Information and communication technologies principles and perspectives

1. Information and Communication
Technologies(ICT)
Principles and Perspectives
Lecture 7

2. Case Study
• ABCbookshop.com
• Discussing points raised in previous lectures w.r.t this website

3. Design for use
• Use vs functionality
• Design not for a single user
• Social, environmental, cultural, psychological factors
• Linguistics

4. Reasons for using cognitive models
1. Understand what is going on when users use system
2. Predict how users will behave
3. Identify & explain problems
4. Provide knowledge what use can or cannot be expected to do
5. Take advantage of particular aspects of user skills and abilities

5. Design Principles
• Visibility
• Feedback
• Constraint
• Consistency
• Affordance
Tradeoff

6. Conceptual Model
• A high-level description of how a system is organized and operates. What
people can do with a product and what concepts are required to understand
how to interact with it?
• Goals
• Keep it simple as much as possible
• Few or No concept from outside of task domain

7. Core Components of Conceptual Model
• Metaphors and analogies
• Concepts exposed through product
• Relationships between these concepts
• Mapping between these concepts

8. Interface Metaphor
• An Interface metaphor is a set of user interface visuals, actions and
procedures that exploit specific knowledge that users already have of other
domains.
• Examples
• Folders
• Bin (Recycle Bin)
• Shopping cart

9. Benefits of Interface metaphor
• Makes learning new systems easier
• Helps users understand the underlying conceptual model
• Can be very innovative and enable the realm of computers and their
applications to be made more accessible to a greater diversity of users

10. Input & Output Technologies
• Input: the process that occurs as information from inside the user’s head or
from the environment is transformed into the sort of data that computers
can use
• Output: the process of re-representing computer data into a form that the
user can comprehend and make use of.

11. Interaction Styles
• all the ways the user can communicate or otherwise interact with the
computer system
1. Command Language
2. Menu Selection
3. Form fill-in
4. Natural Language
5. Direct Manipulation

12. Direct manipulation
• Visibility of objects of interests
• Rapid , reversible incremental actions performed directly on them
• Replacement of complex command language by direct manipulation object
of interest
• Direct manipulation tries to bridge gulf of execution and evaluation

13. Direct Manipulation
(Advantages)
• Visually presents task concepts.
• Easy to learn.
• Errors can be avoided more easily.
• Encourages exploration.
• High subjective satisfaction.
• Recognition memory (as opposed to cued or free recall memory)

14. Direct Manipulation
(Disadvantages)
• May be more difficult to program
• Not suitable for small graphic displays.
• Spatial and visual representation is not always preferable.
• Metaphors can be misleading since the essence of metaphor is understanding
and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another
• Compact notations may better suit expert users

15. Direct Manipulation