PROJECT 1 - Requirements, Heuristics, Catalog & Gestures

Due:

Project 1 is due on M 21 Mar

Goals:

The goals of this project are:

1. To practice reverse-engineering of an interface design, in order to infer from the design what the requirements were;
2. To expose you to some detailed and seminal research in HCI and allow you to evaluate and respond to it;
3. To provide you with an opportunity to do a small usability study to evaluate an interface;
4. To expose you to some current and slightly futuristic work on interfaces to allow you to evaluate and respond to it.

Rationale: HCI professionals would be required to know about interface design requirements. They should also be able to discover, evaluate and use relevant HCI research, and be able to keep current with that work. They should also be able to evaluate and critique other interfaces, as well as their own, as part of the design process. In addition, an HCI professional must know what new devices and techniques are being proposed in the field. All these skills and this knowledge allows them to design and produce good interfaces that demonstrate HCI principles.

Part 1:

1.1 Task:

The task is to carefully study this old WPI home page, find all the design decisions that have been made, and try to infer why all those decisions were made that way. This leads you to infer the Requirements from the Design: the opposite of the normal design process. What you are doing is called "Reverse Engineering", as engineering proceeds from requirements to design.

Hints: When the web site was developed, they needed to create information that would help them design the site. This includes information about 'audience', 'purpose', 'objectives', and 'domain'. That's one way to view the web page in order to make the inferences. It is also useful to reverse-engineer the design by considering the syntax and semantics of every item and item grouping on the page, as well as the relationships between them.

1.2 Hand In:

Hand in a clear, structured, printed explanation of what you think the Requirements were for the old WPI web page. Explain why they were chosen as the Requirements, and what evidence made you think that. Also describe all of the main interface design decisions. Note that we are not asking you for any sort of evaluation. Part 1 can be up to 5 printed pages.

Part 2:

2.1 Task:

Some published articles evaluate or record successful use of HCI techniques on real products: in this case for user interface evaluation. This paper attempts a cost-benefit analysis of three usability analysis techniques. It refers to seminal HCI research that you should know about.

{Note: Here are some notes about GOMS; here are some heuristics (definition) for the Heuristic Evaluation method}.

Your task is to read:

J. Nielsen and V. Phillips, Estimating the Relative Usability of Two Interfaces: Heuristic, Formal, and Empirical Methods Compared, Proceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM INTERCHI'93, ACM Press, April 1993, pp. 214-221.
(also at web.cs.wpi.edu/~dcb/courses/CS3041/p214-nielsen.pdf)

Note that access to the PDF version of this paper at the ACM portal must be via a WPI computer. It can be reached from off-campus by using the WPI Proxy Server.

2.2 Hand in:

Hand in printed answers to all of the following questions. Keep answers precise, clear, and brief. Make sure you explain, as just answering "yes" or "no" isn't adequate. What you hand in for this part (part 2) of project 1 should be no more than 2 printed pages.

1. What is the goal of the research described in this paper?
2. What are two advantages of GOMS analyses?
3. What is the main reason for using a Heuristic method?
4. Do they suggest relying on "relative usability estimates" or "absolute usability estimates"?
5. Under what conditions were Heuristic Estimates better?
6. What is meant by a "cold estimate"?
7. What is a "cost-benefit" analysis?

Part 3:

3.1 Task:

Your task is to do a small, informal usability study with two users. Use their feedback to provide a critical evaluation of their experiences using the current, recently redesigned interface to the WPI Library Catalog. Make sure you know how to use the interface yourself before starting this study. Try to select people who have little or no experience with the interface. Study each user in a separate session, treating them both the same way as much as possible.

The instructions that you should read them, and provide to them on paper, are given directly below. You should not guide them or answer any questions about the Catalog itself. Make notes along the way about what they did and said. Ask them the 7 questions given below.

Make comments out loud as you use the interface about what you feel about the interface. When are you surprised? When unsure? When lost? Try to avoid looking at the Help provided until after you have attempted to use the interface in the way that it appears to work.

Just focus on books: i.e., do not look at Journals or New Acquisitions.

Pick a book title, a book author, and some keywords. Do separate searches for each of these items. Try an Advanced Search and do the searches again.

On paper, construct a complex search for a book that you expect/know the library to have. Use the Advanced Search feature of the interface to carry out that search. Try "limiting" a search.

Once you are finished exploring the Library Catalog interface you will be asked some questions that will help us clarify your reactions during this session.

3.2 Hand in:

Summarize the results of the usability study by handing in printed answers to all of the following questions. Keep answers precise, clear, and brief. What you hand in for this part (part 3) should be no more than 4 printed pages.

1. What was the most confusing aspect of the way that the interface looked?
2. What was the most confusing aspect of the way that the interface behaved?
3. When they looked at a link could they always anticipate what information was going to be displayed when they selected the link? Where was that not true?
4. Were the search results well laid out and helpful?
5. In what way was the interface customizable?
6. Was the Help helpful?
7. Describe three places where the interface makes assumptions about the user's knowledge, that might in fact not be correct.

Part 4:

4.1 Task:

There is a lot of current research on context aware systems: ones that, for example can figure out where the user is, or what they are doing, and change their interaction accordingly.

Your task is to read the paper:

Brandon Paulson, Danielle Cummingsa, and Tracy Hammond, Object interaction detection using hand posture cues in an office setting, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Volume 69, Issues 1-2, January-February 2011, Pages 19-29.

4.2 Hand in:

Hand in a printed version of:

1. your view of the key information in the paper (1 page);
2. your opinions about the strengths, weaknesses and utility of some of the techniques it mentions (1 page);
3. your idea for an important new application for this kind of interface (1 page).