Lecture 5

HCI PARADIGMS AND PRINCIPLES

 Usability Paradigms and Principles

 Designing for maximum usability is the goal of design

 History of interactive system design provides

paradigms/examples for usable designs

 Principles of usability are more general means of understanding

usability

Effective strategies For building Interactive Systems

 Usability Paradigms and Principles

Paradigms (Intellectual perception or views, accepted

by an individual or a society ). Paradigms Concerns:

• How an interactive system can be developed to
ensure its usability
• How can the usability of an interactive system be
demonstrated or measured?
 Usability Paradigms and Principles

Approaches
 Paradigms for usability -Examples of successful
interactive techniques
 Principles for usability-Theoretically driven from
psychological, computational and sociological
knowledge

 
 Paradigms for Usability
Historical Perspective on Interactive System Design
 
•Time-Sharing (single computer supporting multiple
users ) .
40s and 50s – Explosive technological growth
60s – Need to channel the power

J.C.R. Licklider -One of the leading advocates of

research into human centered application of computing
technology.
Single computer must be supporting multiple users
instead of batch processing
 Paradigms (cont’d) Video Display Units

• More suitable medium than paper for presenting

computer outputs.
• 1962 – Sutherland's Sketchpad: Computers for
visualizing and manipulating data
• Allowed a computer operator to use a computer to
create very rapidly sophiscated visual models on a
display screen like TV
 Paradigms (cont’d) Video Display Units

• Visual patterns could be stored in computer memory & could

be manipulated by a comp’s processor .

• Computers could be used for more than data processing-
visualizing and manipulating, since it could be made to speak
a more than human language

• one person's contribution could drastically change the history

of computing
 Paradigms (cont'd)
• Programming toolkits

Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute

• 1963 – use computing technology to complement man's problem

solving activity /computers teaching humans/human learning
from computer

• Secret to achieving the above was providing the right toolkit

• The right programming toolkit provides building blocks to

producing complex interactive systems, just like carpenters
produce beautiful wood work with right tools
 Paradigms (cont'd)

•His team of programmers developed a set of

programming tools they would require in order to build
more complex interactive systems

•Their power is that small well understood components can

be composed in fixed ways in order to create larger tools
 Paradigms (cont’d)

Window systems and the WIMP interface

• The beauty of WIMPs, Increase usability of computer

• Humans can pursue more than one task at a time
• Windows used for dialogue partitioning, to "change the topic“
1981 – Xerox Star first commercial windowing system
• Windows, icons, menus and pointers now familiar interaction
mechanisms
 Paradigms (cont’d) Direct manipulation
1982 – Shneiderman describes appeal of graphically-based
interaction & highlighted following features:
•Visibility of objects
•Incremental action at the interface with rapid feedback on all
actions
•Reversibility of actions so that users can explore without fearing
severe penalties
•Syntactic correctness of all actions so that every action is a legal
operation
•Replacement of complex command languages with actions to
manipulate directly the visible objects hence DM
 Paradigms (cont’d) Language versus Action
• Actions do not always speak louder than words in some
cases e.g. information retrieval tasks
• DM – interface replaces underlying system
Language Paradigm
• Interface as mediator / intelligent agent
• User issues instructions in natural language
• Interface presents instructions for processing & returns
results
e.g. Ability to store and retrieve connected pieces of data by the
use of links
 Paradigms (cont'd) Hypertext
• Is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic
devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text which the
reader can immediately access,
• 1945 – Vannevar Bush and the memex
Key to success in managing explosion of information
mid 60s – Nelson describes hypertext as non-linear (interlinked
nodes) browsing structure
• Hypermedia and multimedia is just another name for
everything that we see, hear, and interact with on the Web.
 Multimodality

•A mode is a human communication channel

•Emphasis on simultaneous use of multiple channels for input and

output e.g. both audio (beeps), touch (keyboard, mouse..) and visual
(screen) or  is a communication practices in terms of the textual,
aural, linguistic, spatial, and visual resources - or modes - used to
compose messages.
 Computer Supported Cooperative Work

•Can no longer neglect the social aspects

•Electronic mail is most prominent success . Others: google docs

and dropbox (groupware)

•Electronic mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages using

digital devices such as computers, tablets and mobile phones.
 Principles to support usability
General principles which can be applied to the design of interactive
systems to promote their usability
 Learnability
The ease with which new users can begin effective interaction and
achieve maximal performance

 Flexibility
The multiplicity of ways the user and system exchange information

 Robustness
The level of support provided to the user in determining successful
achievement and assessment of goal-directed
 Principles of learnability
 Predictability
• Determining effect of future actions based on past interaction history
• operation visibility-how the availability of operations which can next be
performed are shown to the user
e.g. 1,2,4,16,256,...,...(what are the next two numbers
 Synthesizability
• From previous exp. & knowledge to come to right conclusion/decision)
• Ability of the user to assess the effect of past operations on the current state
• Assessing the effect of past actions and linking them to present tasks
• Immediate vs. eventual honesty-ability of UI to provide an observable and
informative account of such change e.g. when a file is moved from one folder
to another, the process and result is observable.
 Principles of learnability (cont’d)
 Familiarity
• How prior knowledge applies to new system. Guessability; affordance
e.g. desktop metaphor from the physical office desk work area, computer
keyboard from type writer keyboard, what else?

 Generalizability
• Extending specific interaction knowledge to new situations which are
similar but previously encountered
• Multi windowing systems attempt to provide cut/copy/paste operations
to all applications in the same way e.g. MS Office suite, MS Visio, web
browsers, search engines, etc

 Consistency
Likeness in input/output behavior arising from similar situations or task
objectives e.g. warning to aircraft crew which are consistently color
coded
 Principles of flexibility

 Dialogue initiative
• Freedom from system imposed constraints on input dialogue
• Maximize the user’s ability to initiate action towards the
system and minimize the reverse for greater flexibility
 Multithreading
• Ability of system to support user interaction for more than one
task at a time
e.g. web browsing and word processing or Skype conference call
• Concurrent vs. interleaving; multimodality
 Principles of flexibility (cont’d)
 Substitutivity
• Allowing equivalent values of input and output to be substituted
for each other
e.g. allowing input values in both metres or inches
• Representation multiplicity; equal opportunity-may not be clear
difference btn in put & output e.g. in a drawing program, user
may draw a line & request system for its length or specify
coordinates and instruct system to draw line
 Customizability
modifiability of the user interface by user (adaptability) or system
(adaptivity) e.g. Personal Facebook page, chat profiles, etc.
 Principles of robustness
 Observability

•Ability of user to evaluate the internal state of the system from its perceivable
representation
•Browsability; defaults (set defaults where applicable); reachability (ability to
move from one state to another); persistence (duration of effect of
Communication-voice does n’t last long); operation visibility

 Recoverability

•Ability of user to take corrective action once an error has been recognized
•Reachability; forward/backward recovery; commensurate effort (if difficult to
undo an action, then it sh’d have been difficult to do in first place)
 Principles of robustness (cont’d)
 Responsiveness

• How the user perceives the rate of communication with the system

• Response time (duration to get state changes from system to

user).instant/short durations desired e.g. web browsing

• Info to user on status if duration is long

• Stability-invariance of duration for identical or similar resources

 Task conformance

• Degree to which system services support all of the user's tasks

task completeness; task adequacy

 References

Alan Dix, Janet Finlay, Gregory Abowd & Russell Beale (2004). Human-
Computer Interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004. ISBN 0-13-458266-7
(hardback); 0-13-437211-5 (paperback) only outside USA. 1998 (Second
Edition) ISBN 0-13-239864-8.