Chapter 1 - I ntroduction

HCI: Designing Effective

Organizational Systems

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

COURSE CODE ITAP3311

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HCI (Human Computer Interaction)

 HCI –is the set of processes and

resources that users employ to interact
with computers
 Building the human computer interface
requires 50-70% of systems development
effort
 To users, the interface is the system
 A study by Nielsen (2003) indicates that if
corporations spend 10% of their
development budget on usability, they can
improve usability by 135%
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The Importance of HCI

 Another study found that 51% of major

websites violate the most basic
design guidelines.
 These studies and more demonstrate
that there is a need for a more
systematic treatment of HCI in the
development process and more HCI
experts are needed.
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When HCI fails, the system fails

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The Importance of HCI

 Organizations of HCI are growing

rapidly
 There are more new journals
dedicated to HCI than any other
information systems sub-discipline

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 What constitutes a good user
interface?
 A good user interface:
 Achieves required performance by operator,
control, and maintenance personnel
 Minimizes skill and personnel requirements and
training time
 Achieve required reliability of person-computer
combinations (reliability, availability, security,
and data integrity)
 Fosters design standardization within and
among systems (integration,
consistency, portability)
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 What constitutes a good user
interface?
 Common measurable goals for
usability
 Time to learn how to operate the
system
 Speed of performance
 Error rate
 User’s retention time of information
presented
 User’s satisfaction with the system 7
 How to achieve these goals?
 Achievement of these goals is no easy task
 Some goals may be conflicting (speed of
performance and error rates).
 What about emotions and the overall experience of
interacting with computers?
 Look at the 2 web sites on the following slides.
 They present similar functionality but have different
designs.
 Assuming they are equally functional (easy to
navigate and find products), which do you prefer?
Why?
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Site 1 has more text and less graphics

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Site 2 is more graphic with less text
Which is more important in this context?

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 scope of HCI
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Software Computer
Engineering Engineering
Human Cognitive
Science
Factors

Physical capabilities Methodology Hardware

Art Aesthetics
Aesthetics Intelligent interfaces Cognitive
Theatre Psychology
Drama
Drama User
Usermodeling
Dialog Collaboration modeling
Cost-benefit Affective
Cost-benefit Computing

Communications

Social Organizational
Psychology Psychology
Sociology Management
Philosophy
12
scope of HCI…Cont

HCI in organizational context requires at

least:
 Organizational perspective

 Psychological and physiological

perspectives.
 Computer perspective.

 Social and global perspectives.

13
HCI Approaches

 Academic field of applied research

(Theory).
 Practice of design and
development.
 Mixture of theory and practice.
14
HCI Themes

 Fit
 Levels of interaction
 Human resources in HCI and their
impact.
 Context
15 Fit

The match between the

computer design and the
user and task so as to
minimize the user’s human
resources needed to
accomplish the task

Figure 1.4 The Fit of HCI Components leads to Performance

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Fit ….Cont

 Reducing the efforts required by the

user…leads to best fit.
 Bad fit may lead to health problems to
the user.
 Best fit improves performance.
17
Fit….Cont

 Computer (Physical fit)

 Physical objects.
 Colors, and fonts.
 Graphical objects…..
 Human (user):
 Training the user leads to best fit.
 Task
 Task analysis leads to best fit.
 Levels of Interaction: Multi-layer TSSL
Model
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Figure 1.6 A Multi-layer model of HCI

 Multi-layer model of HCI (TSSL)
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 The task level pertains to the information

requirements that have to be met.
 The semantic level pertains to the set of objects
and operations through which the computer
becomes meaningful to the user.
 The syntactic level dictates the rules of combining
the semantic objects and operations into correct
instructions.
 The lexical level describes the way specific
computer devices are used to implement the
syntactic level, e.g., move a mouse pointer to the
document label and click twice to open it.
Multi-layer model of HCI (TSSL)

 Each layer provides the context for the

next layer
 TSSL depicts the translation of goals
to a physical implementation at
deferent levels of interaction.
 HCI designers should design the
interface to be transparent, so that the
user can get on with the work.
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 Human Resources in HCI and their impact
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User Activity:
The physical and psychological aspects of the user’s
interaction with the computer to accomplish a task.

User Activity
{
=
Physical resources
Cognitive resources
Affective resources

 Figure 1.7 The Relationship between User

Activity and HCI supported resources
 Human Resources in HCI and their
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impact ….cont

The rational strategy for defining the

roles of any interface is:
 Designing the interface to optimize the
physical, cognitive, and affective
resources of the user to produce the
best HCI.
23 Context

 The general context of HCI in this book is

organizational work.
 For building an application, the context must
be refined further at the specific task level.
 Summary
 Our design philosophy is to develop the
technology so as to achieve a good fit between
the user, the task, and the technology, within a
given context.
 A Methodology for HCI
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Development

 The methodology revolves around a

systems development life cycle that includes
4 phases: planning, analysis, design, and
implementation/operation.
 Each phase focuses on 4 human concerns
of HCI: Physical, cognitive, affective, and
usefulness.
 Evaluation is also key and includes both
formative (intermediary) and
summative evaluation.
 4 phases of HCI development
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methodology

1. The planning phase determines the

organizational information needs.
2. Analysis involves several unique HCI
techniques. We believe that HCI considerations
should start in the analysis stage to uncover
user needs and opportunities.
 Three major analyses are conducted: context, user,
and task analyses.
 Results of analysis called evaluation metrics which
forms the HCI expectation of the target system.
 4 phases of HCI development
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methodology ….. Con.
 3. The design phase specifies the user interface on the basis of the
analysis according to HCI principles and guidelines and tested against
the evaluation metrics.

 TSSL model takes place.

 Design includes:
 Metaphor design: Simulating reality.
 Media design: the medium that best fit information needs
(text, images, sound…..).
 Dialogue design: HCI components used (menus….).
 Presentation design: the overall display layout.
4. The implementation stage makes the target
system a reality.
27 The HCI Methodology

Project Selection Project Selection Project Planning

& Planning

Requirements User Needs Test

Analysis
Determination
Context User Task
Analysis Analysis Analysis

Evaluation Formative

HCI Principles & Guidelines

Metrics Evaluation

Human Concerns: Alternative Selection

Physical
Cognitive
Affective
Usefulness Interface Specification
Formative
Evaluation
Design Metaphor Design Media Design

Dialogue Design Presentation Design

Formative Summative
Coding
Evaluation Evaluation
Implementation
 Good and poor design
 A central concern of interaction design is to develop interactive products that are usable. By
this is generally meant easy to learn, effective to use, and provide an enjoyable user
experience.

 A good place to start thinking about how to design usable interactive products is to compare
examples of well and poorly designed ones. Through identifying the specific weaknesses and
strengths of different interactive systems, we can begin to understand what it means for
something to be usable or not. Here, we begin with an example of a poorly designed system-
voice mailthat is used in many organizations (businesses, hotels, and universities).

 We then compare this with an answering machine that exemplifies good design. Imagine the
following scenario. You're staying at a hotel for a week while on a business trip. You
discover you have left your cell (mobile) phone at home so you have to rely on the hotel's
facilities. The hotel has a voice-mail system for each room. To find out if you have a
message, you pick up the handset and listen to the tone. If it goes "beep beep beep" there is a
message. To find out how to access the message you have to read a set of instructions next to
the phone.
 What is interaction design?

 By interaction design, we mean I

designing interactive products to support
people in their everyday and working
lives.
 One of the biggest challenges at that time was to develop computers that could
be accessible and usable by other people, besides engineers, to support tasks
involving human cognition (e.g., doing sums, writing documents, managing
accounts, drawing plans). To make this possible, computer scientists and
psychologists became involved in designing user interfaces. Computer
scientists and software engineers developed high-level programming languages
(e.g., BASIC, Prolog), system architectures, software design methods, and
command-based languages to help in such tasks, while psychologists provided
information about human capabilities (e.g., memory, decision making).
 The scope afforded by the interactive computing technology of that time (i.e.,
the combined use of visual displays and interactive keyboards) brought about
many new challenges. Research into and development of graphical user
interfaces (GUI for short, pronounced "goo-ee") for office-based systems took
off in a big way. There was much research into the design of widgets (e.g.,
menus, windows, palettes, icons) in terms of how best to structure and present
them in a GUI.
 What is involved in the process of
interaction design?
 Essentially, the process of interaction design involves four basic activities:
1. Identifying needs and establishing requirements.
2. Developing alternative designs that meet those requirements.
3. Building interactive versions of the designs so that they can be
communicated and assessed.
4. Evaluating what is being built throughout the process.
There are three characteristics of the
interaction design process
 In addition to the four basic activities of design, there are three key
characteristics of the interaction design process:
1. Users should be involved through the development of the project.
2. Specific usability and user experience goals should be identified,
clearly documented, and agreed upon at the beginning of the project.
3. Iteration through the four activities is inevitable.
 The goals of interaction design
 Part of the process of understanding users' needs, with respect to designing an
interactive system to support them, is to be clear about your primary objective.
Is it to design a very efficient system that will allow users to be highly
productive in their work, or is it to design a system that will be challenging and
motivating so that it supports effective learning, or is it something else? We call
these top-level concerns usability goals and user experience goals. The two
differ in terms of how they are operationalized, i.e., how they can be met and
through what means.
 Usability goals

 Usability goals are concerned with meeting

specific usability criteria (e.g., efficiency) and
user experience goals are largely concerned
with explicating the quality of the user
experience (e.g., to be aesthetically pleasing).
Usability goals
 To recap, usability is generally regarded as ensuring that interactive
products are easy to learn, effective to use, and enjoyable from the
user's perspective. It involves optimizing the interactions people
have with interactive products to enable them to carry out their
activities at work, school, and in their everyday life. More
specifically, usability is broken down into the following goals:
1. Effective to use (effectiveness).
2. Efficient to use (efficiency).
3. Safe to use (safety)
4. have good utility (utility).
5. Easy to learn (learnability).
6. Easy to remember how to use (memorability) .
For each goal, we describe it in more
detail and provide a key question.

 Effectiveness is a very general goal and refers to how good a system is at

doing what it is supposed to do.
 Question: Is the system capable of allowing people to learn well, carry out
their work efficiently, access the information they need, buy the goods they
want, and so on?

 Efficiency refers to the way a system supports users in carrying out their
tasks. The answering machine described at the beginning of the chapter was
considered efficient in that it let the user carry out common tasks (e.g.,
listening to messages) through a minimal number of steps.
 Question: Once users have learned how to use a system to carry out their
tasks, can they sustain a high level of productivity?
 Safety involves protecting the user from dangerous
conditions and undesirable situations. In relation to the first
ergonomic aspect, it refers to the external conditions where
people work.
 Question: Does the system prevent users from making
serious errors and, if they do make an error, does it permit
them to recover easily?
 Utility refers to the extent to which the system provides the
right kind of functionality so that users can do what they
need or want to do.
 Question: Does the system provide an appropriate set of
functions that enable users to carry out all their tasks in the
way they want to do them?
 Learnability refers to how easy a system is to learn to use. It
is well known that people don't like spending a long time
learning how to use a system.
 Memorability refers to how easy a system is to
remember how to use, once learned. This is
especially important for interactive systems that are
used infrequently.

 Question: What kinds of interface support have been

provided to help users remember how to carry out
tasks, especially for systems and operations that are
used infrequently?
 User experience goals

 The realization that new technologies are offering

increasing opportunities for supporting people in their
everyday lives has led researchers and practitioners to
consider further goals. The emergence of technologies
(e.g., virtual reality, the web, mobile computing) in a
diversity of application areas (e.g., entertainment,
education, home, public areas) has brought about a much
wider set of concerns. As well as focusing primarily on
improving efficiency and productivity at work, interaction
design is increasingly concerning itself with creating
systems that are: satisfying enjoyable fun entertaining
helpful motivating aesthetically pleasing supportive of
creativity rewarding emotionally fulfilling.
 Case 1: Training case
 You have the E-Registration of PPU.
 Try to answer the following questions:
 State whether this interface produces the
best fit for HCI? (analyze the task, human,
and computer requirements.
 What’s the context of this interface?
 Whom are the probable users to this
interface?
 State whether this interface achieves the
TSSL model? 28
Dr. Abdelrafe Elzamly

Ph.D. in Software and Information Systems Engineering