Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 1Nick Guemes

GWDA202 The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience, 1st Ed Morgan

Kaufmann Publishers

Objectives

• Recognize the pervasiveness of computing in our lives• Be cognizant of the changing nature of computing and

interaction and the need to design for it• Understand the traditional concept of usability and its

roots • Have a working definition of user experience, what it is and

is not• Understand the components of user experience, especially

emotional impact• Recognize the importance of articulating a buisness case

for user experience

Computers, Computing and Interacting Everywhere

• Desktops, laptops, network based computing systems still exist and are a part of everyday lives. Businesses are dependent on the old ways of computing such as data base management, word processing and spreadsheet management.

*Changing Concept of Computing

• Today, computing has and is going far beyond graphical user interfaces and the Web.

Computer systems worn by people and embedded within appliances, homes, offices, stereos, entertainment systems, vehicles, and roads. – Now, walls, furniture, objects we carry such as purses, wallets, briefcases, wrist watches, PDA’s, cell phones, and clothing.

*continued

• Robots in more specialized applications than just housecleaning, such as healthcare rehabilitation, search and rescue, and rover vehicles for unmanned space missions.

Changing Concept of Interaction

• Current “concept” of computing is:– Sitting in front of a desktop or laptop conveys a feeling of

interacting (exchanging information, getting work done, learning, playing, entertainment or exploring)

• However!!! – we do computing when we drive and utilize the car’s built in computer and maybe its built in GPS

• Mobile Communications is the fastest growing are of computing with personal devices and represent one of the most intense areas of “designing for a quality user experience”

Designing for a Quality User Experience in 3D Applications

•3D UI’s are still an open field of research and development –

motion controls, freehand gestures, natural user interfaces

User Experience

• Is the totality of the effect or effects felt by a user as a result of interaction with, and the usage context of, a system, device, or product, including the influence of usability, usefulness, and emotional impact during interaction, and savoring the memory after the interation.

Usability

• Usability is the pragmatic component of user experience, including effectiveness, efficiency, productivity, ease-of-use, learnability, retainability, and the pragmatic aspects of user satisfaction.

Usefulness

• Usefulness is the component of user experience to which system functionality gives the ability to use the system or product to accomplish the goals or work (or play)

Functionality

• Functionality is power to do work ( or play) seated in the non-user-interface computational features and capabilities

Emotional Impact

• Emotional impact is the affective component of user experience that influences user feelings. Emotional impact includes such effects as pleasure, fun, joy of use, aesthetics, desirability, pleasure, novelty, originality, sensations, coolness, engagement, novelty, and appeal and can involve deeper emotional factors such as self expression, self identity, a feeling of contribution to the world, and pride of ownership.

Ambient Intelligence

• The goal of considerable research and development aimed at the home living environment.– The computer disappears because it is inside the

walls and you interact with the wall through a small interface or the wall itself.

– Sensors embedded into something that you interact with body temperature or the sensor can detect odors in the room

“dancing bear”

• “GREAT IDEAS Triumphs over Poor Design”• Poor usability was good for the mystique, not to mention job

security – you had to be a “technician” to use the computer system

• As more people began to use computers, the generally slow to realize that we call can demand a better user experience

• Misplaced blame-user experience in design– Example: the failure of voting machines in Florida was blamed by

the press on improperly trained pol workers and confused voters – No one questioned why it takes so much training to operate a simple ballot machine or why citizens experienced with voting were confused with the system.

Designing for Usability and User Experience

• Case in point– An emergency response system developed for the San Jose

Police Dept ( a mobile, in-vehicle communication system for dispatchers and officers in cars – the police had a good working system that they had perfected and customized through use overtime, but the underlying technology was old. The committee appointed to gather requirements did not include the police officers and their focus was on functionality and coast, not usability. No user focus groups or contextual inquiry were considered and the mobile response functions and tasks were addressed minimally in requirements.

Contextual Inquiry

• Is an early system or product UX lifecycle activity to gather detailed descriptions of customer or user work practice for the purpose of understanding work activities and underlying rationale. – The goal: to improve work practice and construct

and/or improve system designs to support it. – Includes: both interviews of customers and users

and observations of work practice occurring in its real world context.

Usability to User Experience

• HCI (Human Computer Interaction) is what happens when a human user and a computer system, get together to accomplish something.

• Usability is that aspect of HCI devoted to ensuring that HCI is:– Effective, efficient, satisfying for the user, which

implies ease of use, productivity, learnability, and retainability

Careful design for a quality user experience as a gateway to that functionality.

• Technology and design have evolved from being just productivity-enhancing tools to more personal, social, and intimate facets of our lives.

• There are many factors governing the relative market share of each product, but given comparably capable products, user experience is arguably the most important

• An interface is the only way to experience the functionality – to users, the interaction experience is the system.

• Users have an effort threshold, beyond which they give up and are not able to access the desired functionality. “If users can’t use the feature, it effectively does not exist” – Larry Marine 1994

Emotional Impact• user satisfaction, traditional subjective measure of usability, has always been a part

of the concept of traditional usability shared by most people, including the ISO 9241-11 standard definition. Also, user satisfaction questionnaires are about how users feel, or at least about their opinions. As Hazzenzahl et al. (2000) point out, at least in practice and as reflected in most usability questionnaires, this kind of user satisfaction has been thought of as a result of how users experience usability and usefulness.

• As a result, these user satisfaction questionnaires have elicited responses that are more intellectual responses than emotional ones; they have not traditionally included much about what we call emotional impact.3 We as a profession did not focus on those aspects as much as we did on objective user performance measures such as efficiency and error counts. Technology and design have evolved from being just productivity-enhancing tools to more personal, social, and intimate facets of our lives. Accordingly, we need a much broader definition of what constitutes quality in our designs and quality in the user experience those designs beget.

Phenomenological Aspects of Interaction

• Phenomenological aspects (deriving from phenomenology, the philosophical examination of the foundations of experience and action) of interaction are the cumulative effects of emotional impact considered over the long term, where usage of technology takes on a presence in our lifestyles and is used to make meaning in our lives.

Design Beyond Technology

• Design is about creating artifacts to satisfy a usage need in a language that can facilitate a dialog between the creator of the artifact and the user. That artifact can be anything from a computer system to an everyday object such as a door knob.

Utility

• utility as a quality of a Website design that will impact visitor experience– refers to the usefulness, importance, or interest of

the site content (the information, products, or services offered)

• Always design for a target audience, based on solid knowledge about that audience

Functional Integrity

• Works as intended– The opposite would be: “dead” links, freeze or

crash when certain operations are invoked, display incorrectly on some browsers or browser versions, they may download unintended files,

Usability

• how easy it is to learn (for first time and infrequent visitors) and/or use (for frequent visitors) a Website.

Persuasiveness

• examples of persuasiveness involve the presence, quality, and location of two types of information: vendor information (e.g., company name, physical address and contact information, company history, testimonials of past customers, and the like) and product information (things such as product color, material, care 1718instructions, and the like). Visitors look for evidence that they can trust an online vendor, especially if they have never heard of it before. Also, they are often unwilling to order a product if they cannot find all the information they need in order to judge whether it will meet their needs.

• encourages and promotes specific behaviors, which are referred to as “conversions.”

Graphic design

• primarily the ways colors, images, and other media are used—invoke emotional reactions in visitors that may or may not contribute to the site's goals.

• look and feel