Category: Uncategorised

Slides: THF-2019-9-Q&A

Course Organisation

• Only five of you have completed the Ethics Check. This is worrying. Everyone who works with human participants MUST complete the questionnaire, linked on LEARN.
• I will offer TopHat office hours while I am away where I will answer questions about the quiz and the usability assessment. I will try to check the TopHat threads daily.

 

Starter

A database of video and audio content was shut down because it was not accessible. Is that justified?

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/06/u-california-berkeley-delete-publicly-available-educational-content

Themes from the Questions and Comments

Misconception 1: Accessibility means simplifying things

That’s not true. Inclusive design makes it very clear that accessible designs make life easer for everyone. Think of barrier free public transport.

Misconception 2: Accessible designs are ugly

This is because specialist designs address a small, captive audience.

Compare this wheelchair fashion site to this article, which clearly takes people’s desire for nice clothes into account.

Misconception 3: Accessibility is only for people who are blind, deaf, or otherwise significantly impaired

Every disability exists on a scale, and it’s beneficial to think of those who have trouble seeing, for those who are hard of hearing, and for those who can’t move very well.

Course Organisation

• For the Quiz, look at the “Remember” sections of the first four weeks, including Session 5.2 (tomorrow), write down the concepts, and make sure that you understand the definitions.
• You can only go forward through the Quiz
• We expect to have all Tutorial Presences entered into Top Hat by the end of Reading Week
• The Tutorial Presences are registered in TopHat in a weird way, because the only way we can mark attendance manually is to create a “manual attendance” column, which shows all 155 students on TopHat automatically as present, and there is no way for us to automatically switch that to a default of “absent” for all 155 students. So we have agreed the following rule with the ITO:
  • Students who were present at a Tutorial are marked as “excused”
  • Students who were absent at all of the Tutorials are left as “present”

Starting Point: Online Games as Social Networks

Examples of networks and network-like elements in Games:

1. Farmville (RIP)
2. World of Warcraft

How the World of Warcraft community discusses cyberbullying

A long read on cyberbullying in World of Warcraft

Themes from Last Year’s Questions and Comments

Race and socioeconomic status

One student pointed out in the questions and comments – quite rightly! – that it appears rude and unthoughtful to say that race is correlated with socioeconomic status.

Race does not determine socioeconomic status; in the current century, you will find people of all races and skin colours at all levels of society. However, in some societies, people of some races are much more likely to be disadvantaged and feel disadvantaged.

Here are some resources:

• US: Perception of discrimination Pew Research Center
• US: Wage gaps Pew Research Center
• UK: Race Report Equality and Human Rights Commission
• UK: Equality in the UK Government statistics

Activity 1: Definition of Race

If you look at the definitions of race in the US versus the UK, what are the main differences? Why do you think some ethnic groups are highlighted?

Tip: For the US, look at the Wage Gaps data; for the UK, look at the Government definition.

What are the relevant Ethnic groups in your home country?

What is socioeconomic status?

Going back to the two UK resources, you will see that they highlight several areas of inequality. The Race Report talks about Employment, Education, Living Standards, Crime, and Health and Care. All of these contribute to socioeconomic status. Each of these areas is made up of separate statistics.

Activity 2: Aspects of Socioeconomic Status

What aspects are discussed in the UK Government statistics? How might each of the six areas (Education, Crime, Housing, Health, Work, Culture) contribute to the likelihood that

• a person has a cheap smartphone
• a person has a laptop
• a person has a high-end smartphone (Galaxy S8, iPhone X)

 

 

Course Organisation

• Start studying for the Quiz! A practice quiz will be up soon. To prepare, make a list of all the concepts that are in the “Remember” section of the Learning outcomes, see whether you know their definition, and check by talking to classmates whether you understand them
• You do not need participant consent for studying posts from a social media web site, but you should still be careful with the data you handle.

Starter

If you can’t find information about the coursework structure, and are confused about the DPT, who is at fault? If we want to solve the problem, how can we go about it? Do we blame people or do we change the system?

Some Themes from Questions and Comments

Here’s a clear explanation of why attribution error matters – is it the user’s fault? Is it the technology’s fault? Or is this just a complex system?

CREAM and THEA are two possible frameworks for analysing sources of error early – CREAM is obsolete now, see why in the linked blog post. For THEA, see this paper with worked examples and why it matters. The THEA paper emphasises just how important it is to have an accurate understanding of the context of use and the user themselves.

 

 

Course Organisation

During today’s session, I will mostly work through some example descriptive statistics with you. The resources for revising the concepts are listed in this post.

Starter

We will discuss the Usability Assignment on LEARN.

Resources

I strongly recommend this online textbook: Online Statistics Education, an Interactive Multimedia Course of Study

The relevant sections for you are the Introduction (Sections 1-11), Summarising Distributions, Graphing Distributions, and Research Design. These are the basic skills you should have for reporting your data.

 

 

Course Organisation

• We now have around 102 people enrolled in the course. I expect ITO to arrange and release tutorial slots soon.
• The blogs provide a scaffold of what is discussed in class.
• Questions and Comments are closed for submissions on Monday 9am on the week when the material is discussed, to give me enough time to prepare the lectures based on your feedback.

The News

High pitched sounds repel teens

But is it really needed? (Read the comments!)

From Questions and Comments

What are realistic perceptual thresholds for design?

Realistic thresholds allow people to perceive signals in realistic contexts. This is why questionnaires ask people to report how well they can do in typical situations where they will use a certain sense. For example, for vision, one would ask how well a person can read newspaper headlines, or for hearing, whether they can hear birds chirping in the trees.

For hearing, think about background noise. The signal needs to be louder than the noise (signal to noise ratio).

Example from radio 

Thresholds, for example for people’s ability to understand speech, are calibrated first using standardised tests in quiet, and then tested again with background noise.

Thresholds vary from person to person – they are affected by age, acute illness, chronic illness …

In order to decide on the correct thresholds for design, we need to understand

• who is using our systems
• under what circumstances

What is Signal Detection Theory, and why does it matter?

Here is an alternative introduction by David Hager.

Link to Machine Learning: The Receiver Operating Characteristic is related to Signal Detection Theory

What are affordances, and why should we care?

Physical affordances are what you can do with a physical object – properties of the object that you can act on. For example, pick it up, wave your hands in front of it, move your hands under it, move the handle …

Example: Washroom water taps. This one by Dyson is particularly badly designed, because it is very easy to dry your hands when you just want water.

Perceived affordances are about what users think they  can do  with an interface.

Conventions is what designers use to communicate with users, to signal to them that something could be of interest / can be interacted with

Example: Where are buttons and links that you can click on a web site? How do you notice? When this is not clear, we have a case of Mystery Meat Navigation

Many of the examples on the Bad Designs web site are bad because of the affordances.

Affordances can also be ignored: See the “Desirepath” subreddit, where people subvert designed paths to make their own

Course Organisation

In Weeks 6 and 7, our classroom will be the city – we are going out into Edinburgh for our class activities. Watch this space!

If you can’t see Questions and Comments or the Quiz any more after you’ve completed it, that’s because they are no longer visible to you after the due date has passed. These assignments are pass / fail, and you pass them if you complete them before the deadline. This is why I don’t allow late submissions, and once the deadline has passed, you can no longer see them in your student view.

Structure of the Session

We will be working mostly with TopHat on practical applications of user assessment techniques.

Task 1: Evaluating Hotel Booking Systems

Choose the hotel booking service with which you are most familiar. How many clicks does it take you to see a list of hotels near London King’s Cross station with free WiFi and a fitness centre? How many different web pages / app pages do you have to visit? How long (in seconds) does it take you to see this? You can do this either by yourself or in groups of 3-4, where one person does the search, one person counts clicks, one person uses a timer, and one person keeps track of pages.

For people with a HCI background: Document the choices available at each step. How can people zoom in on the desired area? What do they need to know about London to do so? If a property has a fitness centre, what do users need to do to figure out whether it has any dumbbells, or whether it just consists of cardio machines? Which kind of person would care about the quality of the hotel gym?

All of you should do the search. If you are searching in a group, then vary your destination – London King’s Cross, Leicester Square, Royal Albert Hall, Greenwich. If you are not working in a group, or if there are less than four of you, make sure that you check out every destination on different booking engines.

Is there anything you can’t find easily? Is there any information that does not appear in the list version?

If you can’t think of a booking engine, try booking.com, lastminute.com, kayak.co.uk.

Rate your booking engine on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 is very bad and 5 is excellent.

Demonstration: Gray Dawes booking system (Traveldoo)

Task 2: System Usability Scale

Complete a System Usability Scale for the  booking engine you tested yourself.

Demonstration: Analysis of Usability Data

Task 3: Comparing Your Findings to What Others Say

For people without an HCI background: Find the app of one of the booking engines that you examined on the App Store. What are the reviews like? Do they agree with what you’ve found?

For people with an HCI background: Draw up three personas, student on a budget, business traveller, backpacker on a gap year. What are their needs? Who could you ask to find out? Where on the Internet could you find some information without having to interview people? Work alone or in groups of 2-3.

 

Welcome to the course!

This is a plan of our first session.

Introduction: Why Human Factors matter – the Hawaii incident.

False emergency alert about an incoming missile. (BBC)

How the emergency could have been avoided. (blog post)

Overview of the Learning Outcomes

see the Course Handbook 

Setting Up Top Hat

When you set up Top Hat for the course, note down every single step you take, and every single problem you have.

Top Hat Activities

• number of steps
• description of errors
• own goals for the course

Introduction to Human Factors

See Week 1 materials

Course Handbook and Assessments

see Course Handbook

For next week:

Read materials

Complete Questions and Comments by Monday, January 21, midnight. I will use the number of Q&Cs completed as an indication of the number of people who will actually be in the course, and move us to a bigger venue.

Task 1: In groups of 4, look for information about how to summarise a variable like SUS scores in a few key numbers. Keep track of all information sources – what people in your group already knew, where you checked, etc.

Task 2: Compute those  numbers. Keep track how you sought out the information you needed to do that in your spreadsheet of choice. How was it presented? Text? Graphics? Pictures? A mix?

Task 3: What would be a good visualisation?

Task 4: Think about examples of information poverty.