FIU - CEN3721 (Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction) Mid Term Study.

Describe some features of the cognitive conscious.

Operates sequentially, can only handle 4 to 8 distinct thoughts at a time, within a few seconds memory fades, good at handling branching tasks. Like making a decision between two actions.

Describe some features of the cognitive unconscious.

Operates simultaneously, used for repetition and expected events / safety. Routine situations.

What are rules?

Rules are similar to conditional logic and are usually presented as if-then structures and are much more applicable to the real world.

Design implications of STM.

We should try to avoid using Modes, where the same action might have different outcomes depending on the current state. We don't remember our search results a lot of times. We don't remember steps of instructions.

What are some implications of visual structure?

We tend to seek visual structure. So rather than passages of text it's better to use bullet points, lists, heading and subheadings things to structure the text in a hierarchy. Also in the case of numbers like phone numbers or credit card numbers structuring the number can help us remember better by grouping .

What are five design implications of perception bias?

1. Avoid ambiguity 2. Be consistent 3. Know who your users are. 4. Understand the context. 5. Understand goals.

What are the three different levels of user?

1. Beginners - They can experience days of frustration and disappointment trying to learn a new product. 2. Intermediates - Most users fall into this category and are considered Perpetual Intermediates. 3. Experienced users. - Can become frustrated when they feel the product is treating them like a beginner.

What are two examples of persistence of modes?

1. Caps lock key. 2. Number lock key.

What are Norman's 3 suggestions to minimize mode errors?

1. Do not use modes. 2. Ensure modes are distinctly marked. 3. Make sure each mode has different commands so a command issued in the wrong mode will not lead to problems.

What are six usability goals?

1. Efficiency - How the product helps users achieve their task faster. 2. Effectiveness - How good is the product at doing what its suppose to do? 3. Safety - Protecting users from dangerous or undesirable situations. 4. Utility - Has the right kind of functionality so users can do what they want or need to do. 5. Learnability - Easy to learn. 6. Memorability - Easy to remember how to use.

CRUM does not consider what?

1. Emotion. 2. Consciousness 3. Physical body (Movement, chemical influences) 4. Physical environment.

What are the four types of goals?

1. False Goals. 2. Corporate Goals. 3. Practical Goals. 4. Personal Goals.

How does our thought cycle work? In terms of goals?

1. Form a goal. 2. Execute actions to make progress towards goal. 3. Evaluate results. 4. Repeat. Often we will need to perform several tasks and sub-tasks to achieve the goal. A design implication of this is we should provide goal / task focused software and give scents that guide the user along in their goal, also show a progress or status section so they know where they are in the process.

What are four basic activities in interface design?

1. Identifying needs and requirements for the UX. 2. Develop alternative designs. 3. Build prototypes. 4. Evaluate what is being built and put it thru actual user testing.

What are three types of design models?

1. Implementation Model - This model is based on software algorithms and describes how the design of the code is. It is more based on how the machine or program really works. 2. User Model (Conceptual Model). - This model deals with how the user thinks things work or how they describe it. This may vary greatly with the real world. 3. Represented Model. - Also know as the designers model this is the face that the software or product shows to people. The closer the represented model is to the user model the easier it will be for the program to be used and understood.

What are the six main approaches to modeling the mind?

1. Logic. 2. Rules. 3. Concepts. 4. Analogies. 5. Images. 6. Neural connections.

Perception can be biased by what three factors?

1. Past experience. 2. Context. 3. Our goals and plans

What are the 7 Gestalt laws?

1. Proximity. 2. Similarity. 3. Continuity. 4. Closure. 5. Symmetry. 6. Figure / Ground. 7. Common Fate.

What are the six steps of the goal directed design process?

1. Research. - This phases purpose is to gather qualitative data about potential users, attempts to ID a set of behavior patterns that are common among users. 2. Modeling. - Uses behavior and workflow data to create domain models (information flow and workflow diagrams) and user models (personas) that are composite archetypes that represent user groups. 3. Requirements. - Tries to identify and balance user, business and other goals to get a overall definition of the project requirements. 4. Framework. - Creaton of the overall product concept including visual design and behaviors. 5. Refinement. - Focuses on increasing details and implementation. 6. Support. - Adjusts the design as needed to meet new deadlines, constraints or accommodate trade offs.

What are five design principles?

1. Visibility - Are key functions clearly visible? 2. Feedback - Confirming what has been done or giving information about the current state. 3. Constraints - Ways of restricting the user interaction with the system. 4. Consistency - Interface has similar operations and elements for doing similar tasks. 5. Affordances - Attributes of an object that allow users to know how to use / interact with it.

What is the Locus of Attention

A feature or object that you are intently and actively thinking about. You can't fully control this and you always hear and see more than just the locus, but not always actively aware of the outside influences. I.e you sometimes "tune them out".

What is the difference between Goals and Tasks.

A goal is an expectation of and end condition, the end goal so to speak. Tasks, sub-tasks and activities are the intermediate steps that help you reach the goal. Example. Military goal is to keep peace. Task is to wage war.

What is an interrupting event?

An event that breaks your focus and forces you to move locus of attention to somewhere else even if just briefly. If the interruption is only a few seconds then no further stimulus is required to continue the task. However, if the interruption is longer you need a trigger to remind you.

What are analogies?

Analogies deal with a new situation by taking a similar but familiar situation and adapting it. An example is how cognitive science compares itself to how computers work.

What is the definition of design principles?

Basically the to do's and don'ts of interactive design. What to provide and what not to provide in the interface.

What is absorption?

Becoming absorbed in the task at hand and it is crucial to productivity. Your interface should work regardless of the users state of absorption. You get more absorbed when you see errors, have stress and are doing a critical task. In those situations you are more likely to ignore or not see warnings.

What is Goal-Directed Design?

Behavior-directed design of digital products. Requires the understanding of user goals

What are cleanup steps?

Cleanup steps are necessary ending steps that we often forget after our goal has been achieved. For instance we forget to turn our car headlights off after arriving at our destination. Design implication for this is that we need the interfaces to remind the users to complete any needed clean-up steps. Like when shutting down if there is unsaved work the system should issue a warning to the user.

What does CRUM stand for?

Computational-Representational Understanding of the Mind.

What are concepts?

Concepts can either be innate (like playing peek-a-boo with babies) or learned (like learning different forms of animals).

What do experts need?

Experts like faster access to things, rather than menus they like shortcuts to everything. They appreciate new and more powerful features. Experts options are often values by buyers so they have a disproportionate influence on less experienced users.

What are personal goals?

Goals that are true and operate for everyone like the software should not make the user feel stupid.

What is the key to a successful product?

Goals, not features are the key. We need to design for goals.

Fill in the blank: In user research, ______________ consist of representative users gathered together in a room and asked a set of structured questions with a structured set of choices.

Focus group.

What are the differences between formal usability testing and "Discount Usability testing"

Formal testing involves using large groups of people from various background and is a very complex and detailed process. Discount Usability testing can be done with a small group of 4 or 5 users. After fixes have been applied the process can be repeated. Often this costs a lot less and can still find 80% of the problems. However, this does not help with marketing data or user preferences.

What is Gestalt theory?

Gestalt theorists followed the basic principle that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

What are user experience goals? Name a few?

How the user experience feels. Some positive ones are satisfying, fun, rewarding etc. Some negatives are boring, frustrating, annoying.

What are images in regards to mental modeling?

Human thinking involves pictorial representations. Images in this sense can be both visual or non-visual like sensory (taste / smell), tactile (touch), motor or emotional.

What are corporate goals.

Hygienic Goals - goals that are prerequisites for effective functioning but are powerless to achieve success by themselves.

What do beginners need?

Image users as very intelligent but very busy. They need some instruction but not much. Good software shortens the passage from beginners to intermediates. A new user needs some guidance but once they become an intermediate this guidance only gets in the way. The process should reflect the users mental model of his tasks. If the user does not grasp the concepts and scope of the product quickly they will abandon it. Beginners tend to use Menu's a lot. Dialog box explanations should be brief and without technical jargon.

Define cognitive conscious.

Information that you are currently aware of and using (are conscious of). You can not make conscious thoughts unconscious on purpose.

Define cognitive unconscious.

Information that you know, but are not accessing at the current moment (are not conscious of). You have some control in making conscious thoughts unconscious.

Question from review video - Doing two tasks simultaneously when neither is automatic will degrade your performance on each task. This is called what?

Interference

Bottom Line of STM and Locus of Attention?

It's a combined focus of attention between perceptual memory and long-term memory.

What is change blindness?

It's when we don't notice things we are not paying attention to or looking for. The monkey video is an example.

What is logic?

Logic is using patterns of inference to come to a conclusion. Such as... All students are overworked. Mary is a student. Therefore, Mary is overworked.

Short Term Memory and Locus of Attention.

Once something moves into our Locus of Attention it enters short term (perceptual) memory and remains for only 10-15 seconds. Perceptions do not automatically become memories. Long term memory also plays a part in the Locus of Attention as it's used to recognize and recall items.

What are the two major opposing forces in digital product design?

Marketers who aim to quantify a marketplace opportunity and introduce new products. Their input in design is usually just a list of requirements. Developers who are focused on solving the technical challenges of the project and meeting deadlines. Often the interface design process does not start until later in the product cycle which can lead to interfaces that irritate the user or that are unusable.

Knowledge in the mind consists of?

Mental representations.

Fill in the blank: An interface where a given user gesture has one and only one result is a _______________ interface.

Modeless.

Are user and employer goals always the same?

No. Example: Accounting clerk Employer's goal: efficient processing of invoices Employee's goals: appearing competent at his job, staying engaged with his work while performing routine and repetitive tasks The software must have a balance to meet the needs of everyone not just the employer or the employee alone.

What should the main focus be when we as users are working on something?

Our goals. The tools we use should fade into the background and allow the focus to remain on our goals.

Design implications of LTM?

People need tools to help their memory... Like save the search term, make the instructions visible at all times, set password rules and reminder questions for passwords that are easy for the user to remember.

Question from review video - "Can I undo?" "What is this control for?" and "I forgot how to import" are questions that are typical of what a _______________ user might ask about a product.

Perpetual Intermediate

What do perpetual intermediates need?

Perpetual intermediates want their frequently used tools to be placed front and center in the user interface. They don't need scope and purpose explained to them. They know how to use reference materials and can use online knowledge bases if needed. They are aware of advanced features that are available even if they do not use them.

What types of external aids do we use to overcome STM and LTM memory limits?

Pointing and counting, counting with fingers, creating bookmarks, using paper or a calculator to help us add, checklists, organizing documents into separate folders. So a design implication of this is the interactive system should allow us to see what we have done (not what we have not yet done) and we should be able to mark or move objects worked on versus which ones have not been worked on.

What are practical goals?

Practical Goals often connect the corporate goals with the user's.

Fill in blank: The set of states in which a gesture (g) has a particular interpretation is called the ___________ of the gesture.

Range

Perpetual Intermediates.

Since most users are intermediates we should develop for the intermediate level. We still need to balance it so the beginners are satisfied and the experts are also satisfied but the primarily things should be optimized for intermediates.

What does creating a scent towards goals mean?

Since users are mostly focused on their goals they tend to interpret things very literally so a design implication is that we should provide hints or scents in the form of clear meanings and wording that leads directly to the goals. Do not use hard to understand or unusual wording. Be clear.

What are automatic tasks?

Tasks that you can do without conscious thought (unconscious) this enables you to work simultaneously on multiple tasks. If you repeat a task enough it becomes a habit and helps to become automatic.

What is cognition?

The collection of mental processes and activities used in perceiving, learning, remembering, thinking, and understanding and the act of using those processes

What is cognitive science?

The science that explains how people accomplish various kinds of thinking. How the mind works; how do we learn; how much can we easily remember; what is pleasant/unpleasant; what motivates/demotivates people; perceptions

What are false goals?

These are not really goals and are usually imposed by the designers in order to make program creation easier. These are ignoring the user and focusing on the code.

What is the central hypothesis of cognitive science?

Thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational processes that operate on those structures.

What are neural connections?

This is dealing with the actual physical brain connections which contains neurons and synapses.

What are mechanical-age representations?

Trying to take something from the real world and represent it in the digital world. Sometimes this is OK but sometimes it is not. An example is a type-writer and loading paper would not translate good to represent a scroll bar scrolling to the next page. Sometimes new technology demands new representations. Don't degrade the user experience by trying to cling to mechanical age representations. Like an address book created digitally sorted by alphabetical tabs is losing potential functionality like a search option. So you can augment its representation to be familiar but have the new functions.

Features of long term memory.

We don't know the capacity of long term memory but it's often error prone we may lose details that we were not paying full attention too. Also it's weighted by our emotions and retroactively alterable, ie it can be influenced by feedback from others.

What does familiar path mean?

Users like to take the familiar path whenever possible because its comfortable and they know how to do it. It can be said that mindlessness trumps keystrokes. The design implication of this is we should try to make the user experience guide users to the best paths while still keeping things familiar and easy to use.

Peripheral Vision.

When it comes to stationary items in muted colors often we will not notice things if they are not in our locus of attention. Motion in the periphery vision is usually noticed. So when displaying error messages we need to put it where the user is looking, mark the error location and possible use a symbol or color like red designated only for errors.

What is cognitive dissonance?

When there is a difference in the represented model and the users mental model. It forces the user to learn a new way of doing something or a new concept and can often lead to confusion.

Question from review video - What is change blindness? Define it and list 1 example of a design implication of this phenomenon?

When we are focused on a specific aspect of something we tend to not notice changes that happen outside of our Locus of attention. A design implication is that we can miss warning messages if they are not displayed near our current focus. For example when we are logging in and get a error message it should be displayed within our Locus of attention.

Can a conscious branching task become automatic?

Yes with enough repetition it can turn into an automatic habit.