Something which comes as no surprise to anyone is people get pissed off when some software twiddler changes the GUI and something doesn't work as it previously did. We all know it but the software twiddlers keep doing it so that disconnection has led to the paper. (Science Daily: People find changes in user interfaces annoying)
The twiddler type of changes are something for which I often rag Facebook since those wankers will move a button from this part of the screen to another one for no apparent reason. It won't do anything different; it just moved. After you find the button again, the only reaction from people after seeing that is, "Just why the fuck did you do that?"
You have lost time and now you're steamed.
Researchers modelled learning and visual search and predicted how users learn new or partially changed user interfaces. The model shows that even small changes can disturb visual search and impede use.
'The problem even with new, high-performance user interfaces is that the user must learn something new, and this is time-consuming. Especially in the beginning, searching for important functionalities may take so much time that the user will not change to a more powerful user interface, but gets frustrated. In our study, we examined how much time users at different stages of learning need in order to find the functionalities, and how learning progresses', explains Postdoctoral Researcher Jussi Jokinen from the Aalto University Department of Communications and Networking.
- SD
Here's how they went after it:
Researchers combined mathematical models and the basic psychological phenomena of learning and measured participants' gaze and the time they spent searching for user interface functionalities. This way they monitored changes in the paths of users' gaze, as learning progressed, and how searching for the functionalities speeded up as users gained more experience.
'Based on the observations, we modelled the way people learn to use different types of user interfaces. We considered long-term memory, visual short-term memory, and eye movements and showed that it is possible to optimise user interfaces for learnability. Therefore, making the user interface as efficient as possible is not the sole objective of design, but the designer has to strike a balance between efficiency and learnability', says Jokinen.
'A similar psychological model predicting both eye movements and learning has not been available to designers before', he continues.
- SD
What good is it to you:
'The same model can be used to develop websites and user interfaces for various occupations. For example, many interfaces can be a visually appealing, but difficult to learn. Therefore, it is good that we know more about human learning and can model learning in different ways', he continues.
The results will be presented at the world's largest computer-human interaction conference CHI in Denver, USA, in May 2017. The study has been carried out in cooperation with Kochi University of Technology in Japan. The research group of Professor Antti Oulasvirta focuses on computational methods that apply mathematical models to human behaviour.
The complete publication is available on the research group's website at https://users.aalto.fi/~jokinej10/visual-search/
- SD
How this will apply precisely in your life is unpredictable but you're aware of the problem or will be the next time a GUI bites you while you try to complete a purchase or some such. All you wanted was to buy a pussy hat but now you're pissed off because of a bad GUI and you still have no pussy hat.
Hopefully more take heed and Apple has been relatively good about it. Maybe Apple is even the forerunner but that kind of GUI thinking needs to be much more pervasive.
The twiddler type of changes are something for which I often rag Facebook since those wankers will move a button from this part of the screen to another one for no apparent reason. It won't do anything different; it just moved. After you find the button again, the only reaction from people after seeing that is, "Just why the fuck did you do that?"
You have lost time and now you're steamed.
Researchers modelled learning and visual search and predicted how users learn new or partially changed user interfaces. The model shows that even small changes can disturb visual search and impede use.
'The problem even with new, high-performance user interfaces is that the user must learn something new, and this is time-consuming. Especially in the beginning, searching for important functionalities may take so much time that the user will not change to a more powerful user interface, but gets frustrated. In our study, we examined how much time users at different stages of learning need in order to find the functionalities, and how learning progresses', explains Postdoctoral Researcher Jussi Jokinen from the Aalto University Department of Communications and Networking.
- SD
Here's how they went after it:
Researchers combined mathematical models and the basic psychological phenomena of learning and measured participants' gaze and the time they spent searching for user interface functionalities. This way they monitored changes in the paths of users' gaze, as learning progressed, and how searching for the functionalities speeded up as users gained more experience.
'Based on the observations, we modelled the way people learn to use different types of user interfaces. We considered long-term memory, visual short-term memory, and eye movements and showed that it is possible to optimise user interfaces for learnability. Therefore, making the user interface as efficient as possible is not the sole objective of design, but the designer has to strike a balance between efficiency and learnability', says Jokinen.
'A similar psychological model predicting both eye movements and learning has not been available to designers before', he continues.
- SD
What good is it to you:
'The same model can be used to develop websites and user interfaces for various occupations. For example, many interfaces can be a visually appealing, but difficult to learn. Therefore, it is good that we know more about human learning and can model learning in different ways', he continues.
The results will be presented at the world's largest computer-human interaction conference CHI in Denver, USA, in May 2017. The study has been carried out in cooperation with Kochi University of Technology in Japan. The research group of Professor Antti Oulasvirta focuses on computational methods that apply mathematical models to human behaviour.
The complete publication is available on the research group's website at https://users.aalto.fi/~jokinej10/visual-search/
- SD
How this will apply precisely in your life is unpredictable but you're aware of the problem or will be the next time a GUI bites you while you try to complete a purchase or some such. All you wanted was to buy a pussy hat but now you're pissed off because of a bad GUI and you still have no pussy hat.
Hopefully more take heed and Apple has been relatively good about it. Maybe Apple is even the forerunner but that kind of GUI thinking needs to be much more pervasive.
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