Human Computer Interaction (COMP352/552)

Food For Thought 4

Exercise 1

You have to design the interface for a computerized book shop. The style of the interaction has to be: direct manipulation.
Produce a preliminary design for the interface, by elaborating on the following points:
  1. Identify at least 3 tasks that clients will perform with the interface, and describe the main operations that will be automated
  2. Design a basic metaphor that could serve as the basis for the interface. Describe the metaphor in a few sentences explaining how a client would interact with the system for the tasks described before and how they would use their experience from the real world situation in order to understand the metaphor.
  3. Briefly describe the interface design. List the basic objects, properties, relations and actions that will be made available to the user in your interface, and indicate your basic mapping from the interface actions to the conceptual model actions.
  4. Critically evaluate the metaphor you have chosen, by giving some examples of errors that users might typically make in using the interface, possibly describing a design choice that can be made to prevent or reduce the possibility of these errors

Exercise 2

Consider again the problem in Exercise 3 of FFT2, but this time you have to design a consistent set of icons to represent the tasks:
  1. go-to beginning of the document
  2. go-to end of the document
  3. go-to beginning of the paragraph
  4. go-to end of the paragraph
  5. go-to beginning of the line
  6. go-to end of the line
  7. delete from current cursor position to beginning of the document
  8. delete from current cursor position to end of the document
  9. delete from current cursor position to beginning of the paragraph
  10. delete from current cursor position to end of the paragraph
  11. delete from current cursor position to beginning of the line
  12. delete from current cursor position to end of the line

Exercise 3

Visualisation of information: for each of the following items, identify the data type that may be appropriate to represent it (1D, 2D, Temporal etc.) and give an example of how each of the visualisation tasks can be performed Note: in some cases the same collection of data can be seen from different viewpoints, leading to different datatype choices.

Exercise 4

Practise spotting problems in interface design. Here is a set of examples. After establishing what the specific problem is (ideally you should look at the picture without reading the text), identify the general, theoretical rule(s) (e.g. one or more of the Golden Rules) violated in each example.