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HCI Introduction and Psychology of Usable Things: Usman Ahmad

The document discusses an introduction to human-computer interaction (HCI) and the psychology of usable things. It outlines goals of shaping students to design good interfaces, the importance of usability, and fundamental HCI principles. It discusses contexts of HCI and five related aspects. Examples are provided of poorly designed everyday things that are difficult to use, and how Norman's principles can improve design through visibility, conceptual models, affordances, mapping, constraints, and feedback.

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55 views14 pages

HCI Introduction and Psychology of Usable Things: Usman Ahmad

The document discusses an introduction to human-computer interaction (HCI) and the psychology of usable things. It outlines goals of shaping students to design good interfaces, the importance of usability, and fundamental HCI principles. It discusses contexts of HCI and five related aspects. Examples are provided of poorly designed everyday things that are difficult to use, and how Norman's principles can improve design through visibility, conceptual models, affordances, mapping, constraints, and feedback.

Uploaded by

black smith
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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HCI Introduction and

Psychology of Usable Things

Lecture 1
Usman Ahmad.
Human Computer Interaction
 Software product development teams mostly know programming only.
 Companies with modest audiences for their software now expect that everyday
programmers will design good interfaces as well as good code.
 Goals
 How to shape students to become programmers with the background and skills required to apply
HCI practices to their everyday job demands.
 The importance of good interfaces and the relationship of interface design to effective human
interaction with computers.
 What good interface design is all about! For example: how to program GUIs using Visual Basic.
 Fundamental HCI principles and foundations.
 Idea of usability engineering
Human Computer Interaction
 Therefore interface has become a critical component of software.
 From a system perspective, the interface dialog standard has shifted away
from text-based command line systems and form-filling dialogs, to highly
interactive graphical user interfaces (GUIs).
 From a user perspective, people are now familiar with the interface design
standard found in software, and they are less tolerant of difficult to-use.
 From a marketing perspective, the customer base has moved from trained
Computer specialists toward a “lay” computer–literate audience.
Human Computer Interaction
 HCI researches the design and use of computer technology, focused
on the interfaces between people (users) and computers.
 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 major phenomena
surrounding them.
[ ACM SIGCHI Curricula for Human-Computer Interaction [Hewett et al., 2002, page 5] ]
Contexts for HCI / Five interrelated aspects
of HCI
Design of Every Day Things
 Why are some everyday things difficult to understand and use?
 What are Don Norman’s principles and how do they apply to the
design of everyday things?
 How can we apply Norman’s principles to the design of computer
interfaces?
Psychology of Things
 Why are some everyday things difficult to understand and use?
 We are surrounded by many everyday things that have poor usability
Programming a VCR
 Telephone features we can’t remember how to use Photocopiers and fax
machines

 Many of these things can be difficult to interpret and


frustrating to use if they provide no clues or false clues as
to how they operate.
Why is usability important
 Usability is a measure of the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with
which specified users can achieve specified goals in a particular environment.
 Poor usability results in
 anger and frustration
 decreased productivity in the workplace
 higher error rates
 physical and emotional injury
 equipment damage
 loss of customer loyalty
 costs money
Example of a poor design
 Trapped between doors!
 Handles afford pulling
 Using a flat plate would constrain the user to push
Early Tractors had a poor design
 Early tractors had a high center of gravity and narrow wheel base
 On rough, hilly surface ! Disaster!
 Used to be called “driver error”
 More probably “design error”, since tractors today are

designed with a low center of gravity and wide wheel base.


Can you use all the functions of your...
 digital watch?
 mobile phone?
 washing machine?
 video recorder?
Phone kept disconnecting..
 The button is at the handle of the phone
Wireless Power point slide controller…
 Wireless Power point slide controller only one button to go advance
 During lectures, sometimes the slides go forwards, sometimes they go
backwards
 Short press to go forward
 Long press to go backward
Norman's Principle of Design
 Make things visible
 Provide a good conceptual model
 Affordance (possible actions)
 Mapping
 Constraints
 Feedback

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