Lecture 18: (11/20) HCI

by Mike Gleicher on November 18, 2012

Reading Assignment 8

Why HCI (see 2011 notes)

Usability vs. Games

Nobody learned to play the violin because it was easy (or play chess, or baseball)

How does usability matter?

Frustration vs. Challenge

Design Principles

Don Norman boils it all down to 2:

  • Visability
  • Conceptual Models

Is needing an instruction manual a cause or a cure?

Other key concepts:

  • Affordances
  • Natural Mappings
  • Constraints
  • Indicators of actions
  • Feedback
  • Hidden state (and making it visible)

Elevator button example.

Engineering Tradeoffs

What do you trade usability for?

  • Efficiency
  • Fun
  • Aesthetics
  • Cost
  • Space/Size

Evaluation and Execution

Basic steps:

  1. form goal
  2. execute
  3. evaluate

Detailed steps (from Norman)

  1. Form Goal
  2. Form Plan
  3. Specify Action
  4. Execute Action
  5. Perceive what happened
  6. Interpret
  7. Evaluate

Important: usability issues in ALL of the above stages.

  • Gulf of Execution
  • Gulf of Evaluation

Notes from student example

  • Me: elevator (old w/o numbers to new)
  • Shree – Water tap (when things go wrong)
  • Scott – Multimeter (why still need to re-plug probes?)
  • Drew – Thermostat
  • Zhouyuan – washing machine (coin op)
  • Mik – Vacuum cleaner (feedback, affordance, constraint, …)
  • Joey – PC
    • generic vs. special purpose
    • internal state (debuggability)
  • Eric – Pandora
  • Zach – Dropbox
  • Sam – Chrome
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