CS8079 – HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION VII Semester CSE

DHANALAKSHMI COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

Tambaram, Chennai

Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering

CS8079 – Human Computer Interaction

Year / Sem : IV / VII
2 Marks Q & A

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UNIT – II
DESIGN & SOFTWARE PROCESS

Interactive Design basics – process – scenarios – navigation – screen Design – iteration and
prototyping. HCI in software process – software life cycle – usability engineering – Prototyping in
practice – design rationale. Design rules – principles, standards, guidelines, rules. Evaluation
Techniques – Universal Design.

PART – A

1. What are the steps for Interaction design process? (N/D – 18)
1) Requirements
2) Analysis
3) Design
4) Iteration and prototyping
5) Implementation and deployment

2. Identify human characteristics in design?

The important human characteristics in design are perception, memory, visual acuity, fovea and
peripheral vision, sensory storage, information processing learning, skill and individual differences.

3. What is the navigation design?

Human interaction with computer system through navigation at several level. So, the navigation design
plays a vital role in computer system and its application.

4. What are the several levels of interaction with computer?

Several levels of interaction with computer
1) Widgets
2) Screens or windows
3) Navigation within the application
4) Environment

5. What are Widgets and screen or windows

Widgets: -The appropriate choice of widgets and wording in menus and buttons will help to know
how to use them for a particular selection or action.
Screens or windows: - need to find things on the screen and understand the logical grouping of buttons.

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6. What is navigation within the application and environment

Navigation within the application need to be able to understand what will happen when a button is
pressed and to understand where you are in the interaction.
Environment The word processor has to read documents from disk and perhaps some are on remote
networks.

7. What is prototyping? (A/M – 17)

Prototyping is the universally accepted ‘best practice’ approach for interaction design. Prototyping is
an example of what is known as a hill climbing approach.

8. What are the prototyping methods? (N/D – 18)

Prototyping methods
1) To understand what is wrong and how to improve.
2) A good start points.

9. What is software life cycle?

The software life cycle is an attempt to identify the activities that occur in software development. These
activities must then be ordered in time in any development project and appropriate techniques must be
adopted to carry them through

10. What are the Activities in the life cycle?

Activities in the life cycle
1) Requirements specification
2) Architectural design
3) Detailed design
4) Coding and unit testing
5) Integration and testing
6) Maintenance

11. What is universal design? (A/M – 17)

Universal design is the process of designing products so that they can be used by as many people as
possible in as many situations as possible. This can be achieved by designing systems either to have
built in redundancy or to be compatible with assistive technologies.

12. What are the three main approaches to prototyping?

Three main approaches to prototyping
1) Throw-away
2) Incremental
3) Evolutionary

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13. What are the potential problems in prototyping?

Potential problems in prototyping
1) Time
2) Planning
3) Non-functional features
4) Contracts

14. What are the Techniques for prototyping? (N/D – 18)

Techniques for prototyping
1) Storyboards
2) Limited functionality simulations
3) High-level programming support
4) Aesthetic: The controls must look good.
5) Economic: It must not cost too much.

15. What is Design rationale?

Design rationale is the information that explains why a computer system is the way it is, including its
structural or architectural description and its functional or behavioral description. design rationale relates
to an activity of both reflection (doing design rationale) and documentation (creating a design rationale)
that occurs throughout the entire life cycle.

16. What is multithreading? (A/M – 18)

Each process contains a single thread, so programming with multiple processes is programming with
multiple threads. But a process is also an address space, and creating a process involves creating a new
address space.

17. What are the categories principles to support usability? (A/M – 18)
1) Learnability – the ease with which new users can begin effective interaction and achieve maximal
performance.
2) Flexibility – the multiplicity of ways in which the user and system exchange information.
3) Robustness – the level of support provided to the user in determining successful achievement and
assessment of goals.

18. What is Heuristic Evaluation?

A heuristic evaluation is a usability inspection method for computer software that helps to identify
usability problems in the user interface (UI) design. It specifically involves evaluators examining the
interface and judging its compliance with recognized usability principles.

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19. What is iterative design?

Iterative design is the purposeful design process which tries to overcome the inherent problems of
incomplete requirements specification by cycling through several designs, incrementally improving upon
the final product with each pass.

20. What is usability?

Usability describes the effectiveness of human performance. It can be defined as “the capability to be
used by humans easily and effectively”.
1) Easily means to a specified level of subjective assessment.
2) Effectively means to a specified level of human performance.

21. List the tools for layout?

Tools for layout
1) Grouping and structure
2) Order of groups and items
3) Decoration
4) Alignment
5) White space

22. What are the scenarios of software processes?

Scenarios of software processes
1) Communicate with others
2) Validate other models
3) Express dynamics

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Part – B

1. What is design? Write the golden rule of design.

A simple definition is: achieving goals within constraints
Goals: what is the purpose of the design we are intending to produce? Who is it for? Why do they want
it? For example, if we are designing a wireless personal movie player, we may think about young affluent
users wanting to watch the latest movies whilst on the move and download free copies, and perhaps
wanting to share the experience with a few friends.
Constraints: What materials must we use? What standards must we adopt? How much can it cost? How
much time do we have to develop it? Are there health and safety issues? In the case of the personal movie
player: does it have to withstand rain? Must we use existing video standards to download movies? Do we
need to build in copyright protection?
Trade-off Choosing which goals or constraints can be relaxed so that others can be met. For example, we
might find that an eye-mounted video display, a bit like those used in virtual reality, would give the most
stable image whilst walking along. However, this would not allow you to show friends, and might be
dangerous if you were watching a gripping part of the movie as you crossed the road.

The golden rule of design

The designs we produce may be different, but often the raw materials are the same. This leads us to the
golden rule of design:
 understand your materials
 understand computers
o limitations, capacities, tools, platforms
 understand people
o psychological, social aspects, human error.

2. Write short notes about Validation and verification

Throughout the life cycle, the design must be checked to ensure that it both satisfies the high-level
requirements agreed with the customer and is also complete and internally consistent. These checks are
referred to as validation and verification, respectively. Verification of a design will most often occur
within a single life-cycle activity or between two adjacent activities. For example, in the detailed design
of a component of a payroll accounting system, the designer will be concerned with the correctness of the
algorithm to compute taxes deducted from an employees gross income.

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The architectural design will have provided a general specification of the information input to this
component and the information it should output. The detailed description will introduce more information
in refining the general specification. The detailed design may also have to change the representations for
the information and will almost certainly break up a single high-level operation into several low-level
operations that can eventually be implemented. In introducing these changes to information and
operations, the designer must show that the refined description is a legal one within its language (internal
consistency) and that it describes all of the specified behavior of the high-level description (completeness)
in a provably correct way (relative consistency). Validation of a design demonstrates that within the
various activities the customers requirements are satisfied.
Validation is a much more subjective exercise than verification, mainly because the disparity between the
language of the requirements and the language of the design forbids any objective form of proof. In
interactive system design, the validation against HCI requirements is often referred to as evaluation and
can be performed by the designer in isolation or in cooperation with the customer.

3. Write short notes on design rules.

 Designing for maximum usability is the goal of interactive systems design.
 Abstract principles offer a way of understanding usability in a more general sense, especially
if we can express them within some coherent catalog.
 Design rules in the form of standards and guidelines provide direction for design, in both
general and more concrete terms, in order to enhance the interactive properties of the system.
 The essential characteristics of good design are often summarized through golden rules or
heuristics.
 Design patterns provide a potentially generative approach to capturing and reusing design
knowledge.

4. Write the Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design

They are intended to be used during design but can also be applied, like Nielsens heuristics, to the
evaluation of systems. Strive for consistency in action sequences, layout, terminology, command use and
so on.
1. Enable frequent users to use shortcuts, such as abbreviations, special key sequences and macros,
to perform regular, familiar actions more quickly.
2. Offer informative feedback for every user action, at a level appropriate to the magnitude of the
action.
3. Design dialogs to yield closure so that the user knows when they have completed a task.

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4. Offer error prevention and simple error handling so that, ideally, users are prevented from making
mistakes and, if they do, they are offered clear and informative instructions to enable them to recover.
5. Permit easy reversal of actions in order to relieve anxiety and encourage exploration, since the
user knows that he can always return to the previous state.
6. Support internal locus of control so that the user is in control of the system, which responds to his
actions.
7. Reduce short-term memory load by keeping displays simple, consolidating multiple page displays
and providing time for learning action sequences.

5. Describe in detail about Evaluation techniques.

• Evaluation
– tests usability and functionality of system
– occurs in laboratory, field and/or in collaboration with users
– evaluates both design and implementation
– should be considered at all stages in the design life cycle
Goals of Evaluation
Evaluation has three main goals:
 to assess the extent and accessibility of the system‘s functionality
 to assess users‘ experience of the interaction
 to identify any specific problems with the system
The system‘s functionality is important in that it must accord with the user‘s requirements. In other
words, the design of the system should enable users to perform their intended tasks more easily. This
includes not only making the appropriate functionality available within the system, but making it clearly
reachable by the user in terms of the actions that the user needs to take to perform the task. It also
involves matching the use of the system to the user‘s expectations of the task. For example, if a filing
clerk is used to retrieving a customer‘s file by the postal address, the same capability (at least) should be
provided in the computerized file system. Evaluation at this level may also include measuring the user‘s
performance with the system, to assess the effectiveness of the system in supporting the task.
In addition to evaluating the system design in terms of its functional capabilities, it is important to assess
the user‘s experience of the interaction and its impact upon him. This includes considering aspects such
as how easy the system is to learn, its usability and the user‘s satisfaction with it. It may also include his
enjoyment and emotional response, particularly in the case of systems that are aimed at leisure or
entertainment. It is important to identify areas of the design that overload the user in some way, perhaps

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by requiring an excessive amount of information to be remembered, for example. Much evaluation is

aimed at measuring features such as these.
The final goal of evaluation is to identify specific problems with the design. These may be aspects of the
design which, when used in their intended context, cause unexpected results, or confusion amongst users.
This is, of course, related to both the functionality and usability of the design (depending on the cause of
the problem). However, it is specifically concerned with identifying trouble-spots which can then be
rectified.

Evaluation through expert analysis

There are four approaches to expert analysis:
• Cognitive walkthrough,
• Heuristic evaluation,
• The use of models
• Use of previous work

6. Explain Cognitive walkthrough in detail.

1. A specification or prototype of the system. It doesn‘t have to be complete, but it should be fairly
detailed. Details such as the location and wording for a menu can make a big difference.
2. A description of the task the user is to perform on the system. This should be a representative task
that most users will want to do.
3. A complete, written list of the actions needed to complete the task with the proposed system.
4. An indication of who the users are and what kind of experience and knowledge the valuators can
assume about them.
Given this information, the evaluators step through the action sequence (identified in item 3 above) to
critique the system and tell a believable story about its usability. To do this, for each action, the
evaluators try to answer the following four questions for each step in the action sequence.
1. Is the effect of the action the same as the user’s goal at that point? Each user action will have a
specific effect within the system. Is this effect the same as what the user is trying to achieve at this
point? For example, if the effect of the action is to save a document, is saving a document‘ what the
user wants to do?
2. Will users see that the action is available?
Will users see the button or menu item, for example, that is used to produce the action? This is not
asking whether they will recognize that the button is the one they want.

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This is merely asking whether it is visible to them at the time when they will need to use it.
Instances where the answer to this question might be no‘ are, for example, where a VCR remote
control has a covered panel of buttons or where a menu item is hidden away in a submenu.
3. Once users have found the correct action, will they know it is the one they need?
Complements the previous question. It is one thing for a button or menu item to be visible, but will
the user recognize that it is the one he is looking for to complete his task? Where the previous
question was about the visibility of the action, this one is about whether its meaning and effect is
clear.
4. After the action is taken, will users understand the feedback they get?
If you now assume that the user did manage to achieve the correct action, will he know that the has
done so? Will the feedback given be sufficient confirmation of what has actually happened? This is
the completion of the execution–evaluation interaction cycle In order to determine if they have
accomplished their goal, users need appropriate feedback. It is vital to document the cognitive
walkthrough to keep a record of what is good

7. Explain Nielsen‘s Heuristic evaluation

Nielsen‘s heuristics are:
1. Visibility of system status Always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate
feedback within reasonable time. For example, if a system operation will take some time, give an
indication of how long and how much is complete.
2. Match between system and the real world The system should speak the user‘s language, with
words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-
world conventions, making information appear in natural and logical order.
3. User control and freedom Users often choose system functions by mistake and need a clearly
marked emergency exit‘ to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialog.
Support undo and redo.
4. Consistency and standards Users should not have to wonder whether words, situations or actions
mean the same thing in different contexts. Follow platform conventions and accepted standards.
5. Error prevention Make it difficult to make errors. Even better than good error messages is a careful
design that prevents a problem from occurring in the first place.
6. Recognition rather than recall Make objects, actions and options visible. The user should not have
to remember information from one part of the dialog to another. Instructions for use of the system
should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.

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7. Flexibility and efficiency of use Allow users to tailor frequent actions. Accelerators – unseen by the
novice user – may often speed up the interaction for the expert user to such an extent that the system
can cater to both in experienced and experienced users.

Part – C

1. What is Software Life cycle models? Explain its activities.

In the development of a software product, we consider two main parties: the customer who requires the
use of the product and the designer who must provide the product. Typically, the customer and the
designer are groups of people and some people can be both customer and designer. It is often important to
distinguish between the customer who is the client of the designing company and the customer who is the
eventual user of the system. These two roles of customer can be played by different people. The group of
people who negotiate the features of the intended system with the designer may never be actual users of
the system. This is often particularly true of web applications. In this chapter, we will use the term
customer to refer to the group of people who interact with the design team and we will refer to those who
will interact with the designed system as the user or end-user.

Activities
The graphical representation is reminiscent of a waterfall, in which each activity naturally leads into the
next. The analogy of the waterfall is not completely faithful to the real relationship between these
activities, but it provides a good starting point for discussing the logical flow of activity. We describe the
activities of this waterfall model of the software life cycle

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Figure The activities in the waterfall model of the software life cycle
Requirements specification
Requirements specification begins at the start of product development. Though the requirements are from
the customers perspective, if they are to be met by the software product they must be formulated in a
language suitable for implementation. Requirements are usually initially expressed in the native language
of the customer. The executable languages for software are less natural and are more closely related to a
mathematical language in which each term in the language has a precise interpretation, or semantics. The
transformation from the expressive but relatively ambiguous natural language of requirements to the
more precise but less expressive executable languages is one key to successful development. Task
analysis techniques, which are used to express work domain requirements in a form that is both
expressive and precise.
Architectural design
The requirements specification concentrates on what the system is supposed to do. The next activities
concentrate on how the system provides the services expected from it. The first activity is a high-level
decomposition of the system into components that can either be brought in from existing software
products or be developed from scratch independently. An architectural design performs this
decomposition. It is not only concerned with the functional decomposition of the system, determining
which components provide which services. It must also describe the interdependencies between separate
components and the sharing of resources that will arise between components.

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Detailed design
The architectural design provides a decomposition of the system description that allows for isolated
development of separate components which will later be integrated. For those components that are not
already available for immediate integration, the designer must provide a sufficiently detailed description
so that they may be implemented in some programming language. The detailed design is a refinement of
the component description provided by the architectural design. The behavior implied by the higher-level
description must be preserved in the more detailed description.
There will be more than one possible refinement of the architectural component that will satisfy the
behavioral constraints. Choosing the best refinement is often a matter of trying to satisfy as many of the
non-functional requirements of the system as possible. Thus the language used for the detailed design
must allow some analysis of the design in order to assess its properties.
Coding and unit testing
The detailed design for a component of the system should be in such a form that it is possible to
implement it in some executable programming language. After coding, the component can be tested to
verify that it performs correctly, according to some test criteria that were determined in earlier activities.
Research on this activity within the life cycle has concentrated on two areas. There is plenty of research
that is geared towards the automation of this coding activity directly from a low-level detailed design.
Most of the work in formal methods operates under the hypothesis that, in theory, the transformation
from the detailed design to the implementation is from one mathematical representation to another and so
should be able to be entirely automated. Other, more practical work concentrates on the automatic
generation of tests from output of earlier activities which can be performed on a piece of code to verify
that it behaves correctly.
Integration and testing
Once enough components have been implemented and individually tested, they must be integrated as
described in the architectural design. Further testing is done to ensure correct behavior and acceptable use
of any shared resources. It is also possible at this time to perform some acceptance testing with the
customers to ensure that the system meets their requirements. It is only after acceptance of the integrated
system that the product is finally released to the customer.
Maintenance
After product release, all work on the system is considered under the category of maintenance, until such
time as a new version of the product demands a total redesign or the product is phased out entirely.
Consequently, the majority of the lifetime of a product is spent in the maintenance activity. Maintenance
involves the correction of errors in the systems which are discovered after release and the revision of the
system services to satisfy requirements that were not realized during previous development.

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2. Explain Norman’s Seven Principles for Transforming Difficult Tasks into Simple Ones.
1) Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head. People work better when the knowledge
they need to do a task is available externally – either explicitly or through the constraints imposed by
the environment. But experts also need to be able to internalize regular tasks to increase their
efficiency. So systems should provide the necessary knowledge within the environment and their
operation should be transparent to support the user in building an appropriate mental model of what is
going on.
2) Simplify the structure of tasks. Tasks need to be simple in order to avoid complex problem solving
and excessive memory load. There are a number of ways to simplify the structure of tasks. One is to
provide mental aids to help the user keep track of stages in a more complex task. Another is to use
technology to provide the user with more information about the task and better feedback. A third
approach is to automate the task or part of it, as long as this does not detract from the users
experience. The final approach to simplification is to change the nature of the task so that it becomes
something simpler. In all of this, it is important not to take control away from the user.
3) Make things visible: bridge the gulfs of execution and evaluation. The interface should make clear
what the system can do and how this is achieved, and should enable the user to see clearly the effect
of their actions on the system.
4) Get the mappings right. User intentions should map clearly onto system controls. User actions should
map clearly onto system events. So it should be clear what does what and by how much. Controls,
sliders and dials should reflect the task – so a small movement has a small effect and a large
movement a large effect.
5) Exploit the power of constraints, both natural and artificial. Constraints are things in the world that
make it impossible to do anything but the correct action in the correct way. A simple example is a
jigsaw puzzle, where the pieces only fit together in one way. Here the physical constraints of the
design guide the user to complete the task.
6) Design for error. To err is human, so anticipate the errors the user could make and design recovery
into the system.
7) When all else fails, standardize. If there are no natural mappings then arbitrary mappings should be
standardized so that users only have to learn them once. It is this standardization principle that
enables drivers to get into a new car and drive it with very little difficulty – key controls are
standardized. Occasionally one might switch on the indicator lights instead of the windscreen wipers,
but the critical controls (accelerator, brake, clutch, steering) are always the same.

3. Explain Design principles in detail.

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These principles give us a framework in which to develop universal designs.

1. Equitable use: the design is useful to people with a range of abilities and appealing to all. No
user is excluded or stigmatized. Wherever possible, access should be the same for all; where
identical use is not possible, equivalent use should be supported. Where appropriate, security,
privacy and safety provision should be available to all.
2. Flexibility in use: the design allows for a range of ability and preference, through choice of
methods of use and adaptivity to the user‘s pace, precision and custom.
3. The system be simple and intuitive to use, regardless of the knowledge, experience, language
or level of concentration of the user. The design needs to support the user‘s expectations and
accommodate different language and literacy skills. It should not be unnecessarily complex and
should be organized to facilitate access to the most important areas. It should provide prompting
and feedback as far as possible.
4. Perceptible information: the design should provide effective communication of information
regardless of the environmental conditions or the user‘s abilities. Redundancy of presentation is
important: information should be represented in different forms or modes (e.g. graphic, verbal,
text, touch). Essential information should be emphasized and differentiated clearly from the
peripheral content. Presentation should support the range of devices and techniques used to
access information by people with different sensory abilities.
5. Tolerance for error: minimizing the impact and damage caused by mistakes or unintended
behavior. Potentially dangerous situations should be removed or made hard to reach. Potential
hazards should be shielded by warnings. Systems should fail safe from the user‘s perspective
and users should be supported in tasks that require concentration.
6. Low physical effort: systems should be designed to be comfortable to use, minimizing physical
effort and fatigue. The physical design of the system should allow the user to maintain a natural
posture with reasonable operating effort. Repetitive or sustained actions should be avoided.
7. Requires size and space for approach and use: the placement of the system should be such
that it can be reached and used by any user regardless of body size, posture or mobility.
Important elements should be on the line of sight for both seated and standing users. All
physical components should be comfortably reachable by seated or standing users. Systems
should allow for variation in hand size and provide enough room for assistive devices to be
used. These seven principles give us a good starting point in considering universal design. They
are not all equally applicable to all situations, of course. For example, principles six and seven
would be vital in designing an information booth but less important in designing word
processing software. But they provide a useful checklist of considerations for designers, together
with guidelines on how each principle can be achieved.
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