Hot answers tagged hci
29
Generally speaking, disruptions and distractions negatively affect human performance, a common finding in cognitive psychology.
Many studies have shown that distraction greatly increases task time on a wide variety of tasks.
There also exist many Quantitative studies showing task performance is negatively affected by distractions (note these figures are ...
26
As you rightfully pointed out there are a lot of articles which mention the increase in productivity levels. To quote this Computer Services Auckland Blog - Pulse IT Blog
A University of Utah and ATI Technologies survey of 108 university &
non university personnel using Dual Screen monitors reported
increases of productivity with 33% fewer ...
16
The general rule of thumb for usability is to start off with no feedback, but to then display some busy indicator after 200ms, and if the process normally takes 5 seconds or more to present a larger feedback element (usually with a time elapsed timer, but preferably not with a progress bar unless you're very sure how long it will take). If something is ...
12
There are two psychological key aspects that are in play when it comes to this matter.
Users want to feel as they are in control
Users (people) want the ability to choose
The I'm feeling lucky feature does not cater to either of these aspects.
It is true that the user and the SEO will agree on the most suiting search result on a majority of the time. ...
10
One big advantage for software developers is that you can have your application running one one screen and your development environment running on the other. This means that there are hardly any issues when you have to switch your attention from one to the other. Having both things visible at a reasonable size at the same time makes it much easier and more ...
10
Sometimes your users and frustrated but they don't know how to express it or they're too polite to do so. Their expression might show that they found that form annoying, even if they tell you it's great! In addition the "major" facial expressions have been found to be largely innate and not bound to cultures, in fact many animals display similar facial ...
9
I tend to deliberately avoid the situation with a variety of alternatives, including, but not limited to the user and they. And in any case, it simplifies the issue a bit because once you use he or she you have to concern yourself with use of his, her, hers, etc.
I am not alone:
The Microsoft user experience guidelines is about 880 pages and refers to he ...
6
The idea that Help is for beginners is misguided. Novices don’t use help; advanced users do. Novices don’t use help because:
We are a victim of our own success. We’ve made apps and web sites that users can use without Help, so that’s what they expect. And, indeed, an app should be designed so that the average new user can be productive without opening help ...
6
The obvious issue with the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button is that it doesn't do anything useful.
(ie it doesn't provide any information that you can't get by pressing 'Return' - which is always easier than having to pick the mouse up and press on a button)
If Google were to remove it one day, I'd be surprised if anyone noticed.
6
I think designing for touch first could be a good general strategy for websites. It seems many designers, myself included, find it easier add features to an existing design than to remove them. So designing an application without assuming a pointer (the touch version), then adding pointer embellishments for the traditional computer version seems like it ...
6
Good question but a ticky one to answer :). Here would be my inputs considering I just broke into the HCI field a couple of years back or so:
Understand that HCI is not about just graphic design or Information architecture or interaction design or user research. You could work as a developer and still have an active interest in human computer interactions ...
5
Not really. Frequency is one issue - but eye tracking is all about eye saccades.
This is a mild oversimplification - hopefully folk won't mind.
Hold your arm out and stick your thumb up. The size of top half of your thumb is roughly the size of the bit of your visual field that sees in 'high res' - the fovea. It takes up less than 1% of the retina area, ...
4
Design a dashboard of data. Allow users to drill down and edit the content.
That sounds like a very specific task, but it's actually one that would expose students to many facets of UX:
The visual display of quantitative information
Discoverability of content and information scenting
Relationships between views and drilldowns; when to use modal windows
...
4
I think you should look into Cognitive Task Load. Which is a model of the strain on the users cognition. The idea is that you don't want the strain to be too low so that your users become bored. Neither too high so they give up. I've studied under Mark Neerincx and he has a couple of good papers in this area.
Another good resource in my opinion is ...
4
I think you're confusing Deep Processing, more accurately referred to as "Levels of Processing" with "lots of stuff going on at once". That's not quite it; the generally accepted reason people remember "deep" things is because they process them at multiple levels. So to remember a word instead of just seeing it on a screen you could hear the word aloud, ...
3
If you use "I'm feeling lucky" and the first result isn't what you want, then what happens? You have to go back and perform the search again. I think that's a major deterrent, because nobody likes backtracking. Instead, the safer bet is to just do a normal search and manually pick a result.
(Also, everything else people have said is probably true as well)
3
Design an android/iphone/windows class schedule phone app for a specific user group as students . The user research part would involve studying about the best design practices for such an app and interviewing students to find out how they would want such an app to be. Other research aspects could be an contextual enquiry into situations where users might ...
3
Well, Feng-GUI.com tries to create a heatmap based on AI.
The reliability has been discussed in other questions:
Has anyone got experience of Feng GUI and been able to test it against real users?
3
As Ben has already commented, this is a very broad question and there is a lot of active research going into it at the moment. However there is a good understanding on a few of the points, so I'll try answer those.
Spacial memory is relative, meaning that people remember the position relative to some reference object or feature. The problem is that there ...
2
No, this is not default in scientific writing. The wikipedia article on 'singular they' sheds some light on the issue.
In the late 20th century, the feminist movement expressed concern
regarding the use of generic he in the English language. The feminist
claim was that such usage contributes to an assumption that maleness
is "standard," and that ...
2
I have found that some of the works by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly is a really good start. His understnading of Flow is of critical importance. The point is that the flow of a task is critical, and dialogs - or anything else - that interrupts this flow is bad in terms of performance in completing this task. His clasic book Flow is a good start.
Of course, if the ...
2
I would like to contribute by pointing to an extract of Apple's iOS UX guidelines:
People appreciate being able to accomplish a self-contained subtask in a modal view, because the context shift is clear and temporary.
2
To supplement what has been written above, if you are recording facial expressions, I think the benefit is that you see the user's body language. As as example, we had recorded students at the university I work at, FIU, to determine usability. We tested them by finding items from a poorly structured site to a well structured site. What we saw in the ...
2
I think that's an excellent interface. Possible enhancements:
Allow users to skip when they have no significant preference. You could have 'Skip to These' appear as a hover when you point at a future image pair.
Dynamically slide the images into and out of the selection box, rather than snapping. It's harder to see the flow when images snap to new ...
2
Personally I think if a manual is required to use something, it is too complex already.
In the scenario of searching or filtering for a report, the common problem is that there are too many results. In these scenarios, it is best to look at how people are using the basic search and why are they trying to get a fine grain view of what the basic search ...
2
This is a very interesting question. I think that usability requirements like "instantaneous" by itself is pretty much worthless. You should have verifiable criteria for responsiveness. However you should also beforehand make sure that whatever verifiable criteria you set should be possible to measure and achieve. I'd imagine that a lot of response time ...
2
The simplest answer, from a UX perspective, is that it's not a predictable experience.
Second, even if you know what you're searching for, and you reasonably expect that the site you want is for sure going to be the first result, honestly who clicks on a button to search? You just press Enter (and you don't even have to do that anymore with Google's ...
2
List of usage scenarios I have encountered:
Work on one, watch the results on the other, random surfing/(news|stocks) ticker/TV/Game/Skype/Documentation lookup for the last
Program in linux, test browser compatibility in that other OS family that can run five major web browsers, look up API in the last
Code review setup with diff 1, diff 2, others. I find ...
2
It can greatly improve the productivity by preventing lots of window changing.
Below I give some examples:
Being a software engineer, I need to compare code or documents once in a while, for comparing, put both items to be compared either on one monitor. This is almost impossible to do on one screen unless you make windows very small (resulting in using ...
2
I recently started using more than one monitor, and I got couple of observations:
Many people start using second, huge monitor (like ~24"), connecting it to notebook/netbook they've used before (so ~15"). That's giant difference, and much of initial excitement after buying second monitor has source here - there's just so much room for everything, compared ...
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