Human-Computer Interaction Course in Short, weeks 1 and 2 — Needfinding and Activity Analysis

Key thoughts from Scott Klemmer’s HCI course on Coursera, October 2015.

HCI Course in Short

Weeks 1 and 2 — Needfinding and Activity Analysis
Week 3 — Rapid Prototyping
Week 4 — Heuristic Evaluation

Needfinding

Watch and interview the representative people, the end-users. They might be current users, users of a competitive product or even non-users. Approximate is better than nothing.

Post-it notes are good pieces in finding what needs improvement.

Matters what people do, not say.

Ask open questions first, don’t provide the answer. Don’t ask how often user does something, ask how much he did it last week. Don’t ask to make an absolute mark, but it’s ok to compare with something else.

Tailor to the context, which could be the user type, the situation, even the day of the week.

Some methods:

• Diary studies — people complete it at a specified time or interval.
• Experience sampling — usually surveys at specified time, e.g. how you feel now.

Lead users (those who use the product very first, even earlier than early adopters) is a source of innovation. The designer is to convert their individual solutions to something more generally usable. They arise when designers don’t understand what users need or the context is shifting very rapidly.

Learn things from extreme users. E. g., if we’re talking about an email system, those are having a way more emails than most of us or, on the contrary, just once a month.

To keep users’ needs in mind use personas. Those are concretely described users representing real ones, having their own motivation, beliefs, intentions, behaviour and goals. Build empathy with these personas.

Empathy leads to insights which lead to design opportunities.

Activity Analysis

An ant’s behaviour looks complex, but complexity is (mostly) in the environment. So if we change the environment, we change the behaviour.

Design transforms existing situations into (hopefully) preferred ones.

All design is redesign, even if we’re not aware of it.

What matters when you design, what should it accomplish?

Design often includes activity analysis implicitly. It leaps to just one solution. Therefore, we should make it explicit.

• It gives you a conceptual representation;
• Increases your mindfulness as a designer;
• Connects you to the domain;
• Helps you to communicate and discuss with other stakeholders;
• Makes it easier to be creative because you’re taking a couple small steps instead of one big one.

The outcome of activity analysis:

• What are the steps?
• What are the artifacts?
• What are the goals? (how you’ll measure success)
  to turn on the car, or to get some bread, or make a successful evening?
• What are the pain points?
  is it necessary to put the key in, why not just drive off? Or broader, bread could be delivered, or you can walk to get it…

This help us make good interfaces that:

• Reflect workflows that are familiar or comfortable;
• Support users’ learning styles;
• Are compatible with the users’ working environment;
• Encompass a design concept that is familiar to the users;
• Have a consistency of presentation (layout, icons, interactions) that make them appear reliable and easy to learn.

We don’t design tasks. Activities and objects don’t map 1:1 (a smartphone is not just one ‘activity’). We design artifacts.

Have multiple related activities:

• The same person uses the same design to achieve slightly different things;
• Also, different people may do things slightly differently;
• Because they have slightly different goals, expertise, etc.

HCI Course in Short

Weeks 1 and 2 — Needfinding and Activity Analysis
Week 3 — Rapid Prototyping
Week 4 — Heuristic Evaluation