Prototypes and Human Machine Coupling

Two Parts

Part OnePrototyping

Part Two The Politics of HCI

How this becomes this

www.emphatic.se/mamecabinet/

The Role of Prototypes in User Testing

Process Before Prototyping• A ‘contract’ relationship between

client and developers –User not involved beyond initial consideration

• User requirements fixed before design

• User related problems discovered after testing

• Product is tested when almost complete (coded)

User-Centred Prototyping: History

• Systems design traced back to mid to late 70s

• Problem of checking that each design stage meets user needs

• Better understanding of requirements

• Cut costs of user-ineffective design processes

Preece et al pp. 357-359

Systems Development Modelling

• First User-Centred Design Project (1984)

• The Olympic Messaging System (OMS)

• Kiosks (message service) were placed around the Olympic village

Process had 5 stages1. Initial analysis of requirements 2. Printed scenarios of the user

interface prepared – commented on by designers,

management and prospective users

3. Early evaluation results in functions altered and others dropped

4. User guides tested on the main user groups (Olympians, their families and friends)– developed iteratively (over 200

slightly modified versions were produced)

5. Simulations constructed, evaluated and tested with users

Principles of user-centered designThe key principles of user-centred design were

developed from the design of the OMS (Gould, 1987 - summarized)

1. From an early stage design process focuses on users and their task

2. Observations of user reactions and performance recorded and analyzed using scenarios, manuals, simulations and prototypes.

3. Design iteratively

4. Usability factors taken together and responded to by design team

Iterative processPlanning

Concept testing

Testing user participation

ObservingReporting

Feedback into project

Prototype

• See example on YouTube• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v

=9wQkLthhHKA

The Politics of HCI

User Centred Design

‘Nobody is ever against usability’ Donald A. Norman, Emotional Design, New York: Basic Books 2004 p. 39

Work

User Centred Design

What are the issues?

Locating the Prototype in Three Paradigms of HCI (recapping MS2306)

1. Ergonomics and Engineering• Making things and people work

2. Cognitive Science • Putting minds to work

3. Situated Perspectives (user experiences)• Context• Learning• Ambience• Emotion & Affect• What kind of work is this?

Paper by Harrison, Tatar & Sengers Proceedings from ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

http://people.cs.vt.edu/~srh/Downloads/TheThreeParadigmsofHCI.pdf

Three [managerial] Paradigms of HCI

Management of efficient human-

machine coupling

(Taylorism)

Management of perception, attention &

memory

(Post- Taylorism)

Management of noncognitive and

neurological unconscious

(?????)

Ergonomics Cognitive HCI Noncognitive HCI

First Paradigm Ergonomics and Engineering

• Considers “interaction as a form of man-machine coupling in ways inspired by industrial engineering and ergonomics.” Harrison, Tatar, Sengers

A political-economic dimension

Scientific Management

Read Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/taylor/principles/index.htm

Critique of TaylorismTaylor states that “engineers and managers

are best suited to counteract the evil of inefficiency in the workplace and lead the way to efficiency with scientific management”

(See Taylor 1911, p. 5).

Taken from “Intuitive interaction – Steps towards an integral understanding of the user experience in interaction design By Brigitte Kaltenbacher (Goldsmith’s PhD Thesis)

“Work should be re-organised according to the following principles…

• “A division of labour between management and workers.”

• “managers would control work processes rather then foremen or skilled workers.”

• “A division of individual tasks… to improve efficiency and “develop a science for each element of a mans’ work.”

• “Scientific time motion studies to control costs and the efficiency of movements during work processes.”

Critique of Taylorism

• Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s critique of Taylorism as the “massification”of labour

• “Taylorism and the Mechanization of the Worker”

Taylorism, Mechanization, and the Worker’s Brain

Taylorism, Mechanization, and the Worker’s Brain

• “[Taylorism] is not the spiritual death of man. Once the process of adaptation has been completed, what really happens is that the brain of the worker, far from being mummified, reaches a state of complete freedom.”

Taylorism, Mechanization, and the Worker’s Brain

• The only thing that is completely mechanized is the physical gesture; the memory of the trade, reduced to simple gestures repeated at an intense rhythm, ‘nestles’ in the muscular and nervous centres and leaves the brain free and unencumbered for other occupations.”

HCI Taylor and Cognitive Paradigm• Preece sees Taylorism as an

influential, but problematic and outmoded precursor to HCI (pp. 190-191)

• Taylorism “assumes that workers are like machines”

• Requires more sociotechnical approach that considers workers’ perceptions (minds)

Second Paradigm

“... organized around a central metaphor of mind and computer as coupled information processors.”

Harrison, Tatar, Sengers

Underpinned by Cognitive Psychology

Second ParadigmCognitive Processes

• How does information get in?

• What transformations does it undergo?

• How does it go out again?

• How can it be communicated efficiently?

Harrison, Tatar, Sengers Proceedings from ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems http://people.cs.vt.edu/~srh/Downloads/TheThreeParadigmsofHCI.pdf

Why are cognitive processes important to usability?

• How people perceive and interpret a task

• What they pay attention to• How they become aware• How they process

experiences mentally• How they remember

(memory)• How they make choices and

decisions

Mental Models

Further Reading Mental Models in Usability

The Mind and Decisions to Act

Donald Norman

External world processed internally

Mind Processing

So where are the politics?

So where are the politics?

So where are the politics?• Shift away from physical

labour (the worker’s body and the machine)

• The focus shifts to the USER and their minds (mental labour)

• Question: If Taylorism treats human bodies as part of the machine, then what does post-Taylorism do?

• How does this relate to the cognitive paradigm…?

Cognitive Capitalism

• “Industrial society was characterized by… concepts of manual labor, production of goods, and fatigue.

• “Between 1940 and 1960… gradually replaced by new concepts of cognitive labor, [and] information processing…”

• “Taylorism… and behaviorism gave way to engineering psychology, "human information processing," and cognitive science.”

Read Lev Manovich The Labor of Perception http://www.manovich.net/TEXT/labor.html

Cognitive Capitalism

• “The disciplines of the efficiency of the body were replaced by the disciplines concerned with the efficiency of the new instrument of labor -- the mind.”

• Lev Manovich The Labor of Perception (http://www.manovich.net/TEXT/labor.html)

Cognitive Capitalism and the Information Age

• “[the transition from the] work of the laborer to the work of communication," ensures that work is primarily "cognitive or semiotic." Pierre Naville cited in

Manovich

A New Kind of Worker

A New Kind of Worker

• “the cerebral worker whose material and product is 'information' is emblematic of the vast distance traversed between the worker who surveys complex technologies of communication and the 'man-beef' of Taylor." Rabinbach cited in Manovich

• The knowledge worker!• The Cognitive Subject

Cognitive Capitalism Defined

• We move beyond the separation between mind and brawn typical of Taylorised work

•Edited definition taken from Ed Emery’s summary at http://p2pfoundation.net/Cognitive_Capitalism

The role of knowledge becomes

fundamental

• Brain activity becomes increasingly present and important

Cognitive Capitalism Defined

• The production of immaterial elements deriving directly from employment of the relational, affective and cerebral faculties of human beings

Cognitive Capitalism Defined

• A tendency for the separation between work time and life time to disappear

• Increase in working hours… piling-on of additional tasks

Mental Models

Study of mental models and conceptual modelling of user experience

Mental Models and Walkthroughs

‘Designing something requires that you completely understand what a person wants to get done. Empathy with a person is distinct from studying how a person uses something. Empathy extends to knowing what the person wants to accomplish regardless of whether she has or is aware of the thing you are designing.’

From Chapter One of Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy With Human Behaviorby Indi YoungPaperback, 299 pagesPublisher: Rosenfeld Media (2008)ISBN-10: 1933820063

What is a Mental Model

From Chapter One of Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy With Human Behaviorby Indi Young

Paperback, 299 pagesPublisher: Rosenfeld Media (2008)

ISBN-10: 1933820063

Putting the mind to work?

Question?

• Are decisions solely based on how the mind processes information?

Damasio

• Emotion and Decisions• No rationality without

emotion• Somatic Marker

Hypothesis

• Watch:• Damasio on YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wup_K2WN0I

Damasio• “Damasio's (contra-

Cartesian) argument that our reasoning and decision-making processes are not as purely cognitive as we may think they are. In fact, Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis persuasively argues that "emotions and feelings may not be intruders in the bastion of reason at all; they may be enmeshed in its networks."

• Damasio cited in Tony D. Sampson, “Contagion Theory Beyond the Microbe.” CTheory Journal, 2011 http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=675

Problems with Cognitive Rationality

• “Left at the margin are phenomena that are difficult to assimilate to information processing, such as those that admit of variation and multi-causal explanation including how people feel about interaction, the place of a particular interaction in larger systems of use, and elusive and enigmatic aspects of everyday life such as “what is fun?”.

Harrison, Tatar, Sengers

Affect & Emotional Design• “A set of issues arise out

of the marginalization of emotion in classic cognitive work. A wide range of approaches to emotion, notably those of Picard (1997) and Norman (2004), has been inspired by recent cognitive psychology, which argues that emotion plays a central role in cognition and models emotional exchange as a type of information flow.” Harrison, Tatar, Sengers

Norman, D. A. (2004) Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books. Read 1st Chapter

“… emotions play a critical role in daily lives, helping assess situations as good or bad, safe or dangerous… emotions aid in decision making.”

“Most of the research on emotions has concentrated upon the negative: stress, fear, anxiety, anger. But positive emotions are as important as negative ones -- positive emotions are critical to learning, curiosity and creative thought… being happy broadens the thought processes and facilitates creative thinking.”

Usability

Norman’s model extends to the emotional context of the user

Visceral (wired in)– Signals from the

environment enter senses

– Gut responses

– What’s beautiful? – my iMac?

Non-Cognitive Capitalism

• “The emphasis is increasingly on the labour of emotions, affect and experience. These are measured using biometric and neurotechnologies alongside more traditional cognitive tools that probe memory and attention. This is just one aspect of the neuroculture we find ourselves in today where it is not the person, but the neuron, or perhaps the neurotransmission itself, that is being put to work in all kinds of ways to produce a new kind of molecular subjectivity.”

‘Tarde as Media Theorist’: an interview with Tony D. Sampson, by Jussi Parikka on the Theory, Culture and Society blog

Three [managerial] Paradigms of HCI

Management of efficient human-

machine coupling

(Taylorism)

Management of perception, attention &

memory

(Post- Taylorism)

Management of noncognitive and

neurological unconscious

(?????)

Ergonomics Cognitive HCI Noncognitive HCI

HCIParadigm

Workspace Organization

Managerial aims

Subjectivation Methods

Ergonomic• (engineering and

early comp science)

Explicitly Taylorist• The most efficient fit between

human and machine (coupling)

Cog in a Wheel • Testing• Behavioural• Empirical • Atheoretical

Cognitive• (cognitive turn)

Management of cognition

• How to get often distracted users to pay attention and guide conscious decision-making processes.

• Management of perception, attention, memory and action (decisions)

• Post Taylorism• Cognitive capitalism

Cognitive/Attentive Subject

• Testing of concepts • Mental models, cognitive

walkthroughs etc. • Task orientated usability

testing.• Time spent on task, errors

made.

Experience?• (pervasive

computing - - ideas from neuroscience)

• Ubiquitous computing (“Everyware”).

• Management of emotional, affective and expereinces of user

• neurological, and noncognitive interactions.

• Non-cognitive capitalism

The Neuro-Consumer(the consumer’s

experience)

• Non task orientated. • The affective priming of

consumer experience.• Exploring relations between

conscious and unconscious states

• Neuro-usability• Neuromarketing!• New methods of persuasion

Managerial aims of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) The Three Paradigms of HCI – greatly adapted from Harrison, Tatar and Sengers and McCarthy and Wright

Seminar 2

Planning

Concept testing

Testing user participation

ObservingReporting

Feedback into project

Stages of User Testingin a nutshell

1. Planning2. Concept testing 3. Testing user participation 4. Observing5. Reporting6. Feedback into project

Seminar QuestionIn groups discuss what you think should be included in each

stageConsider the specifics of your project and how user testing will

relate to your project

1. Planning2. Concept testing 3. Testing user participation 4. Observing5. Reporting6. Feedback into project

Planning User TestingPlanning• What are you testing?• Who are the users?• What format – paper prototypes?• Where is the location for the testing Concept testing• How will user concepts be captured –

questionnaires, observations, reports, video/audio • How can you test user concepts before setting out?

– pre-test questions, interviews on everyday day usage, focus groups

Testing User Participation

1. How will the user carry out the tests?– How is “usage” established? Paper prototypes?

2. What post-test questions are asked? – How do these relate to pre-test concepts

Observation

1. What is the role of the observer?

– Will the tester be visible or invisible?

2. The architecture of the user test location is key?

3. It must assist clear, but hindrance-free observation. How?

Reporting1. Report on “everything” observed?2. How can report focus on improvements?3. Should the report be text, text/images, video/audio?

– Think about your own presentation

4. How does the report inform layout and visual design, platform specifications, technical jargon,

5. Ultimately, what does the test tell you about the user's conceptual model of the task and how the project ‘design’ can learn from the test

Feedback into Paper Prototype

• Define area of the interface• List of elements that will be displayed• Design opening page layout• Design interactions (add on paper menus etc) • Test on focus group• Make changes accordingly

Next four seminars

Stages

• Learning (week three)• Looking (week four)

• Asking (week five)• Trying (week six)