HCI NOTES

UNIT 4
1.Discuss about HCI in software process.

Figure 1 The activities in the waterfall model of the software life cycle

A.Requirements Specification:
- Focuses on capturing what the eventual system will provide, not how it will
provide it.
- Involves eliciting information from the customer about the work environment
and functions of the software product.
- Starts at the beginning of product development and requires formulating
customer requirements in a language suitable for implementation.
- Transforms requirements from natural language to more precise executable
languages.
Architectural Design:
- Concentrates on how the system provides expected services.
- Involves high-level decomposition of the system into components and
describing interdependencies between them.
- Utilizes structured techniques to derive architectural descriptions.
- Typically focuses on capturing functional requirements but may not
immediately address non-functional requirements like efficiency, reliability, and
safety.
Detailed Design:
- Refines the component descriptions provided by architectural design.
- Ensures that the behaviour implied by the higher-level description is
preserved.
- Involves selecting the best refinement to satisfy as many non-functional
requirements as possible.
Coding and Unit Testing:
- Involves implementing components based on detailed design in an executable
programming language.
- Component is tested to verify correct performance according to predefined
test criteria.
Integration and Testing:
- Involves integrating implemented components and further testing to ensure
correct behaviour.
- Acceptance testing with customers may be performed to ensure system
meets requirements.
- System is released to the customer after acceptance.
Maintenance:
- All work on the system after release is considered maintenance.
- Involves correcting errors discovered after release and revising system
services to meet new requirements.
- Provides feedback to all other activities in the software life cycle.

2. Define iterative design. explain the main approaches to

prototyping
A.Iterative design is a purposeful design process aimed at overcoming the
challenges of incomplete requirements specification by cycling through
multiple design iterations, each time incrementally improving upon the final
product based on feedback and testing. It acknowledges that requirements for
interactive systems cannot always be fully specified at the beginning of the
software development life cycle. Instead, iterative design embraces the notion
of building, testing, and refining the design through successive iterations.

Main Approaches to Prototyping:

1. Throw-away Prototyping: In this approach, a prototype is built and

tested, and the insights gained from testing are used to inform the final
product. However, the actual prototype is discarded after its purpose is
served. This approach allows for quick exploration and validation of
design concepts without committing to a specific solution. It is
particularly useful when requirements are unclear or evolving.

2. Incremental Prototyping: Here, the final product is developed as

separate components, one at a time. The overall design for the final
system exists, but it is divided into independent and smaller
components. Each subsequent release includes one more component
 until the final product is complete. This approach allows for progressive
refinement and integration of components, reducing the risk associated
with building the entire system at once.

3. Evolutionary Prototyping: Unlike throw-away and incremental prototyping, in

evolutionary prototyping, the prototype is not discarded but serves as the basis
for the next iteration of design. The actual system evolves from a limited initial
version to its final release. This approach is suitable for projects where
requirements are complex or continuously changing. It allows for flexibility and
adaptability as the system evolves based on user feedback and changing needs.
3. Write a detailed note on design rules principles to support
usability.
A.Design rules principles to support usability encompass a set of guidelines and
principles aimed at enhancing the user experience and usability of interactive
systems. These principles are derived from the need to explain the success or
failure of different design paradigms and aim to provide repeatability in design,
ensuring consistent usability outcomes. Let's delve into each category of
principles:
1. Learnability:
Learnability focuses on how easily new users can start interacting with the
system and achieve proficiency over time.
 Table 7.1 Summary of principles affecting learnability

The principles under this category include:

- Predictability: Users should be able to predict the system's behavior based on

their interaction history and the current context.
- Synthesizability: Users should be able to assess the effects of past interactions
on the current system state to form a mental model of system behavior.
- Familiarity: The system's interface should leverage users' existing knowledge
and experiences to facilitate effective interaction.
- Generalizability: Users should be able to apply their knowledge and
experience from one context to similar but new situations.
- Consistency: Similar actions or situations should have consistent responses or
behaviour across the system.
2. Flexibility:
Flexibility pertains to the variety of ways users and the system can exchange
information. Key principles in this category include:
- Dialog Initiative:Users and the system should have appropriate levels of
control over the interaction process, balancing user freedom with system
safety.
- Multi-threading: The system should support concurrent and coherent
interaction threads to accommodate complex user tasks.
- Task Migratability: Users and the system should be able to transfer control of
tasks seamlessly between each other.
- Substitutivity: Equivalent inputs or outputs should be interchangeable,
allowing users flexibility in their interactions.
- Customizability: Users should be able to modify the user interface to suit their
preferences and needs.
3. Robustness:
Robustness concerns the system's ability to support users in achieving and
evaluating their goals effectively. The principles in this category include:
-Observability: Users should be able to assess the system's internal state
through its interface, aiding in task evaluation and plan revision.
- Recoverability: Users should be able to recover from errors and unintended
interactions, either forward or backward.
- Responsiveness: The system should provide prompt and instantaneous
feedback to user actions.
- Task Conformance: The system should support all relevant user tasks within
the application domain, ensuring completeness and adequacy.
By adhering to these design rules principles, designers can create interactive
systems that are intuitive, adaptable, and supportive of users' needs and goals,
ultimately enhancing overall usability and user satisfaction.

4.Explain Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design.

A. 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.
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.
These rules provide a useful shorthand for the more detailed sets of principles
described earlier. Like those principles, they are not applicable to every
eventuality and need to be interpreted for each new situation. However, they
are broadly useful and their application will only help most design projects.

5. Describe different approaches to evaluation through user

participation.
A. Evaluation through user participation: The techniques so far concentrate on evaluating a
design or system through analysis by the designer, or an expert evaluator, rather than testing
with actual users. For easiness we can discus part by part.

• Styles of evaluation —
If we consider style of evaluation there are two main parts. First one performed under
laboratory conditions and second one conducted in the work environment or ‘in the field’.
Laboratory studies : In the first type of evaluation studies, users are taken out of their
normal work environment to take part in controlled tests, often in a specialist usability
laboratory.
Field studies : The second type of evaluation takes the designer or evaluator out into the
user’s work environment in order to observe the system in action

• Empirical methods: experimental evaluation —

One of the most powerful methods of evaluating a design or an aspect of a design is to use a
controlled experiment. This provides empirical evidence to support a particular claim or
hypothesis. It can be used to study a wide range of different issues at different levels of
detail. These methods include the participants chosen, the variables tested and
manipulated, and the hypothesis tested.
Participants :- The choice of participants is vital to the success of any experiment. In
evaluation experiments, participants should be chosen to match the expected user
population as closely as possible.
Variables :- Experiments manipulate and measure variables under controlled conditions, in
order to test the hypothesis. There are two main types of variable: those that are
‘manipulated’ or changed ( independent variables) and those that are measured (the
dependent variables).
Hypotheses :- A hypothesis is a prediction of the outcome of an experiment. It is framed in
terms of the independent and dependent variables, stating that a variation in the
independent variable will cause a difference in the dependent variable.
Experimental design:- In order to produce reliable and generalizable results, an experiment
must be carefully designed. We have already looked at a number of the factors that the
experimenter must consider in the design, namely the participants, the independent and
dependent variables, and the hypothesis. There is a process to do this.

• Observational techniques —
A popular way to gather information about actual use of a system is to observe users
interacting with it. Usually they are asked to complete a set of predetermined tasks,
although, if observation is being carried out in their place of work, they may be observed
going about their normal duties.
Think aloud and cooperative evaluation :- Think aloud is a form of observation where the
user is asked to talk through what he is doing as he is being observed; for example,
describing what he believes is happening, why he takes an action, what he is trying to do.
Protocol analysis :- Methods for recording user actions analyze. we can use following
methods for recode user details.
— Paper and pencil
— Audio recording
— Video recording
— Computer logging and etc.
the most popular thing is use a mix method of these.
Automatic protocol analysis tools :- Analysing protocols, whether video, audio or system
logs, is time consuming and tedious by hand. It is made harder if there is more than one
stream of data to synchronize. One solution to this problem is to provide automatic analysis
tools to support the task. These offer a means of editing and annotating video, audio and
system logs and synchronizing these for detailed analysis.
Post-task walkthroughs :- Often data obtained via direct observation lack interpretation. We
have the basic actions that were performed, but little knowledge as to why. Even where the
participant has been encouraged to think aloud through the task, the information may be at
the wrong level.

• Query techniques —
Another set of evaluation techniques relies on asking the user about the interface directly.
Query techniques can be useful in eliciting detail of the user’s view of a system. They
embody the philosophy that states that the best way to find out how a system meets user
requirements is to ‘ask the user’. They can be used in evaluation and more widely to collect
information about user requirements and tasks. There are two main types of query
technique:
interviews — Interviewing users about their experience with an interactive system provides
a direct and structured way of gathering information.
questionnaires — An alternative method of querying the user is to administer a
questionnaire. This is clearly less flexible than the interview technique, since questions are
fixed in advance, and it is likely that the questions will be less probing.

• Evaluation through monitoring physiological responses

One of the problems with most evaluation techniques is that we are reliant on observation
and the users telling us what they are doing and how they are feeling. However for this
evaluation mostly use eye tracking and physiological measurement.
Physiological measurements :- emotional response is closely tied to physiological changes.
These include changes in heart rate, breathing and skin secretions. Measuring these
physiological responses may therefore be useful in determining a user’s emotional response
to an interface. Physiological measurement involves attaching various probes and sensors to
the user. These measure a number of factors:
Heart activity — indicated by blood pressure, volume and pulse. These may respond to
stress or anger.
Activity of the sweat glands — indicated by skin resistance or galvanic skin response (GSR).
These are thought to indicate levels of arousal and mental effort.
Electrical activity in muscle — measured by the electromyogram (EMG). These appear to
reflect involvement in a task.
Electrical activity in the brain — measured by the electroencephalogram
6. What are the evaluation techniques in HCI? Explain in detail.
(Or)
What are the techniques of evaluation? Explain.
A. Evaluation techniques:
The techniques to perform evaluation can be broadly divided into two categories:

• Evaluations that require expert analysis.

• Evaluations that require involving user participation.

The different methods of evaluation under these two broad categories are:
Evaluation through expert analysis
Expert analysis is practical when the designer lacks the resources to involve users. Evaluation
through inspection by experts can be done through the following methods:

• A cognitive walkthrough involves the evaluators performing the sequence of actions

for each task and evaluating their learnability and usability from the users'
perspective.
• In the heuristic evaluation technique, evaluators critique the interface design,
keeping some usability heuristics or principles in mind. Learn more about heuristic
evaluation in this answer.
• A model-based evaluation involves assessing the interface using some models of
design specifications. One such model is the GOMS model.
• An evaluation can be found based on previous studies or existing studies and
experiments regarding specific interface designs. The expert evaluators sometimes
make use of these studies to assess the interface.
Evaluation through user participation
Following are a few evaluation techniques involving participation from actual users.

• In the experimental evaluation technique, controlled experiments are carried out to

test specific hypotheses regarding the interface design.
• The observational techniques involve watching the users and recording their
behavior to understand their thought processes while using the interface.
• The query techniques include asking the user directly about their experience with
the interface, such as interviews and questionnaires.
• Monitoring physiological responses is a way to take physiological measurements of
users while they are exposed to the interface and analyze them.

7. Give a brief summary on multi-modal interaction.

A. Multi-modal interaction
Since our daily interaction with the world around us is multi-modal, interaction channels hat
use more than 1 sensory channel also provide a richer interactive experience. The use of
multiple sensory channels increases the bandwith of the interaction between human and
computer and also makes the interaction look more like a natural human-human interaction.
1. Sound in the interface
There is experimental evidence that the addition of audio confirmation of modes reduces
errors. There are 2 types of sound available: speech and non-speech.
Speech in the interface

• Structure of speech The English language is made up of 40 phonemes: atomic

elements of speech that represent a distinct sound. However, the sounds do not
make the language entirely: the alteration of tone and quality in phonemes, prosody,
gives additional emotion and meaning to a sentence. Also, the sound of a phoneme
is influenced by its preceding phoneme, which is called co-articulation. The result of
prosody and co-articulation on phonemes can be used to construct a set of
allophones, which represent all the different sounds of a language. These can be
combined into morphemes: the smallest still meaningful elements of a language,
being either words or part of words.
• Speech recognition Speech recognition has not yet been very successful due to the
complexity of language, but also because background noise interferes with the input,
the user’s provide gap-fillers in their speech and different speakers produce different
sounds. However, despite it’s limitations, speech recognition is becoming available in
commercial products.
• Speech synthesis Speech synthesis has also not yet been very successful, mostly
because we are sensitive to variation and intonation in speech which can barely be
accomplished by the computer. Also, being, transient, spoken output cannot be
reviewed or browsed easily. However, for users with certain visual or speech
disabilities, the current techniques already work well.
• Uninterpreted speech Speech does not have to be interpreted by a computer to be
useful in the interface: recordings of speech can be a useful output.
• non-speech sound Non-speech sounds can often be assimilated more quickly than
speech sounds, and are language-independent. It also requires less of the users
attention. A disadvantage is that the meaning of the sounds has to be learned. There
are two kinds of usable non-speech sounds: sounds that occur naturally in the world
(example: SonicFinder) and using more abstract generated sounds (example:
Earcons).
2. Touch in the interface
The use of touch in the interface is known as haptic interaction (cutaneous perception
[tactile sensations through the skin] and kinesthetics [the perception of movement and
position]). Touch can provide a primary source of information for users with visual
 impairments and a richer multi-modal experience for sighted users. The main devices are
the electronic braille and the force feedback device.
3. Handwriting recognition
Handwriting is mostly captured using a digitizer tablet or electronic paper. Recognition is
difficult due to the differences between various person’s handwriting. Individually
written characters are better recognized than longer strings.
4. Gesture recognition
Gesture is user-dependent, subject to variation and co-articulation and therefore difficult
to recognize by a computer. The current systems mostly use data-gloves to capture the
gestures

8. What is meant by Universal design?

A. 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. Applied to HCI, this means 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.
Universal design principles
In the late 1990’s a group at North Carolina State University proposed seven general
principles of universal design, which give us a framework in which to develop interactive
systems.
1. 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 appropriate, security, privacy and safety provision should be available to all.
2. 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.
3. Simple and intuitive to use, regardless of the users (intellectual/physical)properties. It
should provide prompting and feedback as far as possible.
4. Perceptive information: the design should provide effective communication of information
regardless of the environmental conditions or the user’s abilities.
5. Tolerance for error: minimizing the impact and damage caused by mis-takes or
unintended behavior.
6. Low physical effort: systems should be designed to be comfortable to use, minimizing
physical effort and fatigue.
7. 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.