Category: weekly-post

Course Organisation

• Please all sign up for tutorials via LEARN. We use tutorials to check attendance, which is particularly important for students on Tier 4 visas.
• If you miss Questions and Comments, you can’t make up for them. They are a very small part of the final grade, though.
• The Assignment for the Usability Study will be released tomorrow.
• Questions about my MSc projects? I have two information sessions on Friday, February 1, 2-3 and 3-4, Room 4.31/4.33 Informatics Forum, or you can ask me after the lecture. You must complete the Google Form for me to rate you suitable.

Starter

Compare the landing pages of four big search engines:

• Baidu
• Google
• Yahoo
• Naver

What are the main differences?

Themes from Questions and Comments

Which Technique to Use When?

As with all research, this depends on

• how much time you have to design and run a study
• what access you have to end users
• what equipment you have
• what you want to find out

Whether a study in the lab is valid depends on how much findings will be affected by context. For example, if you want to use eye tracking to find out what draws attention, and what users read first, you can do that in the lab.

More on A/B testing

A/B testing is useful if you have an alternative (B) to your existing design (A) that you wish to test, if you have a substantial user base already, so that you can get enough data, and if you have put enough work into B to be able to deploy it. It is for solutions that are either easy to implement, or that have been pre-tested sufficiently. Lab studies are useful for pre-testing.

Field experiments are often neglected, because they are difficult to do, but these can tell you the most about how your system is actually used in practice. Methods from ethnography are useful here.

Heuristic Evaluation – What and Why?

You use guidelines and design patterns to create your technology, and you can use heuristic evaluation to check what you have created. Here are some more practical examples of the classic Nielsen guidelines: 10 usability heuristics with examples.

Heuristics also need to be weighed against each other – there is a good reason why Naver is less minimalist than Google!

Face Validity

Many questionnaires don’t measure what they are intended to measure or what they appear to measure. Face validity is all about appearance. Does it look like a questionnaire is measuring usability (face validity), or does it actually measure usability (construct validity)? We care about construct  validity. I often recommend the System Usability Scale to my students for measuring user satisfaction – this link to the paper should work. Although the SUS was designed to be quick and dirty, it has turned out to have good reliability and good construct validity, and it has been used over so many studies that values are now well calibrated.

Course Organisation

• Don’t worry if you missed the Questions and Comments from Week 2. You will still be able to do well on the assignment.
• We have tutorials! You can sign up on LEARN – the link to Tutorial Groups is on the left hand side, below “Announcements”. There are 8 groups at the moment. We start next week.

Starter

When Microsoft switched from Windows 7 to Windows 8, the new user interface was a shock, because it ditched most existing mental models of what the Windows operating system should look like.

This article is a good summary of the main critiques when Windows 8 first came out. (Also: Anyone remember netbooks?)

This article is a good reminder of why usability doesn’t predict sales. (Also remember: what Steve Jobs and Apple did was to make actual user needs, which can be quite different from what users think they need, part of their design process.)

Themes from Questions and Comments

Theme 1: Clarifying the different types of memory

What I am teaching you here is one particular type of theory, based on the approach of Alan Baddeley and colleagues, which is well studied and has a lot of evidence. The graphics below are based on this theory.

Theme 2: Can we avoid user bias?

No – we have to work with them and around them. One of the main points of understanding how perception works is that this knowledge allows you to exploit perceptual biases to structure user interfaces and guide the user’s attention. Perception and cognition are closely linked, for good reason.

Theme 3: Can mental models be changed and adapted?

Yes, they can – but you need to make sure it’s worth the effort

Theme 4: Recall versus recognition

if we want to build interfaces for people who use systems rarely, if we want to add in a layer of redundancy, if we want to help people who have forgotten the commands, we make sure people can recognise what to do.

If we want to make interfaces fast to operate, we support fast recall.

Course Organisation

• This is the last week of Questions and Comments, and the last week I will be teaching you
• The Quiz will cover Weeks 2-5, and what you need to study are the things listed under “Remember” in the Learning Outcomes
• If you have further questions about the Usability Report, I will announce Office Hours on Monday April 16.
• For the last two weeks, we will be in the Psychology Building, S1 (7 George Square, second floor), and you will have guest lectures on information retrieval and data visualisation

Themes from Questions and Comments

For each theme, I am giving you a paper that shows how the concept can be used to analyse collaboration using technology.

Articulation Work:

Grant, S., Mesman, J., & Guthrie, B. (2016). Spatio-temporal elements of articulation work in the achievement of repeat prescribing safety in UK general practice. Sociology of Health & Illness, 38(2), 306–324. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.12308

Attribution Theory:

Activities

These are exercises in qualitative analysis and analysis of text data. Do these alone or in groups.

1. Looking for keywords: Go to the TopHat activity Museum 1 and determine how many people asked a museum employee. Alternatively, go to the TopHat activity Museum 2 and look for the number of people mentioning the exhibition Down to Earth.
2. Tabulating mentions of relevant things: Go to the TopHat activity CSCW 2 or 3, and make a list of the solutions that were mentioned, and how often they were mentioned. Is there any information you miss when you just list the solutions?
3. Going deeper: What do people talk about? Look at one of Museum 4, 5, and 6. What do students mention? The gallery, the exhibit? Do they mention their reaction to the exhibit, social context, usability issues? What else is mentioned?
4. Analysing Reasons: Look at one of CSCW1, CSCW2, or Information Architecture 2. What types of reasons do people give for their choice? Can you categorise them? If you have chosen IA2, do people give reasons without having been prompted by the question?

Course Organisation

• The deadline for Questions and Comments is Monday midnight. No exceptions. I need the time to analyse 100+ submissions and extract themes for teaching.
• The Case Study Assignment will be visible from Thursday onwards. We will do our best to return marks on time. Make sure you submit anonymously, and put your exam number and the number of words in the title. Captions and references don’t count towards the number of words.
• For the next three weeks (January 31, February 7, February 14), I am running two sessions with the same content – 11-1 Wednesdays 5.05, 1-3 Wednesdays 6.06. After the “week off” (aka Festival of Creative Learning) I will go back to one session per week, because most of you need the 11-1 slot.
• Strike action: I am currently not a member of UCU. However, I plan to join the Union and be part of the strike action for the last five days, March 14, 15, 16, 19, and 20, if there is no resolution by then. University staff in the UK do not have tenure, unlike staff in many other countries.
• Session Recording: I will use my own laptop and set up session recording on it for next week. In the mean time, feel free to record me with your own devices. Since this is a flipped classroom, there are no slides except for those posted here. Sit at the front, stop me when you can no longer understand what I’m saying, and ask questions!

Starter

When Microsoft switched from Windows 7 to Windows 8, the new user interface was a shock, because it ditched most existing mental models of what the Windows operating system should look like.

This article is a good summary of the main critiques when Windows 8 first came out. (Also: Anyone remember netbooks?)

This article is a good reminder of why usability doesn’t predict sales. (Also remember: what Steve Jobs and Apple did was to make actual user needs, which can be quite different from what users think they need, part of their design process.)

Themes from Questions and Comments

Theme 1: Clarifying the different types of memory

What I am teaching you here is one particular type of theory, based on the approach of Alan Baddeley and colleagues, which is well studied and has a lot of evidence. The graphics below are based on this theory.

Theme 2: Can we avoid user bias?

No – we have to work with them and around them. One of the main points of understanding how perception works is that this knowledge allows you to exploit perceptual biases to structure user interfaces and guide the user’s attention. Perception and cognition are closely linked, for good reason.

Theme 3: Human learning versus machine learning

Neural networks started out as a way of modelling the brain – now, the field of machine learning has become partly uncoupled from the aim of modelling human neural function.

Theme 4: Can mental models be changed and adapted?

Yes, they can – but you need to make sure it’s worth the effort.

Activities

Students without HCI experience: Write out the step by step script of adding an appointment to your phone or laptop calendar. Start with unlocking your phone. Treat any text entry as one single step. Write down which calendar app you are using.

Students with HCI / Design Informatics experience: There are still people who use paper calendars and planners. Why? Make a plan for searching the web for statements from people who use paper calendars. You can choose from the following options:

• compare user reactions to different paper calendar systems (search for e.g. Filofax, Moleskine)
• Investigate the bullet journal culture (and here’s a stimulus for those interested in computer security)
• draw up an interview schedule for classmates who use paper calendars

Course Organisation

• The location of this course is still not fixed, because we have an enrolment of  129 as of this morning, which is 2.5x the number that Timetabling originally scheduled. So keep an eye on announcements!
• You will receive an announcement, both on LEARN and via email, as soon as the revised page with the readings and materials for the week goes live.
• Questions and comments are about the material covered in the course. If you have any questions and comments about how the course is run, email me. I expect at least one pertinent question and/or comment pertinent to the material.
• I am taking attendance, because many of you are here on Tier 4 visas, and the Home Office expects them to report in regularly.
• You will need to access most of the papers referenced in this web site through a University account. I’m not allowed to link to Sci Hub, I’m afraid.
• If you have any additional support needs, both documented and undocumented, please contact me now!

Themes from Questions and Comments (First Part)

Many of you requested discussion of examples from privacy and security and from game design and development.

Theme 1: Inclusive Design

Does inclusive design mean that we need to design for everyone? How does that work in practice, and how can we get it to work?

Additional Resources: The Inclusive Design Cube

Theme 2: Affordances

What is an affordance, why does it matter, and why do we differentiate between physical and perceived affordances and cultural conventions?

Additional resources: Bad Designs

Where does the term come from? An overview paper from Ecological Psychology

How is it used in HCI? A summary by McGrenere and Ho. See in particular Figure 3 in that paper for a good explanation of why we care about this concept.

Theme 3: Perception

Why do we care about perceptual thresholds, and how are they established?

Theme 4: Signal Detection Theory

How does signal detection theory work, and why does it matter for design?

Additional resources:

Introduction by David Heeger

Course Activities (Second Part)

You will be observing a variety of classrooms and set ups as you take this course. As an ongoing activity, I’d like you to keep notes about the way in which the environment affected your ability to learn. Did you have good seats? Could you see and hear? Was it immediately obvious to you where best to sit?

Top Hat Activities: Culture and Language, Neko Atsume reviews, Neko Atsume user experience