The Human-Machine Interface (HMI) PDF
The Human-Machine Interface (HMI) PDF
Definition
The human- machine interface (HMI) is where people and technology meet. This
people-technology intercept can be as simple as the grip on a hand tool or as
complex as the flight deck of a jumbo jet.
Overview
This tutorial introduces the underlying principles of good HMI design and
outlines a core usability engineering lifecycle.
In addition, the tutorial guides the reader to relevant international standards and
sources of further information.
The target audiences for this tutorial are as follows:
Topics
1. What Is the Human-Machine Interface?
2. Usability: Why Is It Important?
3. Usability Engineering Principle #1: Know Your Users
4. Principle #2: Involve Users Early and Continuously
5. Principle #3: Rapid and Frequent Iteration toward Measurable Usability
Targets
6. The Usability Engineering Lifecycle: Requirements Gathering and Rapid
Prototyping
7. The Usability Engineering Lifecycle: Usability Evaluation
8. Relevant International Standards
9. Where to Find 0ut More
Self-Test
Correct Answers
Glossary
In nearly every technological solution, the effectiveness of the HMI can predict
the acceptance of the entire solution by the intended users. Often, as far as
consumers are concerned, the HMI is the product—the user's experience with the
interface is far more important than the architecture of the internal workings.
• efficiency Can the users learn the HMI quickly? Can they carry out
their tasks with minimum expended effort, including a minimum of
errors? Does it improve the productivity/effort ratio? Does it do things
right?
Usability Engineering
These components are not intrinsic qualities of a product. The designer cannot
take a tape measure to an HMI and measure its effectiveness, efficiency, or
satisfaction scores. Effectiveness depends on the users' intentions, goals, or tasks;
efficiency depends on users' understanding of the product and on their previous
experience; and satisfaction can only be expressed by the users.
The importance of usability will vary from product to product. For safety-critical
applications such as nuclear power-station management or air-traffic control,
usability is crucial. Where a high value is placed on productivity, or perhaps a
Users are experts in their requirements—they understand their goals and their
tasks, and they know the objects and artifacts they produce and use, the work-
arounds they invent (not just the official, formal procedures), and the problems
they have. However, users are not always good at describing, explaining, or
predicting their behavior. Because users do not often make good designers, they
must be involved in effective ways.
In particular, users develop their own conceptual model of their work. This
conceptual model is never the same as the designer's model. Users always
behave in surprising ways, which is why they must be involved in the design
process. A successful HMI maps the users' conceptual model directly onto the
software or hardware so that users may not even be aware of the HMI
components.
For almost all products, there will not be a single user or user role. Although the
end user may be the primary person affected by a design, there will also be
secondary users—people who have requirements that must be taken into account
in the design and who are affected by the design even if they do not actually press
the keys. The task of identifying the users and their different requirements is
known as "stakeholder analysis."
For example, in a call center for customer assistance and queries, the call-center
operators are the primary users, but the call-center managers and the customers
who call are other stakeholders. Similarly, the people who decide to buy a
videoconferencing service for a major corporation are often not the people who
have to use it, but both of these stakeholders—the users and the choosers—have
important needs that must be met.
During the early gathering of information, designers will start to understand the
users' range of concerns, goals, and priorities. It is often helpful to develop a
series of stereotypes—imaginary individuals whose life details and images are
representative of the main user population. Developers and users alike can often
relate to these portraits more easily than to dry statistics. These imaginary
individuals can also star in the storyboards and scenarios that are used to gather
users' requirements and explore solutions, as will be described later.
For this reason, users should be involved as early as possible in the design
process. Users usually contribute to early efforts to gather information through
observation, questionnaires, focus groups, interviews, or more detailed task
analysis. At this stage, designers will build models of the users' domain and
establish task priorities and relationships. As was noted, users may not be good at
articulating their requirements or describing or predicting their own behavior.
For this reason, field observation of user behavior is often most effective.
Users are also better at critiquing an existing HMI than designing one from
scratch. However, user involvement must be cost-effective. Simply placing users
in front of a new application and asking for improvements will lead to an
unprioritized wish list. This is why prototyping is crucial. Users should be given a
number of alternative designs—whether high-level or detailed—to compare and
critique. The alternatives will help them generate more ideas and also show that
their comments are welcome and useful.
As the design becomes relatively stable, user activities are aimed at refining and
validating detailed design. Usability testing becomes most effective when
measuring performance and productivity—including error rates and causes—and
validating terminology and icons. Typically, users will be asked to carry out
specific tasks designed to test parts of the interface or to address particular design
issues that could not be resolved earlier. Well-designed user trials will get
maximum results for the time and effort invested by designers and users.
One potential downfall is that with iteration it is difficult to know when to stop.
Each iteration must be focused on a desirable target and should improve the
design. Usability metrics are the key, derived from an understanding of the users'
priorities, the main tasks they will carry out, and the desired productivity. Even if
a development is time-boxed, with a prespecified number of main iterations,
there should be some minimum usability acceptance criteria.
The basic usability engineering lifecycle contains four phases, as shown in Figure
3. An initial intensive requirements gathering phase is followed by a series of
rapid iterations between prototyping and user testing before final
implementation. Field implementation then becomes a source of requirements
for future products, and the cycle repeats.
Requirements Gathering
There are three primary activities in the requirements capture phase: user
observation, interviewing, and task analysis, often carried out in that order. Other
Web ProForum Tutorials Copyright © 7/21
http://www.iec.org The International Engineering Consortium
techniques, such as focus groups, questionnaires, and surveys, may be employed.
Additional information on potential product features may be obtained from user
groups, from sales and marketing forces, from maintenance engineers and help
lines, and from analysis of competitors' products.
User observation will be the designer's primary source for a model of the users'
domain, main tasks, and priorities. Observation is especially helpful in studying
work habits of which the users themselves may not have been aware such as
work-arounds, failures, and exceptions. When looking for innovation, these
breakdowns can be a rich source of new product ideas. Observation gives the
designers access to informal work practices—for example, observing the decisions
made and the work conducted in the corridors, rather than by the formal
corporate process. Observation will also bring to light the work context around
the use of a particular product or application and the relationship of the use of
the product to other products. Interviews with users about their work will
typically be semistructured and focused around the designer's agenda but will
allow the focus of the investigation to change.
There are many different task analysis techniques, usually involving a more
formal and detailed interaction with users. The designers may ask users to carry
out tasks while describing what they are doing and why, or the designer may even
run through some user tasks, with users commenting and guiding. Video records
of such sessions are often kept, so that the designers can refer back to them. One
successful task analysis technique involves asking pairs of users to carry out a
task, forcing the users to communicate with each other to complete the task.
Formal task documentation, such as existing training material or company
process descriptions, will be valuable at this stage, but the designer must still take
into account the informal activities of users.
• users' terminology
This phase can produce large amounts of information, making it easy to lose sight
of the main user priorities. One of the best techniques for ensuring continued
focus on key user requirements is to capture main priorities in "scenarios."
Scenarios are vignettes or stories, often produced as storyboards or short videos,
which are taken from the task analysis and observation. They characterize the
target user population (the stereotypes mentioned earlier), distill the key user
tasks, incorporate critical design qualities, and communicate main product
features.
Rapid Prototyping
Requirements capture obviously demands users' involvement. However, the
design activities that follow requirements capture have traditionally failed to
continue this user focus. Iterative development, by employing prototypes, is the
key to ensuring that users remain at the center of the process while the product is
being refined and cost trade-offs are being made. Users also often find it difficult
to understand written specifications and prefer to critique rough prototypes.
When the main design issues are relatively stable, or when a predefined project
deadline has been reached, a prototype will be produced that is to be refined into
the final product. This prototype will need to be robust, reliable, and meet
software design quality requirements. Users still must test and critique this
prototype, as there will still be design trade-offs and probably some HMI
compromises to be made that will affect end users.
For example, for a product sold mainly through retail outlets, observing buying
behavior with a mock-up of the new product packaging on a shelf alongside
competitive products will more accurately reflect potential buying behavior than
questioning buyers about their likely behavior. Similarly, installation can be a
moment of truth, as it brings together all the elements of the product in an
important interaction that can set the tone for the customer's future perception of
the product and manufacturer/supplier.
The user manuals, helplines, and other support also make up a vital part of the
whole product. The user guide should be prototyped and tested in parallel with
the product, not written as an add-on to try to cure usability problems. Similarly,
the user guide need not be idiot-proofed but should adopt diverse strategies to
installing and learning a new product.
Usability targets should correspond to the key scenarios that have been
articulated. The actual values will be based on comparison with competitors'
products, with previous versions of the product, or perhaps with the manual
performance of a task that is being automated. Usability targets may be at
different levels of detail (see examples).
Usability trials often take place in laboratory conditions when the measures must
be precise and the environmental conditions carefully controlled. However, field
tests will more accurately reflect the end use situation.
Implementation
The heart of the user-centered usability engineering process is the cycle between
prototyping and evaluation. However, sooner or later—ideally triggered by
achieving the usability targets—the product is implemented and there is a greater
investment in packaging, marketing, production, selling, and maintenance.
In theory, all key issues should have surfaced during the previous design
activities. There are always last-minute trade-offs to be made in implementation,
however, and surprises that only emerge when a product finally goes to market.
At least with a user-centered design approach, these further trade-offs can be
made while keeping in mind the user priorities outlined earlier in the process.
Continuing the product evaluation activities post-launch will also help capture
any surprise issues as soon as possible and give quick feedback for the next
version of the product.
Figure 5. Implementation
Project Post-Mortems
Project post-mortems are not frequently carried out, but should be viewed as an
opportunity to answer questions such as the following:
• What trends will change the targets for the next generation?
• ITU
Books
Bias, R. G. and Mayhew, D. J. Cost-Justifying Usability. Boston: Academic Press,
1994.
Kirwan, B. and Ainsworth, L. K., Eds. A Guide To Task Analysis. London: Taylor
& Francis, 1992.
Winograd, T. Bringing Design To Software. New York: ACM Press and Addison-
Wesley, 1996.
Web Sites
The World Wide Web is becoming an increasingly valuable source of research
information. In addition to the sites listed above, the following sites are great
Self-Test
1. What is the best term to describe the practice of techniques and
methodologies that address the usability of a product?
a. human-machine interface
c. usability engineering
a. rapid prototyping
b. usability evaluation
c. usability design
d. requirements capture
4. The design team should focus on the end-user to the exclusion of all the other
population segments affected by their product.
a. true
b. false
a. task analysis
b. systems analysis
c. stakeholder analysis
d. enterprise analysis
a. 30 percent
b. 50 percent
c. 70 percent
a. rapid prototyping
b. usability evaluation
c. usability design
d. requirements capture
8. Field trials are particularly important because they reflect the end-use
situation.
a. true
b. false
a. rapid prototyping
b. usability evaluation
c. implementation
d. both a and c
e. both b and c
a. true
b. false
Correct Answers
1. What is the best term to describe the practice of techniques and
methodologies that address the usability of a product?
a. human-machine interface
c. usability engineering
See Topic 1.
a. rapid prototyping
b. usability evaluation
c. usability design
d. requirements capture
See Topic 3.
4. The design team should focus on the end-user to the exclusion of all the other
population segments affected by their product.
a. true
b. false
5. What is the name of the technique in which users and their needs are
identified?
a. task analysis
b. systems analysis
c. stakeholder analysis
d. enterprise analysis
a. 30 percent
b. 50 percent
c. 70 percent
See Topic 2.
a. rapid prototyping
b. usability evaluation
c. usability design
d. requirements capture
8. Field trials are particularly important because they reflect the end-use
situation.
a. true
b. false
a. rapid prototyping
b. usability evaluation
c. implementation
d. both a and c
e. both b and c
a. true
b. false
See Topic 1.
Glossary
ACM
Association for Computing Machinery
ANSI
American National Standards Insitute
HMI
human machine interface
HTML
hypertext markup language
IISP
Information Infrastructure Standards Panel
ISO
International Standards Organization
ITU
International Telecommunications Union
LIFES
North American Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
UPA
Usability Professionals’ Association