HCI Seminar 310-89

Day 6 Notes

10/9/00

 

Syllabus and links to class notes available at:

 http://ils.unc.edu/~march/courses/310_f00/syllabus.html

 

  1. One Minute Papers

 

Main Points

Tradeoff in supporting old and pusing the new

Innovative interfaces only part of solution---need good info arch too

 

Questions

What options to visual representation are there?

Where will we be in 10 years?

Does abundant display hierarchy apply visually?

What types of data lend themselves to visual rep (e.g., like themescape)?

How much should we strive for natural? Should we not aim for supernatural?

Why so many startups at other places but not SILS?

What is the difference between 3d games and info vis? (why former works well)

Given video game (3D) usage, what will next generation design?

Principles/models for mapping info arch to tasks and tools?

Are we at LCD vs high end interfaces disjunction?

Is there a single SILS web page that would make each of us happy?

 

2. Readings. 

Koenemann & Belkin.  Conceptual interface example

Baseline rank-retrieval system + one of three ‘added value’ variants.

Relevance feedback useful (confirming past work)

BIG Finding: User control (interaction) is both beneficial AND preferred

 

Christel et al. 

Incremental work embedded in a larger project (Intermedia)

Goal: Surrogates that give an order of magnitude improvement.  (skims)

Skim creation techniques (representations)

            Systematic sampling (10 sec of each 100)

            Image-centric (use visual signal processing)

            Audio-centric (use audio signal processing + text processing)

            Combined image+audio

Two kinds of tasks: fact finding (text?) and gist extraction (text)

Note this is a within subjects design (compare to K&B above which was across subjects)

No statistically reliable differences, move to next iteration of skim design

            Increase length of skims (and full-length video)

            Improve synchrony

            Use phrases rather than words in text processing

Pilot test: Choppy audio worse than choppy video; audio considered more content-bearing

Focus on gisting, but use video images+text to ID gist

Only the best audio with bad visual sync was stat different on visual recog task; full video better on text task.

Results: full is better and preferred (no surprise), but improved skim better than others.  Claim that visual content not so crucial for gisting (we might argue that it depends on what is meant by gisting).

 

  1. Usability

Usability must be situated, usability must be focused. 

Usability engineering lifecylce (adapted from Mayhew, 1999).

Requirements analysis

            User profile (user needs analysis)

            Task analysis

            Platform capabilities/constraints

            General design principles

Design/testing/development

            Iteration 1

Work re-engineering (amplification and augmentation here?)

                        Conceptual model

                        Mockups

                        Mockup evaluation (discount testing ala Nielsen)

            Iteration 2

                        Screen design standards

                        Screen prototypes

                        Prototype evaluation (informal testing, lab testing)

            Iteration 3

                        Detailed UI specifications and prototypes

                        Prototypes evaluation (lab, field testing)

Installation

            User feedback

            Maintenance

 

4. Interface design in context.  The BLS and Fedstats case.

            User and Tasks (a taxonomy based on interviews, focus groups, t-logs, email content analysis)

            The Multiple portal visual interface + minimizing clicks + abundant display

            RB iteration 1 and usability testing

            RB iteration 2 and field testing, revision, usability testing

            The challenges of implementation in real world environments

 

Next week: read Hutchinson et al.; read Jacob.

 

 

5. One-minute paper

What was the big point you learned in class today?

What is the main, unanswered question you leave class with today?