Chapter 3: Understanding Users

This chapter focused on understanding the cognitive aspects of users. According to Interaction Design, cognition includes attention, perception / recogntion, memory, learning, reading / speaking / listening, and problem solving / planning / reasoning / decision making.

Attention is crucial for us to focus on information to process and is dependent on our goals and how the information is presented to us. Information presentation is important for how easily and accurately we understand the material. The design implication for attention would be to make information avaiable when it needs to be attended to at a given stage of a task, and to use techniques such as spacings, groupings, pictures, colors, and sounds to help the user to focus and sort.

Perception is complex and incorporates memory, attention, and language. Vision is the most dominant type of attention, followed by auditory and touch. The design implications for perception include using borders (which are more effective than color contrasts), icons & other graphical representations (which should enable users to readily distinguish their meaning), use sound effects, etc.

Memory is exercised through a filtering process. This includes 1) encoding: the extent to how information is interpreted when it is encountered affects the ability to recall it later, 2) context in which it is encoded (such as the neighbor at the train station), 3) better at recognizing things than recalling (it is better to browse through a list than have to recall from memory). This is all a part of the PIM, or personal information management.

Learning takes into account both learning how to use a novel application or using an application as an aid to learn. Interactive technologies is a strong example of learning; other design implications include encouraging exploration and to dynamically linking concrete representations and abstract concepts to help difficult material to be more understandable.