I Don T Think So; I Think It S Okay
David1
Do you want this… the power in there?
I don’t think so; I think it’s okay.
Okay.
Well I wasn’t sure really how to do this and, you know, what artefacts to bring or anything for HCI. I mean do you want to go first or shall I go first?
No, no, off you go.
Okay, well what I did, in the end I brought a student’s final year project – this was a fairly good student – and this is just an assignment from some second-year students who did a group-based piece of work in the Human Computer Interaction unit, the old unit, that we were doing when we were doing the Commons. Because… no, no, sorry, this was the new unit. Sorry, my mistake. What happened was, when we did the Commons it was the last year of an old unit called HCI, which then changed to a new unit which now goes right through our whole year so it’s a 20 credit unit…
Okay, right.
…called Human Digital Interaction Design. And then… so last year, last academic year, was a kind of new experience for me because I had to, if you like, expand on all the themes and the ideas that were in the old unit, and for a whole year effectively.
Yeah, right.
And so there was a lot of redesign that I was involved with last year, and it was a completely new experience, and I found that the students actually put quite a lot of work into their final hand-in, if you like. I mean there’s…
Can I have a look?
But the artefact from this that I’ve… just to save time looking through all that – you can have a look through it by all means – but if I just flick… not that one but this one… This is from that assignment that these students did, so this is a student piece of work. It’s only on his slide. You can see the whole thing on here if you want to.
Right.
But I asked them to evaluate both the website, that they had not produced, and their own work that they had produced qualitatively and quantitatively. Please have a look at it if you wish.
Is this one in here?
That is in there somewhere.
Oh, okay sorry, I thought these were just the marked sheets. Right, okay, this one here?
Yes. So what they did, I asked them to sort of use somebody who has sets of guidelines or heuristics that we’d talked about throughout the unit, so these chose Shneiderman and his Eight Golden Rules. And they did a fairly good job, reasonable job, of both presenting this piece of work and also discussing this particular website which was the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency.
That was your choice, this particular website…
I chose that.
…or they chose it?
No, no, I chose that because they had to do a piece of work to actually evaluate the actual DVLA but also produce their own version of DVLA in a piece of software. So it was a design and build exercise and an evaluation exercise, very much so really, but done in a group of four, a maximum of four.
Okay. What year level is this, David?
This is Level 2.
Right, okay.
Level 2, and this was one of the better groups.
A great exercise.
And it was…
And this was their choice to use Eight Golden Rules…
Yes.
…or they could have used any other framework?
They could have used somebody like Neilson’s heuristics…
Yeah, okay.
…or some other guidelines.
Right.
We’ve looked at various sets of guidelines and principles of heuristics throughout the unit and I’d referred them to Shneiderman, Neilson, and one or two others that are less well known. And I think we focused quite a bit on Shneiderman so probably that was the reason why they chose that.
And so what they had to do is they had to come up with their own sort of tasks to try it out…
Yes.
…in order to see if it would work?
Yes, they had to sort of come up with a set of tasks to try out the site, and then evaluate and discuss it with participants who could be from within their group or other students or friends, and then write up a report based on these Eight Golden Rules. So, for example, is it consistent? What are the problem areas that came up with the users? So they did theirs very discursively; they almost wrote it like an essay with the screenshots in the middle of it and it reflected their presentation.
And it’s very kind of thorough and systematic.
Yes, yes. Well it provides, I think… my feeling is that if you give them these heuristics, it’s a good set of rules to hang an evaluation on. Whereas, if you don’t do that or if they don’t do that, they tend to go off all over the place and it tends to get a bit woolly.
And then after this they had to design their own screens…
Yes.
…for exactly the same function?
No, no. They had to evaluate the DVLA as almost a separate exercise and they had to build a system based on a case study that I gave them…
Okay, right.
…which was sort of similar to the DVLA, you know, the DVLA does this, this and this.
Right, okay.
People work in this department, this department, this department; this is the scenario, analyse your users, talk about… do an analysis of your users, try and expand on their backgrounds, find out who they are. Then, based on what are your discoveries, design and storyboard an initial system; go back to your users and see whether… and of course you’re faking it a little bit because going back to the users really means going back to their friends…
That’s right, yes.
…but, you know, they kind of simulated a real life project, I suppose, building a system and…
And did this take the whole year then?
This assignment was given out in late October and they had to hand it in in late April/May, so yes, it took the whole year.
Right, so it’s extensive then.
Yes.
Excuse me. Janet, how long do we have?
About another, let’s say, ten minutes for your first one.
Ten minutes each?
Ten minutes per person?
20 minutes per person because we didn’t really… we started probably because of the ((0:06:53.1?)) about 25 past so first person ((0:06:57.9?)) that will be another 20 minutes.
Okay.
First one’s got until quarter to. Okay, so I’m taking too long on it, sorry.
That’s fine. That’s why I needed to check.
Okay.
Okay, so it’s great that it’s a project that goes over the whole time…
Yes.
…because it means that it hopefully captures their engagement all the time, yeah.
That’s right.
Good. And they come up with something kind of concrete and big at the end which is really useful.
That’s right, yes. Then this one is a Level 3 individual project and what… just very quickly to talk about… I’ll try and summarise this very quickly, this is slide one. This is a screenshot from some of the stuff he did.
Okay.
His project was that.
Fantastic.
“Can a computer software application cater for the cognitive usability?” Well you can see what it says. But it was a reasonably good project. He was very interested in our usability lab.
Right, good.
We’ve just built a lab and I’m sort of responsible for it.
Yeah.
And we’re trying to get outside companies interested in it and evaluating their products so, as well as using it for students, generating some income for the university…
Yeah, fantastic.
…possibly. We’ve got an eye tracker in the lab which will actually…
Very neat.
So he sort of looked at… or he used heat maps which analyse where the user looks on the screen, the red areas. So this would be… this heat map here would probably be an average of maybe ten different users, so on average most people tend to look in this area of the screen first…
That’s right, yeah.
…the hot areas. And the colder yellow and green areas are where people look a little bit but less so. So it measures people’s fixations on a screen, so you can evaluate an interface from a usability point of view and go back to your client and say, “Well, everybody’s looking where you want them to, or they’re not looking where you want them to,” basically, in a nutshell.
Isn’t it fantastic to have a student who’s actually collecting real data and then analysing it?
Absolutely, yeah.
That’s excellent.
It also does gaze plots, which show fixations; and the movement of your eyes between fixations are called ‘cicadas’ so it’ll analyse these as well. And he wrote a lot about this and it was quite an interesting project.
And so what did he conclude at the end?
He tended to compare a group of older people that he found somewhere, I think through friends or through his family and how they reacted to this system that he’d built himself.
Oh, okay, so this was his own ((0:09:38.1?))
His own product, yeah – and with a group of 20 year olds – and tried to analyse the difference between where… in terms of fixation lengths, in terms of areas of interest, and how they could use an interface; whether their use of a particular interface was the same as…
Fantastic. And did he find big differences? Were there differences?
I don’t think so, no, I don’t actually think… ((laughs))
Oh, after that. Yeah.
I mean his conclusion…
I’m just trying to see… these look like appendices at the end.
Yeah, yes, I know, they’re all appendices.
Yeah.
So there’s conclusions somewhere in there.
Okay, so that’s limitations. “Different users’ groups have different ((0:10:30.5?)) in different ways.” How many participants did he use?
He had about, I think, six people in each group.
Okay, that’s pretty good.
Hmmm.
That’s fantastic.
I think he had great difficulties finding a selection of older people, yeah.
Excellent to have a project that…
Yeah. He initially was going to sort of test on children but we had to sort of say no, you can’t test on anybody under 18 because there’s too many problems, so he went for older people again, the 20 year old market.
Good stuff.
And the third one… sorry I know I’m running out of time…
That’s fine, don’t worry, no worries.
And then… so the first two artefacts were really these two pieces of student work, and the third one was just a little exercise I do with…
Ah, fabulous. I love icons.
Yeah, and it was just looking at a whole load of icons.
Yeah, great.
What’s the general theme? I don’t know whether you can spot what the general theme is.
Weather.
Yes, so which are the odd ones out?
Um… that one…
Yeees.
…that one, that one. ((laughs)) I don’t know.
((laughs)) Ah, right.
Yeah. No, that one’s got nothing to do with weather.
Yeah, intentionally the odd ones out are these two. I suppose that’s got something to do with wind power.
With wind, yeah, okay, I guess so, and that’s rain.
Rain, maybe, maybe, but yeah, they are a little…
Oh, and students love this kind of exercise.
Yeah, well it’s interesting because the discussion takes the form… goes along the lines of how you viewed them as well.
Yeah.
Because the whole thing was, well what makes a good metaphor, you know. As I say, as a rule of thumb if you don’t get it more or less instantly…
That’s right.
…then the metaphor is a bit too complex.
Yeah.
And so we discuss that whole area.
I’ve asked students in the past to say… you know in a lift there’s those little icons for opening a door and closing a door?
Yes.
And I say to the class, “How many of you get them mixed up?” and half the class put their hands up: you press the wrong button; when somebody’s running to the lift you press the close one instead of the open one or whatever.
Yeah.
And I get them to try and design better icons for the lift.
Oh great, yeah, great idea.
It’s actually very, very difficult.
Yes, it is, yes.
More difficult to get your open and close door icons for the lift… very hard.
Yes.
Anyway that’s fantastic; I like that.
We’ve got a lift at our place that has 0 for ground and then lower ground.
Oh right.
And I’ve been there almost 20 years now and I still don’t understand which is which.
Still don’t… yeah, yeah. ((laughs)) That’s dreadful, very hard.
But yeah, so that’s really it.
Yeah, I bet they like that. And it’s good because it’s not just talking about icons; it’s talking about metaphors.
Yeah, we talk a lot about metaphors. And also, before that, they talk a little bit about affordance, you know, good affordance and so on. So there’s a lot that is involved with that kind of exercise which I think…
Yeah, it’s a small exercise but with big application.
Yeah, yeah. So that’s my three artefacts, so I don’t want to sort of go over the time.
Good, fantastic.
I’m aware that…
Okay, well…
So I’ll leave that over there.
And I’ll start getting mine going.
Yes. Do you want to… shall we… are we both recording or…?
Oh, well you can record mine, if you like. I have been recording yours, but if you want to… it’s up to you.
Well I don’t mind. I mean do you want me to or…?
Well I’ll just put this on there.
I’m not quite sure what the idea was.
The idea is that we can take them back individually and you’ve got yours and I’ve got mine. That’s why we’ve each got one.
Oh, okay. So I’ll switch this off.
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