Activity 2 - Module 2 (Human Capabilities)

Answer the following questions:

 
1. What are mental models, and why are they important in interface design?
- Mental models are an explanation of how things work. They are how we decide
what variables matter in a given situation and how those variables interact with
one another. Mental models are how we make sense of the world. Mental
models help reduce the friction between a user and a user interface (UI). The
more that a UI matches a user's model of the world, the easier it will be for the
user to the use the UI and get their tasks done. A good example is e-commerce
websites.

2. What can a system designer do to minimize the memory load of the user?
- The system designer, particularly the designer of the user interface, can make
the system behave in a way that aligns with what the user expects, knows, and
the user interface of other applications the user likely uses. This way, the users
have their “common user experience” rather than a “novel user experience” or
even a “conflicting user experience.” The designer can retain and use data
rather than asking for it to be repeated.

 
3. What does this indicate about the capacity of short-term memory?
- The Magic number 7 (plus or minus two) provides evidence for the capacity of short-
term memory. Most adults can store between 5 and 9 items in their short-term
memory. This idea was put forward by Miller (1956) and he called it the magic number
7. He though that short term memory could hold 7 (plus or minus 2 items) because it
only had a certain number of “slots” in which items could be stored. 

4. What does it indicate that helps improve the capacity of short-term memory?
- "Chunking" of information can lead to an increase in the short-term memory
capacity. Chunking is the organization of material into shorter meaningful groups
to make them more manageable. For example, a hyphenated phone number,
split into groups of 3 or 4 digits, tends to be easier to remember than a single
long number. Experiments by Herbert Simon have shown that the ideal size for
chunking of letters and numbers, whether meaningful or not, is three. However,
meaningful groups may be longer (such as four numbers that make up a date
within a long list of numbers, for example). With chunking, each chunk
represents just one of the 5 - 9 items that can be stored in short-term memory,
thus extending the total number of items that can be held.