week 2 notes: design principles and feedback cycles
lesson 2.1: introduction to principles
Interfaces: Between Users and Tasks
To design a good interface, we need to understand both the user's goals and the tasks they're trying to accomplish.
Understanding the task is really important.
One of the mistakes many novice designers make, is jumping too quickly to the interface, without understanding the task.
by focusing on the task instead of just the interface, we can come up with more revolutionary designs
Usefulness and Usability
The ultimate goal of design in HCI is to create interfaces that are both useful and useable.
Biggest concern is usability
Views of the User: Processor
In looking at human-computer interaction, it's important that to understand the role that we expect the human to play in this overall system.
there are three different possible types of roles the human can play: 
Processor--> They take input in, and they spit output out.
If we are designing with this role in mind, then our main concern is that
These are things like what humans can sense, what they can store in memory, and what they can physically do in the world.
In this case, usability means that the interface is physically usable.
we evaluate our interfaces with quantitative experiments.
That means we take numeric measurements on how quickly the user can complete some tasks or how quickly they might react to some incoming stimulus.
views of the user: predictorHere, we care deeply about the human's knowledge, experience, expectations, and their thought process.
That's why we call them the predictor.
Views of the User and Psychological Schools of Thought
The 3 different views come from psychology
> The processor view of the user goes back to the behaviorist school of psychology--> behaviorism
- Behaviorism was the dominant school of thought in psychology throughout the late 19th century.
> The predictor view of the user goes back to the next major school of thought in psychology, Cognitive psychology
- While Behaviorism was only concerned with what we could observe, Cognitivism is concerned with what goes on inside the mind.
> the participant view resembles the functionalism view of psychology, which emphasizes examining mental behaviors in the context of broader environments.
Conclusion to Intro to Design Principles
basic things we need to understand before talking about design principles.
> the idea that interfaces mediate between users and tasks, and the best interfaces are those that let the user spend as much time thinking about the task as possible.
> the idea of usability and how you have to keep in mind the efficiency and user satisfaction of the interface.
> three views of the user and how those different views affect how we define usability and evaluation.
the user experience does not exist just at the user level but also at group and even societal levels.
Feedback cycles are fundamental
Feedback cycles are incredibly ubiquitous, whether or not there's a computational interface involved.
We find that nearly all of HCI can be interpreted in some ways as an application of feedback cycles, whether between a person and a task, a person and an interface, or systems comprised of multiple people and multiple interfaces.
Feedback cycles conclusion
We describe feedback cycles for our purposes as the exchange of input and output between a user and a system to accomplish some goal.
gulf of execution ---> the distance between knowing what they want to accomplish and actually executing the steps necessary to accomplish it.
gulf of evaluation ---> the distance between making some change in the system and evaluating whether or not the goal was accomplished.
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