Human Computer Interaction:
Modeling

Mick McQuaid

2/9/23

Week FIVE

Today

• Q and A from last time
• Discussion leading (Ty Chaney)
• Design Critique (Jyotsna Vempati)
• Article Presentation (Bhanu Kowshik)
• Break
• Modeling
• Readings

Q and A from last time

Oops!

Modeling

What is a model?

• an abstraction of reality
• an oversimplified view of reality
• omits irrelevant details
• the catch: hard to know what’s irrelevant beforehand

(see Jacek’s slides for more detail)

Some famous models

• UML (about nine main diagram types, each giving a different perspective on software development)
• WordNet (models the English language as a network with several kinds of relationships, including component relationships and inheritance relationships)

Kinds of models of concern in HCI

• Flow models
• Task models
• User models
• Other, less prominent kinds

Flow Models

Austin Film Festival Flow

Discover Texas Flow

Flow model used as critique

MUTTS flow model

MUTTS flow model expanded

MUTTS flow model final

Physical models

MUTTS physical model

Problems with flow models

• Informal (except UML data flow diagrams)
• Not everyone agrees about meaning—two people could look at the same flow model and take away two different pictures
• Consequently I prefer leveled data flow diagrams for easily understood detail (but dfds can take too much time!)

Task models

User models

Persona Example

Personas, from Cooper et al. (2014). Personas are waning in popularity but I still find them valuable. The two biggest objections I’ve heard to personas are (1) people use too many of them and (2) they are not real people. Of course, it makes more sense to use fewer if you use too many and it may make sense to cast real people in the role of personas. It is really easy to create personas from a contextual inquiry so it is tempting to create many of them. But creating many brings you the risk of losing focus on a narrow set of objectives that will make your application suitable for one person.

If you work for a large firm with established telemetry, you may know a vast amount about your individual users. It might be possible to draw as rich a picture of a real user as you can of a fictitious persona. In that case, your practice in using personas will still serve you.

Steve Jobs is a stellar example of a user about whom a great deal was known. Some Apple apps, such as Keynote, were created specifically for Steve Jobs to use. He can be a real person you design for, but he can just as easily be interpreted as a persona.

Personas injected into scenarios

narratives illustrating an interaction, e.g., tellyhci.wordpress.com

Path from contextual inquiry through personas to scenarios

Once you create a persona, you can inject that persona into a scenario. You should have an idea of how that persona will behave in that scenario because of your contextual inquiry.

Storyboarding is often used to represent scenarios

Storyboarding, from McCloud (2006), is one way to illustrate a scenario.

Readings

Readings last week include Hartson and Pyla (2019): Ch 7, 8

Readings this week include Hartson and Pyla (2019): Ch 9, 10

Assignments

none

References

Cooper, Alan, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, and Christopher Noessel. 2014. About Face 4.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley.

Hartson, Rex, and Pardha Pyla. 2019. The UX Book, 2nd Edition. Cambridge, MA: Morgan Kaufman.

McCloud, Scott. 2006. Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels. Harper Paperbacks.

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