HCI Quiz 4

Distributed Cognition

- Suggests models of cognition should be extended outside the mind, you can't necessarily do complex addition in your head, but with a pen and paper in hand it becomes much easier, even though you yourself didn't get any smarter

How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds by Edwin Hutchins

- hwo a collection of controls, interfaces, sensors, and pilots as a system remembers the speed, no individual part in isolation remebers what the system of a whole can, different configurations of the plane must happen at different speeds

How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds by Edwin Hutchins

- pilots are responsible for actually reasoning over things (deliberation), booklet forms long term memory of different speeds for different parameters (Long term memory), sheet pulled from booklet for current parameters is pinned up and then acts as short term memory (short term memory), knowledge of the speeds gets attributed to the cockpit itself. Speed bugs on speedometer allow for quick access to speeds (working memory) don’t need to remember the speeds themselves. No single part could land the plane on its own, this is the essence of distributed cognition.

Cognitive Load

- minds ability to only handle a certain amount of information at a time

Distributed Cognition and cognitive load

- distributed cognition suggests that artifacts add additional cognitive resources, the same cogntive load can be distributed across a larger number of resources, artifacts are like plugging extra memory into your brain. GPS offloads navigation from driver, and decreases personal cognitive load

Distributed Cognition

- is a way of looking at interfaces and interface design that focuses our attention on what systems as a whole can accomplish as opposes to invidiuals on their own. A clock helps me track the passage of time so I don't have to do it myself

Distributed Cognition

- how the mind can be extended with relations with other artifacts and other individuals

Social Cognition

- how social connections create systems that can, together, accomplish tasks, you and your friend in the passenger seat forming a driving navigation system. Also concerned with the social underpinnings of cogntion as well, perception, memory, and learning relate to social phenomena. For example in social media, maybe you don't want friends to see how long you spend on the platform, that understanding in task design comes from an understanding of social perception

Situated Action

- concerned with the context within which people interact, but unlike distributed cognition, it is not interested in the long term and the permanent interactions amongst these things. Focuses on humans as improvisers, interested in the kinds of novel situational problems that arise all the time (not problems that have already been solved), defining the task as we go along

Situated Action

- must examine the interfaces we design within the context they're used

Situated Action

- we must understand the task the user performs grows out of interaction with the interface

Situated Action

- The task doesn't exist until the user gets started, and once they start, they define the task

Plans and Situated Actions by Lucy Suchman

- people simply act on the world and plans are simply derived from those actions, rather than assuming users have plans in mind we only consider their immediate interaction and how they decide what to do next

Activity Theory

- generalizes our unit of analysis from the task to the activity, not just interested in what they are doing, but why they are doing it and what it means to them. Our designs will be different for example if users are using an interface because they are required to or because they choose to

Activity Theory

- puts an emphasis on the idea that we can create low level operations from higher level actions, similar to the GOMS model. How quickly a conscious action within an activity can move to an subconcsious operator is a function of how good the learning curve is on that design. Similar to invisible design in focusing on the actions to accomplish a task rather than the operators within each action

Bonnie Nardi Activity Theory and Human Computer Interaction

- activity theory offers a set perspective of human activity and a set of concepts for describing that activity, this is exactly what HCI needs as we struggle to understand and describe context, situation, and practice

Bonnie Nardi A comparision of Activity Theory, Situated Action Models and Distributed Cognition

- activity theory and distributed cogntion are driven by goals, situated action demphasizes goals for a focus on improvisation. Situated action as goals are constructed retroactively to interpret past actions. The main difference between activity theory and distributed cognition is their evaluation of the symmetry between people and artifacts. Activity Theory regards them as fundamentally different given humans have conciousness. Distributed Cognition believes that artifacts can server cognitive roles and so those should be considered conceptually equivalent to humans

Artifacts have politics

- whehter artifacts can personify specific forms of authority or power whether for good or bad, the context in which our designs change the world around us, anticipated or not

Three Goals of HCI

- help a user do a task, understand how a user does a task, or change the way a user does a task due to some value that we hold

Inherently political technologies

- technologies that due to their very design are only compatible with certain political structures, like nuclear power whether due to safety, resources or complexity require considerable top down organization, lending itself to authoritarian power structures

Technologies used to achieve political motives

- technologies can be used to achieve changes to social order when used in the correct way, technology itself has no inherent political leanings like nuclear or solar power, but its use in a particular context for a particular purpose can accomplish some political goals

Negative Change By Design

- using technologies influence on political motivations for bad, like designing tunnels that are not tall enough for public busses to pass through, so that only people who have enough to have their own cars can pass through

Positive Change By Design

- interfaces can be designed to lead to positive social change, for example, facebook only having a like button to emphasize only positive interaction

Positive Change By Happenstance

- positive political change due to the design of a technology that was simply a biproduct of that technology, such as bicycles allowing individual transportation for women

Negative Change By Happenstance

- negative political change due to the design of a technology that was simply an accidental biproduct of that technology, such as only wealth areas with better infrastructure having accessibility to high speed internent access leading to a better economic growth, its just natural to build connections in areas with better infrastrucutre, it is not intended to harm more rural communities

Value Sensitive Design

- seeks to provide theory and method to account for the human values in a principled and systematic manner throughout the design process. Designing interfaces to not only be successful in accomplishing a task and being usable by the user but is it consistent with their values? A big one is privacy

Conceptual investigations

- thought experiments where we explore the role values play in questions like who are the direct and indirect stake holders

Empirical Investigations

- go out and use real users, exploring how they make sense of interfaces and answering questions like how do stakeholders apprehend individual values in the interactive context, how do they prioritize individual values and usability considerations

Technical Investigations

- are like empirical investigations that target the systems instead of the users, whether or not the systems are compatible with the values of the users

Value sensitive design

- should be proactive and distinguish between usability and human values

Right to be forgotten

- allows individuals some control over what information is available about them online

Value Sensitive design

- identify the values you want to account for early in the design process and check on them throughout the design process, know your users and their values, consider direct (use the system) and indirect  (do no use the system but who are nonetheless affected by it) stakeholders, brainstorm the interface's possibilities (negative and positive uses or biproducts), choose carefully between supporting values and prescribing values

Process Model of the role of a human in the system

- at the narrowest level, view HCI as the interaction between a person and an interface, almost viewing it as the interaction between computers, one of them just happens to be human, human's actions are approached computationally, have to take into account what a human can sense, remember and physically  do. Evaluated by quantitative experiements

GOMS Model

- similar to the Process model, narrow view, distills the human's role into goals, operators, methods, and selection rules, all of which can be externalized

Predictor Model

- Zooming out a little bit. Interface must fit with knowledge. The user interacting through some interface to accomplish some task. Evaluated by qualitative studies. Look at the Gulf of execution and the gulf of evaluation, how hard is it for a user to execute a task, and how hard is it for them to get feedback on it. Have to understand how users think about the task they are performing, what mental models they have for it. The idea of invisible interfaces

Participant Model

- the most zoomed out. Interface must fit with context, evaluated by in situ studies. Understand the user as an active participant in the worl and how the design should fit within that context. Activity theory for example treats the unit of analysis not as a task but as an activity including some elements of the context surrounding the task. Distributed cogntion, how artifacts and minds combine to help accomplish the task. Situated Action, the situation to situation behavior of a user. Social cognition, viewing the task in the context of social norms and relationships

Grid

- powerful way of guiding user sight around the interface, highlighting important content, grouping together content, and so on. Newspapers and magazines have used these layouts for decades

Use whitespace

- users are very good at consuming small chunks of information at a time. News articles use very short paragaphs, work with grids to provide context and guide the user's visual perception of the interface

Gestalt Principles

- how users perceive groups of objects, users group objects based on proximity, continuation, movement, and similarity

Reduce Clutter

- eye has difficulty processing informaiton of this style, grids, whitespace, and gestalst principles can help with this because they invisibly communicate content that might otherwise need to  be communicated visually, instead of drawing a box to group controls, surround them with whitespace

Design in grayscale

- color can be a powerful tool but it can run awry of universal design.  Color can emphasize the content and structure of your interface but it shouldn't be necessary to understand it (for example a stoplight always having red light at the top) Color emphasizes content but content doesn’t rely on the color

Agile

- emphasizes earlier delivery, more continuous improvement, and rapid feedback cycles, in terms of the design life cycle, just speeds up, it changes the type of prototyping to high fidelity and live and the evaluation to things lke AB testing,. Quick and small comparisions on live interfaces

When to not use Agile (no full design lifecycle)

- big websites, complex apps, hardware, involving a high profile first impresion, anything high in stakes

When to Go Agile

- criticality is low, requirements change frequently, small teams that are comfortable with change

Similarities between User Centered Design and Agile Development

- both emphasize iterative development process building on feedback from previous rounds, both place emphasis on the user's role in the development process, both emphasize the importance of team coherence

Differences between User Centered Design and Agile Development

- UCD disagrees with Agile development on the importance of documentation and importance of doing research prior to the design work actually beginning (agile likes minimal documentation, agile does not require up front investigation)

Principle for Integrating UCD and Agile Development: User involvement

- the user should be involved in the development process but also supported by a number of other roles within the team, such as having a proxy user on the team

Principle for Integrating UCD and Agile Development: Collaboration and Cultrue

- the designers and developers must be willing to communicate and work together extremely closely, on  a day to day basis. Customer should also be an active member of the team not just a passive bystander

Principle for Integrating UCD and Agile Development: Prototyping

- the designers must be willing to feed the developers with prototypes and user feedback on a cycle that works for everyone involved

Principle for Integrating UCD and Agile Development:  project Lifecycle

- UCD practitioners must be given ample time in order to discover the basic needs of their users before any code gets released into the shared coding environemnt

Principle for Integrating UCD and Agile Development: Project Management

- The agile/UCD integration must exist within a cohesive project management fraemwork that facilitates without being overly bureaucratic or prescriptive

Live Prototyping

- gotten to the point of constructing working interfaces is just as easy as constrcuting prototypes, Optimizely, allows for drag and drop builidng of websites that can actually go live

AB Testing

- rapid software testing between two alternatives, A and B, statistically not any different from T-Tests, rapidly testing small changes with real users, do it by rolling out the B version, the new version to only a small number of users, and ensuring that nothing goes terribly wrong, make sure a change is positive before rolling it out and testing comes from realy users with no additional costs

Tips for mitigating risk in HCI and Agile Development

- Start more traditional (foundational user research and needfinding and then switch to agile once you have something up and running, now you have a baseline for how to probe the user experience further), focus on small changes, adopt a parallel track method (agile uses short two week sprints, so have HCI research one sprint ahead of the impelmentation), be careful with consistency (how frequent you make changes should depend on how much your users rely on a consistent interface) , nest your design cycles (take all the information gathered from short agile cycles and put them toward slong term in depth improvements)

User centered design

- start the design process by understanding users needs and then get user feedback throughout the design process, as we do our understanding of our user and the task improves and our designs along with it.

Needfinding driven by

- human abilities, task analysis (allows us to describe needs as task in formal way to equip the interface design process), and cognitive load (lets us keep in mind how much users are asked to do at a time)

Design Alternatives driven by

- direct manipulation (gives a family of techniques we want to emphasize in coming up with our design alternatives), mental models (provide us an understanding of how the design alternatives might mesh with the user's understanding of the task), distributed cognition (gives us a view on interface design that lends itself to design at a larger level of granularity, designing systems, not just interfaces)

Prototyping driven by

- design principles (give us rules of thumb to use when creating our initial prototypes and designs), representations (ensures the prototypes we create  match with users mental models that we uncovered) and invisible interfaces (help us remember the interface should be the conduit between the user and the task, not the focus of attention itself

Evaluation driven by

- Feedback cycles (gulf of execution and gulf of evaluation give us ways to evaluate and describe the interfaces we design), politics and values (allow us to evaluate the interface not just in terms of its usable interactions but in the types of society it creates or preservers), usability heuristics (a way of evaluating our interface and mentally simulating what a user will be thinking while using our creations)

Participatory design

- all the stakeholders including the users themselves are involved as part of the design team, aren't just a source of data, they are members working on the design team working on the problem, allows the user perspective to be present throughout the design process.

Action Research

- methodology that addresses an immediate problem and researches it by trying to simultaneously solve it, undertaken by actual users. Data gathered on the success of the approaches and used to inform the understanding of the problem and future approaches. Teacher tries a new activity in classroom and reflects on the results or manager tries new evaluation system and notes the changes

Design based research

- similar to action research but can be done by outside practitioners as well, it is where designers create interventions based on their current understanding of the theory and the problem, use the success of those interventions to improve our understanding of the theory and problem (creating a solution that we assume is correct and evaluate whether or not we were actually correct) If believed an intersection had a lot of jay walkers due to low visibility of the signs, interview the people at the intersection for their thooughts or create a more visible sign and it fixes the problem to determine if we were correct