Saturday, September 9

Designing with the Mind in Mind

A seminar with Tom Hewett, PhD
Professor of Psychology and Computer Science
Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA

Doubletree Hotel at Lloyd Center
1000 NE Multnomah St.
Portland, Oregon

*Discounted member rate applies to members of CHIFOO, partner organizations, and government and educational groups.

Tutorial registration is now closed.

This course is designed for interface designers, technical writers, and anyone who wants insight into some of the workings of the human mind and how they can influence design. Although there are few hard-and-fast guidelines that are always true for interaction design, you'll increase your store of information needed to make educated design choices and learn to avoid some common errors. No psychology background is required.

Course Outline:

• Preliminary Observations and Caveats
• About Human Memory
• The Demonstrations
• Some characteristics of long-term memory (LTM)
• Some characteristics of short-term or working memory
• Thinking about HCI: Questioning a design claim
• One relationship between long-term and working memory
• Elaborative rehearsal
• Thinking about HCI: A design example
• Importance of understanding in LTM
• LTM is integrative, extrapolative and even creative
• Thinking about HCI: User knowledge structures are important
• Memory and HCI: A summary
• Memory Outline and Comments
• Problem Solving
• Problem representation
• Problem solving schema
• Problem solving set
• Some observations about set
• Functional fixedness
• Thinking About HCI: Breaking the set or escaping from functional fixedness
• Another side effect of schemas
• Representation and re-representation
• Complex problems may require subgoaling
• Some rules of thumb for effective problem solving
• A trap for the unwary
• Problem Solving and HCI: A summary
• Tutorial Reference Materials will include
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Appendix A: Example and Problem Solutions
• Appendix B: Some Basic Perceptual Phenomena
• Appendix C: Tips Desk Accessories User Documentation
• Appendix D: Memory Lists and Directions

Tutorial registration is now closed.

Unlike brief overviews of the Gestalt principles and theories of short-term memory that frequently appear in UI design material, Tom Hewett provides detailed references of research and numerous "live" experiments to drive the issues home. These practical exercises are extremely useful to anyone faced with the prospect of teaching or promoting UI design, but they would also appeal to those wanting a greater understanding of the underlying psychology.

—Paraphrasing William Hudson, principal consultant for Syntagm Ltd, based near Oxford in the UK

About the speaker

Tom Hewett is Professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Drexel University, where he teaches courses on Cognitive Psychology, The Psychology of Human Computer Interaction, The Psychology of Human Computer Interaction Design, and Problem Solving and Creativity. He has been a visiting fellow, visiting professor or visiting researcher at the University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland, Twente University, Hengelo, The Netherlands, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK, the Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, and the University of the Aegean, Syros, Greece. Most recently, during academic year 2003-2004, Tom spent a month as Visting Professor in the Faculty of Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.

Currently Tom is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI), the Society for Applied Research in Cognition (SARMAC), the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) and the IEEE Computer Society. Tom regularly offers a professional development tutorial on cognitive aspects of interactive computing system design to interface designers at both conferences and in-house training sessions. He regularly teaches a week-long course module on Human Problem Solving for the User System Interaction program at the Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands. In addition, Tom has made a variety of invited and refereed conference presentations.