EBoard 05: Working with humans

This class will be recorded! Its use will be limited to members of the class. Please do not share with others.

Approximate overview

• Preliminaries
  • Administrative stuff
  • Q&A
• Demo fair!
• Break
• Demo debrief
• Class design discussion
• Investigation 3 team meeting

Administrative stuff

General Notes

• Sam: Don’t forget to turn on the captions!
• Don’t forget that Mai is available to serve as a resource on investigations.

Upcoming Activities

• CS Table Monday at Noon
• CS Extras Thursday at 5pm: Rosario Robinson on Open Source

Work for Monday’s class

• Lewis & Rieman (1994). Getting to know users and their tasks.
  Chapter 2 of Task-Centered User Interface Design. http://hcibib.org/tcuid/chap-2.html.
• Salazar (2020). Contextual inquiry: Inspire design by observing and interviewing users in their context. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/contextual-inquiry/
• Baumer and Silverman (2011). When the implication is not to design (technology). In CHI ‘11. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1978942.1979275
• Journal 6a: Main points
• Journal 6b: Compare and Contrast
• Task 6: Representing tasks

Work for Friday’s class

• Investigation 3: Users and their tasks.
  • Teams are posted on the Investigation 3 channel on the class team.
  • I’ve used the NATO Phonetic Alphabet to name teams. (The NATO Phonetic Alphabet was an interesting design challenge.)
  • Investigation 3 channel
• More readings!

Q&A

Box and Room Fair

Process (feel free to modify):

• Tell us about your project.
• Show us your project.
• Sam shows the video (in most cases).
• Tell us about your observations.
• Q&A

Observations

• Asking questions is hard.
• Some people don’t know when to stop. Signal stopping? [x3]
• Context matters: People may use a handle if the box is on the ground but not if it’s on the table.
• Don’t lie to your users.
• People interpret words differently.
• Don’t suck up to your faculty.
• Users can be easily frustrated.
• The substances and technologies we use to build devices can make our lives more difficult.
• Sometimes people use parts of your tool in unexpected ways.
• People are destructive.
• Security
• Scope can be complicated.
• Don’t include too many features.
• Instructions can limit play.
• Sometimes there are enough affordances that people may not use your intended affordances.
• Technology makes people feel stupid.
• Some natural affordances IRL are not natural affordances in cyberspace (particularly simulations).

Debrief

TPS

• What did you learn in doing the project?
• What did you learn from listening to other peoples’ projects?
• What if you could not have used writing?
• What other than texture would get people to rub a box?

Class design debrief

The structure of classes is always a design question. The design of online accelerated classes is especially challenging, particularly when it’s a new topic for the instructor. So it’s time for a design debrief slash discussion. Here are some characteristics we might consider.

Workload

• Enough work that I feel like I’m learning, but not too much.
• I’m only taking ten credits; you could double the workload.
• It’s more than a two-credit class should be, but that’s okay because it’s fun!
• It’s my last term, please cut back.

Primary in-class components

• Fridays as demo/debrief days.
• Use of TPS as a primary strategy.
• Assorted mini-lectures.
• Anti-component: Assumption that we don’t need to discuss every reading; you’ve learned from reading and reflecting.
• Etc.

Finding out what’s due

• Teams channels (sometimes posted a bit late)
• Links from the daily eboards.
• Links from the schedule (not always there)
• Email (not used any more)

UD in class

• Eboards
• Distracting Otter.ai transcriptions
• Class recordings

Questions for you to discuss

• What is going well?
• What should I improve (if I can find time)?
• Anything else to add/subtract/modify/try/whatever?

Investigation 3 group meetings