3/16/09
1
Chapter 2: Understanding and
conceptualizing interaction
Recap • HCI has moved beyond designing interfaces
for desktop machines • Concerned with extending and supporting all
manner of human activities • Designing for user experiences, including:
• Making work effective, efficient and safer • Improving and enhancing learning and training • Providing enjoyable and exciting entertainment • Enhancing communication and understanding • Supporting new forms of creativity and expression
Understanding the problem space
– What do you want to create? – What are your assumptions? – What are your claims? – Will it achieve what you hope it will?
If so, how?
A framework for analysing the problem space
• Are there problems with an existing product or user experience?
• Why do you think there are problems? • How do you think your proposed design
ideas might overcome these? • When designing for a new user
experience how will the proposed design extend or change current ways of doing things?
An example
• What do you think were the main assumptions made by developers of online photo sharing and management applications, like Flickr?
Assumptions and claims
• Assumptions – Able to capitalize on the hugely successful
phenomenon of blogging – Just as people like to blog so will they want
to share with the rest of the world their photo collections and get comments back
– People like to share their photos with the rest of the world
• A claim – From Flickr’s website (2005): “is almost
certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world”
3/16/09
2
From problem space to design space
• Having a good understanding of the problem space can help inform the design space – e.g., what kind of interface, behavior,
functionality to provide • But before deciding upon these it
is important to develop a conceptual model
Conceptual model
• Need to first think about how the system will appear to users (i.e. how they will understand it)
• A conceptual model is: “a high-level description of how a system is
organized and operates.” (Johnson and Henderson, 2002, p. 26)
What is and why need a conceptual model?
• Not a description of the user interface but a structure outlining the concepts and the relationships between them
• Why not start with the nuts and bolts of design? – Architects and interior designers would not think
about which color curtains to have before deciding where the windows will be placed in a new building
– Enables “designers to straighten out their thinking before they start laying out their widgets” (p. 28)
– Provides a working strategy and a framework of general concepts and their interrelations
Helps the design team
• Orient themselves towards asking questions about how the conceptual model will be understood by users
• Not to become narrowly focused early on
• Establish a set of common terms they all understand and agree upon
• Reduce the chance of misunderstandings and confusion arising later on
Main components
• Major metaphors and analogies that are used to convey how to understand what a product is for and how to use it for an activity.
• Concepts that users are exposed to through the product
• The relationships between the concepts – e.g., one object contains another
• The mappings between the concepts and the user experience the product is designed to support
A classic conceptual model: the spreadsheet
• Analogous to ledger sheet
• Interactive and computational
• Easy to understand • Greatly extending
what accountants and others could do
www.bricklin.com/history/refcards.htm
3/16/09
3
Why was it so good?
• It was simple, clear, and obvious to the users how to use the application and what it could do
• “it is just a tool to allow others to work out their ideas and reduce the tedium of repeating the same calculations.”
• capitalized on user’s familiarity with ledger sheets
• Got the computer to perform a range of different calculations and recalculations in response to user input
Another classic
• 8010 Star office system targeted at workers not interested in computing per se
• Spent several person-years at beginning working out the conceptual model
• Simplified the electronic world, making it seem more familiar, less alien, and easier to learn
Johnson et al (1989)
The Star interface Interface metaphors
• Designed to be similar to a physical entity but also has own properties – e.g. desktop metaphor, search engine
• Exploit user’s familiar knowledge, helping them to understand ‘the unfamiliar’
• Conjures up the essence of the unfamiliar activity, enabling users to leverage of this to understand more aspects of the unfamiliar functionality
• People find it easier to learn and talk about what they are doing at the computer interface in terms familiar to them
Benefits of interface metaphors
• Makes learning new systems easier • Helps users understand the
underlying conceptual model • Can be innovative and enable the
realm of computers and their applications to be made more accessible to a greater diversity of users
Problems with interface metaphors (Nelson, 1990)
• Break conventional and cultural rules – e.g., recycle bin placed on desktop
• Can constrain designers in the way they conceptualize a problem space
• Conflict with design principles • Forces users to only understand the system in terms of
the metaphor • Designers can inadvertently use bad existing designs
and transfer the bad parts over • Limits designers’ imagination in coming up with new
conceptual models
3/16/09
4
Activity
• A company has been asked to design a computer-based system that will encourage autistic children to communicate and express themselves better.
• What type of interaction would be appropriate to use at the interface for this particular user group?
Interaction types
• Instructing – issuing commands using keyboard and function keys
and selecting options via menus • Conversing
– interacting with the system as if having a conversation • Manipulating
– interacting with objects in a virtual or physical space by manipulating them
• Exploring – moving through a virtual environment or a physical
space
Instructing • Where users instruct a system by telling
it what to do – e.g., tell the time, print a file, find a photo
• Very common interaction type underlying a range of devices and systems
• A main benefit of instructing is to support quick and efficient interaction – good for repetitive kinds of actions
performed on multiple objects
Vending machines
Describe the conceptual model underlying the two vending machines
Which is easiest to use?
Conversing • Like having a conversation with another
human
• Differs from instructing in that it more like two-way communication, with the system acting like a partner rather than a machine that obeys orders
• Ranges from simple voice recognition menu-driven systems to more complex ‘natural language’ dialogues
• Examples include search engines, advice-giving systems and help systems
Pros and cons of conversational model
• Allows users, especially novices and technophobes, to interact with the system in a way that is familiar – makes them feel comfortable, at ease and
less scared
• Misunderstandings can arise when the system does not know how to parse what the user says – e.g. child types into a search engine, that
uses natural language the question: “How many legs does a centipede have?” and
the system responds:
3/16/09
5
Manipulating
• Exploit’s users’ knowledge of how they move and manipulate in the physical world
• Virtual objects can be manipulated by moving, selecting, opening, and closing them
• Tagged physical objects (e.g., bricks, blocks) that are manipulated in a physical world (e.g., placed on a surface) can result in other physical and digital events
Manipulatives (PicoCrickets) Direct manipulation
• Shneiderman (1983) coined the term Direct Manipulation
• Came from his fascination with computer games at the time
• Proposes that digital objects be designed so they can be interacted with analogous to how physical objects are manipulated
• Assumes that direct manipulation interfaces enable users to feel that they are directly controlling the digital objects
Core principles of DM
• Continuous representation of objects and actions of interest
• Physical actions and button pressing instead of issuing commands with complex syntax
• Rapid reversible actions with immediate feedback on object of interest
Why are DM interfaces so enjoyable?
• Novices can learn the basic functionality quickly • Experienced users can work extremely rapidly to carry out a
wide range of tasks, even defining new functions • Intermittent users can retain operational concepts over time • Error messages rarely needed • Users can immediately see if their actions are furthering
their goals and if not do something else • Users experience less anxiety • Users gain confidence and mastery and feel in control
3/16/09
6
What are the disadvantages with DM?
• Some people take the metaphor of direct manipulation too literally
• Not all tasks can be described by objects and not all actions can be done directly
• Some tasks are better achieved through delegating rather than manipulating – e.g., spell checking
• Moving a mouse around the screen can be slower than pressing function keys to do same actions
Exploring
• Involves users moving through virtual or physical environments
• Examples include: – 3D desktop virtual worlds where people
navigate using mouse around different parts to socialize (e.g., Second Life)
– CAVEs where users navigate by moving whole body, arms, and head
– physical context aware worlds, embedded with sensors, that present digital information to users at appropriate places and times
A virtual world A CAVE
Theories, models and frameworks
• Are used to inform and inspire design • A theory is a well-substantiated explanation of
some aspect of a phenomenon • A model is a simplification of some aspect of
human–computer interaction intended to make it easier for designers to predict and evaluate alternative designs
• A framework is a set of interrelated concepts and/or a set of specific questions
Main differences
• Theories tend to be comprehensive, explaining human–computer interactions
• Models tend to simplify some aspect of human–computer interaction
• Frameworks tend to be prescriptive, providing designers with concepts, questions, and principles to consider
3/16/09
7
Summary points
• Need to have a good understanding of the problem space – specifying what it is you are doing, why, and how it will
support users in the way intended • A conceptual model is a high-level description of a
product – what users can do with it and the concepts they need to
understand how to interact with it • Decisions about conceptual design should be made
before commencing any physical design • Interface metaphors are commonly used as part of a
conceptual model
Summary points
• Interaction types (e.g., conversing, instructing) provide a way of thinking about how best to support the activities users will be doing when using a product or service
• Theories, models, and frameworks provide another way of framing and informing design and research
Top Related