READ: Human Factor Evaluation in HCI

 

Human Factor is the property or behavior of an individual and how he or she reacts to certain tasks.
Here are the Human Factor evaluation in HCI that must be considered by system designers.

1. Ethnographic Analysis. 

This is analysis is derived from the word ethnography. Ethnography according to Oxford Dictionary is the scientific description of peoples and cultures with their customs, habits, and mutual differences. The ethnographic analysis studies how people use technology in real life and their behavior towards those technologies. Ethnographic analysis is a qualititative research carried out by ethnographers who meet people, sit with them and learn about their culture.

2. Iterative Design

This is also called prototyping and it is the most crucial stage in the design process. prototyping is a process whereby prototypes are been tested and errors are corrected continuously at the early stage of the design. A prototype is an early sample that is taken, tested and corrected before the final version is made.

Iterative design  involves a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, analyzing and evaluation. the first step is to design a prototype, then the prototype is evaluated and the result gotten from the evaluation which is done by a number of people is used in the next stage of design. This process is repeated until the design has reached a safe level. If iterative design is done at an early stage, it saves alot of cost and Future difficulties.

3. Focus Group

Focus group is a qualitative research method where one person asks a number of people in an open discussion or dialogue about their opinion, perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes on a particular design model. The focus group method gets a large amount of data and these datas are further used to improve the design. In a focus group, individual is free to express their opinions or beliefs without fear or intimidation. Focus groups these days don’t even need to be offline, it could be online via computers that are connected together. However, the researcher or data collector has to carefully select the members of the focus group carefully to ensure that efficient data is collected.

4. Meta Analysis

After the data has been collected from the focus group, Trends are generated from the data. That is what meta analysis is about. It generates the trend to further get data to aid the design.

5. Think Aloud Protocol

Think aloud protocol is also known as concurrent verbal protocol. This involves engaging users and asking them to use the computer and continuosly express their thoughts openly so the system designers can get design flaws that may be not be harmful to the system but have a negative impact on the users. this is usually a thing designers may not notice during the design stage but the users do during the testing stage. An example of think aloud protocol is when the user speaks the word “Seat” to the computer but it interprets it as “Sit” or when the user pronounce “It” but the computer interprets it as “Eats”. This could be as a result of accent and intonations.

6. User Analysis

This is a way of creating a persona for the users. This analysis is used to predict the most common user of the computer system and their behavior so that the computer can be designed to match the demand of the user. This method is less expensive and very effective.

7. Wizard of OZ

This Concept was derived from the movie “Wizard of Oz”. It is used to fake functionality when trying to test the computer with the users. The Wizard of OZ involves someone staying behind a computer and secretly operating it so the user in front of the computer thinks the computer is autonomous I.e works on its own. The person behind the computer usually referred to as the “wizard” receives the input from a user and enter a response into the computer, since it is not a voice message, the computer just displays the result on the screen for the user, the user may also gives the computer am instruction and then the wizard repeats the same step to display or perform the task for the user. This approach is usually expensive and expensive to use.