graphic artist uses lines, differences in value, color, and/or texture. Every object is composed of shapes. Color palette choices and combinations are used to differentiate items, create depth, add emphasis, and/or help organize information. Color theory examines how various choices psychologically impact users. Texture refers to how a surface feels or is perceived to feel. By repeating an element, a texture will be created and a pattern formed. Depending on how a texture is applied, it may be used strategically to attract or deter attention. Typography refers to which fonts are chosen, their size, alignment, color, and spacing. Form applies to three-dimensional objects and describes their volume and mass. Form may be created by combining two or more shapes and can be further enhanced by different tones, textures, and colors. Principles for Creating a Visual Design A successful visual design applies the following principles to elements noted above and effectively brings them together in a way that makes sense. When trying to figure out how to use the basic elements consider: Unity has to do with all elements on a page visually or conceptually appearing to belong together. Visual design must strike a balance between unity and variety to avoid a dull or overwhelming design. Gestalt, in visual design, helps users perceive the overall design as opposed to individual elements. If the design elements are arranged properly, the Gestalt of the overall design will be very clear. Space is "defined when something is placed in it", according to Alex White in his book, The Elements of Graphic Design. Incorporating space into a design helps reduce noise, increase readability, and/or create illusion. White space is an important part of your layout strategy. Hierarchy shows the difference in significance between items. Designers often create hierarchies through different font sizes, colors, and placement on the page. Usually, items at the top are perceived as most important. Balance creates the perception that there is equal distribution. This does not always imply that there is symmetry. Contrast focuses on making items stand out by emphasizing differences in size, color, direction, and other characteristics. Scale identifies a range of sizes; it creates interest and depth by demonstrating how each item relates to each other based on size. Dominance focuses on having one element as the focal point and others being subordinate. This is often done through scaling and contrasting based on size, color, position, shape, etc. Similarity refers to creating continuity throughout a design without direct duplication. Similarity is used to make pieces work together over an interface and help users learn the interface quicker.

How to measure Gulf of execution

Thus, to measure or determine the gulf of execution, we may ask how well the action possibilities of the system/artifact match the intended actions of the user.

prototype fidelity

Prototyping can range in method and technique, which is often referred to as low, medium, or high fidelity. Fidelity refers to the level of detail and the functionality of your prototype. Typically, the higher the fidelity, the more effort and cost it takes to create. Different scenarios call for different levels of fidelity, and there are pros and cons of each. Best practices include knowing what each includes, as well as how and when to use them.

Learning and Transference

Transference, in this context of learning, refers to our expectations about an interface's behavior based on our previous experiences with other interfaces. How do we know the way a scrollbar works? That knowledge is based on previous experience.

Sensory Memories

Sensory memories are the memories which are stored for tiny time periods and which originate from our sensory organs (such as our eyes or our nose). They are typically retained for less than 500 milliseconds. Visual sensory memory is often known as iconic memory. Sensory visual memories are the raw information that the brain receives (via the optic nerve) from the eye. We store and process sensory memories automatically - that is without any conscious effort to do so.

Helping Memorising

• It is easier to memorise meaningful information. • When doing visual design, structure information to make it meaningful to the user and to help chunking - use categories, ordering, associations.

Affective technology

Affective computing technologies are designed to sense and respond based on human emotions. This technology allows a computer system to process the information gathered from various sensors to assess the emotional state of an individual. Affective computing refers to the study of emotional machines and their impact on human lives. Though the field encompasses a wide range of disciplines, in technology, it is primarily associated with artificial intelligence (AI)

Affective Technology

Affective technology is one that senses the user's emotional state and acts in response, potentially aiming to influence that state. The sensing might be achieved through facial recognition, heart rate, gestures, temperature, etc.

Synthesise INSIGHTS

An "Insight" is your remarkable realization that can help you to solve the current design challenge you're facing. Look to synthesise major insights, especially from contradictions between two user attributes. It can be found within one quadrant or in two different quadrants. You can also synthesise insights by asking yourself: "Why?" when you notice strange, tense, or surprising behaviour. Write down your insights.

Long-Term Memories

In most instances the memories transferred to our short-term memories are quickly forgotten. This is, probably, a good thing. If we didn't forget the huge volumes of information that we perceive on a daily basis we could well become overloaded with information and find processing it in a meaningful way soon became impossible. In order for most memories to transfer from short-term to long-term memory - conscious effort must be made to effect the transfer. This is why students review for examinations; the repeated application of information or rehearsing of information enables the transfer of the material they are studying to long-term memory. It is also possible for a long-term memory to evolve through a meaningful association in the brain. For example, we know that a static shock is painful even if we are only shocked once. It doesn't take repeated shocks to memorize that.

Mental Models

A representation of the external world which people construct in their minds to help them understand how things work and what to do in current and future situations. According to Norman: "The model people have of themselves, others, the environment and the things with which they interact. People form mental models through experience, training and instructions."

design thinking ideology

Definition: The design thinking ideology asserts that a hands-on, user-centric approach to problem solving can lead to innovation, and innovation can lead to differentiation and a competitive advantage. This hands-on, user-centric approach is defined by the design thinking process and comprises 6 distinct phases, as defined and illustrated below. Empathize: Conduct research in order to develop knowledge about what your users do, say, think, and feel. Imagine your goal is to improve an onboarding experience for new users. In this phase, you talk to a range of actual users. Directly observe what they do, how they think, and what they want, asking yourself things like 'what motivates or discourages users?' or 'where do they experience frustration?' The goal is to gather enough observations that you can truly begin to empathize with your users and their perspectives. Define: Combine all your research and observe where your users' problems exist. In pinpointing your users' needs, begin to highlight opportunities for innovation. Consider the onboarding example again. In the define phase, use the data gathered in the empathize phase to glean insights. Organize all your observations and draw parallels across your users' current experiences. Is there a common pain point across many different users? Identify unmet user needs. Ideate: Brainstorm a range of crazy, creative ideas that address the unmet user needs identified in the define phase. Give yourself and your team total freedom; no idea is too farfetched and quantity supersedes quality. At this phase, bring your team members together and sketch out many different ideas. Then, have them share ideas with one another, mixing and remixing, building on others' ideas. Prototype: Build real, tactile representations for a subset of your ideas. The goal of this phase is to understand what components of your ideas work, and which do not. In this phase you begin to weigh the impact vs. feasibility of your ideas through feedback on your prototypes. Make your ideas tactile. If it is a new landing page, draw out a wireframe and get feedback internally. Change it based on feedback, then prototype it again in quick and dirty code. Then, share it with another group of people. Test: Return to your users for feedback. Ask yourself 'Does this solution meet users' needs?' and 'Has it improved how they feel, think, or do their tasks?' Put your prototype in front of real customers and verify that it achieves your goals. Has the users' perspective during onboarding improved? Does the new landing page increase time or money spent on your site? As you are executing your vision, continue to test along the way. Implement: Put the vision into effect. Ensure that your solution is materialized and touches the lives of your end users. This is the most important part of design thinking, but it is the one most often forgotten. As Don Norman preaches, "we need more design doing." Design thinking does not free you from the actual design doing. It's not magic. Milton Glaser's words resonate: "There's no such thing as a creative type. As if creativity is a verb, a very time-consuming verb. It's about taking an idea in your head, and transforming that idea into something real. And that's always going to be a long and difficult process. If you're doing it right, it's going to feel like work." As impactful as design thinking can be for an organization, it only leads to true innovation if the vision is executed. The success of design thinking lies in its ability to transform an aspect of the end user's life. This sixth step — implement — is crucial.

Fogg Behaviour Model (FBM)

FBM is a model of persuasive tech: "The FBM asserts that for a person to perform a target behavior, he or she must (1) be sufficiently motivated, (2) have the ability to perform the behavior, and (3) be triggered to perform the behavior. These three factors must occur at the same moment, else the behavior will not happen. The FBM is useful in analysis and design of persuasive technologies."

Norman's Model of Action (on test)

Norman's Model of Action describes the interaction cycle which occurs when a user engages with a system to achieve a particular goal. Seven stages of user activity: • Perceiving the system state • Interpreting the state • Evaluating the system state • Establishing the goal • Forming the intention • Specifying the action sequence • Executing the action The action cycle At the end you need to know that the action has been done correctly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahtOCfyRbRg To sum up, the gulfs of evaluation and of execution refer to the mismatch between our internal goals on the one side, and, on the other side, the expectations and the availability of information specifying the state of the world (or an artifact) and how we may change it (Norman 1991).

The 7 +/-2 rule

The 7 +/-2 rule works when it's something people HAVE to remember. If the menu is always there it can have as many things as it can fit b/c you don't have to remember it. Have 7 rule for like Alexa or gesture interactions but not a header menu (that's on every page)

Analysis and Synthesis

Analysis is about breaking down complex concepts and problems into smaller, easier-to-understand constituents. We do that, for instance, during the first stage of the Design Thinking process, the Empathise stage, when we observe and document details that relate to our users. Synthesis, on the other hand, involves creatively piecing the puzzle together to form whole ideas. This happens during the Define stage when we organise, interpret, and make sense of the data we have gathered to create a problem statement.

Mixed-Up Mental Models

In case of a mental-model mismatch, you basically have two different options: Make the system conform to users' mental models — assuming most models are similar. This is the approach we usually recommend to fix IA problems: If people look for something in the wrong place, then move it to the place where they look for it. Card sorting is a useful way to discover users' mental model of an information space so that you can design your navigation accordingly. Improve users' mental models so that they more accurately reflect your system. You can do this by, for example, explaining things better and making labels clearer to make the UI more transparent (even though the underlying system remains unchanged). For example, the word "Google" is usually the top query at other search engines, and words like "Yahoo" and "Bing" score high on Google. Why, oh why, do people search for a website if they already know its name? Why not just type, say, www.bing.com into the URL field? The reason is that many users have never formed an accurate model of how the "type-in boxes" on their screen function. When they type stuff into a box, they sometimes get where they want to go. What to type where and exactly how each type-in box functions, however, are often beyond their ken. The inability to distinguish between similar type-in boxes is a key reason for the guideline to avoid multiple search features. When a website or intranet has several search engines on the same page, users often don't know the difference. They'll enter their query into whatever box catches their fancy and assume that the site doesn't have the answer if nothing comes back. Users don't just confuse search fields; many less-techy users don't understand the differences between many other common features: Operating-system windows vs. browser windows A window vs. an application Icons vs. applications Browser commands vs. native commands in a web-based app Local vs. remote ("cloud") info Different passwords and log-in options (users often log in to other websites as if they were logging in to their email) Netflix started as a mail-order service for renting movies on DVD. However, Netflix worked differently than typical e-commerce sites, which caused problems when we tested it with new users in our project about famous sites' usability: When users added a film to their Netflix "queue," they used a mental model of an e-commerce shopping cart to predict what would happen: nothing. Adding stuff to the cart doesn't cause you to receive that item in the mail. You first have to proceed through checkout and confirm that you want it. In reality, however, Netflix will immediately mail you the DVD that's on top of the queue. Later, when you mail it back, they'll send you the next movie in your queue, without you having to go to the site and do anything. That's why they have the "queue" feature instead of a standard shopping cart. There's great inertia in users' mental models: stuff that people know well tends to stick, even when it's not helpful. This alone is surely an argument for being conservative and not coming up with new interaction styles. On the other hand, sometimes you do need to innovate, but it's best to do so only in cases where the new approach is clearly vastly superior to the old, well-known ways. Netflix is obviously a successful company, and its innovation of sending customers a steady stream of movies from a queue was a major reason for this success.

Physical buttons outperform touchscreens in new cars, test finds artical

Big differences The easiest car to understand and operate, by a large margin, is the 2005 Volvo V70. The four tasks is handled within ten seconds flat, during which the car is driven 306 meters at 110 km/h. At the other end of the scale, Chinese electric car MG Marvel R performs far worse. The driver needs 44.6 seconds before all the tasks are completed, during which the car has travelled 1,372 meters - more than four times the distance compared to the old Volvo. BMW iX and Seat Leon perform better, but both are still too complicated. The driver needs almost a kilometer to perform the tasks. Lots can happen in traffic during that time. Dacia Sandero and Volvo C40 perform well although they both have touchscreens. However, they are not overloaded with features. Volvo shows that a touchscreen doesn't need to be complicated.

Social Proof

In cognitive psychology, social proof is a theory that people conform to the opinions of others. There are many ways to use social proof marketing in UX design: Add logos from the companies a client or employer collaborated with. Encourage customer reviews, comments, and ratings on a website. Show customer testimonials, along with their name and location.

human memory three facets

In essence, human memory has three facets: sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory. The designer is most concerned with the first two types and strategically designs to appeal to short-term and sensory memory.

7 +/- 2

Perhaps one of the most useful bits of information about human memory is that humans have trouble remembering and engaging with anything that has more than 7 (give or take 2) task items. Designers take this memory limitation into account when presenting information and wireframing products, in order to provide the most memorable and efficient user experience.

Why Use Empathy Maps

Empathy maps should be used throughout any UX process to establish common ground among team members and to understand and prioritize user needs. In user-centered design, empathy maps are best used from the very beginning of the design process. Capture who a user or persona is. The empathy-mapping process helps distill and categorize your knowledge of the user into one place. It can be used to:Categorize and make sense of qualitative research (research notes, survey answers, user-interview transcripts)Discover gaps in your current knowledge and identify the types of research needed to address it. A sparse empathy map indicates that more research needs to be done.Create personas by aligning and grouping empathy maps covering individual users Communicate a user or persona to others: An empathy map is a quick, digestible way to illustrate user attitudes and behaviors. Once created, it should act as a source of truth throughout a project and protect it from bias or unfounded assumptions. Collect data directly from the user. When empathy maps are filled in directly by users, they can act as a secondary data source and represent a starting point for a summary of the user session. Moreover, the interviewer may glean feelings and thoughts from the interviewee that otherwise would have remained hidden.

Gestalt Visual Principles

Gestalt originates from the German word "Gestalt," meaning "shape" or "form." It is a cognitive psychology theory explores people's perceptions of massive amounts of data they learn every day. Namely, when we perceive complex objects, we tend to group their elements and observe them as a whole. Figure-ground People subconsciously separate website elements on different planes of focus. We tend to analyze the object to understand what elements are put prominently to the front and which ones are in the background. Use layering, contrast, and information hierarchy to emphasize the most important website elements. Closure When shapes, images, or letters have missing parts, our perception bridges this visual gap and observes the object as a whole. This is particularly used in logo designs, such as IBM or NBC. Completion meters and loaders are also a great example of this law. Continuity This law emphasizes that the eye is compelled to move through one object and continue to another one. Elements that are arranged on a line are often considered more related than those standing independently. There are many ways to use the law of continuity in UX design. For example, you could apply it to creating an intuitive navigation bar or when grouping products that are similar or related to each other. Proximity Elements that are close appear to be more related than those that are far apart. A perfect example of that Gestalt principle is product pages, where the nearness of a product image and its title and description indicate their relatedness. Similarity The idea behind the Gestalt law of similarity is simple - items that are similar to each other are grouped together.

Hick's Law

Hick's law, explains that the time it takes for us to make a decision is directly impacted by the number of choices we have. Logically, increasing the number of choices will increase users' decision time. Remove Unnecessary Design Elements Like I have mentioned above, every user landing on a website has a specific goal. When the website is cluttered with lots of content and too many design elements, it would be difficult to interpret and navigate through. You should always give every page a clear purpose. For example, when creating a landing page for a client, make sure it has a clear goal. Providing multiple CTAs on a single page will only confuse a user and prevent them from converting. Finally, leave lots of white space to keep users focused. Avoid using multiple typography options, color palettes, high-contrast colors, links, images, and font sizes. You should also stop using frustrating auto-play videos.

"How Might We" Questions

How Might We (HMW) questions are questions that have the potential to spark ideation sessions such as brainstorms. They should be broad enough for a wide range of solutions, but narrow enough that specific solutions can be created for them. "How Might We" questions should be based on the observations you've gathered in the Empathise stage of the Design Thinking process. For example, you have observed that youths tend not to watch TV programs on the TV at home, some questions which can guide and spark your ideation session could be: How might we make TV more social, so youths feel more engaged? How might we enable TV programs to be watched anywhere, at anytime? How might we make watching TV at home more exciting?

chunks in memory

Often psychologists think of memory as organized in chunks: basic interconnected units. Each chunk can be described by its activation: a measure of how easily that chunk can be retrieved from memory. For example, your name is a chunk in memory; it has very high activation — if someone woke you up in the middle of the night and asked you what your name was, you'd be able to produce it fairly quickly. On the other hand, if you had to remember the name of your first-grade teacher, that answer would likely be harder to come up with: its activation is lower. The activation of a chunk is influenced by three different factors: Practice: how many times a chunk has been used in the past Recency: how recently a chunk has been used Context: what is present in the person's focus of attention

Low-fidelity prototypes

Pros Quick. Paper prototypes are easy and fast to create, and they are great for brainstorming various ideas and concepts. Additionally, you can make changes and updates on the fly. Inexpensive. Low fidelity prototypes are cheap in both labor and materials. Pen and paper are common office supplies, and since they are quick to create, labor costs are significantly low. Empathy building. Paper prototypes are a great team-building exercise, resulting in increased involvement, ownership, and empathy towards the users and product. Honest user feedback. During usability testing, a user is more prone to giving their honest feedback if they think you did not spend a lot of time on it. Users tend to be more open with their feedback towards paper prototypes opposed to higher fidelity prototypes. Cons Unrealistic. At the end of the day, paper prototypes are a poor substitute for a digital experience. There is a lack of realism that impacts the user feedback, which can lead to false positives. False positives. Inaccurate feedback from users due to lack of realism in the experience. Users may "fill in the gaps" in ways that are different than what the designer has in mind, therefore impacting results.

Model Human Processor

The Model Human Processor was an early cognitive engineering model intended to help developers apply principles from cognitive psychology. This was facilitated by analogous developments in engineering and design areas adjacent to HCI, and in fact often overlapping HCI, notably human factors engineering and documentation development. Human factors had developed empirical and task-analytic techniques for evaluating human-system interactions in domains such as aviation and manufacturing, and was moving to address interactive system contexts in which human operators regularly exerted greater problem-solving discretion. Documentation development was moving beyond its traditional role of producing systematic technical descriptions toward a cognitive approach incorporating theories of writing, reading, and media, with empirical user testing. Documents and other information needed to be usable also.

Visual perception

Visual perception also factors into the user experience because visual cues are often the basis for mental associations users make among items on the interface. The Gestalt psychologists explored how visual perception works, isolating a number of rules that explain how the human perceptual system functions. The two rules most pertinent to the Web are proximity and similarity.

Long-term memory

main store of information - our usual sense of memory; unlimited capacity; persistent Long-term memory is our permanent store of information - our everyday sense of memory Consists of inter-connected chunks of information (associations) Features: • capacity nearly infinite - storing is always possible, problem is remembering • slow, but variable access time • little decay • performance decreases with age, but the store becomes richer • different types of memory: episodic, semantic etc

There are many situations where autonomous, intelligent technology should be deployed

often in areas characterized by the "three D's": dull, dirty, and dangerous

Stages of HTA

you can easily apply when either modifying an existing design or creating a new design. Creating other UX tools such as personas and user journeys relies on your having a good understanding of the fundamental tasks users need to perform to accomplish their goals. Constructing a hierarchical task analysis requires that you have a good understanding of both a system and its users. Thus, hierarchical task analysis provides an integrated view of a design space. Other UX tools can refer to a hierarchical task analysis and, in turn, it can refer to other UX tools.

What is Usability?

"...the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which specified userscan achieve specified goals in particular environments..." • Users - who they are, their attitudes, skills and motivations. • Environments - what is the context-of-use; platform, devices, situation. • Goals - what do users want to do and how. • Satisfaction - how users perceive the experience. • Efficiency - how quickly can users achieve their goals. • Effectiveness - how successful are users in achieving the goals.

Persuasive Technology

"A computing system, device or application intentionally designed to change a person's attitudes or behaviour in a predetermined way" Fogg (1999) Fogg Behaviour Model (FBM)

Sampling

"A magazine surveys its readers and claims 70 per cent of Britons believe in fairies, but the magazine is called Paranormal and StarGazers Monthly. Simply by buying it, the readership proves itself already more predisposed to believe than the general population of 'Britons' to whom its conclusions are too readily applied."

Don Norman's High-level Design Principles

5 Design Principles that can guide your detailed design ▪ Visibility - Can I see it? ▪ Feedback - What is it doing now? ▪ Affordances - How do I use it? ▪ Mapping - Where can I go/what can I do? ▪ Constraints - Why can't I do that? ▪ Consistency - I think I have seen this before?

Affinity Diagramming

A group workshopping activity carried out after research has been conducted. • Each researcher writes out memorable insights (e.g. activities/tasks, attitudes, aptitudes, motivations, skills) from their research onto individual sticky notes. • Researchers and wider stakeholders collaborate to physically group the sticky notes into categories they feel make sense. • Researchers adjust the categories throughout the workshop as new insights are reviewed. • The team then review the categories and use them to inform design insights. • Finally the team document the categories for future reference and to show the origin of any design ideas generated.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Naturalistic Observation

Advantages of Naturalistic Observation The advantages of this approach include: • More reliable - When people use a product in real life - they are much more likely to encounter the frustrations (and benefits) of real life use than they are in a lab following a set of instructions. • More useful for ideation - Qualitative research can generate lots of ideas for product improvement as it opens up possibilities that aren't found in quantitative research. Disadvantages of Naturalistic Observation Disadvantages of this approach include: • It's difficult to include a representative sample - This kind of research is more expensive and time consuming to conduct than controlled observations and that limits the reach of the research. It's better to use this kind of research to create ideas and then test those ideas with other forms of research than to rely on the output of the research as gospel. • It's difficult to make them replicable - Because of the problem with sample sizes - you are going to find very different results if you repeat the research. This is doubly true if you use a different observer (as observers will see different things in even identical situations). • It's hard to manipulate external variables - For example, if it's raining when you observe your users working on a smartphone - their behavior is likely to be different to when it's sunny. You have no control over the weather "in the wild"

DICE Counterintuitive

Counterintuitive Some situations that a learner can experience in the physical world come at a significant cost. In an interview for Learning Solutions, Bailenson mentioned one: A father in the 1970s, catches his son smoking a cigarette, sticks him in the closet, and forces him to smoke a carton to learn a lesson. His son may learn that lesson—but at some cost to his lungs. Parallels in the corporate or safety training arena could include the public service and other campaigns that simulate the dangers of distracted driving or texting while driving, which falls into the sometimes overlapping "dangerous" and "Counterintuitive" categories. Corporate safety training could also land here. A more mundane example might be various customer-service scenarios where servers, sales personnel, receptionists, and the like practice interacting with customers who might be impatient, angry, or rude to them. These employees often do learn on the job how to improve their responses and find solutions, but they might make blunders along the way that damage their relationships with customers or colleagues.

Measures of Usability

Effectiveness - contains appropriate functions and information content organised in an appropriate manner • Efficiency - people will be able to do things using an appropriate amount of effort • Safety - safe to operate in a variety of contexts of use • Utility - does things people want to get done • Learnability - easy to learn how to do things "intuitive" • Memorability - easy to remember how to do things Measuring Usability: Metrics If usability is so important, can we measure it? Yes, we can define and measure metrics such as: − Effectiveness (success) - how often users succeed at tasks − Ease of use (efficiency) - resources for user to perform a task − User experience and satisfaction - whether users enjoy using the system, feel successful, in control, competent, etc − Ease of learning (learnability) - the time and effort required for a user to meet a specified level of performance Metrics: Examples • Effectiveness: "90% of users find the information they need on Moodle" • Efficiency: "On average, it takes a user 2 mins 28 seconds to upload a coursework to Moodle" • Satisfaction: "When asked to rate the experience of using Moodle on a scale from 1- 5, where 1 is very unpleasant and 5 is very pleasant, the average rating was 2.8" Poor usability leads to: • Systems that cause frustration, stress and fatigue to users • Systems that are costly to use due to more user errors and slower operation speeds • Unsafe systems • Ultimately, systems that are rejected or underused

Norman's Model of Action: The Gulfs

Gulf of execution - distance between the user's formulation of the actions needed to achieve his/her goal and the actions allowed by the system. If the two are the same, the interaction will be effective. Gulf of evaluation - distance between the presentation of system state and the expectation of the user. If the user can readily evaluate the presentation in terms of his/her goal, the gulf is small and the interaction more effective

Three Illusions of Virtual Reality

In order to successfully immerse users within a Virtual Reality experience Mel Slater has proposed 3 Illusions of Virtual Reality that should be designed for. • Place Illusion - Users need to believe they have been transported somewhere else. • Plausibility Illusion - Users need to consistently believe the virtual environment is behaving in a realistic way. (Can easily be broken). • Embodiment Illusion - Users need to believe that the virtual body they are inhabiting belongs to them.

Persona Goals and Tasks

Personas often include goals and tasks. One informs the other. Goal - The big thing they want to achieve. Task - The smaller activities they need to achieve their goals. According to Alan Cooper there are different types of goals that might influence your target users. Experience goals - How they want to feel while using the product e.g. feel smart and in control, have fun, etc End goals - Motivation behind task e.g. stay connected with friends and family, find music that I love, clear my to-do list before end of week Life goals - Why they want to achieve end goals e.g. live the good life, succeed in job, be respected by peers. You do not need to explicitly state these within your personas just keep them in mind.

Design Thinking

Most important of all, is that the process is iterative and expansive. Designers resist the temptation to jump immediately to a solution to the stated problem. Instead, they first spend time determining what the basic, fundamental (root) issue is that needs to be addressed. They don't try to search for a solution until they have determined the real problem, and even then, instead of solving that problem, they stop to consider a wide range of potential solutions. Only then will they finally converge upon their proposal. This process is called "Design Thinking."

testing to help you learn mental model

One of the main reasons I like the thinking aloud method of user testing is that it gives us insights into a user's mental model.

Open vs Closed Questions

Open - No restrictions on response. e.g. "How did you travel to university today?" Closed (or fixed alternative) - Respondent must select one of several fixed alternatives. e.g. "Did you travel by tube today?" Pros and cons: • Open questions very useful in early design to elicit general and unanticipated information. • Closed questions more useful in evaluation than in the early stages of design. • More difficult to analyse data from open questions. • Closed questions are inflexible. • Closed questions require certainty about range of possible answers. • Favour open questions (ones that require more than one word answers). • Avoid compound sentences (i.e. What do you think about x and y?). • Avoid jargon. • Stay neutral, no leading questions. • Stay focused on what you want to find out. • Danger of researcher bias towards subset of knowledge s/he possesses: you only find out about what you ask about . • Information is idealised version of what should rather than what does happen, often generalised and lacking detail. • Responses may lack accuracy or honesty.

Output Devices - Examples

Screens - still dominant; touch screens, projectors, VR headsets, AR glasses Sound output - used for feedback, alerts, monitoring, visually intensive tasks; sounds or speech Haptic output - force feedback from a phone, game controller, thimble, stylus, dataglove, wearable Digital scent technology, e.g. iSmell from Digiscents

Why create personas?

So that you can use them later in design: 1. As characters for future user journeys. 2. As a focus of ideation sessions, guiding design. 3. For expert reviews of prototypes.

Detailed Design

Specific proposals for: • Which function/solution will match user requirements • Definitions of the sequence of task/interaction • Proposal of the appearance of the interface Prioritise for detailed design 1) Any element that is used either repeatedly OR triggers key actions for the interaction 2) Any operation that is known to be error-prone (from observation or previous evaluation) or ineffective 3) Any operation that is known to demand particular concentration or effort from the user

DICE Framework

Stanford's Jeremy Bailenson came up with the DICE framework to assist teams in deciding whether particular topics would be suitable for training in virtual reality as opposed to other methods. The acronym stands for: • Dangerous • Impossible • Counterintuitive • Expensive / Rare

Persuasive Technology For Good

The idea behind persuasive technology was to create a useful propaganda for the consumers, offload their cognition and allow the system to bring about behavioral change. An area where it has been widely successful is in fitness tracking wearables and apps (Fitbit, Jawbone, Garmin etc). In a study conducted (Frtiz et al., 2014), the researchers interviewed long-term (between 3 and 54 months) users of these devices. They recorded the reactions on various aspects surrounding these devices so as to gain important insights pertaining to their commercial value. It was found that the long-term users of these trackers had integrated them deeply into their routines and described a strong attachment towards them. Some even said that they would feel bad if they happened to do a physical activity without the tracker, thus making them more drawn to the digital reward and not the affective value of the activity. The users were more aware of the activities they engaged in and the immediate impact they had on their health. These systems are adopted by people by their own volition and have managed to keep them so engaged that they have made it a way of life. That is an ultimate form of naturalistic success for persuasion with the ubiquitous systems that rely on motion sensing. "The creators of a persuasive technology should never seek to persuade anyone of something they themselves would not want to be persuaded of". "the issue of whether the techniques of so-called 'persuasion' are indeed manipulative has escaped serious scrutiny within the computing community".

Interaction Styles for VR

There are 3 common interaction styles used when interacting with objects in Virtual Reality. • Within Reach. • Hyper Natural. • Magical Interaction. Extends the users ability to interact with objects by stretching their virtual arms so that they can touch, grab and move objects that are not physically within reach. To interact with an object far away users would extend their hands fully and their arm will stretch to the object. • Removes the need for users to manipulate objects with their hands. Instead they would use a pointer which they aim at an object they would like to interact with (no matter what the distance) and presses a button. Useful for moving things or triggering events at a great distance. Not useful for manipulation of objects.

Movement within VR

There are 2 common movement types within VR. • Continuous movement - Replicates how users control characters within other computer games. A thumbstick is used to rotate and move VR characters around the environment in real time with the players view updating accordingly. • Teleportation - Players aim at an area within the game environment and press a button to teleport there. Continuous movement tends to trigger motion sickness in users. When designing VR experiences this can be reduced by providing a fixed point of reference in the horizon and narrowing users field of view whilst their avatar is moving.

Virtual Reality - 3 vs 6 degrees of freedom

Virtual Reality headsets offer different degrees of freedom. With 3 dof and 6 dof being the current standards. • 3 dof - Users can rotate their heads left / right, up / down, side to side. • 6 dof - Users can do all of the above plus move forwards / backwards, side to side and up / down.

UX Dark Patterns

When we discuss ethics in persuasive technology, an important aspect of user experience often pops up. It is dark patterns (Brignull H., 2013), the well-crafted designs that intentionally trick users into performing a certain action against their wills. However, after looking into more cases, it can be believed that UX dark patterns are not necessarily bad designs, but compromised designs. That is to say, they need the UX dark patterns to keep the business running. Take budget airlines for example, in order to provide users with flight tickets with insanely low fares, they have to rely on add-on costs to offset the loss from the ticket price. Some innocent users end up falling into the "trap" and paying more, while the careful others get the chance to enjoy the affordable travel. In this case, it is arguable that the dark patterns are just the means for these companies to reach the ends — to offer valuable services to users.

Techniques for Collecting User Data

• Direct observations: in lab, in field, ethnography. • Indirect 'observations': user diaries, interaction logging, literature. • Query techniques: interviews, questionnaires (surveys), focus groups. • Usability testing with thinkalouds. • Experimental techniques e.g. card sorting.

"Sensing" Users' Emotions

• Facial expressions: • captured via a camera • or by detecting muscle movements • Physiological sensors • galvanic skin response • ECG, EEG • Sensing physical movement • gestures • posture • Verbal expressions

Input Devices - Examples

• Keyboard - QWERTY layout ubiquitous, requires learning for skilled use • Other text entry devices - stylus, speech recognisers • Pointing devices - keyboard cursor keys, mouse, trackpad, joystick, stylus • Touch screens - direct selection and touch gestures • Sensors, cameras, fingerprint scanner, barcode reader, dataglove, wearables...

Contextual Inquiry

• One-on-one interview with users coupled with observing and collecting artifacts while they are doing what you want to support with your product or service.

Design Principles for Voice Interfaces

• Reduce the number of steps it takes to complete a task. • Be brief with the questions and responses. • Handle errors. • Reflect a unique identity. • Confirm when a task has been completed.

Schneiderman's 8 Golden Rules in Interaction Design

• Strive for consistency. • Enable frequent users to use shortcuts. • Offer informative feedback. • Design dialog to yield closure. • Offer simple error handling. • Permit easy reversal of actions. • Support internal locus of control. • Reduce short-term memory load.

User-Centred Design (UCD)

• User Research - Find out about users: their abilities, motivations, views, needs and opportunities. • Design • Conceptual Design - Create and explore alternative high-level design ideas. • Detailed Design - Create and prototype detailed designs. • Evaluate - Test the usability and user experience of what is being designed throughout the process.

Dangerous

▪ Is the training activity going to put trainees in unnecessary risk? ▪ Is the training activity going to put others at risk? ▪ Is the training activity going to put the equipment or infrastructure at risk?

Jakob Nielsen's Heuristics

• Visibility of system status The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time. • Match between system and the real world The system should speak the users' language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order. • User control and freedom Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked "emergency exit" to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo. • Consistency and standards Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions. • Error prevention Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action. • Recognition rather than recall Minimize the user's memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate. • Flexibility and efficiency of use Accelerators -- unseen by the novice user -- may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions. • Aesthetic and minimalist design Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility. • Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution. • Help and documentation Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user's task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.

5 Steps To Creating a Persona

1. Collect The Information About Your Users The first step is to conduct user research to understand the target audience's mindsets, motivations, and behaviors. The most accurate personas are based on actual field research — they are distilled from in-depth user interviews and observation data of real users. 2. Identify Behavioral Patterns From Research Data The next step is analyzing research findings. The goal during this step is to find patterns in user research data that make it possible to group similar people together into types of users. 3. Create Personas and Prioritize Them Next, it's important to assemble a persona's descriptions around behavioral patterns. The researcher's task here is to describe each persona in such way that expresses enough understanding and empathy to understand the users. During this step, it's best to avoid the temptation to add a lot of personal details: one or two bits of personality can bring a persona to life, but too many details will be distracting and will make the persona less credible as an analytical tool. If you have more than one persona it's good to define the primary persona (the most relevant) and follow the rule "design for the primary - accommodate the secondary." 4. Find Scenario(s) Of Interaction And Create Persona Documentation Personas have no value in and of themselves. They become valuable only when they tied up to a scenario. A scenario is an imaged situation that describes how a persona would interact with a product in a particular context to achieve its end goal(s). Scenarios help designers understand the main user flows - by pairing the personas with the scenarios, designers gather requirements, and from those requirements, they create design solutions. Scenarios should be written from the persona's perspective, usually at a high level, and articulate use cases that will likely happen. 5. Share Your Findings And Obtain Acceptance From the Team Socializing personas among stakeholders is critical in moving the design team toward action. All team members and stakeholders should have a positive association with personas and see the value in them. As people become familiar with the personas, they start talking about them as if they were actual people.

Formative vs. Summative Evaluations

Although summative evaluations are often quantitative, they can be qualitative studies, too. For example, you might like to know where your product stands compared with your competition. You could hire a UX expert to do an expert review of your interface and a competitor's. The expert review would use the 10 usability heuristics as well as the reviewer's knowledge of UI and human behavior to produce a list of strength and weaknesses for both your interface and your competitor's. The study is summative because the overall interface is being evaluated with the goal of understanding whether the UX of your product stands up to the competition and whether a major redesign is warranted. Additionally, formative evaluations aren't always qualitative, although that is often the case. (Since it's recommended to run an extended series of formative evaluations, it makes financial sense to use a cheaper qualitative study for each of them.) But sometimes big companies with large UX budgets and high level of UX maturity might use quantitative studies for formative purposes in order to ensure that a change to one of their essential features will perform satisfactorily. For instance, before launching a new homepage design, a large company may want to run a quantitative test on the prototype to make sure that the number of people who will scroll below the fold is high enough.

Example of HTA

Let's look at an example of a hierarchical task analysis. Our example is from a hierarchical task analysis I performed to better understand an existing system. We'll consider a common task: ordering a book. Figure 1 shows a high-level hierarchical task analysis for this task. In this hierarchical task analysis, I've broken this task down into subtasks, expressing the relationships between the parent task and its subtasks through a numbering scheme. This hierarchical task analysis is very coarse from a user experience standpoint. It does not communicate anything about what is happening at the level of a user's interaction with the system. However, it does give a clear understanding of the task's high-level steps. A more complete task analysis would ultimately get down to the level of user interactions. To illustrate, Subtask 1.4, "Complete address," would break down as follows: Locate the Full Name field. Move the insertion point to the field. Type the full name. Locate the Address Line 1 field. Move the insertion point to the field. Type the address. Optional: Locate the Address Line 2 field. Move the insertion point to the field. Type the address. Locate the Town/City field. Move the insertion point to the field. Type the town or city. Locate the County field. Move the insertion point to the field. Type the county. Locate the Postcode field. Move the insertion point to the field. Type the postal code. Locate the Country field. Move the insertion point to the field. Select the country from the drop-down list. Locate the Phone Number field. Move the insertion point to the field. Type the phone number. Optionally, you can provide an illustration of the screen on which a user performs this task, helping to put this interaction in context. Figure 2 shows the screen for the "Complete address" task. Combining different approaches to describing user interactions provides an understanding of tasks that is both broad and deep. The diagram shows how the high?level steps of a task relate to one another. The structured breakdown of the task into its subtasks describes each interaction in detail. The screenshot puts the interaction in context. It is advisable to create a plan that describes the way in which a hierarchical task analysis assembles the subtasks that let users achieve a particular goal and any conditions the subtasks must fulfill. In many cases, users can simply work through the subtasks in a hierarchical task analysis, so keeping the plan separate from the tasks provides an additional degree of flexibility. For the example hierarchical task analysis, there could be two different plans, as follows: If a user is new to the system, complete Task 1. If a user has registered and is signed in, complete Tasks 1.1, 1.2, and 1.5. https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2010/02/hierarchical-task-analysis.php

what is Hierararchical Task Analysis (HTA)?

A structured, objective approach to describing users' performance of tasks, hierarchical task analysis originated in human factors. In its most basic form, a hierarchical task analysis provides an understanding of the tasks users need to perform to achieve certain goals. You can break down these tasks into multiple levels of subtasks. Once you've created a hierarchical task analysis, it can serve as an effective form of system documentation, enabling developers to rapidly understand how users interact with a system. As software engineers are all too aware, the intimate familiarity you may have gained with why users do something in a certain way can quickly fade in just a few days or weeks. A hierarchical task analysis is an effective means of capturing this information. Hierarchical task analysis requires a detailed understanding of users' tasks. You can achieve this understanding by identifying users' primary goals detailing the steps users must perform to accomplish their goals optimizing these procedures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC_6Mcqzjkc

The process: using the Double Diamond

Design Council's Double Diamond clearly conveys a design process to designers and non-designers alike. The two diamonds represent a process of exploring an issue more widely or deeply (divergent thinking) and then taking focused action (convergent thinking). Discover. The first diamond helps people understand, rather than simply assume, what the problem is. It involves speaking to and spending time with people who are affected by the issues. Define. The insight gathered from the discovery phase can help you to define the challenge in a different way. Develop. The second diamond encourages people to give different answers to the clearly defined problem, seeking inspiration from elsewhere and co-designing with a range of different people. Deliver. Delivery involves testing out different solutions at small-scale, rejecting those that will not work and improving the ones that will. This is not a linear process as the arrows on the diagram show. Many of the organisations we support learn something more about the underlying problems which can send them back to the beginning. Making and testing very early stage ideas can be part of discovery. And in an ever-changing and digital world, no idea is ever 'finished'. We are constantly getting feedback on how products and services are working and iteratively improving them. Explore: challenges, needs and opportunities Shape: prototypes, insights and visions Build: ideas, plans and expertise

Prototyping

Prototyping is a process in which design teams ideate, experiment with, and bring concepts to life, ranging from paper ideas to digital designs. At its core, a prototype is an early sample of a design that allows users to visualize or interact with it before a final product is developed. It is the fourth step of the design thinking process, followed by usability testing. A key characteristic of prototyping is that prototypes are created without a single line of code.

Working memory

limited capacity memory for current information; rapid access and decay • Research has shown that memory over short periods of time (working memory) has different characteristics to memory over longer periods. • Working memory provides a temporary store of facts (sometimes called short term memory). • Fast to store and retrieve information. • But information rapidly decays or gets overwritten with new input. • In general, people remember most recent information best, but this effect is removed if there is interference from another task - working memory can be damaged. Working memory holds a very limited amount of information This is an issue when users are multi-tasking - all input and output converges on working memory - or when users are required to remember current information Experiments suggest that its capacity is 7 +/- 2 chunks of information, where a chunk is a meaningful group of smaller items of information The capacity of working memory is increased by chunking: • chunking is the process of a person forming a meaningful whole from individual pieces of information • e.g. the telephone number 020-7040-8000 is easier to remember than the string of digits 02070408000

Human Cognition

"All processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used." Ulrich Neisser (1967) "Cognition is the set of all mental abilities and processes related to knowledge, attention, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and "computation", problem solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language, etc." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognition

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

"Human-Computer Interaction is a discipline concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and with the study of major phenomena surrounding them"

Attention

"Humans can essentially attend to only one conscious task at a time. We cannot maintain attention on a task for extended periods. Basically, we are sensitive to changes to the environment: we attend to changing events, not continual, ongoing ones." "Want to guarantee error? Then devise tasks that require using the memory for details, that require devoting extended periods of attention to unchanging situations" Influenced by the task: • Complex tasks hold attention better than mundane ones. • Humans poor at monitoring tasks - error prone. Sensory input disrupts focused attention - hard to ignore - e.g. a moving advert or flashing phone notification. • Guide user's attention to relevant information, e.g. use colour, movement, alerts, structure to direct attention. • Avoid distractions. • Avoid clutter. • Engage user in active problem solving, not just monitoring. • Design for multi-tasking. • Provide breakpoints in lengthy tasks. What Users Really, Really Want • Users want to concentrate on what they are doing (their tasks), not have to think about how to get the system to do the task. • Psychologically, this makes good sense, we have limited cognitive capacity, want to spend it all on the task. • If the interaction is too complex, won't have any capacity left for the task.

Cognitive Load

"The cognitive load involved in a task is the cognitive effort (or amount of information processing) required by a person to perform this task." (Reif, 2010) Intrinsic cognitive load is the inherent difficulty of a task. Extraneous cognitive load is anything taking up a user's mental resources to deal with problems that are not related to the task.

User Research

Aims: • Find out about the users, their abilities and views. • Find out about what users do and why they do it: their goals, the activities they engage in to achieve those goals, the problems they experience, what they need, design opportunities. • Find out about where users do these things: the context (physical, social, organisational). • Define design goals. Activities include: • Observations. • Interviews, questionnaires, focus groups, diary studies. • Evaluations of existing systems. • Reading literature. • Creating personas, empathy maps, user journeys, storyboard,task models, requirements.

DICE Expensive or rare

Expensive or rare Finally, VR offers the potential to create experiences that are too expensive or rare to practice in the physical world. An example Bailenson cites in his book is setting up simulations of rioting or demonstrating crowds to train police officers. In the interview, he mentioned training that Walmart provides for seasonal employees who will face Black Friday shoppers. In both of these instances, the learners need to choose appropriate responses in crowd situations that are emotionally charged and constantly changing. Just knowing what to do and reading about the experience—or watching a video—doesn't adequately prepare learners for the reality. But repeated practice in VR can reduce their anxiety and help ingrain a calmer, more measured response than they might have without practice. Other expensive or rare experiences are less stressful: Field trips to far-away places, visits to dying coral reefs to see the impact of warming or acidifying waters, guided tours of a lunar lander, a nuclear sub, or the site of a historic battle become feasible for far more learners through VR. VR offers opportunities to practice skills that are costly or difficult to practice in the physical world as well. Surgeons can practice difficult operations on a virtual patient, improving their skill to the benefit of their living patients. Organizations ranging from NFL teams to the military, hospitals, and home improvement stores are adopting VR training for skills practice in a bid to reduce costs while dramatically improving performance.

Norman's Model of Action: Gulf of evaluation

How do I know what happened? -Relates to Feedback pushing the button at a traffic light and not knowing if the system noticed (This happens bc of lack of feedback) well I kicked and waved my foot and nothing happened. Now what am I supposed to do? Distance between the presentation of system state and the expectation of the user. If the user can readily evaluate the presentation in terms of his/her goal, the gulf is small and the interaction more effective Source: https://youtu.be/bg4UwyPPZ6U?t=13 The gulf of evaluation is the degree to which the system/artifact provide representations that can be directly perceived and interpreted in terms of the expectations and intentions of the user (Norman 1988). Or put differently, the gulf of evaluation is the difficulty of assessing the state of the system and how well the artifact supports the discovery and interpretation of that state (Norman 1991). "The gulf is small when the system provides information about its state in a form that is easy to get, is easy to interpret, and matches the way the person thinks of the system" (Norman 1988: p. 51).

Working Memory - Relevance for IxD?

Reduce working memory load: • don't expect users to remember lots of temporary facts. • or to be able to deal with lots of information arriving simultaneously from different sensory channels. • you can help users chunk information in working memory by presenting data in ways that make patterns clear - sort, order, group information.

Steps when creating/using empathy maps

Step 1: Fill out the Empathy Map Lay the four quadrants out on a table, draw them on paper or on a whiteboard. Review your notes, pictures, audio, and video from your research/fieldwork and fill out each of the four quadrants while defining and synthesising: What did the user SAY? Write down significant quotes and key words that the user said. What did the user DO? Describe which actions and behaviours you noticed or insert pictures or drawing. What did the user THINK? Dig deeper. What do you think that your user might be thinking? What are their motivations, their goals, their needs, their desires? What does this tell you about his or her beliefs? How did the user FEEL? What emotions might your user be feeling? Take subtle cues like body language and their choice of words and tone of voice into account. Step 2: Synthesise NEEDS Synthesise the user's needs based on your Empathy Map. This will help you to define your design challenge. Needs are verbs, i.e. activities and desires. Needs are not nouns, which will instead lead you to define solutions. Identify needs directly from the user traits you noted. Identify needs based on contradictions between two traits, such as a disconnection between what a user says and what the user does. Step 3: Synthesise INSIGHTS Look to synthesise major insights, especially from contradictions between two user attributes. It can be found within one quadrant or in two different quadrants. You can also synthesise insights by asking yourself: "Why?" when you notice strange, tense, or surprising behaviour.

Gestalt rule of similarity

The Gestalt rule of similarity indicates that items with a similar appearance are perceived as being related/associated:

Cognitive Processes

Thinking, also known as 'cognition', refers to the ability to process information, hold attention, store and retrieve memories and select appropriate responses and actions. The ability to understand other people, and express oneself to others can also be categorised under thinking. Thinking is essential for interacting with a product, as the user needs to process the information from the product interface and decide what to do. Many different aspects of thinking may be involved. http://www.inclusivedesigntoolkit.com/UCthinking/thinking.html

recognition versus recall

Think of meeting a person on the street. You can often tell quite easily if you have seen her before, but coming up with her name (if the person is familiar) is a lot harder. The first process is recognition (you recognize the person as familiar); the second involves recall. Recognition refers to our ability to "recognize" an event or piece of information as being familiar, while recall designates the retrieval of related details from memory. The big difference between recognition and recall is the amount of cues that can help the memory retrieval; recall involves fewer cues than recognition. Answering a question such as Did Herman Melville write Moby Dick? involves recognition: you simply have to recognize whether the information provided is correct. If instead I asked you Who wrote Moby Dick? you would use a process of recall to retrieve the right answer from your memory. Recognition is easier than recall because it involves more cues: all those cues spread activation to related information in memory, raise the answer's activation, and make you more likely to pick it. It's the reason for which multiple-choice questions are easier than open questions, where the respondent has to come up with an answer. Say you want to go to our site: if you've been here a lot, you might recall that it's called nngroup.com and get here quickly and easily. But many people would only be able to recall some terms they associate with the site, such as maybe "usability," "user experience," or "Jakob Nielsen." Luckily, for most such terms, entering them into a major search engine will bring up this website as one of the entries on the first page. This transforms your task into one of scanning the SERP (search engine results page) and relying on recognition to pick out the desired website from among the other options listed. (In fact, a paper by Eytan Adar, Jaime Teevan, and Susan Dumais showed that this method of retracing the path to a previous page is the preferred method for revisiting content on the web.) The classic example of recall in an interface is login. When you log in to a site, you have to remember both a username (or email) and a password. You receive very few cues to help you with that memory retrieval: usually, just the site itself. Some people make it easier for themselves by using the same credentials everywhere on the web. Others create a password that is related to the site (e.g., "amazonpassword" for Amazon.com or "buyshoes" on zappos.com) so that they can increase the ability of recall by making the site a stronger cue. And many others just keep their passwords somewhere on their computer or on a piece of paper. Recognition in Interfaces A menu system is the most classic example of a recognition-based user interface: the computer shows you the available commands, and you recognize the one you want.

The Benefits of Hierarchical Task Analysis

Understanding user interactions at multiple levels of abstraction provides several benefits. It lets you objectively compare different approaches to the supporting same task—in terms of the numbers and types of steps the approaches require. For instance, reducing the number of steps in a task would probably enable a user to complete the task more rapidly, so replacing multiple fields with a single field would speed up the task. However, this would also make the address less easy to verify. The hierarchical task analysis provides a framework in which you can capture such a design rationale and refer to any related documentation. There may be several competing approaches to the same problem, so ensuring your team uses common language and a consistent approach to hierarchical task analysis can help you to compare them fairly. It enables effective UX design, because designers can understand how a system works, at whatever level of abstraction is most appropriate for what they are currently trying to accomplish. It supports UX design reuse. UX design patterns are a useful step toward UX design reuse, but they describe only the high?level principles of interactions. Hierarchical task analysis lets you capture multiple implementations of a design pattern—expressing interactions in a common structured format—and identify new design patterns.

Mental Models and Interaction Design

Users need to understand how to interact with complex (and not so complex) digital technologies. "Most people have incomplete, unstable, easily confusable and superstitious mental models of systems and devices" (Norman 1983) Inappropriate user mental models lead to interaction problems; problems arise when a person's mental model differs from the reality in ways that impact their interaction with a system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAgXISssAws&feature=youtu.be&themeRefresh=1

Sensory memory

specific to each of the senses; holds information for a very brief period of time • Sensory memory retains an impression of sensory information for very short periods of time. • Information is transferred from sensory memory to working memory when we pay attention to it. • Information not attended to will be overwritten and lost.

Affective Computing

• Giving technology the skill of "emotional intelligence" for interacting with people. • Emerging from an AI tradition, motivated by an interest in adapting the interaction to the user's emotional state. • Originated with Rosalind Picard's 1995 paper on "Affective Computing" https://www.media.mit.edu/groups/affective-computing/overview/ "Affective computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects*"

Storyboards

• Similar to scenarios but in visual form. • Very compact way of showing flow of the system. • Highly creative. • Good for communicating key aspects of system. • Very similar to storyboarding in film; you have a series of panels which show the major interaction moments with the system • Show important concep

Counterintuitive

▪ Could training in a live setting lead to negative repercussions? ▪ (e.g. Real life training in customer services could end up with customer dissatisfaction).

When 7+/-2 Is Not Appropriate

The limited capacity of working memory is not relevant when thinking about: ▪ The number of items in an on-screen menu ▪ Or icons in a toolbar ▪ Or tabs on a web page

User Experience

"User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction... the first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance which produces products that are a joy to own, a joy to use."

Detailed Design

Aims: • Choose between alternatives. • Design details of presentation and interaction. • Create interactive prototypes. Activities include: • Wire-framing. • High-fidelity prototyping. • Applying guidelines. • Creating design rationale.

Conceptual Design

Aims: • Explore alternatives - lots of alternatives. • Design high-level concepts. • Envision users' future activities. Activities include: • Brainstorming / ideating. • "Borrowing" inspirations. • Sketching. • Low-fidelity prototyping. • User journeys, storyboards.

Affective Interaction (arguments against)

An alternative view: • Overly simplistic to model emotions using just a few variables. • And what about the ethics of doing this? • Therefore don't model and adapt - the adaptation can be very frustrating for the user. • Instead view emotion as constructed in the interaction and make emotional experiences available for reflection.

Interaction Techniques to "Persuade"

Examples • Pop-up ads. • Reminders. • Personalized messages. • Recommendations. • Amazon 1-click.

Fogg Behaviour Model (FBM)

FBM asserts that for a person to perform a target behavior, 3 conditions must be satisfied: Motivation - the person must be sufficiently motivated. Ability - They must have the ability to perform the behaviour Trigger - (and) They must be triggered to perform the behaviour. These three factors must occur at the same moment, or else the behavior will not happen. The FBM is useful in analysis and design of persuasive technology. Motivators: − hope / fear − pleasure / pain − social acceptance / rejection Triggers: − spark − facilitator − signal Ability: − time − money − physical effort − "brain cycles" − social deviance − non-routine

Five characteristics of IxD (Interaction Design)

Five characteristics of IxD: • Changes situations by shaping and deploying digital artifacts. • Is about exploring possible futures. • Entails framing the "problem" in parallel with creating possible "solutions". • Involves thinking through sketching and other tangible representations. • Addresses instrumental, technical, aesthetical and ethical aspects throughout.

Persuasive System Design (PSD) Principles 28 design principles

Persuasive System Design (PSD) Principles 28 design principles for persuasive system content and functionality Four categories: − Primary task support, e.g. tailoring − Dialogue support, e.g. rewards − System credibility support, e.g. third-party endorsements − Social support e.g. social comparison

Place Illusion

Place illusion works on producing an effect or a feeling that the person has actually been transported somewhere else. This is achieved by taking various factors into consideration such as: The Quality of the display: The quality of the display plays an important role in making the illusion seem realistic. This is because in case we have a lower quality display, the illusion looks less real due to possibly a more pixelated look, which isn't desirable. Position and rotation tracking (6 degrees of freedom for maximum immersion): More degrees of freedom, the better. It makes the user feel like they are in the virtual world as it tracks the head movement in real-time. If it isn't supported by a good tracking mechanism, it will constantly remind the user that what they are viewing isn't really as it doesn't move along with you. Use of external hardware to stimulate other senses such as sound and touch: By including hardware that includes our various senses, the immersion, and authenticity of the illusion feel far more real compared to those that cater to less number of senses. If Place illusion breaks, it can still recover the illusion created in the user's mind.

Plausibility Illusion

Plausibility illusion works on the principle of creating a plausible environment that we can believe to be real. The above factors can be taken into consideration for plausibility illusion as well. However, the illusion can easily be broken if: The environment doesn't respond in a realistic way: If you end up running into another person, and they pass through you or don't react, you will immediately realize that it is an illusion, hence breaking the effect. Objects go through repetitive motions to a point that it becomes very noticeable: If you see the same bird hopping around a puddle and flying away and returning for a few minutes, it will look unrealistic because not every bird will do the hop in the same manner. If Plausibility illusion breaks, it cannot be recovered because it works on the sole principle of being plausible enough to believe.

Observation: Strengths and Drawbacks

Observation: Strengths ▪ Yields information about activities that have observable behaviour or stages. ▪ Provides detailed, in-depth information. ▪ Good for gathering information about activities that involve many individual steps which may be omitted in a verbal description. ▪ Good for gathering information about activities that are difficult to verbalise (e.g. skilled behaviour). ▪ Good for information about unknown and unexpected activities. ▪ Useful for corroborating information gathered using other techniques. Observation: Drawbacks ▪ Time-consuming. ▪ Not so useful when the users' activities are cognitive rather than observable. ▪ Not so useful for events that happen only occasionally. ▪ Often not sufficient on its own. ▪ Involves a greater degree of inference on the part of the researcher - potential bias. "To design an easy-to-use interface, pay attention to what users do, not what they say. Selfreported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behaviour." • Use observation in user research to find out about users: their characteristics, behaviours, motivations, frustrations, opportunities • Use observation in evaluation to find out about the usability and user experience of prototypes and final products

Interview types

Structured interview - pre-determined questions; asked in fixed order; like a questionnaire Semi-structured interview - questions determined in advance, but may be reworded, re-ordered, explained, elaborated or even omitted Unstructured interview - no pre-determined questions; interviewer has a general area of interest but conversation may develop freely • Favour open questions (ones that require more than one word answers). • Avoid compound sentences (i.e. What do you think about x and y?). • Avoid jargon. • Stay neutral, no leading questions. • Stay focused on what you want to find out.

FBM Fogg Behavior Model

a product of three factors: motivation, ability, and triggers The FBM asserts that for a person to perform a target behavior, he or she must (1) be sufficiently motivated, (2) have the ability to perform the behavior, and (3) be triggered to perform the behavior. These three factors must occur at the same moment, else the behavior will not happen. The FBM is useful in analysis and design of persuasive technologies. Motivation & Ability Can Trade Off The users who land in the lower right of the grid are unlikely to type their email addresses onto the web form. In contrast, the users in the upper right corner - those with both high motivation and ability - are much better candidates for typing their addresses. Now I will change the scenario to show a situation where users have low ability. Suppose that the web site creator has decided to include a math puzzle on the entry form for email addresses. In order for users to submit an email address, they must also solve the puzzle. In this scenario, some users may have difficulty completing the task. So even if someone wants to submit his or her email address, their ability is low: They can't figure out the math puzzle. In this case, the star representing the target behavior would be in the upper left part of Figure 1: high motivation and low ability. In this scenario with the hard math puzzle, note that even if the web site creator increases the motivation level, the behavior is still not likely to occur. The FBM makes clear that motivation alone - no matter how high - may not get people to perform a behavior if they don't have the ability. People with low motivation may perform a behavior if the behavior is simple enough (meaning, high on ability). For example, right now I have very low motivation to buy a new car. But if someone offered me a new car for $1, I would buy it.

Horizontal vs Vertical Prototypes

▪ Horizontal prototypes ▪ give broad coverage of features ▪ but less depth; superficial functionality only ▪ Vertical prototypes ▪ cover reduced number of features ▪ but in greater depth ▪ Note that the sense of 'horizontal' or 'vertical' depends on the level of design - i.e. a 'vertical' conceptual design may appear like a 'horizontal' design when we are in the detailed design phase

Low-fidelity vs high-fidelity

▪ Low-fidelity (e.g. paper) ▪ generally created in different medium to final product ▪ requires person to 'play computer' ("Wizard-of-Oz") to walkthrough prototype ▪ quick and cheap to create; easily changed and thrown away ▪ used to elicit user feedback as early as possible ▪ focuses attention on the design, not the implementation details Pros and Cons of Lo-fi protoyping ▪ Pros: ▪ good for involving users early in design and evaluation activities ▪ cheap, fast to learn and use ▪ leading to less attachment to designs on the part of the designer ▪ shifts emphasis to creating the design rather than using the tool ▪ elicits comments on conceptual design rather than style details ▪ potential for creative designs ▪ Cons: ▪ although good for presentation design, less good for interactivity ▪ difficult to store, edit and search - management of large designs ▪ inadequate as a stand-alone design specification ▪ inappropriate for impressing clients (unless done in very high quality by an artist!) ▪ layout and design choices may fail to take account of system constraints or platform specific guidelines Hi-fidelity prototypes ▪ High-fidelity (e.g. clickable wireframes, HTML, software) ▪ created in similar (or same) medium to final product; often require more work ▪ more 'faithful' to final product in look and feel ▪ expensive and time-consuming to create ▪ more difficult to change; designers are more reluctant to change and discard ▪ better for interaction, for 'selling' the system ▪ users tend to comment on superficial features rather than the real design ▪ can establish unrealistic expectations ▪ Pros: ▪ most reliable way of assessing the complex dynamics of a system ▪ appropriate for evaluating non-functional as well as functional aspects of systems ▪ Cons: ▪ Can require a full development team ▪ Take weeks of labour to construct hence not cheap - £10k+ for a basic system is common ▪ may freeze a specification, 'owned' by the designer, imposes a particular style, lack of creativity

What Makes a Good Problem Statement?

A problem statement is important to a Design Thinking project, because it will guide you and your team and provides a focus on the specific needs that you have uncovered. It also creates a sense of possibility and optimism that allows team members to spark off ideas in the Ideation stage, which is the third and following stage in the Design Thinking process. A good problem statement should thus have the following traits. It should be: Human-centered. This requires you to frame your problem statement according to specific users, their needs and the insights that your team has gained in the Empathise phase. The problem statement should be about the people the team is trying to help, rather than focusing on technology, monetary returns or product specifications. Broad enough for creative freedom. This means that the problem statement should not focus too narrowly on a specific method regarding the implementation of the solution. The problem statement should also not list technical requirements, as this would unnecessarily restrict the team and prevent them from exploring areas that might bring unexpected value and insight to the project. Narrow enough to make it manageable. On the other hand, a problem statement such as , "Improve the human condition," is too broad and will likely cause team members to easily feel daunted. Problem statements should have sufficient constraints to make the project manageable. As well as the three traits mentioned above, it also helps to begin the problem statement with a verb, such as "Create", "Define", and "Adapt", to make the problem become more action-oriented.

grid system

A tried and tested technique that first found favor in print layout. Grids in interactive design can also help provide a consistent experience across multiple devices with different screen sizes. Users are happy when they see familiar features laid out as they would expect to find them. That's not to say that there's no resistance to using the grid system. Some designers feel that the grid limits creativity.While this may be true, it's important to recognize that many designers employ the grid system regularly because it is so effective at organizing information. We divide the web page layout into columns that we separate with margins, using whitespace, between them. The width of the columns and the margins are equal, and we can place content in one or more columns based on the layout of the design. http://1200px.com/1200px: This website helps you build a grid system for much wider website designs than the 960-pixel style. Golden Grid System: This website can help you build a grid system and optimize it for mobile-responsive display. Designers use columns and rows, shaped according to set column width and row height proportions (such as 3:2 or 4:3), and gutters (the spaces between these "boxes") to present elements of our designs in the best way. Although we have the luxury of very high screen resolutions that allow us to show ever-more impressive and realistic designs, by using a grid based on a width of 960 pixels, we can make sure that our designs will translate properly to be displayed on many computer screens and mobile devices such as cell phones. However, we have a wealth of resources at our disposal to help us fine-tune our choice of grid system to match the design we want.

user journey

A user journey is a series of steps (typically 4-12) which represent a scenario in which a user might interact with the thing you are designing. They can be used for 2 main things: Demonstrating the way users currently interact with the service / website / product Demonstrating the way users could interact with the service / website / product Why should I use a user journey? There are many benefits to investing time into user journeys: Demonstrating the vision for the project - user journeys are a great way to communicate what you are trying to achieve with stakeholders. They show an example of what the future state of whatever it is you are designing could be. Along with personas they can be one of the key outputs from the requirements gathering stage at the beginning of a project. They help us understand user behavior - User journeys can help you work out how users are going to interact with your system and what they expect from it. They help identify possible functionality at a high level - by understanding the key tasks they will want to do to you can start to understand what sort of functional requirements will help enable those tasks . They help you define your taxonomy and interface - By understanding the 'flow' of the various tasks the user will want to undertake you can start to think about what sort of taxonomy can help support those tasks and what kind of interface the user will be needing to accomplish them. You will want to think broadly in each step about things such as: Context - Where is the user? What is around them? Are there any external factors which may be distracting them? Further reading: Contextual product backlogs Progression - How does each step enable them to get to the next? Devices - what device are they using? Are they a novice or expert? What features does the device have? Functionality - What type of functionality are they expecting? Is it achievable? Emotion - What is their emotional state in each step? Are they engaged, bored, annoyed? User journeys typically come towards the beginning of a project in the discovery or requirements gathering phase, normally after personas. This is both to visualise the user requirements and help feed into other design activities such as information architecture or wireframing. However, they can also be used further down the line when scoping out pieces of functionality in more detail. Before attempting a user journey you should understand: Your user's goals Their motivations Their current pain points Their overall character The main tasks they want to achieve

Fogg Behaviour Model (FBM)

FBM asserts that for a person to perform a target behavior, 3 conditions must be satisfied: Motivation - the person must be sufficiently motivated. Ability - They must have the ability to perform the behaviour Trigger - (and) They must be triggered to perform the behaviour. These three factors must occur at the same moment, or else the behavior will not happen. The FBM is useful in analysis and design of persuasive technology

Mental categories

From the user's perspective, a mental category is a grouping mechanism, a way to bring together items or concepts through some unifying characteristic(s) or attribute(s). So what are those characteristics or attributes? This is where it gets interesting (and challenging) for the information architect because there are various ways to create categories and certainly no "right" set of categories to use. In fact, from one user to another, the categories may differ significantly. The items in a category could even be based on a set of rules for inclusion and exclusion (e.g., if there are no geometrical shapes, this cannot be a site diagram). Cultural differences, socialization, and cohort effects (differences based on when someone was born) also factor into the categorization process, creating even more diversity in how categories are formed. The best advice is to try to accommodate as many different categorization approaches as possible, ideally supporting the most common approaches while realizing that accommodating everyone is impossible. Open-ended card sorting is a very useful tool for studying mental categories and exploring why some categories are formed and others are not.

HCI

HCI to successfully cultivate respect for the diversity of skills and concepts that underlie innovative technology development, and to regularly transcend disciplinary obstacles. In the early 1980s, HCI was a small and focused specialty area. It was a cabal trying to establish what was then a heretical view of computing. Today, HCI is a vast and multifaceted community, bound by the evolving concept of usability, and the integrating commitment to value human activity and experience as the primary driver in technology. Moreover, since we are in effect constructing a future trajectory, and not just finding it, the cost of missteps is high. HCI is not fundamentally about the laws of nature. Rather, it manages innovation to ensure that human values and human priorities are advanced, and not diminished through new technology. This dialectic of theory and application has continued in HCI. It is easy to identify a dozen or so major currents of theory, which themselves can by grouped (roughly) into three eras: theories that view human-computer interaction as information processing, theories that view interaction as the initiative of agents pursuing projects, and theories that view interaction as socially and materially embedded in rich contexts. HCI is now less singularly focused with respect to core concepts and methods, problem areas and assumptions about infrastructures, applications, and types of users. Indeed, it no longer makes sense to regard HCI as a specialty of computer science; HCI has grown to be broader, larger and much more diverse than computer science itself. HCI expanded from its initial focus on individual and generic user behavior to include social and organizational computing, accessibility for the elderly, the cognitively and physically impaired, and for all people, and for the widest possible spectrum of human experiences and activities. It expanded from desktop office applications to include games, learning and education, commerce, health and medical applications, emergency planning and response, and systems to support collaboration and community. It expanded from early graphical user interfaces to include myriad interaction techniques and devices, multi-modal interactions, tool support for model-based user interface specification, and a host of emerging ubiquitous, handheld and context-aware interactions. There is no unified concept of an HCI professional. In the 1980s, the cognitive science side of HCI was sometimes contrasted with the software tools and user interface side of HCI. The landscape of core HCI concepts and skills is far more differentiated and complex now. HCI academic programs train many different types of professionals: user experience designers, interaction designers, user interface designers, application designers, usability engineers, user interface developers, application developers, technical communicators/online information designers, and more. HCI is the name for a community of communities.

Norman's Model of Action: Gulf of execution

How do I know what I can do? What is possible? - Relates to Discoverability when you buy a new product and don't know how to work it how do I open the trunk? Do I kick or just wave my foot? Distance between the user's formulation of the actions needed to achieve his/her goal and the actions allowed by the system. If the two are the same, the interaction will be effective. The gulf of execution is the degree to which the interaction possibilities of an artifact, a computer system or likewise correspond to the intentions of the person and what that person perceives is possible to do with the artifact/application/etc. In other words, the gulf of execution is the difference between the intentions of the users and what the system allows them to do or how well the system supports those actions (Norman 1988). For example, if a person only wants to record a movie currently being shown with her VCR, she imagines that it requires hitting a 'record' button. But if the necessary action sequence involves specifying the time of recording and selection of a channel there is a gulf of execution: A gap between the psychological language (or mental model) of the user's goals and the very physical action-object language of the controls of the VCR via which it is operated. In the language of the user, the goal of recording the current movie can be achieved by the action sequence "Hit the record button," but in the language of the VCR the correct action sequence is: 1) Hit the record button.2) Specify time of recording via the controls X, Y, and Z.3) Select channel via the channel-up-down control.4) Press the OK button.

Promote Recognition in User Interfaces

How do you promote recognition? By making information and interface functions visible and easily accessible. An application or a website usually has two components: The chrome or the interface: namely all the buttons, navigation, and other elements that are there to help the user reach his goal The content: the information that the user needs to achieve his goal You can make both the content and the interface easy to remember; both can benefit from designing for recognition rather than recall. We'll look at a few successful and less successful examples of supporting retrieval of information through recognition. Search engines such as Google and Bing often help users retrace their searches by providing past histories. Amazon (and many other ecommerce websites) shows users lists of items that they visited recently. These lists help users remember to finish a purchase that they may have started a few days ago. They promote recognition, because users don't need to remember interesting information that they may have seen in the past or recall what that product might have been called. Tips, progressive disclosure, and good gestural affordances are all cues that are meant to help users with this extra memory burden by providing extra cues to make the recall of the gesture easier. Many mobile apps start with tutorials that explain to users how they are supposed to use the apps. People are supposed to memorize that information and remember it when they need it. That's not going to happen: tutorials have a lot of information, but they are not rehearsed much and users have little time to establish associations between the information in the tutorial and the actual interface. Instead of showing general tutorials, use tips that are tailored to the page that the user is visiting. Those will allow the user to recognize which actions they may want to do and how. Interfaces that promote recognition give users extra help in remembering information, be it about tasks and items that they had seen before or about interface functionality.

Interaction design

Interaction design is about shaping digital things for people's use Design entails framing the "problem" in parallel with creating possible "solutions" Interaction design can be understood in simple (but not simplified) terms: it is the design of the interaction between users and products. Most often when people talk about interaction design, the products tend to be software products like apps or websites. The goal of interaction design is to create products that enable the user to achieve their objective(s) in the best way possible. As you might already realise, there's a huge overlap between interaction design and UX design. After all, UX design is about shaping the experience of using a product, and most part of that experience involves some interaction between the user and the product. I felt that there was an opportunity to create a new design discipline, dedicated to creating imaginative and attractive solutions in a virtual world, where one could design behaviors, animations, and sounds as well as shapes. This would be the equivalent of industrial design but in software rather than three-dimensional objects. Like industrial design, the discipline would start from the needs and desires of the people who use a product or service, and strive to create designs that would give aesthetic pleasure as well as lasting satisfaction and enjoyment. Towards the turn of the century, the notion of interaction design started to gain in popularity as a way to acknowledge a more designerly approach to the topic - going beyond pure utility and efficiency to consider also aesthetic qualities of use, for example. analytical and critical studies focus on that which exists, whereas design concerns itself with that which could be. This has epistemological consequences for, e.g., how research is conducted. Framing design as exploration also means that it often makes sense to spend time in early phases on divergent work, essentially looking around in a design space of possibilities before committing to a particular direction. Exploring possible futures in interaction design often involves inviting the future users in various forms of participation.

The Advantage of design thinking

It is a user-centered process that starts with user data, creates design artifacts that address real and not imaginary user needs, and then tests those artifacts with real users. It leverages collective expertise and establishes a shared language and buy-in amongst your team. It encourages innovation by exploring multiple avenues for the same problem. Jakob Nielsen says "a wonderful interface solving the wrong problem will fail." Design thinking unfetters creative energies and focuses them on the right problem. The above process will feel abstruse at first. Don't think of it as if it were a prescribed step-by-step recipe for success. Instead, use it as scaffolding to support you when and where you need it. Be a master chef, not a line cook: take the recipe as a framework, then tweak as needed. Each phase is meant to be iterative and cyclical as opposed to a strictly linear process, as depicted below. It is common to return to the two understanding phases, empathize and define, after an initial prototype is built and tested. It's common to spend an extended amount of time in the define phase, aligning a team to the same focus. Repetition is necessary if there are obstacles in establishing buy-in. The outcome of each phase should be sound enough to serve as a guiding principle throughout the rest of the process and to ensure that you never stray too far from your focus.

inertia and mental models

It's worth noting that there is a level of inertia that must be overcome if you want to try to change someone's mental model. They have developed an understanding (whether this understanding is flawed or not) of a concept - replacing this takes time and effort. If you are going to challenge a mental model and try to supplant it, you need to be aware of the intense efforts required to overcome this inertia. The user must perceive the value they get from your product as of "high value" to themselves - otherwise it is likely that they may become frustrated and go elsewhere where the environment is tailored to match their mental model. The easiest course of action, when you are confronted with a clash between the design and a user's mental model, is to alter the design to match the user's model. In the vast majority of cases this is going to be the best action to take; you will not have to confront that inertia and the user will thank you for it. Mental models provide the designer with a shortcut when developing UI. By learning the user's mental models and not relying on their own internal mental model a designer can emulate these models through the UI and create an experience which is intuitive and easy to follow. This in turn will result in a superior user-experience in which the user can focus on their task rather than complex learning of new models. Mental models can be challenged but careful thought must be put into making the transition to a new model as easy as possible for the user.

Medium-fidelity prototypes

Medium-fidelity prototypes Medium-fidelity prototypes are the next level of prototyping. Often referred to as wireframes, medium-fidelity prototypes are digital and created in greyscale. They limit the design to user flows and information architecture while omitting branding elements, photos, and logos. Limiting the prototype to user flows and information architecture in greyscale allows the user to focus on the fundamental aspects of the design, without the potential of getting distracted by colors, photo placement, and logos. This enables the designer to test the core usability of the product prior to beautifying the product. Pros Increased realism. Since medium prototypes are digital, they are more realistic experiences for user testing. This will impact feedback, since the prototype resembles the final product more than paper prototyping. Quick iteration. Medium-fidelity prototypes allow for faster iteration than adjusting a high-fidelity (or nearly complete) product. Lack of fine details. They are a great way to test an idea before getting too invested and bogged down in the fine details. Cons Nothing will beat the final product. Although low- and medium-fidelity wireframes are cheaper and quicker, the final product will always be the best representation of your work to gather user feedback. Lacking visual elements (e.g., photos, text, and colors) could impact the overall experience and feedback you receive.

Memory

Memory is one of the primary domains examined by cognitive psychologists, since encoding, storage, and retrieval of information constitute a significant portion of our cognitive activity. Unfortunately, research done by cognitive psychologists on memory has not always translated successfully (or correctly) to information architecture practice. The best example of this is research on short-term memory, which established that humans can hold from five to nine chunks of information in short-term (temporary) memory. Based on this research, some practitioners claim that navigation bars should not be longer than nine items. There are a number of flaws in this thinking. The first flaw, and the most important, is that global navigation is meant to be present on every page and that local navigation is meant to be present on every page within a given section of the website. Where is the need to commit the navigation bar to memory, if it is always there? Are users closing their eyes and trying to recall everything on the navigation bar? Of course not. Another flaw is that applying the research to navigation bar length is akin to comparing apples and oranges; they are different settings. Navigating a website involves far more visual stimuli and interaction than the research tasks, and website content is familiar enough to fit into established semantic networks, unlike research content that is often random or nonsensical. This is not to say that short-term memory (or other proposed players in memory processes, such as working memory) never comes into play. It just doesn't come up based on the length of the navigation bar. Short-term memory becomes important when navigation bars disappear in the lower levels of a website, or when a link takes the user to an entirely different part of the website. At that point the user wonders: How did I get here?

Mental models

Note the two important elements of this definition: A mental model is based on belief, not facts: that is, it's a model of what users know (or think they know) about a system such as your website. Hopefully, users' thinking is closely related to reality because they base their predictions about the system on their mental models and thus plan their future actions based on how that model predicts the appropriate course. It's a prime goal for designers to make the user interface communicate the system's basic nature well enough that users form reasonably accurate (and thus useful) mental models. Individual users each have their own mental model. A mental model is internal to each user's brain, and different users might construct different mental models of the same user interface. Further, one of usability's big dilemmas is the common gap between designers' and users' mental models. Because designers know too much, they form wonderful mental models of their own creations, leading them to believe that each feature is easy to understand. Users' mental models of the UI are likely to be somewhat more deficient, making it more likely for people to make mistakes and find the design much more difficult to use. Designers can tap into users mental models so that their products communicate their function through their form. However, they can only do this successfully if they truly understand their users' mental models. It is an all too common failing of designs for designers to base their ideas on their own mental models; their models are often too complete and detailed to bear any relationship with a user's model.

The activation of a chunk is influenced by

Practice: how many times a chunk has been used in the past Recency: how recently a chunk has been used Context: what is present in the person's focus of attention 1. Common lore says that practice makes perfect. Indeed, the more you practice a piece of information, the more likely you are to remember it: a chunk's activation depends on the amount of practice that it has received. 2. practice is not the only thing that influences activation: recency, or how far away in the past you've used a chunk, also dictates how well you remember information. In other words, something that you've used very recently has a higher activation than a piece of information that has not been used for a while (like the name of your first-grade teacher). 3. The connection between two chunks is called association. If I say the word Paris and ask you to tell me what words come to mind when you hear it, you may come up with France, food, Eiffel Tower, or Napoleon. All these words are strongly associated with Paris, and when Paris gets in the focus of attention (that is, you've just heard it or read it), it spreads activation to other chunks associated to it. The most active chunk in your memory is the one selected as your first response; the next most active chunk will be your second response, and so on. (Note that the associations between concepts are highly personal and depend on previous experience: a French person may have totally different associations to the word Paris than an American.)

High-fidelity prototypes

Pros Realistic experiences. Users engage in experiences that mimic the most accurate final product, yielding more accurate and applicable results. Testing a high-fidelity prototype is the best way to predict how users will react to it in the marketplace. A final test. High-fidelity prototypes are a great way to test your final product prior to entering the development phase. Testing your final concepts will allow your team to enter the development phase with confidence, as they know they are creating a usable, desirable product. Communication tool with development. High-fidelity, interactive prototypes are a great way to collaborate with developers, giving them a clearer idea on how the product should behave. This really helps in the development handoff process. Cons Expensive to create. High-fidelity prototypes are the costliest, as they take the most resources to create. Therefore, as a designer, it is important to validate your concepts in lower fidelity prior to jumping into high fidelity. More time to create. Due to the inclusion of fine details, high-fidelity prototypes take longer to create. Therefore, when testing a new concept, it is important to begin in lower fidelity. Hesitation on user feedback. When a user thinks you have spent a long time on something, they may "settle" and not speak up as much as they would when interacting with a paper prototype.

Cognitive Overload

Smartphone users quickly realized that running too many apps at the same time makes the phone slow down or even freeze. Well, pretty much the same happens in the human brain too. Only the human brains don't come with expandable RAM even as smartphones evolve with every upgrade. As a UX designer, your job is to make the app — and the user's life — simple. If your users have to learn a bunch of stuff to use your app, you're probably headed in the wrong direction. You need to give your users the shortest, straightest path to the desired outcome. Any part of your UX that has a learning curve, adds to what is known as cognitive load. What is cognitive load? In terms of UX design, cognitive load is the strain a user experiences when he/she has to think too much just to get something done. Anything that requires users to stop and figure out what to do next is cognitive load.

Reasons for prototyping

Prototypes are an interactive experience created without code to help test out concepts before launch. With prototyping, designers can explore alternative design solutions with zero development effort. They can also test their prototypes on real users to discover usability issues before releasing a final product. This process helps designers save a lot of time, money, and effort throughout the entire design and development lifecycle. Some reasons to prototype include: Exploring new ideas. Prototypes allow designers to experiment with various ideas and solutions. They give the designer freedom to test multiple potential scenarios, while adjusting along the way to optimize the usability of the end product. Discovering problems. Prototypes are a great way to further understand the problem the user is facing. They empower designers to better understand the product or system by literally engaging with them and observing what works and what doesn't. Identifying usability issues. Creating prototypes for users to interact with is a great way to identify issues surrounding the usability of your product. This will allow the designer to make necessary changes prior to development. Engaging stakeholders and end users. Prototypes allow designers to engage with stakeholders and end users, which gives them the chance to become involved in the process and feel a sense of ownership. This will potentially aid in their "buy-in" and help push the concept forward faster. Selling new concepts. Prototypes are a great way to inspire, motivate, and ultimately "sell" design decisions to internal and external stakeholders. They are also a great way to inspire markets towards radical new ideas and processes, as they require little effort to exemplify something potentially extremely costly to produce.

Short-Term Memories

Short-term memory is used to process sensory memories which are of interest to us - for whatever reason. The sensory memory is transferred to the short-term memory where it may be processed for up to a minute (though if the memory is rehearsed - e.g. repeated - it may remain in short-term memory for a longer period up to a few hours in length). Short-term memory is of limited capacity. Experiments conducted by, among others, George A Miller the psychologist, and reported in his paper "The Magical Number Seven, plus or minus two" suggest that we can store between 5 and 9 similar items in short-term memory at the most. This capacity can be increased by a process known as "chunking". This is where we group items to form larger items. So, for example, you can memorize a 12 digit phone number in short-term memory by taking digits in pairs (35) rather than singly (3 and 5) which gives you 6 chunks to remember (which falls between 5 and 9) rather than 12 digits (which exceeds the capacity of short-term memory).

Use Sketching as an Ideation Method

Sketching is a distinctive form of drawing which designers use to propose, explore, refine and communicate ideas. Sketches vs. Prototypes Some designers may assume the role of sketches in the design process is the same as that traditionally associated with low-fidelity prototyping, but that is not the case. Sketches and prototypes have distinctive roles in the development of a design concept and its refinement. You should use them at different stages. Draw sketches first in the exploratory stages of a design to propose, refine, communicate and critique your ideas in a "tangible" format. Later, use low-fidelity prototypes to test broad concepts and specific features. If you focus on a single design idea prematurely, you narrow your opportunities. While it's possible that you may identify a good design from the development of a single idea, you cannot confirm whether other ideas (that you never explored) may have provided a better solution to your problem. Moreover, if you present only one design to users, they will provide a biased input. They will try to be polite and not offend you, even falsely praising your solution, instead of comparing different ideas and sharing genuine feedback. Sketches are: Quick: Don't invest a long period producing them. Timely: Produce them when and as the need arises. Disposable: Rely on their usefulness to explore a concept and not on their production costs. Plentiful: Produce sketches as a collection that explores different aspects of interaction over time. Minimalist: Use sketches to clarify one concept at a time. Annotations - These are names, labels and explanations located next to different parts of a sketch to expand and clarify the meaning of any element depicted. Tie annotations to different elements in your sketch using arrows, braces, numbering and spatial proximity. Write your annotations using a different color that contrasts with the sketch proper. Arrows - Apart from pointing to specific elements in a sketch, use arrows to illustrate interaction flow, a sequence of events, movement and direction. Notes - Any text, long or short, that provides additional insight into your sketch is a note. Use notes to do the following: Provide detailed explanation of the action or sequence illustrated. Describe an idea derived from an illustration. List unresolved issues. Explore design elements not depicted in the sketch. Clarify the purpose of each element you present, especially non-static ones. Keep a record of your thought process when you first draw a sketch. 1. Scribble Sketching The idea behind this technique is to capture, as fast as possible and with the broadest of strokes, the essence of the object, design or action you are trying to preserve. Leave out non-important details, decorations, text and other non-essential elements. Include textual annotations (see previous section) in your scribble sketches to clarify functionality.

Wizard of Oz testing

The Wizard of Oz method is a process that allows a user to interact with an interface without knowing that the responses are being generated by a human rather than a computer by having someone behind-the-scenes who is pulling the levers and flipping the switches. The Wizard of Oz methodology allows you to test users' reactions to a system before you even have to think about development. This could be a new concept you are unsure will work for your users or a project that would require a substantial amount of effort to create, but we want to learn more before it makes sense to invest the time and money, and it cannot be tested with the usual prototype tools. Wizard of Oz is a flexible approach that allows concepts to be tested and modified without having to worry about potentially tiresome code changes, breaks in a daily testing schedule or full development costs.

ubiquitous computing

The pervasive incorporation of computing into human habitats — cars, home appliances, furniture, clothing, and so forth. Desktop computing is still very important, though the desktop habitat has been transformed by the wide use of laptops. To a considerable extent, the desktop itself has moved off the desktop. Computing moved off the desktop to be everywhere all the time. Computers are in phones, cars, meeting rooms, and coffee shops. The focus of HCI has moved beyond the desktop, and its focus will continue to move. HCI is a technology area, and it is ineluctably driven to frontiers of technology and application possibility. The special value and contribution of HCI is that it will investigate, develop, and harness those new areas of possibility not merely as technologies or designs, but as means for enhancing human activity and experience.

User Research: What It Is and Why You Should Do It

Then use data collection techniques to find out these things. • Observations • Interviews • Surveys (maybe) • What else? It can mean anything from doing ethnographic interviews with your target group, to classical usability studies, to quantitative measurements of return on investment (ROI) on your user experience design. What all user research has in common is that it helps place people at the center of your design process and your products. Surveys and formal experiments such as A/B testing and tree testing are examples of quantitative research tools. Quantitative user research methods seek to measure user behavior in a way that can be quantified and used for statistical analysis. Interviews and (to some degree) usability tests are examples of qualitative research tools. These are often more exploratory and seek to get an in-depth understanding of the experiences and everyday lives of individual users or user groups. 1. To Create Designs That are Truly Relevant If you understand your users, you can make designs that are relevant for them. Technical capabilities were still important, but they had to be balanced with design choices that made the TVs fit into people's homes. 2. To Create Designs That are Easy and Pleasurable to Use Wikiwand is a good example of a company that operates solely on providing a great user experience. Their product is a browser plugin which changes the design of Wikipedia articles to make them more appealing and user-friendly. Wikiwand does not provide different content from the classic Wikipedia webpage, but the company has thousands of users who praise it for the awesome user experience it delivers. 3. To Understand the Return on Investment of Your UX Design If you can show that the changes you made in the design generated more sales, resulted in a larger number of customers, or made work processes more efficient, you have a much stronger case for investing in UX. You can do A/B tests during development that compare different versions of your design, or you can do studies after your product is released to measure differences in use patterns.

usability

This concept was originally articulated somewhat naively in the slogan "easy to learn, easy to use". The blunt simplicity of this conceptualization gave HCI an edgy and prominent identity in computing. It served to hold the field together, and to help it influence computer science and technology development more broadly and effectively. However, inside HCI the concept of usability has been re-articulated and reconstructed almost continually, and has become increasingly rich and intriguingly problematic. Usability now often subsumes qualities like fun, well being, collective efficacy, aesthetic tension, enhanced creativity, flow, support for human development, and others. A more dynamic view of usability is one of a programmatic objective that should and will continue to develop as our ability to reach further toward it improves.

Ideation methods

Those who perceive their ideation process as very effective engage in significantly more written ideation (40%) compared to those with only "somewhat effective" (20%) or "ineffective" (22%) idea-generation processes (p=0.05). Written techniques may lead to more effective idea generation by allowing all members in the ideation session to contribute ideas, while avoiding common group dynamics issues such as groupthink, unbalanced contributions (with certain people dominating the conversation and others not sharing at all), and even hierarchy bias if ideas are kept anonymous when evaluated. Teams that do manage to conduct short ideation sessions continue to struggle with group dynamics, managing the ideation sessions, and knowing which ideation methods to utilize at various stages of the design process. Conduct ideation early in the design lifecycle. Make sure that at least some of the ideation sessions involve several people. Look to multiple sources of inspiration, and make sure to include user research as one of these. Employ structured ideation techniques. Use some amount of written ideation. Have a designated facilitator. Ideation sessions can be short (<3 hours), but for optimal success ideation does require a time budget and management support.

Why Do People Expect More From Voice?

Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) not only introduce a change in a way people interact with machines, but they also raise the bar for the quality of interaction. When people interact with GUI's and have troubles with them, they often blame themselves, but when people interact with VUIs and are unable to complete a task, they blame the system. Why is that? Well, talking is the most naturally convenient medium for communication between people, and people are confident in their talking skills. This can have a direct influence on the retention rate: A 2017 report by Voicelabs states there's only a 6 percent chance a user will be active in the second week after downloading a voice application.

Building HTA

You can use established user research techniques to collect the information for a hierarchical task analysis. Observational methods can inform a hierarchical task analysis for an existing system, while interviews and similar qualitative approaches can help you to understand how users think about tasks when you are designing new systems, ensuring that the proposed approach follows users' existing mental schemas. Any hierarchical task analysis must have a clear stopping point that you've defined in advance: the point at which the analysis stops. For most UX applications, this can be the most atomic level of user interaction—for instance, a mouse movement. A hierarchical task analysis is not restricted to describing a single process. You can associate multiple plans with a single hierarchical task analysis to illustrate how users can accomplish multiple tasks, using reference numbers to illustrate the different flows through the hierarchical task analysis. You can also associate different plans with different personas whose needs you intend a system to support or with different options, depending on the type of system. A hierarchical task analysis can provide the basis for creating user journeys. While user journeys may include a lot of information about particular users—their perceptions, backgrounds, and levels of understanding—a hierarchical task analysis objectively describes users' interactions with a system. User journeys are a more specialized application of the information a hierarchical task analysis describes, putting user interactions in the context of specific users. Once you have created a hierarchical task analysis, the development of other design tools such as user journeys becomes much simpler.