Monday, 27 July, 08:30 - 12:30 EDT (Eastern Daylight Time - Canada)
Jeff Johnson (short bio)
Adjunct Professor, Computer Science Dept, University of San Francisco, U.S.A.
jjohnson@uiwizards.com
jajohnson9@usfca.edu
Modality
on-site
Room: TBA
Target Audience
Researchers/academics, Students, Professionals, Industry
Requirements for participants
Course participants should bring their own laptop, tablet or smartphone
Abstract
UI/UX design guidelines are not simple recipes. Applying guidelines effectively requires determining applicability and precedence and balancing trade-offs between conflicting guidelines. By understanding the underlying psychology, UX designers and usability evaluators enhance their ability to apply design guidelines.
This course, based on the instructor's book Designing with the Mind in Mind, 3rd edition, explains that psychology. After completing this course, participants will understand the basic perceptual and cognitive psychology underlying UI design principles and guidelines, and will have learned design guidelines that follow from the cognitive psychology.
Benefits for attendees
User interface design principles, guidelines, and heuristics (collectively called “design guidelines”) have a basis in the psychology of human perception, learning, memory, and problem-solving. Unfortunately, people who design and evaluate user interfaces usually learn the design rules without understanding their psychological basis. UI design guidelines are not simple recipes to be applied mindlessly. Applying them effectively requires determining their applicability (and precedence) in specific situations. It also requires balancing the trade-offs that inevitably arise in situations when design rules appear to contradict each other. By understanding the underlying psychology for the design rules, designers and evaluators enhance their ability to interpret and apply them. Explaining that psychology is the focus of this course. The first part focuses on perception; the second focuses on cognition. The lecture portion of the course includes many visual demonstrations of human perception and cognition. Audience exercises are provided in the form of online demonstrations that audiences will be encouraged to view during designated exercise periods, followed by discussions of what participants found interesting or surprising.
Course Content
- Introduction
- Perception
- Perception is biased by experience, context, goals
- Vision is optimized to perceive structure (Gestalt principles)
- We seek and use structure
- Color vision is limited
- Peripheral vision is poor, and visual search is linear unless target “pops” in periphery
- Exercise: Perceptual demos (online)
- BREAK
- Cognition
- Reading is unnatural
- Attention is limited; Memory is imperfect
- Limits on attention and memory shape our thought and action, e.g., change-blindness
- Recognition is easier than recall
- System 1 and System 2 (per Kahneman, Thinking Fast & Slow, 2013)
- Easy: learning from experience, executing learned actions; Hard: novel actions, problem-solving, and calculation
- Hand-eye coordination follows laws (Fitts’ Law & Steering Law)
- Human error, and how to prevent and mitigate it
- Exercise: Cognitive demos (online)
- Summary, Q&A, wrap-up, evaluations
Bio Sketch of Course instructor
Jeff Johnson is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco (USF-CA). He is also Principal Consultant at UI Wizards, Inc., a product usability consulting firm. After earning B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale and Stanford Universities, he worked as a UI designer and implementer, engineer manager, usability tester, and researcher at Cromemco, Xerox, US West, Hewlett-Packard Labs, and Sun Microsystems. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he was Chair of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. In 1990, he co-chaired the first Participatory Design conference, PDC'90. He has taught at USF-CA, Stanford University, and Mills College, and in 2006 and 2013 was an Erskine Teaching Fellow at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. In the 2000s he served on the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGCHI Public Policy Committee. In 2013 and 2017 he gave talks in the prestigious Authors@Google talk series. He is a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy, a recipient of SIGCHI's Lifetime Achievement in Practice Award, and an ACM Distinguished Member. He has authored or co-authored many articles and chapters on Human-Computer Interaction, as well as the books GUI Bloopers (eds. 1 & 2), Web Bloopers, Designing with the Mind in Mind (eds. 1, 2, & 3), Conceptual Models (eds. 1 & 2, with Austin Henderson), and Designing Technology for an Aging Population (eds. 1 & 2, with Kate Finn).