Martin Frank, Jan. 9, 1997 Copyright Notice: For your use in class only. All rights reserved. These notes may not make any sense to you if you were not in class. Introduce us. Our email addresses, telephone numbers, and home pages. The CS588 home page. What we do. Your need to use email and the World-Wide Web. Mention that your $75 engineering fee pays for those if you do not have other access. To-do: send email to szekely@isi.edu with: (1) Your name (2) Your email address (3) An indication if you are local or remote Are you sure you are registered for this class? Remote students have to send in a form to the ITV center to make their existence known (that is *independent* from normal registration). Otherwise, you will not get any handouts and never see your homeworks again. What is "Specification and Design of User Interface Software"? What is "Human-Computer Interaction"? The books: Interactive System Design, William M. Newman and Michael G. Lamming, Addison-Wesley 1995. The Design of Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman, Currency-Doubleday 1990 (paperback edition). ~$15 Explain class schedule and grading scheme. Cover Chapter 1. The rise of interactive systems, the rise of importance of the people who design them. What are interactive systems? Which systems are we going to cover in this class? How do we know we have succeeded? --------------------------------- -> non-academic measure: market validation -> academic measures: speed of performance, people needed to perform task incidence of errors [safety-critical systems] ability to recover from errors [lack of getting fatally stuck] learning time for system [high turn-over] retention of learned skills [emulate previous system] customizability by users [hard to measure] ability to recognize what system can do user satisfaction with the system [may or may not matter] To be succesful, a system does not have to be perfect (no significant system ever is) - users will learn to cope. What happens if we fail? ------------------------ book story: heavy poll is expected -> heavy turnout is expected --> candidate Pollack turned to Turnoutack before printing own story: group-reply own story: rm *~ own story: Atlanta gas stations book story: USS Vincennes accident Maintaining a track record of success ------------------------------------- -> corporate memory of previous successes and failures -> knowledge of design methods -> broad exposure to existing designs Art vs. Science Discussion -------------------------- Creativity needed e.g. for initial design, Engineering needed for steady improvement and overall design process. BREAK: Form groups during the break. Cover Chapter 2. What's Your Problem? -------------------- (1) What is the human activity that the system supports? (2) Who are the users of the system? (3) What is the level of support the system offers (its usability)? (4) What is the basic form of solution? "Design a cash-operated machine for quick, easy purchase of railway tickets by passengers." "Design a Web site that let air travellers remotely decide on a mode of transportation from the airport to their destination, as well as purchase the necessary tickets, in five minutes or less." Activity to be supported ------------------------ Tasks vs. Processes The danger of focusing on a task without the context of the process. Hierachical task descriptions (use class registration example) Processes - example of processing an email order for a CD, payment by check, the order is shipped Discovering processes: observe, noting: access to files/databases, communication with people, sychnronization with the real world For undocumented processes, the process is really discoved from single steps that the people under observation take. Process improvement: automate, decrease dependencies Users ----- inherent limitations of human beings the users of our particular system Usability --------- (mention success factors from Chapter 1) Choosing a usability target: "faster than before" "with less errors than before" The form of solution -------------------- when to specify the technology used, and to what level innovation - when and why - external vs internal systems Design an alarm clock (as a group). User functions are to (1) set the time (2) set the alarm time (3) turn on and off the alarm. It should have no other functions, use 12-hour (am/pm) time, and you should not assume that your users speak any English. Discuss five or so designs afterwards. Explain class project: (1) idea: system that you use to book transportation from the Los Angeles International airport to one of ten destinations in Los Angeles. The system includes rental cars, taxis, hotel shuttles, public transportation and limousines. (We will provide the data.) Based on different times of the day it can be more or less advantageous to use different services. The main criteria for selection are time and price. Required "interactive" features are (1) a search capability where the users enter their destination and the time-of-day they arrive, and then get their options shown in some way (2) a booking capability where users make a choice and get a final screen which they would normally print out and take with them. Requirements for this class: you have to be able to program the behavior of an interactive system (either in Java, or by writing 'CGI scripts' or 'CGI programs'). If you have never programmed before you probably should take this class at a later time. Clarify that while we use a Web-based system as the class project, this class is not *about* Web-based systems - it is about human-computer interaction. Escape clause: you can do a different project, if it has at least the same complexity. (In that case, send me email