Chapter 0

Addison Wesley

is an imprint of

CHAPTER 2:

Guidelines, Principles, and Theories

Designing the User Interface:

Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction

Fifth Edition

Ben Shneiderman & Catherine Plaisant

in collaboration with

Maxine S. Cohen and Steven M. Jacobs

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Guidelines

• Shared language

• Best practices

• Critics

– Too specific, incomplete, hard to apply, and

sometimes wrong

• Proponents

– Encapsulate experience

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Navigating the interface

• Sample of the National Cancer Institutes

guidelines:

– Standardize task sequences

– Ensure that embedded links are descriptive

– Use unique and descriptive headings

– Use check boxes for binary choices

– Develop pages that will print properly

– Use thumbnail images to preview larger

images

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Accessibility guidelines

• Provide a text equivalent for every nontext

element

• For any time-based multimedia

presentation synchronize equivalent

alternatives

• Information conveyed with color should

also be conveyed without it

• Title each frame to facilitate identification

and navigation

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Organizing the display

• Smith and Mosier (1986) offer five high-

level goals

– Consistency of data display

– Efficient information assimilation by the user

– Minimal memory load on the user

– Compatibility of data display with data entry

– Flexibility for user control of data display

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Getting the user’s attention

• Intensity

• Marking

• Size

• Choice of fonts

• Inverse video

• Blinking

• Color

• Audio

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Principles

• More fundamental, widely applicable, and

enduring than guidelines

• Need more clarification

• Fundamental principles

– Determine user’s skill levels

– Identify the tasks

• Five primary interaction styles

• Eight golden rules of interface design

• Prevent errors

• Automation and human control

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Determine user’s skill levels

• “Know thy user”

• Age, gender, physical and cognitive

abilities, education, cultural or ethnic

background, training, motivation, goals and

personality

• Design goals based on skill level

– Novice or first-time users

– Knowledgeable intermittent users

– Expert frequent users

• Multi-layer designs

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Identify the tasks

• Task Analysis usually involve long hours

observing and interviewing users

• Decomposition of high level tasks

• Relative task frequencies

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Choose an interaction style

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• Direct

Manipulation

• Menu selection

• Form fillin

• Command

language

• Natural language

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Spectrum of Directness

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The 8 golden rules

of interface design

1. Strive for consistency

2. Cater to universal usability

3. Offer informative feedback

4. Design dialogs to yield closure

5. Prevent errors

6. Permit easy reversal of actions

7. Support internal locus of control

8. Reduce short term memory load

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Prevent errors

• Make error messages specific, positive in tone,

and constructive

• Mistakes and slips (Norman, 1983)

• Correct actions

– Gray out inappropriate actions

– Selection rather than freestyle typing

– Automatic completion

• Complete sequences

– Single abstract commands

– Macros and subroutines

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Automation and human control

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Automation and

human control (cont.)

• Successful integration:

– Users can avoid:

• Routine, tedious, and error prone tasks

– Users can concentrate on:

• Making critical decisions, coping with

unexpected situations, and planning future

actions

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Automation and

human control (cont.)

• Supervisory control needed to deal

with real world open systems

– E.g. air-traffic controllers with low

frequency, but high consequences of

failure

– FAA: design should place the user in

control and automate only to improve

system performance, without reducing

human involvement

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Automation and

human control (cont.)

• Goals for autonomous agents

– knows user's likes and dislikes

– makes proper inferences

– responds to novel situations

– performs competently with little guidance

• Tool like interfaces versus autonomous

agents

• Aviators representing human users, not

computers, more successful

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Automation and

human control (cont.)

• User modeling for adaptive interfaces

– keeps track of user performance

– adapts behavior to suit user's needs

– allows for automatically adapting system

• response time, length of messages, density of feedback,

content of menus, order of menu items, type of feedback,

content of help screens

– can be problematic

• system may make surprising changes

• user must pause to see what has happened

• user may not be able to

– predict next change

– interpret what has happened

– restore system to previous state

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Automation and

human control (cont.)

• Alternative to agents:

– user control, responsibility,

accomplishment

– expand use of control panels

• style sheets for word processors

• specification boxes of query facilities

• information-visualization tools

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Automation and

human control (concluded)

Features to aid in universal

access

Above: Mac OS X system preference

settings

Right: Windows Vista Control Panel

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Theories

• Beyond the specifics of guidelines

• Principles are used to develop

theories

• Descriptions/explanatory or

predictive

• Motor task, perceptual, or cognitive

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Explanatory and

predictive theories

• Explanatory theories:

– Observing behavior

– Describing activity

– Conceiving of designs

– Comparing high-level concepts of two designs

– Training

• Predictive theories:

– Enable designers to compare proposed

designs for execution time or error rates

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Perceptual, Cognitive,

& Motor tasks

• Perceptual or Cognitive subtasks

theories

–Predicting reading times for free text,

lists, or formatted displays

• Motor-task performance times

theories:

–Predicting keystroking or pointing times

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Taxonomy

(explanatory theory)

–Order on a complex set of phenomena

–Facilitate useful comparisons

–Organize a topic for newcomers

–Guide designers

–Indicate opportunities for novel products.

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Conceptual, semantic, syntactic, and

lexical model

• Foley and van Dam four-level approach

– Conceptual level:

• User's mental model of the interactive system

– Semantic level:

• Describes the meanings conveyed by the user's command input and by

the computer's output display

– Syntactic level:

• Defines how the units (words) that convey semantics are assembled

into a complete sentence that instructs the computer to perform a

certain task

– Lexical level:

• Deals with device dependencies and with the precise mechanisms by

which a user specifies the syntax

• Approach is convenient for designers

– Top-down nature is easy to explain

– Matches the software architecture

– Allows for useful modularity during design

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Stages of action models

• Norman's seven stages of action

1. Forming the goal

2. Forming the intention

3. Specifying the action

4. Executing the action

5. Perceiving the system state

6. Interpreting the system state

7. Evaluating the outcome

• Norman's contributions

– Context of cycles of action and evaluation.

– Gulf of execution: Mismatch between the user's intentions

and the allowable actions

– Gulf of evaluation: Mismatch between the system's

representation and the users' expectations

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Stages of action models (cont.)

• Four principles of good design

– State and the action alternatives should be visible

– Should be a good conceptual model with a consistent

system image

– Interface should include good mappings that reveal the

relationships between stages

– User should receive continuous feedback

• Four critical points where user failures can occur

– Users can form an inadequate goal

– Might not find the correct interface object because of an

incomprehensible label or icon

– May not know how to specify or execute a desired action

– May receive inappropriate or misleading feedback

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Consistency through grammars

Consistent user interface goal

– Definition is elusive - multiple levels sometimes in

conflict

– Sometimes advantageous to be inconsistent.

Consistent Inconsistent A Inconsistent B

delete/insert character delete/insert character delete/insert character

delete/insert word remove/bring word remove/insert word

delete/insert line destroy/create line delete/insert line

delete/insert paragraph kill/birth paragraph delete/insert paragraph

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Consistency through

grammars (cont.)

Inconsistent action verbs

– Take longer to learn

– Cause more errors

– Slow down users

– Harder for users to remember

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The disappearance of syntax

• Users must maintain a profusion of device-

dependent details in their human memory.

– Which action erases a character

– Which action inserts a new line after the third line of a

text file

– Which abbreviations are permissible

– Which of the numbered function keys produces the

previous screen.

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The disappearance

of syntax (cont.)

• Learning, use, and retention of this knowledge is

hampered by two problems

– Details vary across systems in an unpredictable

manner

– Greatly reduces the effectiveness of paired-associate

learning

• Syntactic knowledge conveyed by example and

repeated usage

• Syntactic knowledge is system dependent

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The disappearance

of syntax (concluded)

• Minimizing these burdens is the goal of most

interface designers

– Modern direct-manipulation systems

– Familiar objects and actions representing their task

objects and actions.

– Modern user interface building tools

– Standard widgets

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Contextual Theories

• User actions are situated by time and place

– You may not have time to deal with shortcuts or device dependent

syntax, such as on mobile devices, when hurried

– Physical space is important in ubiquitous, pervasive and embedded

devices, e.g. a museum guide stating information about a nearby

painting

• A taxonomy for mobile device application

development could include:

– Monitor and provide alerts, e.g. patient monitoring systems

– Gather information

– Participate in group collaboration

– Locate and identify nearby object or site

– Capture information about the object and share that information

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