Methodology II: Cognitive Dimensions and the Gulfs

This chapter introduces two useful high-level approaches that summarize a wide range of aspects of users: how users interact with artifacts and how users perform tasks. A type of analysis, Cognitive Dimension/dimensions, provides a way to represent common and important aspects of interface design. The dimensions are used to describe and then evaluate interfaces. Norman has a similar description of user behavior based on how hard it is to understand the state of the interface (the Gulf of Understanding) and how hard it is to perform an action in an interface (the Gulf of Execution). Both approaches are useful techniques for thinking about, planning, and performing interface design.

[1]  Frank E. Ritter,et al.  One Laptop per Child: Polishing Up the Xo Laptop User Experience , 2010 .

[2]  Colin Potts,et al.  Design of Everyday Things , 1988 .

[3]  Ann Blandford,et al.  Evaluating system utility and conceptual fit using CASSM , 2008, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[4]  H. Simon,et al.  What makes some problems really hard: Explorations in the problem space of difficulty , 1990, Cognitive Psychology.

[5]  David Greathead,et al.  When mental models go wrong: co-occurrences in dynamic, critical systems , 2004, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[6]  Alan F. Blackwell,et al.  First steps in programming: a rationale for attention investment models , 2002, Proceedings IEEE 2002 Symposia on Human Centric Computing Languages and Environments.

[7]  Jonathan Grudin,et al.  The case against user interface consistency , 1989, CACM.

[8]  Donald A. Norman,et al.  The Design of Future Things , 2007 .

[9]  M. S. Mayzner,et al.  Cognition And Reality , 1976 .

[10]  D. Norman.  The psychology of everyday things , 1990 .

[11]  Jens Rasmussen,et al.  Skills, rules, and knowledge; signals, signs, and symbols, and other distinctions in human performance models , 1983, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.

[12]  Alan F. Blackwell,et al.  CHAPTER 5 – Notational Systems—The Cognitive Dimensions of Notations Framework , 2003 .

[13]  Thomas R. G. Green,et al.  Cognitive dimensions of notations , 1990 .

[14]  Elizabeth F. Churchill,et al.  Chapter 22 – Mashed layers and muddled models: Debugging mashup applications , 2010 .

[15]  John Sweller,et al.  Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning , 1988, Cogn. Sci..

[16]  Simon L. Peyton Jones,et al.  A user-centred approach to functions in Excel , 2003, ICFP '03.