Lecture Notes for Human Factors
HCI Chapters 23-28

Richard Halstead-Nussloch, Ph.D.

Chapter 23 Supporting Design

• What is design? (1st creation of two)
• Supporting Designers & Design Teams
  • Designer experience
  • Previous known solutions
  • Problem decomposition
  • Alternative design (solutions)
  • Understanding the problem domain
  • Reasoning strategy

Supporting Design & Guidelines

• Kinds of support
  • Guidance, e.g., Guidelines, rules, standards, etc
  • Communication/recording support
  • Software support, e.g., visual languages
• Guidelines: Principles
  • Know the user
  • Reduce cognitive load
  • Engineer for errors
  • Maintain consistency and clarity

Guidelines, Standards, and Metrics

• Guidelines: Rules describe what should and should not be done, e.g.,
  • Always issue a warning message and get confirmation before deleting a file
  • Always provide a "Reset" button
• Software standards and VDT standards
  • ISO 9241 (pg. 508)
  • House style guides/Commercial style guides
• Metrics (517-521)

Example Usability Metrics

• Time to learn
• Time on task
• Errors
• Percent correct
• Task completion
• Subjective ratings

Design Rationale (Chapter 26) and Prototyping (Chapter 27)

• Prototype - (pg. 538) and techniques
• Methods and tools - Table page 541
• Types - Pages 540, 541
• Supporting design--
  • Product conceptualization(reqs. animation)
  • Task level, e.g., use VB for action sequence
  • Screen design, e.g., use HTML to see
• Prototyping Tools (everybody list one)

Software Support (Chapter 28)

• Tools
• Toolkits
• Integrated Environments
• UIMS
• Group work

Rich's summary of the book/course

• Dr. Rich's one word for this book & course:

Prototype

• Use Scenarios, storyboards, snapshots, code, etc. to make visible your design