Interface Worksheet 1
Answer the following topics separately and provide rationale on each topic.
1) "Electronic Ballots" Please respond to the following:
· Imagine you have just finished interviewing a recent college graduate for a design position within your company. At the end of the interview, the college graduate remarks that design would be much easier if people conformed to the design, rather than the design having to be accessible to diverse populations. Respond to this comment, addressing the legal, societal, and ethical issues that designers face in regard to human-computer interaction.
· Address what changes could be made to make elderly and motor impaired voters have an easier time with the voting process used in the state of Maryland, USA. Support your answer.
2) "Interface Design Models" Please respond to the following:
· Evaluate interface design models and describe design issues across human-computer interaction environments associated with these models. Support your response.
· Building an interface can be broken down into the phases of design and development. Analyze the activities that take place in both phases, and explain why certain activities should be included in design but not in development.
3) "Direct Manipulation and Virtual Environments" Please respond to the following:
· Your software development company has been contracted to build a tool that will manage user accounts and rights in an Active Directory environment. One of your developers tells you that he wants the tool to make use of direct manipulation. A second developer argues that a command line structure would be a better and more secure approach. Take a stand on this argument, providing at least three positives of each approach, and then make a decision for this project and support it.
· Describe virtual and augmented reality. Suggest a way in which this technology could be used in the future; either to improve a current process / procedure or create a new process / procedure. Provide an example of your suggested use of the technology.
4) "Menu Selection and Organization" Please respond to the following:
· Describe the considerations that you would take into account when selecting the menu style for an application and why. Support your response with examples.
· Imagine you have been asked to help a novice designer effectively organize his menu content in an application. Provide the novice designer with the advice you feel would be most helpful when organizing content for menus. Support your response.
*Please see notes on the following pages to assist with this assignment
Notes to use with assignment:
User Experience Guidelines-
Suggested content in user experience guidelines documents Words, icons, and graphics Terminology (objects and actions), abbreviations, and capitalization Character set, fonts, font sizes, and styles (bold, italic, underline) Icons, buttons, graphics, and line thickness Use of color, backgrounds, highlighting, and blinking Display layout issues Menu selection, form fill-in, and dialog-box formats Wording of prompts, feedback, and error messages Justification, white space, and margins Data entry and display formats for items and lists Use and contents of headers and footers Strategies for adapting to very small and very large displays Input and output devices Keyboard, display, cursor control, and pointing devices Sound, voice feedback, speech I/O, touch input, etc. Response times for a variety of tasks Alternatives for users with disabilities Action sequences Direct-manipulation clicking, dragging, dropping, and gestures Command syntax, semantics, and sequences Shortcuts and programmed function keys Touch input for devices such as smartphones, tablets, and large touch displays Error handling and recovery procedures Training Online help, tutorials, and support groups Training and reference materials The “four Es” provide a basis for creating a living document and a lively process: Education. Users need training and a chance to discuss the guidelines. Developers must be trained in the resultant guidelines. Enforcement. A timely and clear process is necessary to verify that an interface adheres to the guidelines. Exemption. When creative ideas or new technologies are used, a rapid process for gaining exemption is needed. Enhancement. A predictable process for review, possibly annually, will help keep the guidelines up-to-date.While a list of guidelines can be highly useful precisely because they are practical and pragmatic, successful designers remain aware of the underlying theories from where they stem.
Social impact-
Interactive systems often have a dramatic impact on large numbers of users. To minimize risks, a thoughtful statement of anticipated impacts circulated among stakeholders can be a useful process for eliciting productive suggestions early in the development when changes are easiest. Governments, utilities, and publicly regulated industries increasingly require information systems to provide services. However, some critics have strong negative attitudes toward modern technologies and see only a hopeless technological determinism: “Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology” (Postman, 1993). Postman’s endless fears do not help us to shape more effective technology or to prevent damage from technology failures. However, constructive criticism and guidelines for design could be helpful in reversing the long history of incorrect credit histories, dislocation through de-skilling or layoffs, and deaths from flawed medical instruments. Current concerns focus on privacy invasion from surveillance systems, government attempts to restrict access to information, and voting fraud because of poor security. While guarantees of perfection are not possible, policies and processes can be developed that will more often than not lead to satisfying outcomes. A social impact statement, similar to an environmental impact statement, might help to promote high-quality systems in government-related applications (reviews for private-sector corporate projects would be optional and self-administered). Early and widespread discussion can uncover concerns and enable stakeholders to state their positions openly. Of course, there is the danger that these discussions will elevate fears or force designers to make unreasonable compromises, but these risks seem reasonable in a well-managed project. An outline for a social impact statement might include these sections (Shneiderman and Rose, 1996): Describe the new system and its benefits. Convey the high-level goals of the new system. Identify the stakeholders. Identify specific benefits. Address concerns and potential barriers. Anticipate changes in job functions and potential layoffs. Address security and privacy issues. Discuss accountability and responsibility for system misuse and failure. Avoid potential biases. Weigh individual rights versus societal benefits. Assess tradeoffs between centralization and decentralization. Preserve democratic principles. Ensure diverse access. Promote simplicity and preserve what works. Outline the development process. Present an estimated project schedule. Propose a process for making decisions. Discuss expectations of how stakeholders will be involved. Recognize needs for more staff, training, and hardware. Propose a plan for backups of data and equipment. Outline a plan for migrating to the new system. Describe a plan for measuring the success of the new system. A social impact statement should be produced early enough in the development process to influence the project schedule, system requirements, and budget. It can be developed by the system design team, which might include end users, managers, internal or external software developers, and possibly clients. Even for large systems, the social impact statement should be of a size and complexity that make it accessible to users with relevant backgrounds. After the social impact statement is written, it should be evaluated by the appropriate review panel as well as by managers, other designers, end users, and anyone else who will be affected by the proposed system. Potential review panels include federal government units (for example, the General Accounting Organization or Office of Personnel Management), state legislatures, regulatory agencies (for example, the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Federal Aviation Administration), professional societies, and labor unions. The review panel will receive the written report, hold public hearings, and request modifications. Citizen groups also should be given the opportunity to present their concerns and to suggest alternatives. Once the social impact statement is adopted, it must be enforced. A social impact statement documents the intentions for the new system, and the stakeholders need to see that those intentions are backed up by actions. Typically, the review panel is the proper authority for enforcement. The effort, cost, and time involved should be appropriate to the project, while facilitating a thoughtful review. The process can offer large improvements by preventing problems that could be expensive to repair, improving privacy protection, minimizing legal challenges, and creating more satisfying work environments. Information-system designers take no Hippocratic Oath, but pledging themselves to strive for the noble goal of excellence in design can win respect and inspire others.
Legal Issues –
As user interfaces have become more prominent in society, serious legal issues have emerged. Every developer of software and information should review legal issues that may affect design, implementation, deployment, marketing, and use. This section merely touches upon the most important such concerns. For more information, Baase (2013) gives an in-depth overview of such social, legal, philosophical, ethical, political, constitutional, and economic implications of computing. Privacy and security are always a concern whenever computers are used to store data or to monitor activity. Medical, legal, financial, and other data often have to be protected to prevent unapproved access, illegal tampering, inadvertent loss, or malicious mischief. Recently implemented privacy assurance laws such as those imposed on the medical and financial communities can lead to complicated, hard-to-understand policies and procedures. Physical security measures to prohibit access are fundamental; in addition, privacy protection can involve user-interface mechanisms for controlling password access, identity checking, and data verification. Effective protection provides a high degree of privacy with a minimum of confusion and intrusion into work. Website developers should provide easily accessible and understandable privacy and security policies. A second concern encompasses safety and reliability. User interfaces for aircraft, automobiles, medical equipment, military systems, utility control rooms, and the like can affect life-or-death decisions. If air traffic controllers are confused by the situation display, they can make fatal errors. If the user interface for such a system is demonstrated to be difficult to understand, it could leave the designer, developer, and operator open to a lawsuit alleging improper design. Designers should strive to make high-quality and well-tested interfaces that adhere to state-of-the-art design guidelines and requirements. Accurate records documenting testing and usage will protect designers in case problems arise. A third issue is copyright or patent protection for software (Lessig, 2006; Samuelson and Schultz, 2007; McJohn, 2015). Software developers who have spent time and money developing a package are understandably frustrated when potential users make illegal copies of the package rather than buying it. Technical schemes have been tried to prevent copying, but clever hackers can usually circumvent the barriers. It is unusual for a company to sue an individual for copying a program, but cases have been brought against corporations and universities. There is also a vocal community of developers, led by the League for Programming Freedom, that opposes software copyright and patents, believing that broad dissemination is the best policy. An innovative legal approach, Creative Commons™, enables authors to specify more liberal terms for others to use their works. The open source software movement has enlivened these controversies. The Open Source Initiative describes the movement as follows: “When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.” Some open source products, such as the Linux® operating system and the Apache™ web server, have become successful enough to capture a substantial portion of the market share. A fourth concern is with copyright protection for online information, images, or music. If customers access an online resource, do they have the right to store the information electronically for later use? Can the customer send an electronic copy to a colleague or friend? Who owns the “friends” list and other shared data in social networking sites? Do individuals, their employers, or network operators own the information contained in e-mail messages? The expansion of the web, with its vast digital libraries, has raised the temperature and pace of copyright discussions. Publishers seek to protect their intellectual assets, while librarians are torn between their desire to serve patrons and their obligations to publishers. If copyrighted works are disseminated freely, what incentives will there be for publishers and authors? If it is illegal to transmit any copyrighted work without permission or payment, science, education, and other fields will suffer. The fair use doctrine of limited copying for personal and educational purposes helped cope with the questions raised by photocopying technologies. However, the perfect rapid copying and broad dissemination permitted by the Internet demand a thoughtful update (Samuelson, 2003; Lessig, 2006). A fifth issue is freedom of speech in electronic environments. Do users have a right to make controversial or potentially offensive statements through e-mail or social media? Are such statements protected by freedom of speech laws, such as the U.S. First Amendment? Are networks similar to street corners, where freedom of speech is guaranteed, or are networks similar to television broadcasting, where community standards must be protected? Should network operators be responsible for or prohibited from eliminating offensive or obscene jokes, stories, or images? Controversy has raged over whether Internet service providers have a right to prohibit e-mail messages that are used to organize consumer rebellions against themselves. Another controversy emerged over whether a network operator has a duty to suppress racist e-mail remarks or postings to a social media platform. For example, Twitter has been commonly used by racists, bullies, and terrorist organizations. If libelous statements are transmitted, can a person sue the network operator as well as the source? Should designers build systems where the default is to “opt out” of lists and users have to explicitly “opt in” by making a selection from a dialog box? Other legal concerns include adherence to laws requiring equal access for users with disabilities and attention to changing laws in countries around the world. Do Yahoo! and eBay have to enforce the laws of every country in which they have customers? These and other issues mean that developers of online services must be sure to consider all the legal implications of their design decisions. The Internet Association (http://internetassociation.org/), the spiritual successor to the venerable NetCoalition, is a collective political lobbying organization in Washington, DC, that monitors many of the legal issues raised here. Founded by Amazon, eBay, Facebook, and Google, its website is an excellent source for information about privacy legislation and related issues. For the international level, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (https://www.eff.org/), founded in 1990, is a non-profit digital rights group providing support to individuals fighting corporations and governments against baseless or misdirected legal threats. There are also many other legal issues to be aware of today, including anti-terrorism, counterfeiting, spam, spyware, liability, Internet taxation, and others. These issues certainly require your attention, and legislation may eventually be needed.
References:
Shneiderman, B., Plaisant, C., Cohen, M., Jacobs, S., Elmqvist, N., Diakopou, N. Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction.