Human Computer Interaction Flashcards
Basic questions on field work
What do people do now?
What values and goals do people have?
How are these particular activities embedded in a larger ecology?
What are similarities and differences accross people?
Ask vs Observing
Asking people what they want generally don`t give as many clues as observing what they do
Good clues for usability bugs
When people do a workaround for something, this something is by default broken.
Rewarding intervieweers
People will usually not perform interviews for free.
But you don`t need to pay them huge ammounts of money either.
Depending on the situation, giving them a token of appreciation for their time, like something useful related to the interview, is good enough.
The trick to finding ideas
Convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell.
Also, realize that people at the middle have better stories then the people at the top, since people at the top have to be self aware of what they say
How do you choose a participant
if you want to improve an existing interface
- Choose a representative of the target users
If you want to Build a new interface, based on an existing solution
- Choose users of a similar system
If you want to broaden up the ammount of people who are able to use your interface
- Choose Non-users
How users view the importance of features
If you ask someone if something is important, they will likely answer “yes”, regardless of wether or not it is important. It is a leading question, for users will not
3 Questions to avoid
What would you do in hypothetical scenario?
How often do you do things?
How much they like things on an absolute scale?
Binary Questions
Silence rule
Wait a few (30) seconds before you move to the next question. People will usually complete their questions afterwards.
Diary studies
Give people a diary that they complete at a specific time or interval.
Offer training and practice to create the habit of the diary, and keep talking to them to maintain it.
Experience sampling
Similar to diary studies, but you send a page out for users whenever you need the data.
Lead users
Users that are proactive on their envrionment and came up with solutions of their own, that can be studied and generalized to a broader public.
Extreme users
Users that work under extreme situations of the object of study. Keep in mind they do not compose the majority of actual users, so their problems might not be so significant when projecting.
Personas
Abstract users that include demographic information, motivation, belief, intention, behavior and goals according to what you researched.
What is the outcome of activity analysis
What is the current process performed by users?
What are the artifacts?
What are the goals?
What are the pain points?
What is the purpose of a storyboard
To help understand what are the actions an user would be willing to do.
How do you organize a storyboard.
First panels convey the setting - Who, where, and what.
Middle panels convey the sequence - What happens after the setting, and why would someone need the app in the first place.
Ending panels are the design of the reward.
Tips for easily drawing people
Star people help getting personas on paper.
Paper prototype
Take you design idea, and draw it on paper.
6 paper prototyping tips and tricks
Work with speed, not beauty.
Keep all your materials together; widgets can get lost through time.
Transparency pens allow the user to input content
Use wide-tipped pens - smaller line widths can be difficult to see
Use stacks of index cards to simulate tabbed dialog boxes.
Wizard-of-oz prototyping
Get a human being to pretend they are a machine so you don’t need to jump into coding right away.
How do you make a wizard of oz prototype
Map out scenarios and application flow
Put together interface skeletons
Develop hooks for wizard input
Figure out what kind of input the wizard is allowed to offer
Roles on wizard prototyping
- Facilitator: provides the tasks and takes notes.
- Wizard: Process the requests and operate the interface
Optimally should be performed by separate people, with the wizard hidden. But, if impossible, can be done by one guy.
User feedback on wizard prototyping
Think aloud: Ask user to think about what he is seeing in real time
Retrospective: Ask user what he was thinking in moments you noticed difficulties, after the test.
Heuristic evaluation: Ask user to pay attention to specific parts.
