41. What is attention? What are the design implications for attention?

Attention- Selecting things to concentrate on at a point in time from the mass of stimuli around us

Allows us to focus on information that is relevant to what we are doing

Involves audio and/or visual senses

Focussed and divided attention enables us to be selective in terms of the mass of competing stimuli but limits our ability to keep track of all events

Information at the interface should be structured to capture users’ attention, e.g. use perceptual boundaries (windows), colour, reverse video, sound and flashing lights

42. What is the mental model?

People make inferences using mental models of how to carry out tasks. Logo of the website (go to homepage. If not, mental model crashes) – internal agreements based on external agreements

43. What is the Gestalt Rule of similarity? What is the Gestalt Rule of proximity?

Improvise

44. Describe the TOE chart?

TOE (Task, Object, Event) – chart to record the application’s tasks, objects, and events.

45. What is the anthropomorphism?

Attributing human-like qualities to inanimate objects (Dancing car, talking raccoon, M&M’s)

46. What are four basic activities of Interaction Design? What are three key characteristics which permeate these four activities?

There are four basic activities in Interaction Design:

1. Identifying needs and establishing requirements.

2. Developing alternative designs

3. Building interactive versions of the designs

4. Evaluating designs

Three key characteristics permeate these four activities:

1. Focus on users early in the design and evaluation of the artefact

2. Identify, document and agree specific usability and user experience goals

3. Iteration is inevitable. Designers never get it right first time

47. What is lifecycle model? Describe different types of lifecycle model

The term lifecycle model1 is used to represent a model that captures a set of activities and how they are related

• A simple interaction design model

• The waterfall lifecycle model

• The spiral lifecycle model

• A basic RAD lifecycle model

• Netpliance’s spiral model of lifecycle

• The Star lifecycle model.

• The Usability Engineering Lifecycle.