Human-Centered Design: An Introduction

Human Computer Interaction

Good design brings people joy. It helps us do things we care about and helps us connect to

people that we care about.

Good interfaces can have a tremendous impact ob both inviduals' ability to accomplish things

and society's as a whole. Graphical user interfaces have put computing on hundreds of

millions of desks, enabling us to do thinks like create documents and share photos,

interact with family and find information.

Conversely, bad designs costs time, money and lives. Medical devices, airplane accidents and

nuclear disasters are just a few domains where bad user interfaces have caused serious injury

even debts.

Fixing these problems requires following to some basic principles like consistency and

feedback. Let's say that friction caused by bad design causes Americans ten minuts of delay

each day. Now. there are 300 million Americans. So just in American alone, that would be 3

billion person minutes a day. Or 18 billion person hours per year.

Designing great user interfaces requires enormous creativity and a lot of hard work. But

designing pretty good user interfaces is actually pretty easy if you know some basics

methods, techniques and principles.

The Power of Prototyping

Prototypes are questions. Ask a lot of them.

When we're talking about prototyping what we mean is rapidly creating an approximation of a

design so that you can quickly get feedback. Prototyping is the pivotal activity that structures

innovation, collaboration and creativity in design.

Succesful design results from a series of conversations with materials. It's not the artefact, it's

feedback iteraction. Build some prototypes, evaluate them, and use what you've learned to drive

the next design

The audience of a design:

Colleagues
 Clients

Users

Yourselves

Different prototypes help you figure out different things. It's important to have a goal. If you're

using prototyping well, you'll explore multiple alternatives. At each stage in your prototyping

process you've got a question. And then from there you'll have new prototypes with new

questiones.

A prototype should be easy to change. And lastly, a prototype gets to retire. While it's active,

it is the spec, or the reasoning instrument for a piece of your design process.

What matters is the quality and quantity of the information you get back. SO as you go in time

your prototypes, you can think about how much are you learning as a function of time.

With software as a service, the release point of a product is more ambiguous. On the web we're

seeing more and more people who are focusing on release early and often. When does the

release early and often strategy work? It depends a lot on the costo of change over time.

Software as a service can be a lot cheaper than the redising of a car.

Prototypes are questions like How does this looks? What would they like more? What is faster

but clear?

Ask a lot of them

Evaluating Design

The insights that you will get from testing designs can help to get new ideas, make changes

and decide wisely. But now How can measure it? There are different methods to study this.

Usability Study:

Is a common and straight forward way to find and fix interface bugs in existing software. In the

real world people may have different motivation using your product.

Survey and Focus Groups:

Quickly to get feedback from a large number of people. Difference between wha people and

what they do. People incluned to be polite and say polite things

Feedback from Experts:

Comparative Experiments

Actual behavior

Participants observation:

Actual work enviroment and gaining insight by discovering people's actual practicer.

Simulation and Formal Models:

Assumption => Results (Theory and prediction)

The number of alternatives

Monte Carlo method Optimist

The Birth of HCI

Screenshot_20_04_05_18h:24m.png

Bush

Grace Hopper

Ivan Sutherland

Doigh Engelbart

Alan Kay

Participant Observation

An effective starting point for designing new technology is to clearly identify an existing problem

or user need. Finding a big problem or need often yield an untapped opportunity for design.

Observing people can also help you build empathy and think from their point of view.

"You can observe a lot just by watching" - Yogi Berra

What do people do now?

What values and goals do people have?

How are these particular activities embeded in a large ecology?

Train your eye to to able to pay attention to all the artefacts

Look for workarounds and hacks

"Errors" are a goldmine

Screenshot_20_04_07_15h:12m.png

Interviewing

In addition to gaining insights from observing people, it's also valuable to interview them. Ask

them about their experience directly.

Choose Participant

Representative of target users

Maybe current users of a similar system

Might also be non-users

Recruiting Participants

Get a diverse set of stakeholders

Use incentives and motivation

Approximate better than nothing

If you're working on a project that needs medical person, like a doctor. Maybe talking with

medicine students can be not the ideal. But, it's better than nothing.

Not idea, better than nothing.

The Importance of Being Curious

tell. I say trick, but what I really mean is challenge, because it's a very hard think to do.

Shampoo doesn't seem interesting? Well, dammit, it must be, and if it isn't, I have to believe

that it will ultimately lead me [to something] that is.

The other trick to finding ideas is figuring out the difference between power and knowledge.

You don't start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it's

the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.

My friend Dave. who taight me about ketchup, is a middle guy. He's worked on ketchup.

That's how he knows about it. People at the top are self-conscious about what they say

(and rightfully so) because they have position and privilage to protect. And self-

consciousness is the enemy of "interestigness".

What are good Questions?

People are experts in their live. Not in design. You should ask questions about how they're using

your system or your product in their lives.

You should avoid questions like

What they would do / like / want in hypothtical scenarios

How often they do things

How much they like thinkgs on an absolute scale

At the beginning of an interview, It'd be better to make open-ended questions. And after asking

the question, five somebody a chance to respond.

A little bit of silence is GOLDEN. After making a question, let the silence happen. After a few

seconds, you'll hear the second story. And the second story is often a lot more interesting.

Additional Needfinding Strategies

In addition to participant observation and structure interviews that we already see. There are

other ways that you can forage for design insights.

One effective solution is for the participant to do the capturing of the information themselves.

Diary Studies

Give people a diary that they complete at a specified time or interval

Can use journals, cameras, voice or video

Tailor the recording to the context

Can scale better than direct observation (Because is limited by your time)

Easier tools -> Better results

Experience Sampling

The idea behind this, si to beep people at some regular interval, and have them write down a

key piece of information at that time. Sometimes they are also called "page studies", because

many ofthe early studies used pagers.

They're often coupled with some kind of diary, so the paper beeps- or now it might be yout

mobile phone. And then there's a structured form that you'd fill in. And these are, again, used for

thinks like

How do you feel?

What's your energy level?

Where are you?

Extreme users

We can learn about users that make that application or product almost as they live. One can be

extreme as a technophile, or one might be an extreme as a technophobe.

Personas

A model of a person, an example.

Includes demographic information. but should also capture a person's motivation,

beliefs, intentions, behavior and goals

Draw a picure of your persona or use a photo

Give him or her a name, an occupation, a background, a social situation, some hopes

and dreams, and goals etc. Give the person a story to tell.

Knowing what our persona thinks, does and feel help build empathy
 So that you can understand the state of mind, emotion, philosophy, beliefs, or point of

view of the user.

Creating Design Goals

Creating goals for design is a step before actually crating the design itself, and a step after doing

the needfinding observations.

All design is redising

We ought to have a really good sense of what the existing situations are and what preferred

means for us. Preferred has to do with both user's goals and your point of view as a designer.

So far we have a sense of what people do and their high-level values, goals and context. That'l

help us connect observation to design.

What's our level as a designer. And a way to know it. There's two questions that helps us:

When you are designing, what matters? What should it accomplish?

Estimate wether different designs are meaningfully different

You are doing this already

Design often includes activity analysis implicity

Problem: leap to (just) one solution

Our goal is to make it explicit

We're trying to to this, by having intermediate representation to avoid problems about wich

design to follow or wich features to add.

Making this explicit:

Give you a conceptual representation

This increases your mindfulness as a designer, connects you to the texture of the domain,

and helps you communicate and discuss with other stakeholders

Having this intermediate conceptual representation makes it easier to be creative because

you're taking a couple small leaps instead of one big one.

The outcome of activity analysis

What are the artifacts?

What are the goals?

What are the pain points?

For example: Turn on a car

Steps

Unlock driver's door

Take a seat behind the wheel

Insert key in ignition switch

Turn key fully clockwise

When engine starts, release the key

Artifacts

Key

Car

Door-locl

Ignition Switch

Goals

(Your point of view comes in here)

Turn on the car?

Pick up bread?

Make a meal?

Have a satisfying evening?

Pain Points

In the narraw version: necessary to put the key in? It's already in the car. Why not just

drive off?
 In the slightly broader framing, the pain point could be needing a car to get bread.

Storyboards, Paper Prototypes, and Mockups

Heuristic Evaluation

Created by Jabok Nielsen and helps us find usability problems in a design. The base idea is set

on that we're going to give the people that will evaluate our project a set of heuristic or

principles. And the're gonna use those to look for problems in our design.

Nielsen's Ten Heuristics

Visibility of system status

Match Between System and World

User control and Fredom

Consistency & Standards

Error Prevention

Recognition Rather than Recall

Flexibility & Efficient of use

Aesthetic & Minimalist Design

Help Upsers Recognize, Diagnose & Recover from Errors

Help & Documentation

Evaluators Process

Step through design several times

Wich Principles?

Use violations to redesign/ fix problems

Heuristics Vs User Testing

Heuristic Evaluation is often faster

HE results come pre-interpreted

Valuable to alternate methods

Phases of Heuristic Evaluation

1. Pre-evaluation training: give evaluators needed domain knowledge and information on the

scenario

2. Evaluation: Individuals evaluate and then aggregate results

3. Severity Rating: Determine how severe each problem is (priority). Can do first individually

and then as a group

4. Debriefing: Review with design team

How-to: Heuristic Evaluation

At least two passes for each evaluator

If system is walk-up-and-use or evaluators are domain experts, no assitence needed

Each evaluator produces a list of problems

Separate each violation for no risk to repeat problematic aspect

Where problems should be found?

Single location UI

Two or more locations that need to be compared

Problem with overall structure of UI

Something is missing (Ambiguous and not implemented)

Severity Rating

Independently estimate after review

Allocate resources to fix problems

Estimate need for more usability efforts

Severity combines

Frequency
 Impact

Persistence

0 - Dont consider a usability problem

1- Cosmetic Problem

2- Minor usability Problem

3- Major Usability problem; important to fix

4- Usability catastrophe; imperative to fix

Debriefing

Conduct with evaluators, observers and development team members

Discuss general characteristics of UI

Suggest potential improvements to adress major usability problems

Dev. team rates effor to fix

Brainstorm solutions