CHAPTER SIX

Design Rules and

Implementation Support
Design rules
Design rules (or usability rules) are rules that a
designer can follow in order to increase the usability of
the system/product e.g., principles, standards,
guidelines.
Designing for maximum usability is the goal of
interactive systems design.
Design rules should be used early in the lifecycle [e.g.,
during the design; note that they can also be used to
evaluate the usability of the system]
Usability
•“Extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve
Usability

specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a

specified context of use.”
• Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy users
interfaces to use.
• Five quality dimensions:
– Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks
the first time they encounter the design?
– Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can
they perform tasks?
– Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of
not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?
– Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these
errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
– Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?
Design metrics UX
• Usability – Easy of use and efficiency

• Aesthetics – sensorial experience generated by the look and

feel of the interface and to the extent to which this
experience matches individual preferences and goals.

• Symbolism – meanings and associations extracted by a

system.
– As opposed to aesthetics which can be ‘visceral’,
symbolism requires cognitive processing (the individual
recognizes a symbol and associate a meaning to it).
Usability Principles
(by Dix et al (HCI book) )
1. Learnability: the ease of the system new users can
begin effective interaction and achieve maximal
performance.
2. Flexibility: the multiplicity of ways the user and
system exchange information.
3. Robustness: the level of support provided to the user
in determining successful achievement and
assessment of goal-directed behavior
Usability Principles (ctd)
Learnability
• Predictability, Synthesizability, Familiarity,
Generalizability, Consistency.
Predictability: support for the user to determine the
effect of future action based on past interaction history
(can I ‘tell’ what will happen based on what I have gone
through in past?).
Synthesizability: support for the user to assess the effect
of past operations on the current state (can I ‘tell’ why I
am here based on what I have gone through in the past?).
Usability Principles (ctd)
Familiarity: the extent to which a user's knowledge and
experience in other real world or computer-based domains
can be applied when interacting with a new system.
Generalizability: support for the user to extend knowledge
of specific interaction within and across applications to
other similar situations.
Consistency: likeness in input-output behavior arising from
similar situations or similar task objectives.
Familiarity can be considered as 'consistency' wrt past real-
world experience. Generalizability as 'consistency' wrt
experience with the same system or set of applications on
the same platform.
The golden rule of design
The golden rule of design: understand your materials
  The designs we produce may be different, but often the
raw materials are the same.
For Human–Computer Interaction the obvious
materials are the human and the computer. That is we
must:
 understand computers
– Limitations, capacities, tools, platforms
understand people
– Psychological, social aspects, human error.
Shneiderman’s 8 Golden Rules
1. Strive for consistency
2. Enable frequent users to use shortcuts
3. Offer informative feedback
4. Design dialogs to yield closure
5. Offer error prevention and simple error handling
6. Permit easy reversal of actions
7. Support internal locus of control
8. Reduce short-term memory load
Implementation support

Programming tools for interactive systems provide a means of effectively translating

abstract designs and usability principles into an executable form. These tools provide
different levels of services for the programmer.

Windowing systems are a central environment for both the programmer and user of an
interactive system, allowing a single workstation to support separate user-system
threads of action simultaneously.

Interaction toolkits abstract away from the physical separation of input and output
devices, allowing the programmer to describe behaviors of objects at a level similar to
how the user perceives them.

User interface management systems are the final level of programming support tools,
allowing the designer and programmer to control the relationship between the
presentation objects of a toolkit with their functional semantics in the actual
application.
Implementation support

What should tools do?


Help design the interface given a specification of the tasks.

Help implement the interface given a design.

Help evaluate the interface after it is designed and propose
improvements, or at least provide information to allow the
designer to evaluate the interface.

Create easy-to-use interfaces.

Allow the designer to rapidly investigate different designs.

Allow non-programmers to design and implement user interfaces.

Provide portability across different machines and devices.Be easy
to use themselves.