HCI Human Computer Interaction

ITec4122

Yadeta G.

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 Outlines
1. Introduction
2. Human in HCI
3. Computer in HCI
4. Interaction
5. Interaction Design & HCI Software process
6. Design Rules and Implementation Support
7. Evaluation Techniques and Universal Design
8. User Support
Evaluation Methods:
60% Continuous Assessments and 40% final Exam

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 What is this course about?
 How to make a good (usable) user interface for an
interactive application
 Why are usable user interfaces important?
 Nearly all applications have a user interface
 Bad interfaces are frustrating for the user and
will influence the productivity
 Competitors may have better systems
 Good user interface are hardly noticed, bad ones
are!
 It is easier to make a bad interface than a good one.

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 Introduction
What is Human Computer Interaction (HCI)? As defined by the
Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction (SIGCHI)
of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
“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 the major
phenomena surrounding them.”
(HCI) is a cross-disciplinary area (e.g., engineering,
psychology, ergonomics, and design) that deals with the
theory, design, implementation, and evaluation of the ways that
humans use and interact with computing devices.

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 Introduction …cont’d

 HCI is the study of how people interact with computers and

to what extent computers are or are not developed for
successful interaction with human beings
HCI concerns:
 process: design, evaluation and implementation
 on: interactive computing systems for human use
 plus: the study of major phenomena surrounding them
(ergonometric).

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 Humans, Computers and Interaction
 The Humans good at: Sensing low level stimuli, pattern
recognition, inductive reasoning, multiple strategies,
adapting “Hard and fuzzy things”.
 The Computers good at: Counting and measuring, accurate
storage and recall, rapid and consistent responses, data
processing/calculation, repetitive actions, performance over
time, “Simple and sharply defined things”.
 The Interaction focused on the list of skills is somewhat
complementary. Let humans do what humans do best and
computers do what computers do best.

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 A major shift

 50s - Interface at the hardware level for engineers - switch

panels
 60-70s - interface at the programming level - COBOL,
FORTRAN
 70-90s - Interface at the terminal level - command languages
 80s - Interface at the interaction dialogue level - GUIs,
multimedia
 90s - Interface at the work setting - networked systems,
groupware
The current technologies were the product of previous HCI
concept.

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 From HCI to Interaction Design
 Human-computer interaction (HCI) is: “concerned with the
design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing
systems for human use and with the study of major phenomena
surrounding them”
 Interaction design (ID) is: “the design of spaces for human
communication and interaction”
 One distinction: more application areas, more
technologies
and more issues to consider when designing ‘interfaces’

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 Relationship between ID, HCI and other
fields

Academic
disciplines
(e.g. computer Design practices
science, (e.g. graphic design)
psychology) Interaction
Design

Interdisciplinary fields
(e.g HCI, CSCW)

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 Goals of HCI
To develop or improve the
 Safety
 Utility
 Effectiveness
 Efficiency
 Usability
 Appeal (application)
. . . of systems that include computers

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 The goals of HCI
To achieve usability, the design of the user interface to any
interactive product, needs to take into account and be
tailored around a number of factors, including:
 Cognitive, perceptual, and motor capabilities and constraints
of people in general
 Special and unique characteristics of the intended user
population in particular
 Unique characteristics of the users’ physical and social work
environment
 Unique characteristics and requirements of the users’ tasks,
which are being supported by the software
 Unique capabilities and constraints of the chosen software
and/or hardware and platform for the product

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 Safety
 Safety of Users—think of
 Air traffic control
 Hospital intensive care
 Safety of Data—think of
 Protection of files from tampering
 Privacy and security

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 Relationship of HCI wither other Disciplines

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 Fields that HCI builds on

 Computer Science
 Implementation of software
 Engineering
 Faster, cheaper equipment
 Ergonomics
 Design for human factors
 Graphic design
 Visual communication
 Technical writing
 Textual communication

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 Fields that HCI builds on

 Linguistics, artificial intelligence

 Speech recognition, natural language processing
 Cognitive psychology
 Perception, memory, mental models
 Sociology
 How people interact in groups
 Anthropology
 Study of people in their work settings

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 Topics in HCI

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 Topics in HCI
Computer systems exist within a larger social, organizational and
work milieu (U1).

Within this context there are applications for which we wish to

employ computer systems (U2).

But the process of putting computers to work means that the

human, technical, and work aspects of the application situation
must be brought into fit with each other through human learning,
system tailorability, or other strategies (U3).

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 Topics in HCI

In addition to the use and social context of computers, on the

human side we must also take into account:
the human information processing (H1)
communication (H2)
and physical (H3) characteristics of users

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 Topics in HCI
On the computer side, a variety of technologies have been developed for
supporting interaction with humans:
Input and output devices connect the human and the machine (C1).
These are used in a number of techniques for organizing a dialogue (C2).
These techniques are used in turn to implement larger design elements, such
as the metaphor of the interface (C3).
Getting deeper into the machine substrata supporting the dialogue, the
dialogue may make extensive use of computer graphics techniques (C4).

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 Topics in HCI
Complex dialogues lead into considerations of the systems architecture
necessary to support such features as interconnect-able application
programs, windowing, real-time response, network communications, multi-
user and cooperative interfaces, and multi-tasking of dialogue objects (C5).

Finally, there is the process of development which incorporates design (D1)

for human-computer dialogues, techniques and tools (D2) for implementing
them (D2), techniques for evaluating (D3) them, and a number of classic
designs for study (D4).

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 Human in HCI
Humans are limited in their capacity to process
information. But it has important implications for design.
Information is received and responses given via a number
of input and output channels.

These channels are:

Visual channel
Auditory channel
Haptic channel
Movement

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 Human Input-Output channels
 A person’s interaction with the outside world occurs
through information being received and sent (input and
output).
 In interaction, the user receive the information
displayed by the computer and sent information for
machine.
 In other speaking output info for human is input for
machine and input info for human is output for
computer.

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 Information is stored in memory
The human memories are categorized as:
o Sensory memory
o Short-term memory
o Long-term memory
 It sentiments about feeling.
 Users share common capabilities but are individuals with
differences, which should not be ignored.
 We should have to appreciate with the diversity

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 Sensory memory
 The sensory memories act as buffers for stimuli received
through the senses.
 A sensory memory exists for each sensory channel: iconic
memory for visual stimuli, echoic memory for aural stimuli
and haptic memory for touch.
 These memories are constantly overwritten by new
information coming in on these channels.

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 Short-term memory

 Short-term memory acts as a ‘scratch-pad’ for temporary

recall of information.
 It is used to store information which is only required briefly.
 For example, calculate the multiplication 35 × 6 in your
head.
 Short-term memory also has a limited capacity

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 Long-term memory
 If short-term memory is our working memory or ‘scratch-
pad’, long-term memory is our main resource.
 Here we store real information, experimental knowledge,
and procedural rules of behavior in fact,
 It differs from short-term memory in a number of significant
ways.
 First, it has a huge, if not unlimited, capacity.
 Secondly, it has a relatively slow access time of
approximately a tenth of a second.
 Thirdly, forgetting occurs more slowly in long-term
memory, if at all.

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 Human in description HCI
 We start with the human, the central character in any
discussion of interactive
systems.
 The human (user), is after all, the one whom computer
systems are designed to assist.
 The requirements of the user should therefore be our first
priority.
 In this chapter we will look at areas of human psychology
coming under the general exceptional of cognitive
psychology.
 One way to structure this discussion is to think of the user in
a way that highlights these aspects. In other words, to think of
a simplified model of what is actually going on?

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 …. Cont’d
 There are five major senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste
and smell.
 Of these, the first three are the most important to HCI.
The human input/output channels are:
 Visual channel for Seeing
 Auditory for Hearing
 Haptic or sense for touching
 Movement, and the like

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 Information Processing in Human
Information is processed and applied in human bay:
o Reasoning
o Problem Solving
o Skill acquisition
o Error understanding

Emotion can influences human capabilities

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 THINKING: REASONING AND PROBLEM SOLVING
 We have considered how information finds its way into and
out of the human system and how it is stored.
 Finally, we come to look at how it is processed and
manipulated.
 This is perhaps the area which is most complex and which
separates humans from other information-processing
systems, both artificial and natural.
 Human thought is conscious/ mindful and self-aware: while
we may not always be able to identify the processes we use,
we can identify the products of these processes, our thoughts.

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 Thinking … cont’d
 In addition, we are able to think about things of which we
have no experience, and solve problems which we have never
seen before.
 Thinking can require different amounts of knowledge.
 Some thinking activities are directed and the knowledge
required is constrained.
 Others require vast amounts of knowledge from different
areas.
For instance: the knowledge we used for solving problem by
calculation and understanding the newspaper headlines.

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 Reasoning
 Reasoning is the process by which we use the knowledge we
have to draw conclusions or infer something new about the
domain of interest.
 There are a number of different types of reasoning:
deductive, inductive and abductive.
 We use each of these types of reasoning in everyday life, but
they differ in significant ways.

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 Deductive reasoning
 Deductive reasoning derives the logically necessary conclusion from
the given premises. For example, it goes from general to specific idea.
If it is Friday then she will go to work
It is Friday
Therefore she will go to work.
 It is important to note that this is the logical conclusion from the
premises; it does not necessarily have to correspond to our notion of
truth. So, for example,
If it is raining then the ground is dry
It is raining
Therefore the ground is dry.

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 Inductive reasoning
 Induction is generalizing from cases we have seen to conclude
information about cases we have not seen.
 For example, if every elephant we have ever seen has a trunk,
we infer that all elephants have trunks.
 The best that we can do is gather evidence to support our
inductive inference.

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 Abductive reasoning
 The type of reasoning whereby one seeks to
explain relevant evidence by beginning with some commonly
well known facts that are already accepted and
then working towards an explanation.
 The third type of reasoning is abduction. Abduction reasons
from a fact to the action or state that caused it.
 This is the method we use to derive explanations for the
events we observe.
 For example: suppose we know that Sami always drives too
fast when he has been drinking. If we see Sami driving too
fast we may infer that he has been drinking.

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 Problem solving
 Reasoning is a means of concluding new information from
what is already known,
 Problem solving is the process of finding a solution to an
unfamiliar task, using the knowledge we have.
 Human problem solving is characterized by the ability to
adapt the information we have to deal with new situations.
 However, often solutions seem to be original and creative.
 There are a number of different views of how people solve
problems.

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 Three views of how human to solve problems
 Gestalt view: the earliest, dating back to the first half of the
twentieth century is that problem solving involves both reuse
of knowledge and understanding.
 Problem Space Theory: this takes the view that mind is
limited information processor.
 It generating both problem states (initial state and goal state)
 Analogy in Problem Solving: this is use the analogy while
solving the problem
 Implemented by mapping knowledge related to the similar
domain (analog mapping) old knowledge is used to solve new
problem

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 Skill acquisition
 The entire problem solving that we have considered so far has
concentrated on handling unfamiliar problems.
 However, for much of the time, the problems that we face are
not completely new.
 Instead, we gradually acquire skill in a particular domain
area.
 We can gain insight into how skilled behavior works, and how
skills are acquired, by considering the difference between
novice and expert behavior in given domains.
Discuss: If we have no prior knowledge how we solve
problem?

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 Error and mental model
 Human capability for interpreting and manipulating
information is quite impressive.
 However, we do make mistakes. Some are trivial, resulting in
no more than temporary inconvenience or frustration.
 Others may be more serious, requiring substantial effort to
correct.
 Occasionally an error may have catastrophic effects, as we see
when ‘human error’ results in a plane crash or nuclear plant
escape.
 In order to answer the latter part of the question we must first
look at what is going on when we make an error.

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 Mental model
 People build their own theories to understand the causal
behavior of systems. This is known as mental model.
 Mental model characteristics
 Emotion
 Individual difference
 Psychology
 Designing of Interactive systems

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 Computer in HCI
 A computer system contains various elements, each of which
affects the user of the system.
 Input devices for interactive use, allowing text entry, drawing
and selection from the screen:
 text entry: traditional keyboard, phone text entry, speech
and handwriting pointing:
 principally the mouse, but also touchpad, stylus and others
3D interaction devices.

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 From hardware component of Computer
o Input devices
o Output devices
o Storage devices
o Processing
 Output display devices for interactive use:
 different types of screen mostly using some form of bitmap
display
 large displays and situated displays for shared and public use
 Virtual reality systems and 3D visualization which have
special interaction and display devices

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 Various devices in the physical world:
 – physical controls and dedicated displays
– sound, smell and haptic feedback
– sensors for nearly everything including movement,
temperature, bio-signs.
 Paper output and input: the paperless office and the less-
paper office:
 Different types of printers and their characteristics,
character styles and fonts
 Scanners and optical character recognition.

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 Memory and Information Processing in Computer
 Memory
– Short-term memory: RAM
– Long-term memory: magnetic and optical disks
– Access methods as they limit or help the user.
 Processing
The effects when systems run too slow or too fast, the myth of
the infinitely fast machine
Limitations on processing speed (since all machine doesn’t have
same speed)
Networks and their impact on system performance.

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 INTERACTION
 Interaction is a kind of action which occurs when two or
more object have an affect on each other
 Interaction models help us to understand what is going on in
the interaction between user and system.
 They address the translations between what the user wants
and what the system does.
 Simply, interaction design is a process of connecting the
digital world to the human one.

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 Interaction Design
 Interaction design is a process in which designers focus
on creating attractive web interfaces with logical and thought
out behaviors and actions.
 Successful interactive design uses technology and
principles of good communication to create desired user
experiences.
 In design, human–computer interaction, software
development, and interaction design, is “about shaping digital
things for people’s use”

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 MODELS OF INTERACTION
 So far, we have seen the usefulness of models to help us to
understand complex behavior and complex systems.
 Interaction involves at least two participants: the user and the
system.
 Both are complex, as we have seen, and are very different
from each other in the way that they communicate and view
the domain and the task.
 The use of models of interaction can help us to understand
exactly what is going on in the interaction and identify the
likely root of difficulties.

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 Model of interaction
 We consider the most influential model of interaction,
Norman’s execution evaluation cycle; then we look at
another model which extends the ideas of Norman’s cycle.
The terms of interaction
 Traditionally, the purpose of an interactive system is to aid a
user in accomplishing goals from some application domain.
 A domain defines an area of expertise and knowledge in
some real-world activity.
 Some examples of domains are graphic design, authoring and
process control in a factory.

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 Model of interaction
The execution evaluation cycle
 Norman’s model of interaction is perhaps the most
influential in Human–Computer interaction.
 Interaction, possibly because of its closeness to our intuitive
understanding of the interaction between human user and
computer.
 The user formulates a plan of action, which is then executed
at the computer interface.
 When plan, or part of plan, has been executed, the user
observes the computer interface to evaluate the result of the
executed plan, and to determine further actions.

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 Stages in Norman’s model of interaction
 The interactive cycle can be divided into two major phases:
execution and evaluation. These can then be subdivided
into further stages, seven in all.
1. Establishing the goal.
2. Forming the intention.
3. Specifying the action sequence.
4. Executing the action.
5. Recognizing the system state.
6. Interpreting the system state.
7. Evaluating the system state with respect to the goals and
intentions.

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 ERGONOMICS
 Ergonomics (or human factors) is traditionally the study of
the physical characteristics of the interaction:
 how the controls are designed,
 the physical environment in which the interaction takes place
and the layout and physical qualities of the screen.
Arrangement of controls and displays
The physical environment of the interaction
Health issues: Lighting the lighting level will again depend on
the work environment. Considering temperature
Noise Excessive noise can be harmful to health, causing the user
pain, and in acute cases, loss of hearing.

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 Ergonomics
 It looks at the physical characteristics of the interaction and
how these influence its effectiveness.
 It deals with the relation workers with their work
environments.
 The dialog between user and system is influenced by the style
of the interface.
 The interaction takes place within a social and organizational
context that affects both user and system.

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 INTERACTION STYLES
 We have said an Interaction is a dialog between the computer and
the user.
 The choice of interface style can have a deep effect on the nature
of this dialog.
From the number of interaction style following are the most
common:
 Command line interface,
 Menus,
 Natural language
 Question/answer and query dialog,
 Form-fills
 WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointer)
 Point and click,
 Three-dimensional interfaces.

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 Interaction Design and HCI in the Software Process
Design process
 The design process is a series of steps that engineers or
computer scientists follow to come up with a solution to
solve a problem.
 Many times the solution involves designing a product (like a
machine or computer code) that meets certain criteria
and/or accomplishes a certain task.
 Interaction design is about creating involvements in often
complex situations using technology of many kinds including
PC software, the web and physical devices.

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 Design involves:
 Achieving goals within constraints
 Understanding the raw materials: computer and human
 Accepting limitations of humans and of design.
 The design process has several stages and is iterative and
never complete.
 Interaction starts with getting to know the users and their
context:
 Finding out who they are and what they are like . . . probably
not like you!
 Talking to them, watching them.

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 Design is the outcomes of the following fields
 Computer Science (User interface Management Systems - Techniques)
 Cognitive psychology (Perception, attention, learning, thinking)
 Social and organizational psychology (attitude, behavior, group work)
 Ergonomics and human factors (safety, performance, adaptation)
 Linguistics (terminology, multilingual systems)
 Artificial intelligence (automated behavior)
 Philosophy (knowledge)
 Sociology (group behavior)
 Anthropology (ethnomethodology)
 Engineering (tools, techniques, equipment)
 Design (graphic design, layout, colors)

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 What are the components of design?
 This does not capture everything about design, but helps to focus us on
certain things:
 Goals What is the purpose of the design we are intending to produce?
Who is it for? Why do they want it?
For example, if we are designing a wireless personal movie player, we may
think about young affluent users wanting to watch the latest movies whilst
on the move and download free copies, and perhaps wanting to share the
experience with a few friends.
 ConstraintsWhat materials must we use? What standards must we
adopt? How much can it cost? How much time do we have to develop it?
Are there health and safety issues?
In the case of the personal movie player: does it have to withstand rain?
Must we use existing video standards to download movies? Do we need to
build in copyright protection? Of course, we cannot always achieve all our
goals within the constraints. So perhaps one of the most important things
about design is:

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 ….. components of design
Trade-off Choosing which goals or constraints can be relaxed
so that others can be met.
 For example, we might find that an eye-mounted video
display, a bit like those used in virtual reality, would give the
most stable image whilst walking along.
 However, this would not allow you to show friends, and
might be dangerous if you were watching a gripping part of
the movie as you crossed the road.

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 Scenarios
 Scenarios are rich design stories, which can be used and
reused throughout design:
– they help us see what users will want to do
– they give a step-by-step walkthrough of users’ interactions:
including what they see, do and are thinking.
 Users need to find their way around a system. This involves:
– helping users know where they are, where they have been and
what they can do next
– creating overall structures that are easy to understand and fit
the users’ needs
– designing comprehensible screens and control panels

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 Complexity of design means we don’t get it right first time:
– so we need iteration and prototypes to try out and evaluate
– but iteration can get trapped in local maxima, designs that
have no simple improvements, but are not good
– theory and models can help give good start points.

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 User Focus
 As we’ve already said, the start of any interaction design
exercise must be the intended user or users. This is often
stated as:
know your users
Who are they?
Probably not like you!
Talk to them.
Watch them.
 …….

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 The golden rule of design
 Part of the understanding we need is about the
circumstances and context of the particular design
problem.
 We will return to this later in the chapter.
 However, there are also more generic concepts to
understand.
 The designs we produce may be different, but often the raw
materials are the same.
 This leads us to the golden rule of design: understand your
materials

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 For Human–Computer Interaction the obvious materials are
the human and the computer. That is we must:
 understand computers
– limitations, capacities, tools, platforms
 understand people
– psychological, social aspects, human error.
This is equally important in other design areas.
 For example, the way you fit seats and windows into an
airplane’s hull affects the safety and strength of the aircraft as
a whole.

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 Process of designing and models
 Often HCI professionals complain that they are called in too late.
 A system has been designed and built, and only when it proves
unusable do they think to ask how to do it right!
 In other companies usability is seen as equivalent to testing
checking whether people can use it and fixing problems, rather
than making sure they can from the beginning.
 In the best companies, however, usability is designed in from the
start.
 The next figure shows Interaction design process

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65 HCI-Notes Compiled by Yadeta G 05/27/2020
 From the figure
Requirements- deals with what is wanted.
 The first stage is establishing what exactly is needed.
Analysis The results of observation and interview need to be
ordered in some way to bring out key issues and communicate
with later stages of design.
 System annalists Categorizes requirements, Organizes
them into related sub-sets explores relationships between
requirements
Design Well, this is all about design, but there is a central
stage when you move from what you want, to how to do it.
 There are numerous rules, guidelines and design principles
that can be used to help with this.

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 From the figure
 Iteration and prototyping Humans are complex and we
cannot expect to get designs right first time.
 We therefore need to evaluate a design to see how well it is
working and where there can be improvements.
 Implementation and deployment Finally, when we are
happy with our design, we need to create it and deploy it.
 This will involve writing code, perhaps making hardware,
writing documentation and manuals everything that goes
into a real system that can be given to others.

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 Navigation Design: design is the planning of:
 Artifacts and systems , interactions and interventions which
achieve goals within constraints, select appropriate trade-offs,
improve on existing solutions.
 Reusing the materials: Physical design requires understanding
basic materials.
The “materials” for HCI are:
 People: human capabilities and psychology, human error, social
context, cultural experience, . . .
 Computers: Processing capability of computer and limitations
• Interaction Facilities such as WIMP, Audio, video etc…
• Platform conventions and design rules and
• Interface building blocks, toolkits

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 The prototype of interaction design process is:
 We said that the process of designing interaction is iterative
(non terminate)

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 HCI in the Software Process
 In software development, designers use models that help
them understand, organize and represent the system's
architecture and functionality.
 In object-oriented development, the UML provides us with a
large set of models to represent complementary aspects of
the system.
 Use cases, class diagrams, sequence diagrams and activity
diagrams are perhaps the most widely used UML models in
the initial design stages.

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  Software engineering provides a means of understanding
the structure of the design process, and that process can be
assessed for its effectiveness in interactive system design.
 Usability engineering promotes the use of explicit criteria
to judge the success of a product in terms of its usability.
 Iterative design practices work to incorporate crucial
customer feedback early in the design process to inform
critical decisions which affect usability.
 Design involves making many decisions among numerous
alternatives.
 Design rationale provides an explicit means of recording
those design decisions and the context in which the decisions
were made.

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 The Software Life Cycle
 Software engineering is the discipline for understanding the
software design process, or life cycle.
 Designing for usability occurs at all stages of the life cycle,
not as a single isolated activity.
Activities in the life cycle
Requirements specification: Designer and customer try
capture what the system is expected to provide can be
expressed in natural language or more precise languages, such
as a task analysis would provide.

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 Architectural design: High-level description of how the system will
provide the services required factor system into major components of the
system and how they are interrelated needs to satisfy both functional and
nonfunctional requirements. We should:
 Concentrate on how the system provides the services expected from it.
 In the case, the first activity is a high-level decomposition of the system
into components that can either be brought in from existing software
products or be developed from scratch independently.
 An architectural design performs this decomposition.
 It is not only concerned with the functional decomposition of the
system, determining which components provide which services.
 It must also describe he interdependencies between separate
components and the sharing of resources that will arise between
components.

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 Detailed design: refinement of architectural components and
interrelations to identify modules to be implemented separately the
modification is governed by the nonfunctional requirements.
 The architectural design provides a decomposition of the system
description that allows for isolated development of separate
components which will later be integrated.
 For those components that are not already available for immediate
integration, the designer must provide a sufficiently detailed
description so that they may be implemented in some
programming language.
 The detailed design is a refinement of the component description
provided by the architectural design.
 The behavior implied by the higher-level description must be
preserved in the more detailed description.

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 Coding and unit testing: The detailed design for a
component of the system should be in such a form that it is
possible to implement it in some executable programming
language.
 After coding, the component can be tested to verify that it
performs correctly, according to some test criteria that were
determined in earlier activities.
 Research on this activity within the life cycle has
concentrated on two areas.
 There is plenty of research that is expressed towards the
automation of this coding activity directly from a low-level
detailed design.

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 Integration and testing: Once enough components have
been implemented and individually tested, they must be
integrated as described in the architectural design.
 Further testing is done to ensure correct behavior and
acceptable use of any shared resources.
 It is also possible at this time to perform some acceptance
testing with the customers to ensure that the system meets
their requirements.
 It is only after acceptance of the integrated system that the
product is finally released to the customer.
 It may also be necessary to certify the final system according
to requirements imposed by some outside authority, such as
an aircraft certification board.

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 Maintenance: After product release, all work on the system
is considered under the category of maintenance, until such
time as a new version of the product demands a total redesign
or the product is phased out entirely.
 Consequently, the majority of the lifetime of a product is
spent in the maintenance activity.
 Maintenance involves the correction of errors in the system
which is discovered after release and the revision of the
system services to satisfy requirements that were not realized
during previous development.
 Therefore, maintenance provides feedback to all of the other
activities in the life cycle.

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  Validation and verification: Throughout the life cycle,
the design must be checked to ensure that it both satisfies the
high-level requirements agreed with the customer and is also
complete and internally consistent.
 These checks are referred to as validation and verification,
respectively.
 Verification of a design will most often occur within a single
life-cycle activity or between two adjacent activities.
 Validation is a much more subjective exercise than
verification,
 In interactive system design, the validation against HCI
requirements is often referred to as evaluation and can be
performed by the designer in isolation or in cooperation with
the customer.

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 The activities in the waterfall model of
the software life cycle

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 Usability Engineering
 One approach to user-centered design has been the
introduction of explicit usability engineering goals into the
design process.
 The major feature of usability engineering is the assertion of
explicit usability metrics early on in the design process which
can be used to judge a system once it is delivered.
 There is a very solid argument which points out that it is only
through empirical approaches such as the use of usability
metrics that we can reliably build more usable systems.
 But, the problem with usability metrics is that they rely on
measurements of very specific user actions in very specific
situations.

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 Iterative Design and Prototyping
 The design can then be modified to correct any false
assumptions that were revealed in the testing.
 This is the essence of iterative design, a purposeful
design process which tries to overcome the inherent
problems of incomplete requirements specification by
cycling through several designs, incrementally improving
upon the final product with each pass.
 On the technical side, iterative design is described by the use
of prototypes, artifacts that simulate or animate some but not
all features of the intended system.
 There are three main approaches to prototyping:

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 Three Main Approaches To Prototyping
Throw-away the prototype is built and tested. The design
knowledge gained from this exercise is used to build the final
product, but the actual prototype is discarded.
 Next figure depicts the procedure in using throw-away
prototypes to arrive at a final requirements specification in
order for the rest of the design process to proceed.

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 Incremental
 The final product is built as separate components, one at a time.
There is one overall design for the final system, but it is
partitioned into independent and smaller components.
 The final product is then released as a series of products, each
subsequent release including one more component.
Evolutionary
 Here the prototype is not discarded and serves as the basis for the
next iteration of design. In this case, the actual system is seen as
evolving from a very limited initial version to its final release.
 Evolutionary prototyping also fits in well with the modifications
which must be made to the system that arise during the operation
and maintenance activity in the life cycle.

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 Incremental prototyping within the life cycle

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 Evolutionary prototyping throughout the life cycle

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 Design Rationale
 In designing any computer system, many decisions are made
as the product goes from a set of vague customer
requirements to a deliverable entity.
 Often it is difficult to recreate the reasons, or rationale,
behind various design decisions.
 Design rationale is the information that explains why a
computer system is the way it is, including its structural or
architectural description and its functional or behavioral
description.

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 Summary
Interaction design is about creating interventions in often
 complex situations using technology of many kinds including
PC software, the web and physical devices.
Design involves:
 achieving goals within constraints and trade-off between
these
 understanding the raw materials: computer and human
 accepting limitations of humans and of design.

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  The design process has several stages and is iterative and
never complete.
 Interaction starts with getting to know the users and their
context:
– finding out who they are and what they are like... probably
not like you!
– talking to them, watching them.

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 CHAPTER SIX
Design Rules and Implementation support
Design Rules
Introduction
 One of the central problems that must be solved in a user-
centered design process is how to provide designers with the
ability to determine the usability consequences of their design
decisions.
 We require design rules, which are rules a designer can follow
in order to increase the usability of the eventual software
product.
 Design rules for interactive systems can be supported by psychological,
cognitive, ergonomic, sociological, economic or computational theory,
which may or may not have roots in empirical evidence.

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  Designing for maximum usability is the goal of interactive
systems design.
 Abstract principles offer a way of understanding usability in a
more general sense, especially if we can express them within
some coherent catalog.
 Design rules in the form of standards and guidelines provide
direction for design, in both general and more concrete terms,
in order to enhance the interactive properties of the system.
 The essential characteristics of good design are often
summarized through ‘golden rules’ or heuristics.
 Design patterns provide a potentially generative approach to
capturing and reusing design knowledge.

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 Concept of Usability Engineering
 Usability Engineering is a method in the progress of software and
systems, which includes user contribution from the inception of
the process and assures the effectiveness of the product through
the use of a usability requirement and metrics.
 It refers to the Usability Function features of the entire process of
abstracting, implementing & testing hardware and software
products.
 Requirements gathering stage to installation, marketing and
testing of products, all fall in this process.
Goals of Usability Engineering
 Effective to use – Functional
 Efficient to use – Efficient
 Error free in use – Safe
 Easy to use – Friendly
 Enjoyable in use − Delightful Experience
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 Guidelines for designing (Normans 7 principles)
 Use both knowledge on the world and knowledge in head
 Simplify the structure of tasks
 Make things visible execute and evaluate
 Get the mappings right
 Exploit the power of constraints both natural and artificial.
 Design for error
 When all else, standardize

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 Guidelines for Designing Conceptual Models:
 Reflect the user's mental model, not the designer's.
 Minimal training requirements (easy to learn)
 High transfer of training (easy to remember)
 People perform real tasks well (efficient to use)
 Easy to recover from errors
 Invisible
 People like it (subjectively pleasing)
 Draw physical analogies or present metaphors.
 Comply with expectancies, habits, routines.
 Few fonts and colors (5 to 7 colors)

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  Provide action-response compatibility.
 Make invisible parts and process of a system visible.
 Provide proper and correct feedback.
 Avoid anything unnecessary or irrelevant.
 Provide design consistency.
 Provide documentation and a help system that will reinforce the
conceptual model.
 Promote the development of both novice and expert mental
models
 Good Graphic Design and Color Choice
 Minimize User Memory Load
 (Pervasive, generic rules (cut/paste) Prompts provide format,
Cancel buttons, exit, dialog box etc….)
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 Principles to Support Usability
 The most abstract design rules are general principles, which
can be applied to the design of an interactive system in order
to promote its usability.
 Derivation of principles for interaction has usually arisen out
of a need to explain why a paradigm is successful and when it
might not be.
 Principles can provide the repeatability which paradigms in
themselves cannot provide.
 In this section we present a collection of usability principles.

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 The principles we present are first divided into three
main categories:
 Learnability – the ease with which new users can begin
effective interaction and achieve maximal performance.
 Flexibility – the multiplicity of ways in which the user and
system exchange information.
 Robustness – the level of support provided to the user in
determining successful achievement and assessment of goals.
In the next, we will subdivide these main categories into more
specific principles that support them. By looking Summary of
principles affecting learnability

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 Summary of principles affecting learnability
 Predictability: Support for the user to determine the effect of
future action based on past interaction history
 Synthesizability: Support for the user to assess the effect of past
operations on the current state
 Familiarity: The extent to which a user’s knowledge and
experience in other real-world or computer based domains can be
applied when interacting with a new system
 Generalizability: Support for the user to extend knowledge of
specific interaction within and across applications to other similar
situations
 Consistency: Likeness in input–output behavior arising from
similar situations or similar task objectives

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 Standards
 Standards for interactive system design are usually set by
national or international bodies to ensure compliance with a
set of design rules by a large community.
 Standards can apply specifically to either the hardware or the
software used to build the interactive system.
 Smith points out the differing characteristics between
 hardware and software, which affect the utility of design
standards applied to them:
Underlying theory
Change

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 For example, the UK Ministry of Defense has published an Interim
Defense
Standard 00–25 on Human Factors for Designers of Equipment,
produced in 12 parts:
Part 1 Introduction
Part 2 Body Size
Part 3 Body Strength and Stamina
Part 4 Workplace Design
Part 5 Stresses and Hazards
Part 6 Vision and Lighting
Part 7 Visual Displays
Part 8 Auditory Information
Part 9 Voice Communication
Part 10 Controls
Part 11 Design for Maintainability
Part 12 Systems

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 Guidelines
 We have observed that the incompleteness of theories underlying the
design of interactive software makes it difficult to produce
authoritative and specific standards.
 As a result, the majority of design rules for interactive systems are
suggestive and more general guidelines.
 Our concern in examining the wealth of available guidelines is in
determining their applicability to the various stages of design.
 The more abstract guideline, which would be most suited to
requirements specification; and the more specific the guideline, is
the more suited it is to detailed design.
 The guidelines can also be automated to some extent, providing a
direct means for translating detailed design specifications into actual
implementation.
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 Golden Rules and Heuristics
 So far we have considered a range of abstract principles and
detailed guidelines, which can be used to help designers
produce more usable systems.
 But all of these rules require a certain amount of
commitment on the part of the designer, either to track
down appropriate guidelines or to interpret principles.
Is there a simpler way?

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 Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design
 Shneiderman’s eight golden rules provide a convenient and
succinct summary of the key principles of interface design.
 They are intended to be used during design but can also be
applied, like Nielsen’s heuristics, to the evaluation of systems.
1. Strive for consistency in action sequences, layout, terminology,
command use and so on.
2. Enable frequent users to use shortcuts, such as abbreviations,
special key sequences and macros, to perform regular, familiar
actions more quickly.
3. Offer informative feedback for every user action, at a level
appropriate to the magnitude of the action.
4. Design dialogs to yield closure so that the user knows when they
have completed a task.

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 5. Offer error prevention and simple error handling so that,
ideally, users are prevented from making mistakes and, if they
do, they are offered clear and informative instructions to enable
them to recover.
6. Permit easy reversal of actions in order to relieve anxiety and
encourage exploration, since the user knows that he can always
return to the previous state.
7. Support internal locus of control so that the user is in
control of the system, which responds to his actions.
8. Reduce short-term memory load by keeping displays simple,
consolidating multiple page displays and providing time for
learning action sequences.

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 Norman’s Seven Principles for Transforming Difficult Tasks
into Simple Ones
 In previous Chapter we discussed Norman’s execution–
evaluation cycle, in which he elaborates the seven stages of
action.
Later, in his classic book The Design of Everyday Things,
he summarizes user-centered design using the following seven
principles:
1. Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the
head.
2. Simplify the structure of tasks.

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 3. Make things visible: bridge the gulfs of execution and
evaluation.
4. Get the mappings right.
5. Exploit the power of constraints, both natural and artificial.
6. Design for error. To err is human, so anticipate the errors the
user could make and design recovery into the system.
7. When all else fails, standardize. If there are no natural
mappings then arbitrary mappings should be standardized so
that users only have to learn them once.

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 HCI Patterns
 As we observed in prior, one way to approach design is to learn
from examples that have proven to be successful in the past: to
reuse the knowledge of what made a system or paradigm
successful.
 Patterns are an approach to capturing and reusing this
knowledge of abstracting the essential details of successful design
so that these can be applied again and again in new situations.
 Patterns originated in architecture, where they have been used
successfully, and they are also used widely in software
development to capture solutions to common programming
problems.
 Patterns address the problems that designers face by providing a
‘solution statement’.

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 Patterns and pattern languages are characterized by a number of features,
which, taken as a whole, distinguish them from other design rules:
 They capture design practice and embody knowledge about successful
solutions: they come from practice rather than psychological theory.
 They capture the essential common properties of good design: they do
not tell the designer how to do something but what needs to be done
and why.
 They represent design knowledge at varying levels, ranging from social
and organizational issues through conceptual design to detailed widget
design.
 They are not neutral but embody values within their rationale.
Alexander’s language clearly expresses his values about architecture.
HCI patterns can express values about what is humane in interface
design.
 The concept of a pattern language is generative and can therefore assist
in the development of complete designs.
 They are generally intuitive and readable and can therefore be used for
communication between all stakeholders.
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 Implementation support
 Programming tools for interactive systems provide a means of
effectively translating abstract designs and usability principles
into an executable form.
 These tools provide different levels of services for the
programmer.
 Windowing systems are a central environment for both the
programmer and user of an interactive system, allowing a
single workstation to support separate user system threads of
action simultaneously.

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  Interaction toolkits abstract away from the physical
separation of input and output devices, allowing the
programmer to describe behaviors of objects at a level
similar to how the user perceives them.

 User interface management systems are the final level of

programming support tools, allowing the designer and
programmer to control the relationship between the
presentation objects of a toolkit with their functional
semantics in the actual application.

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 User Interface Management System (UIMS)
The main concerns of a UIMS, for our purposes, are:
 a conceptual architecture for the structure of an interactive
system which concentrates on a separation between
application semantics and presentation;
 techniques for implementing a separated application and
presentation whilst preserving the intended connection
between them;
 support techniques for managing, implementing and
evaluating a run-time interactive environment.

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 UIMS as a conceptual architecture
 A major issue in this area of research is one of separation between the
semantics of the application and the interface provided for the user to
make use of that semantics.
There are many good arguments to support this separation of concerns:
 PortabilityTo allow the same application to be used on different
systems it is best to consider its development separate from its device-
dependent interface.
 Reusability Separation increases the likelihood that components can
be reused in order to cut development costs.
 Multiple interfaces To enhance the interactive flexibility of an
application, several different interfaces can be developed to access the
same functionality.
 CustomizationThe user interface can be customized by both the
designer and the user to increase its effectiveness without having to alter
the underlying application.

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 The logical components of a UIMS were
identified as:
 Presentation The component responsible for the
appearance of the interface, including what output and input
is available to the user.
 Dialog control The component which regulates the
communication between the presentation and the
application.
 Application interface The view of the application semantics
that is provided as the interface.

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 Chapter 7 Evaluation Techniques and Universal Design
Evaluation tests the usability, functionality and acceptability of an
interactive system.
Evaluation may take place:– in the laboratory and in the field.
Some approaches are based on expert evaluation:
– analytic methods
– review methods
– model-based methods.
Some approaches involve users:
– experimental methods
– observational methods
– query methods.
An evaluation method must be chosen carefully and must be suitable
for the job.

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 What is Evaluation?
 In previous chapters we have discussed a design process to
support the design of usable interactive systems.
 However, even if such a process is used, we still need to assess
our designs and test our systems to ensure that they actually
behave as we expect and meet user requirements. This is the
role of evaluation.
 Evaluation should not be supposed of as a single phase in the
design process (still less as an activity tacked on the end of
the process if time permits).
 Ideally, evaluation should occur throughout the design life cycle,
with the results of the evaluation feeding back into
modifications to the design.
HCI-Notes Compiled by Yadeta G
114 05/27/2020
 Goals of Evaluation
Evaluation has three main goals:
 to assess the extent and accessibility of the system’s
functionality,
 to assess users’ experience of the interaction, and
 to identify any specific problems with the system.
 We will consider evaluation techniques under two broad
headings: expert analysis and user participation.
 However, we will consider why we do evaluation and what
we are trying to achieve (goals of evaluation).

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  The system’s functionality is important in that it must accord
with the user’s requirements.
 In other words, the design of the system should enable users
to perform their intended tasks more easily.
 In addition to evaluating the system design in terms of its
functional capabilities, it is important to assess the user’s
experience of the interaction and its impact upon him.
 This includes considering aspects such as how easy the system
is to learn, its usability and the user’s satisfaction with it.
 The final goal of evaluation is to identify specific problems
with the design.
 These may be aspects of the design which, when used in their
intended context, cause unexpected results, or confusion
amongst users.

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 Ease of Learning & Ease of Use
Ease of learning
 determine naturalness of voice commands and quality of feedback
 determine effectiveness of buttons' images and text in conveying
function
 understanding how the shopping list and recipe function works
Ease of use
 After initial exploration, given a task, can the user quickly
accomplish it
 Do they take the direct path or press some wrong buttons along
the way
 Evaluation will be based on time, errors, and frustration

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 Evaluation Through Expert Analysis
Evaluation should occur throughout the design process.
 In particular, the first evaluation of a system should ideally be
performed before any implementation work has started.
 If the design itself can be evaluated, expensive mistakes can be
avoided, since the design can be altered prior to any major
resource commitments.
 Typically, the later in the design process that an error is
discovered,
The four approaches to expert analysis:
cognitive walkthrough,
heuristic evaluation,
the use of models and
use of previous work.

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 Evaluation Through User Participation
 The techniques we have considered so far concentrate on
evaluating a design or system through analysis by the
designer, or an expert evaluator, rather than testing with
actual users.
 However, useful as these techniques are for filtering and
refining the design, they are not a replacement for actual
usability testing with the people for whom the system is
intended: the users.
 Different approaches to evaluation through user participation
includes: empirical or experimental methods,
observational methods, query techniques, and
methods that use physiological monitoring, such as eye
tracking and measures of heart rate and skin conductance.

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 Choosing an Evaluation Method
 As we have seen, a range of techniques is available for evaluating
an interactive system at all stages in the design process.
So how do we decide which methods are most appropriate for
our needs?
 There are no hard and fast rules in this – each method has its
particular strengths and weaknesses and each is useful if applied
appropriately.
 However, there are a number of factors that should be taken
into account when selecting evaluation techniques.
 These also provide a way of categorizing the different methods
so that we can compare and choose between them.

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 Factors Distinguishing Evaluation Techniques
We can identify at least eight factors that distinguish
different evaluation techniques and therefore help us to make
an appropriate choice. These are:
1. the stage in the cycle at which the evaluation is carried out
2. the style of evaluation
3. the level of subjectivity or objectivity of the technique
4. the type of measures provided
5. the information provided
6. the immediacy of the response
7. the level of interference implied
8. the resources required.

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 Universal Design
Universal design is about designing systems so that they can
be used by anyone in any circumstance.
 Multi-modal systems are those that use more than one human
input channel in the interaction.
 These systems may, for example, use:
– speech
– non-speech sound
– touch
– handwriting
– gestures.
 Universal design means designing for diversity, including:
– people with sensory, physical or cognitive impairment
– people of different ages
– people from different cultures and backgrounds.

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 Introduction
 Universal design is the process of designing products so that
they can be used by as many people as possible in as many
situations as possible.
 In our case, this means particularly designing interactive
systems that are usable by anyone, with any range of abilities,
using any technology platform.
 This can be achieved by designing systems either to have built
in redundancy or to be compatible with assistive
technologies.

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 Universal Design Principles
 We have defined universal design as ‘the process of designing
products so that they can be used by as many people as
possible in as many situations as possible’.
 But what does that mean in practice?
 Is it possible to design anything so that anyone can use
 it and if we could, how practical would it be?
 Wouldn’t the cost be prohibitive? In reality, we may not be
able to design everything to be accessible to everyone, and
we certainly cannot ensure that everyone has the same
experience of using a product, but we can work toward the
aim of universal design and try to provide an equivalent
experience.

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 Seven General Principles of Universal Design
 These were intended to cover all areas of design and are
equally applicable to the design of interactive systems.
 These principles give us a framework in which to develop
universal designs.
 Principle one is equitable use: the design is useful to
people with a range of abilities and appealing to all. No user
is excluded or stigmatized.
 Wherever possible, access should be the same for all; where
identical use is not possible, equivalent use should be
supported.
 Where appropriate, security, privacy and safety provision
should be available to all.

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  Principle two is flexibility in use: the design allows for a
range of ability and preference, through choice of methods of
use and adaptivity to the user’s pace, precision and custom.
 Principle three is that the system be simple and
intuitive to use, regardless of the knowledge, experience,
language or level of concentration of the user.
 The design needs to support the user’s expectations and
accommodate different language and literacy skills.
 It should not be unnecessarily complex and should be
organized to facilitate access to the most important areas.
 It should provide prompting and feedback as far as possible.

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  Principle four is perceptible information: the design
should provide effective communication of information
regardless of the environmental conditions or the user’s
abilities.
 Principle five is tolerance for error: minimizing the
impact and damage caused by mistakes or unintended
behavior.
 Principle six is low physical effort: systems should be
designed to be comfortable to use, minimizing physical
effort and fatigue.
 Principle seven requires size and space for approach and use:
the placement of the system should be such that it can be
reached and used by any user regardless of body size, posture
or mobility.

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 Multi-Modal Interaction
 As we have seen in the previous section, providing access to
information through more than one mode of interaction is an
important principle of universal design.
 Such design relies on multi-modal interaction.
 We also discussed like there are five senses: sight, sound,
touch, taste and smell.
 Therefore, our design of interaction system should consider
the variety of information Transmission/accessed like:
 Sound in the interface (sound non-speech and speech)

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 In Multimodal Interaction:
 Sound in the Interface includes: speech sound, non-speech
sounds --> we also do for speech recognition in our
interaction.
 Touch in the Interface includes: handwriting recognition

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 Designing for Diversity
 We can make general observations about human capabilities,
users in fact have different needs and limitations.
 Interfaces are usually designed to cater for the ‘average’ user,
but unfortunately this may exclude people who are not
‘average’.
 As we saw in the introduction to this chapter, people are
diverse and there are many factors that must be taken
into account if we are to come close to universal design.
 We consider briefly some of these factors and the particular
challenges that each raises.
 We will consider three key areas: disability, age and
culture.

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 Designing for users with disabilities
 It is estimated that at least 10% of the population of every
country has a disability that will affect interaction with
computers.
 Employers and manufacturers of computing equipment have
not only a moral responsibility to provide accessible products,
but often also a legal responsibility.
 In many countries, legislation now demands that the
workplace must be designed to be accessible or at least
adaptable to all the design of software and hardware should
not unnecessarily restrict the job prospects of people with
disabilities.

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 We should consider the disabilities:
 Visual impairment: The sensory impairment that has attracted
the most attention from researchers, perhaps because it is
potentially also one of the most debilitating as far as interaction is
concerned, is visual impairment.
 Hearing impairment: Compared with a visual disability where
the impact on interacting with a graphical interface is immediately
obvious, a hearing impairment may appear to have little impact on
the use of an interface.
 Physical impairment: Users with physical disabilities vary in
the amount of control and movement that they have over their
hands, but many find the precision required in mouse control
difficult.
Speech input and output is an option for those without speech
difficulties.
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 We should consider the disabilities:
 Speech impairment: For users with speech and hearing
impairments, multimedia systems provide a number of tools
for communication, including synthetic speech and text-
based communication and conferencing systems.
Textual communication is slow, which can lower the
effectiveness of the communication.
 Dyslexia: Users with cognitive disabilities such as dyslexia
can find textual information difficult.
In severe cases, speech input and output can alleviate the need
to read and write and allow more accurate input and output.

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 Autism: mental condition
Autism affects a person’s ability to communicate and interact with
people around them and to make sense of their environment.
This manifests itself in a range of ways but is characterized by the
triad of impairments:
1. Social interaction – problems in relating to others in a
meaningful way or responding appropriately to social situations.
2. Communication – problems in understanding verbal and
textual language including the use of gestures and expressions.
3. Imagination – problems with rigidity of thought processes,
which may lead to repetitive behavior and inflexibility.

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 Designing for Different Age Groups
 We have considered how people differ along a range of
sensory, physical and cognitive abilities.
 However, there are other areas of diversity that impact upon
the way we design interfaces. One of these is age.
 In particular, older people and children have specific needs
when it comes to interactive technology.
Designing for cultural differences
 The final area of diversity we will consider is cultural
difference.
 Cultural difference is often used synonymously with national
differences but this is too simplistic.

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 Summary
 Universal design is about designing systems that are accessible by all users in
all circumstances, taking account of human diversity in disabilities, age and
culture.
 Universal design helps everyone – for example, designing a system so that it
can be used by someone who is deaf or hard of hearing will benefit other
people working in noisy environments or without audio facilities.
 Designing to be accessible to screen reading systems will make websites better
for mobile users and older browsers.
 Multi-modal systems provide access to system information and functionality
through a range of different input and output channels, exploiting redundancy.
 Such systems will enable users with sensory, physical or cognitive impairments
to make use of the channels that they can use most effectively.
 But all users benefit from multi-modal systems that utilize more of our senses
in an involving interactive experience.
 For any design choice we should ask ourselves whether our decision is
excluding someone and whether there are any potential confusions or
misunderstandings in our choice.

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 Chapter 8: User Support
Users have different requirements for support at different times.
 User support should be:
– available but unobtrusive
– accurate and robust
– consistent and flexible.
 User support comes in a number of styles:
– command-based methods
– context-sensitive help
– tutorial help
– online documentation
– wizards and assistants
– adaptive help.
 Design of user support must take account of:
– presentation issues
– implementation issues.

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 Introduction
 There is often an implicit assumption that if an interactive
system is properly designed it will be completely intuitive to use
and the user will require little or no help or training.
 This may be a grand ideal but it is far from true with even the best
designed systems currently available
 The type of assistance users require varies and is dependent on
many factors: their familiarity with the system, the job they are
trying to do, and so on.
There are four main types of assistance that users require:
 quick reference
 task-specific help
 full explanation
 tutorial..

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 Requirements of User Support

 If we were to design the ideal help system, what would it

look like?
 This is a difficult question to answer, but we can point to
some features that we might like our help system to have.
 Not every help system will have all of these features,
sometimes for good reason, but they are useful as
benchmarks against which we can test the support tools we
design.

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 Availability
 The user needs to be able to access help at any time during
his interaction with the system.
 In particular, he should not have to quit the application he is
working on in order to open the help application.
 Ideally, it should run concurrently with any other application.
 This is obviously a problem for non-windowed systems if the
help system is independent of the application that is running.
 However, in windowed systems there is no reason why a help
facility should not be available constantly, at the press of a
button. Availability may include: Accuracy and
completeness, Consistency, Robustness, Flexibility

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 Approaches to User Support
 As we noted in the previous section, there are a number of
different approaches to providing help, each of which meets a
particular need.
 These vary from simple captions to full adaptive help and
tutoring systems.
 In this section we will concentrate on the styles of help provided
rather than any particular help system (although we will use real
help systems for illustration).
 Next we will then go on to look at adaptive help in more detail.

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 Approaches to User Support
Command assistance
 Perhaps the most basic approach to user support is to provide
assistance at the command level – the user requests help on a
particular command and is presented with a help screen or
manual page describing it.
Command prompts
 In command line interfaces, command prompts provide help
when the user encounters an error, usually in the form of
correct usage prompts.
 Such prompts are useful if the error is a simple one, such as
incorrect syntax, but again they assume knowledge of the
command.

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 … cont’d
Context-sensitive help
 Some help systems are context sensitive.
 These range from those that have specific knowledge of the particular
user (which we will consider under adaptive help) to those that provide
a simple help key or function that is interpreted according to the
context in which it is called and will present help accordingly.
Online tutorials
 Online tutorials allow the user to work through the basics of an
application within a test environment.
 The user can progress at his own speed and can repeat parts of the
tutorial if needed.
 He will also get a feel for how the application works by experimenting
with examples, albeit small ones, or by watching an automated
demonstration of how to perform a task.

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 … cont’d
Online documentation
 Online documentation effectively makes the existing paper
documentation available on computer.
 This makes the material available continually (assuming the
machine is running!) in the same medium as the user’s work and,
potentially, to a large number of users concurrently.
Wizards and assistants
 A wizard is a task-specific tool that leads the user through the task,
step by step, using information supplied by the user in response to
questions along the way.
 They are distinct from demonstrations in that they allow the user
actually to complete the task.

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 Adaptive Help Systems
 In any large or complex computer system, users will be familiar
with a subset of the available functionality, demonstrating
expertise in some applications and having no experience with
others, even to the point of being unaware of their existence.
 In addition, different users will have different needs and levels of
under standing.
 Adaptive help systems attempt to address these problems by
adapting the help that they provide to the individual user who is
making the request and by actively suggesting alternative courses
of action of which the user may not be aware.

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  Adaptive help is a special case of a general class of interactive
systems, known as intelligent systems.
 These include domain-specific expert systems, intelligent
tutoring systems and general adaptive interfaces.
 Adaptive help systems operate by monitoring the activity of
the user and constructing a model of him.
 We should consider some of the developments and solutions,
concentrating, in particular, on the knowledge requirements.
 Knowledge representation: user modeling
 Knowledge representation: domain and task modeling
 Knowledge representation: modeling advisory strategy

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 Techniques for knowledge representation
 Rule-based techniques
Knowledge is represented as a set of rules and facts, which are
interpreted using some inference mechanism.
 Frame-based techniques
Frame-based systems are used to represent commonly occurring
situations and default knowledge.
 Network-based techniques
Networks represent knowledge about the user and system in terms
of relationships between facts.
 Example-based techniques
Example-based techniques represent knowledge implicitly within a
decision structure of a classification system.

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 Designing User Support Systems
 There are many ways of providing user support and it is up to the
designer to decide which is most appropriate for any given
system.
 However, there are a number of things which the designer should
take into account.
 First, the design of user support should not be seen as an ‘add-on’
to system design.
 Ideally, the help system should be designed integrally with the
rest of the system.
 If this is done, the help system will be relevant and consistent
with the rest of the system.

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  The same modeling and analytic used to design the system can guide
the design of support material as well.
 Secondly, the designer should consider the content of the help and the
context in which it will be used before the technology that will be
required.
Presentation issues
How is help requested?
 The first decision the designer must make is how the user will access
help.
 There are a number of choices.
 Help may be a command, a button, a function which can be switched
on or off, or a separate application.
 A command (usually) requires the user to specify a topic, and
therefore assumes some knowledge, but may fit most consistently
within the rest of the interface.

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  How is help displayed?
 Effective presentation of help
Implementation issues
 Alongside the presentation issues the designer must make
implementation decisions.
 Some of these may be forced by physical constraints, others
by the choices made regarding the user’s requirements for
help. We have already considered how help may be requested
and how it appears to the user.

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 Summary
 This chapter has been concerned with user support in the form of help
and documentation.
 No interactive system of any complexity is so intuitive that the user
never requires help. Help should therefore be an integral part of the
design.
 Users require different types of help, depending on the context and
circumstances, and the user support facilities should support these.
 Different styles of help support different requirements and different
types of user.
 We have considered several types of help system, including adaptive user
support.
 It is important to select a support style and design user support with the
user in mind, just as the design of the system is user centered.
 In particular, the presentation of help should take into account usability
principles, and the language should be clear and instructional.

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