HCI - How to evaluate a device to the relation with these theories such as: "senses (Visual, Auditory, Haptic) and cognition (short term and long term memory)"?

Question

How can to evaluate a computerized device or a software application in the HCI field to the relation with these theories such as: "Senses (Visual, Auditory, Haptic) and cognition (short term and long term memory)" and based on the context where the device is used? Any help or advice is appreciated. Thanks

Answer 1

My guess would be that the senses part would be covered by:

• how pleasing is the device/software.
• how real is the application.

and following from that:

• immersion

Virtual reality is a big thing in the HCI world. Fire fighters, pilots, the army etc etc use virtual worlds to do more and more of their training, it would be important for them to actually feel like they are there so they react more naturally.

What I can think of for short term and long term cognition:

• menu sizes.
• categorization.
• how many clicks does it take to do X.

These all help a user to remember how to achieve task X and where it was located in the software. (I guess that's all long term...)

I hope this inspires you a bit. Go to http://scholar.google.com/ and find some papers on the subjects, at the very least these papers will explain how they evaluate what they are testing, if you can't find a paper that discusses the evaluation techniques themselves.

Hint: If you are studying at a university the university usually has already paid for full access to the papers. Access scholar.google from a computer at university or use a vpn to connect through your university. Direct links to the papers are located on the right of the search result. As a bonus you can configure scholar to add a link with the bibTeX information!

The first result I got was a chapter of a book on user interfaces, which is about testing the user interface. Happy hunting!

Answer 2

There are a set of heuristics that, at least from my knowledge, have collectively become an industry standard method for evaluating interfaces. They were developed by Jakob Nielsen and can be found here:

http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html

Usually when someone says they are performing a "Heuristic Evaluation" or an "Expert Evaluation" that means they are basing it off of these 10 criteria. It's possible your professor is looking for something along these lines. I had a very similar experience in two courses I took recently, I had to write papers evaluating several interfaces on Nielsen's Heuristics.

A couple other useful links:

http://www.westendweb.com/usability/02heuristics.htm

http://www.morebusiness.com/getting_started/website/d913059671.brc

http://www.stcsig.org/usability/topics/articles/he-checklist.html

Hope this helps, good luck!