Practical Programming COMP15308S

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Practical ProgrammingCOMP153-08S

• Week 5 L2 HCI

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What is HCI?

• Human Computer Interaction
• the study of humans
• the study of computer technology
• the study of how they influence each other
• Designing systems that are more usable

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Usability

• Does what user wants in the way they can easily
  understand.

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Poor Usability is seen in software

• Microsoft Entourage
• has a calendar/diary
• you can have reminders that events are about to
  happen (eg meetings)
• reminders appear in a popup window
• but they dont appear on top of all other windows
• so you might never see them!

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Poor Usability is seen in hardware

• Apple puck mouse
• for a while was the standard mouse provided with
  Apple computers
• too small to fit into hand comfortably
• its round, so difficult to tell which way it is
  pointing
• people had to buy add-on covers to make it usable

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Some Key Usability Concepts

• Visibility

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Some Key Usability Concepts

• Affordance

The control panel at the 5 mile Island Nuclear
Power Plant. The controls were so badly designed
that the user had to modify them.
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Some Key Usability Concepts

• Affordance

Te Takascrockpot
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Some Key Usability Concepts

• Mappings

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Some Key Usability Concepts

• Feedback

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Some Key Usability Concepts

• Understanding Users

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Designing for Usability

• Understand user needs
• Study them what really happens in the world?
• Involve them
• Prototyping
• Early on build versions of the system that the
  user can see and use
• Get comments
• Listen and adjust
• Use design guidelines
• Learn from others
• Rules of good practice

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So.

• Paper sketches
• Show user, modify
• .net forms
• Just layout
• Some functionality
• Again, show users, modify

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Design guidelines

• Through experience and experiments, lots of good
  design advice available.
• Youve seen a range in the Zak book
• Tooltips (why?)
• Access keys (why?) choice of letter?
• If an operation is destructive, prompt the user
  to verify that he or she wants to proceed with
  the operation
• Appendix B GUI Design Rules
• No easy, magic way for good design though.
  Guidelines are just guides

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Taking things further

• Read
• The psychology of everyday things Don Norman.
• Look at www.baddesigns.com (site about how bad
  design makes life difficult)
• Look at www.useit.com (site about usability)
• Practice good practice
• Prototype your vb apps sketch, show users,
  redesign
• Apply good design guidelines
• Do COMP258 (Engineering Usable Systems)

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THE END

• of the lecture