User Psychology

Transfer, Affordance, Metaphors

Transfer, Affordance, Metaphors

Transfer, Affordance, Metaphors

• Positive: People always transfer their past experiences to present situations
• Negative: People always transfer their past experiences to present situations

Supporting Users‘ Cognition

• Repetitio mater studiorum est
• Consistency and Interference
• Recognition is easier than recall
• Learning and thinking is context dependent
• Law of Experience -> Transfer of Learning
• Use simple conceptual models oriented at the goals of the user

Supporting Users‘ Cognition

• Repetitio mater studiorum est
• Consistency and Interference
• Recognition is easier than recall
• Learning and thinking is context dependent
• Law of Experience -> Transfer of Learning
• Use simple conceptual models oriented at the goals of the user
• Enable meaningful experiences (e.g., semantics over syntax, self-explaining terminology)

Supporting Users‘ Cognition

• Repetitio mater studiorum est
• Consistency and Interference
• Recognition is easier than recall
• Learning and thinking is context dependent
• Law of Experience -> Transfer of Learning
• Use simple conceptual models oriented at the goals of the user
• Enable meaningful experiences (e.g., semantics over syntax, self-explaining terminology)
• Address different modalities (≠ developping fancy multi-media interfaces)

Motor Control

• Learning, remembering, selecting, planning, and controling of movement during execution
  • The production of purposeful, goal-directed movement pervades all human activity and are a necessary part of interacting with our environment (-> HCI)

Some Key Topics in Motor Control

• Speed vs. Accuracy
• Degrees of freedom
• Simultaneous motor movement
• Visuo-motor integration
• Serial order, motor programs, schemata, scripts
• Skill acquisition
• Strong memory (also interference, negative transfer)

The Model Human Processor

• Perception system
• Cognition system
• Motor system
• ----------------------------
  • Affective System?

Reasons for Integrating Affect

• User experience vs. usability & utility
• „Attractive things work better“ (Norman, 2002)
• Emotions as biggest differentiator in user experience
• Difference between skill and will
• Emotions are part of cognition, affect our perception, attention, thinking, and guide our behavior
• The Final Frontier (e.g., Affective Computing and AI)

Reasons for Integrating Affect 2

HCI focus over time

• 1960- : UI for expert users (system operators)
• 1970- : From Main Frame to Desktop machine
• 1980- : Increasingly novice users (GUI)
• 1990- : Ubiquitous computing, consistent interfacing
• 2000- : User experience, Socio-emotional dimension of HCI

Why Affect has been discared?

• Dominance of Cognitive Psychology and their adaptation of a deficient Information Processing metaphor to the study of humans
• Irrational emotions distract from the study of pure cognition
• Dispute over emotion theory
• Measurement problem

What Is an Emotion?

• Everybody knows - except scientists
• Emotion as
  • Content experience (feeling)
  • Physical experience
  • Motivational and behavioral indicator
• „Emotions as ratiomorph evaluations“ (Bischof, 1985)
• „Emotions as action tendencies“ (Frijda, 1986)
• Affect family: Emotions, Moods, Motivations, Values, Needs

Why Do We Have Emotions?

• Emotions inform us about our inner status and our relation to the world with respect to our goals.
  • Emotions tell us...
    • what‘s good and what‘s bad
    • what‘s important
    • and in what direction we would like to change matters.

Role of Affect in Use Interaction

• Affect Use Interaction
  • Affect Use Interaction

Emotions as Goals of Use

Emotions as Goals of Use 2

Affect and Cognition

• Mood, emotions, and attitudes selectively capture our attention, memory, and thinking
  • Productive use through emotionally-laden stimuli
    • E.g., Colors, Music, Humour, Alerts
  • The downside is attention rigidness, distraction, and neglect
    • E.g., Errors, dominance of negative events, contextual information gets lost

Affect and Cognition

Affect and Cognition

• Positive mood enhances cognitive activity and boosts creativity. LOL.
• Medium level arousal enhances learning and performance.
• Positive emotions can balance out negative experiences and influence the use experience in a holistic way.
• Positive emotions are rewarding and motivating.

Affect and Cognition

• Negative emotions and attitudes hinder effective, efficient, satisfying use.
• Anxiety (e.g., fear of failure) reduces Working Memory capacity, causes slower learning, hinders performance (even for easy tasks), and builds up negative attitudes.
• Negative attitudes result in use avoidance, impaired learning and use, and predict negative future attitudes.

Aesthetics

• Aesthetics alter users' perceptions of usefulness, usability, performance (Davis, 1989; Dillon, 2001, Norman, 2002)
• Apparent vs. inherent usability (Kurosu & Kashimura, 1995; Tractinsky, 1997)

Relevance

• People expect things that look good to work better
• Indeed, they often actually do! (e.g., obey laws of perception, motivate people, place them into good mood)
• Self-fulfilling prophecy: Negative expectations affect users’ subsequent evaluation of the interface (i.e., expression of dissatisfaction). (Hiltz & Johnson, 1990)
• However: Don‘t hide bad interaction design behind beauty.
• Also: Aesthetics is not culture-free!

The Positive Affective Chain

• Looks good, sounds good (aestethics, attractivity)
• Feels good (symbolics, trust, pride, identification)
• Is good for me (emotional evaluation, attitude)
• I Want it (motivation, intention)
• I Use it (behavior, action)

The Negative Affective Chain

• Looks unappealing, confusing
• Embarrasses me, intimidates me
• I don‘t like it
• Aversion, anxiety
• I avoid it, or use it with discomfort

Technophobia & Computer Anxiety

• Think negatively about technology use
• Feel negatively about and during use
• Ineffective and inefficient use
• Use avoidance

Who is technophobic?

„Fear Factors“

• Disposition
• Lack of clarity (what, how, where, who, why)
• Lack of control
• Relevance of outcome
• Lack as well as type of prior experiences (especially failures and errors)

References

• Dalal, N.P., Quible, Z., & Wyatt, K. (1999). Cognitive design of home pages: an experimental study of comperhension on the WWW. Information Processing and Management, 36, 607-621.

• Card, S. K., Moran, T. P., & Newell, A. (1983). The Psychology of Human Computer Interaction.

  Lawrence Erlbaum.

• Newell, A. & Card, S. K. (1985). The prospects for psychological science in human-computer interaction. Human-Computer Interaction, 1(3), 209-242.
• Landauer, T. K. (1987). Psychology as a mother of invention. In J. M. Carroll & P. P. Tanner (Eds.), Proceedings of the SIGCHI/GI conference on Human factors in computing systems and graphics interface (pp. 333-335). New York: ACM Press.
• Koffka, K. (1935). Principles of Gestalt Psychology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Stroop, J.R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 643-662.
• Bower, G. H. (1981). Mood and memory. American Psychologist, 36(2), 149-158.
• Frijda, N. H. (1986). The emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Norman, D. A. (2002). Emotion and design: Atrractive things work better. Interactions Magazine, ix (4), 36-42.
• Mehrabian, A. (1995). Framework for a comprehensive description and measurement of emotional states. Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs, 121, 339-361.

References

• Hiltz, S.R. and Johnson, K. User satisfaction with computer mediated communication systems, Management Science. 30.6 (1990). 739-764.
• Kurosu, M, & Kashimura, K. (1995). Apparent usability vs. inherent usability: experimental analysis on the determinants of the apparent usability. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM Press.
• Atkinson, R. C. & Shiffrin, R. M. (1968). Human memory: A proposed system and its control processes. In K.W. Spence & J.T. Spence (Eds.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol 2. New York: Academic Press.
• Norman, D. A., & Draper, S. W. (Eds.) (1986). User centered system design: New perspectives on human-computer interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Irina Ceaparu, Jonathan Lazar, Katie Bessiere, John Robinson and Ben Shneiderman Determining Causes and Severity of End-User Frustration
• Seyle, H. (1956). The Stress of Life.
• Picard, R.; Affective Computing, MIT Press, 1997
• Weil, M.M. & Rosen, L.D. (1995). The Psychological Impact of Technology from a Global Perspective: A Study of Technological Sophistication and Tehnnophobia in University Students from Twenty-Three Countries. Computers in Human Behavior, 11(1), 95-133.