HCI Final Document

SUBMITTED BY: Tharanga Nuwan Chandrasekera (CB002976) Nuwanthi Illukkumbura (CB002926) Thaveesha Gamage (CB003342)

INTAKE: HF09B1 SE

MODULE CODE & TITLE: CE00306-2-HCIU

ASSIGNMENT TITLE: Group Assignment

SUBMITTED TO: Ms. Jina Daluwatta

DATE DUE: 09th February 2010 [1]

TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ 2 1.0 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... 6 2.0 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 7 2.1 PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION ........................................................................................... 9 3.0 User Requirement ................................................................................................................... 11 3.1 Stakeholder Analysis .......................................................................................................... 11 3.1.1 Who are the stakeholders? ........................................................................................... 11 3.1.2 What is the stakeholder Analysis and Why ................................................................. 14 3.1.3 When to Use Stakeholder Analysis.............................................................................. 15 3.1.4 How to do the Stakeholder analysis ............................................................................. 16 3.1.5 Matrix for prioritizing the stakeholders of a company ................................................ 18 3.1.6 Stakeholder Analysis Matrix........................................................................................ 21 3.2 User Profiling and Requirement Analysis .......................................................................... 28 3.2.1 User Profiling ............................................................................................................... 28 3.2.2 Data Gathering ............................................................................................................. 29 3.3 The sampling methods ........................................................................................................ 44 3.3.1 Random sampling ........................................................................................................ 45 3.3.2 Systematic sampling .................................................................................................... 45 3.3.3 Stratified sampling ....................................................................................................... 45 3.4 Questioner given to customers ........................................................................................ 47 3.5 Evaluation of the Questionnaire.......................................................................................... 51 3.6 RESULTS analysis ............................................................................................................. 53 3.7 Task Analysis ...................................................................................................................... 65 3.8 Reference ............................................................................................................................ 66

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4.0

Usability Goals and Usability Engineering........................................................................ 69

4.1 Importance of Usability ...................................................................................................... 71 4.2 The Usability Engineering Life Cycle ................................................................................ 72 4.2.1 Know the User ............................................................................................................. 73 4.2.2 Competitive Analysis ................................................................................................... 73 4.2.3 Goal setting .................................................................................................................. 74 4.2.4 Parallel Design ............................................................................................................. 75 4.2.5 Participatory Design..................................................................................................... 76 4.2.6 Coordinating the Total Interface .................................................................................. 77 4.2.7 Guidelines and Heuristic Evaluation ........................................................................... 77 4.2.8 Prototyping ................................................................................................................... 78 4.3 Usability Goals.................................................................................................................... 80 4.3.1 Qualitative Usability Goals .......................................................................................... 81 4.3.2 Quantitative Usability Goals ........................................................................................ 82 4.3.3 Types of Quantitative usability goals .......................................................................... 83 4.4 Prioritising usability goals .................................................................................................. 85 4.5 Applying of the usability aspects to the given situation. ................................................... 86 4.6 Facts gathered from the competitive analysis ..................................................................... 90 4.7 Usability Goals determined for the current system development. ...................................... 91 4.7.1 Qualitative usability goals............................................................................................ 91 4.7.2 Qualitative Usability Goals .......................................................................................... 92 4.8 Critical analysis ................................................................................................................... 93 References and Bibliography .................................................................................................... 96 5.0 Design and Prototype .............................................................................................................. 98 5.1 What is Design .................................................................................................................... 98 [3]

5.1.1 Design Process ............................................................................................................. 99 5.1.2 Design for the User .................................................................................................... 100 5.2 Design Concepts ............................................................................................................... 112 5.2.1 Shneiderman‟s “Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design”........................................ 112 5.2.2 Nielson‟s Guidelines .................................................................................................. 115 5.3 Types of Design ................................................................................................................ 117 5.3.1 Conceptual Design ..................................................................................................... 117 5.3.2 5.4

Physical Design ..................................................................................................... 118

WHAT is User Centered Design? ................................................................................ 118

5.5 Prototype ........................................................................................................................... 121 5.5.1 What is prototyping? .................................................................................................. 121 5.5.2 Types of Prototyping.................................................................................................. 122 6.0 Reference .......................................................................................................................... 125 7.0 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 126 8.0 Testing................................................................................................................................... 126 8.1 Heuristic Evaluation.......................................................................................................... 126 8.2 Formative Testing ............................................................................................................. 129 8.2.1 Types of formative evaluation ................................................................................... 129 8.0 Critical Discussion and Application of Design and Prototype ............................................. 131 8.1 Requirements .................................................................................................................... 131 8.2 Analysis............................................................................................................................. 131 8.3 Design ............................................................................................................................... 131 8.3.1 Parallel Design ........................................................................................................... 133 8.4 Critical Discussion on Parallel Design ......................................................................... 152 8.5 Participatory Design...................................................................................................... 153 [4]

8.4 Iteration and Prototyping .................................................................................................. 154 8.4.1 Low Fidelity Prototype .............................................................................................. 154 8.4.2 High Fidelity Prototype.............................................................................................. 160 9.0 Workload Matrix ................................................................................................................... 175 10.0 Reference ............................................................................................................................ 176

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1.0 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank our lecturer Miss.Jina Daluwaththa for guiding and advising us and for the knowledge showered on us. Thank you Miss. Without your support this assignment wouldn‟t have been a success.

We also wish to thank our colleagues for the support given to us at all times, by commenting on our assignment.

Thank you!

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2.0 INTRODUCTION Pizza Hut is an American restaurant which has over 34,000 branches opened worldwide. Since 1958 Pizza Hut has evolved to be a world‟s favorite by introducing new innovative ideas for dishes and marketing. The system we‟re designing is for Pizza Hut. Here we‟re introducing a change for the restaurant so that customers will have an enjoyable experience like never before. Our project introduces a computerized ordering system where customers can order whenever they want without having a waiter. Our systems are using a device called Light Touch Interactive Projector. It uses the Holographic Laser Technology and with its multi-touch technology any flat surface, anywhere can now be turned into a touch screen. We are using these devices to project screens on the customer‟s tables which will allow them to do the ordering.

Projector

Touch Screen

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There are hundreds and hundreds of different restaurants all around the world, but only few of them are successful. Is it only because of the delicious, clean food that they provide or is there some other reasons affecting this? Presentation, impressions and feelings created by a restaurant also plays a huge role for the success of a restaurant. Impressions can be made with colors, layouts, ease, and good service. Usually in a traditional restaurant the picture that pops into our mind is, a waiter bringing in a menu to a customer, giving them time to make an order, taking the order, serving food and receiving payment. There are some problems in this procedure which can be improved in order to bring in more business and make the day today work at the restaurant more efficient. The system we‟re designing is for Pizza Hut. They are currently using a simple ordering system with basic functionality. The system we‟re designing is to provide the customer an enjoyable experience and to overcome the problems that we have identified.

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2.1 PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION Waiters are human beings, therefore they might write down incorrect information, or lose the written form of the order. There is also a possibility of the waiter confusing the table they have taken the order from, since they‟ll be taking orders from more than just one table. Another problem that leads to customer dissatisfaction is that customers get irritated when they want to make an order but cannot get hold of a waiter. In rare cases they might leave the restaurant if they are not attended to. When a customer wants to order something after their first order they will lose their appetite if they have to look for a waiter for a long time. When some item on the menu is not available, they cannot remove it from the menu. Therefore when a customer orders something which is not available and they receive a negative answer, they might get irritated. Sometimes when you walk into a new restaurant, customers will not know much about what they are ordering. A restaurant might have a lot of items on their menu; therefore they cannot visually represent everything on the menu. When customers with a certain limited budget arrive they will have great difficulty going through the menu looking what fits their budget. We would like to design a system which will not only give joy to the customer, but also help the restaurant itself. Therefore through the new system we‟re developing we hope to overcome the above problems.

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SUBMITTED BY: Tharanga Nuwan Chandrasekera (CB002976)

INTAKE: HF09B1 SE

MODULE CODE & TITLE: CE00306-2-HCIU

ASSIGNMENT TITLE: Individual Assignment

SUBMITTED TO: Ms. Jina Daluwatta

DATE DUE: 09th February 2010

Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology [ 10 ]

3.0 USER REQUIREMENT 3.1 STAKEHOLDER ANALYSIS 3.1.1 WHO ARE THE STAKEHOLDERS?

According to the Zaphiris (2009) Stakeholders are the people, groups or organization with interests in a project or program (system). In other words stakeholders are the people who will benefit from the system as well as they may get bad outputs as well. Stakeholders play a vital character in a successive of a project; because they are the ones who use the system and they are the ones who affected by the system and also they are the ones who get the feedback and develop and re develop the system. So stakeholders are one of the most important elements of the system. Not only in the developing life cycle. In each and every step in the project life cycle stakeholders plays a vital role. There are main 4 types of stakeholders; 1. Primary Stakeholders 2. Secondary Stakeholders 3. Tertiary Stakeholders 4. Facilitating

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PRIMARY STAKEHOLDERS According to the Zaphiris (2009) Primary stakeholders are the ones who are directly make use of the system by input the data to the system and receiving the outputs from the system. Primary stakeholders frequently use the system in order to perform their work effectively and efficiently. If we take a billing center system as an example; primary stakeholders are the people who input the billing details and user details to the system (cashiers) and who generate the receipts for the user. So this example clearly shows that primary stakeholders are the ones who directly use the system.

SECONDARY STAKEHOLDERS According to the Zaphiris (2009) Secondary stakeholders are the category which gets the feedback from the system. Secondary stakeholders will not directly use the system to get the feedback but they will get some kind of an output from the system. Usually the input data which primary stakeholders are key-in to the system are generated by secondary stakeholders and the feedback which generate from the system according to that data will receive to the secondary stakeholders. As the above example in primary stakeholders the customers are the people who are named as the secondary stakeholders in here. Customers will provide the input data to the system and they will get a receipt as a system feedback. Even though the secondary stakeholders don‟t use the system directly they will have a huge impact on the system, its function and the design of it.

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TERTIARY STAKEHOLDERS According to the Zaphiris (2009) Tertiary stakeholders are the category which is not belonging to the primary and secondary stakeholders and still affect by the systems. Tertiary stakeholders may not provide the input to the system but they will get some kind of an output from the system as a requested feedback. Asking back the same example of billing center; the tertiary stakeholders will be the managers (sometimes) of that particular company or branch. Managers will not generate the data to the system to key-in but they will receive the progress details or progress reports, in order to analyze the company performances which are processed by using the data which is key-in by the primary stakeholders and generated by the secondary stakeholders. And also due to the failure or the succeeded of the system manager‟s profit will increase or decrease. So it clearly shows that tertiary stakeholders are directly affected by the system even though they do not use the system directly. Competitors also includes to the tertiary stakeholders because the failure or the succeeded of the one companies system will affect to the profit of their company. So this tertiary stakeholder‟s category includes various people, groups or organizations.

Facilitating According to the Zaphiris (2009) facilitating category includes the people who are design and develop the system according to the user requirements. Their main duty is to design, develop and maintain the system in order to satisfy the user requirements. This category contains the all the people who involved developing the system such as programmers, system designers and project managers. They also play a vital role as primary secondary and tertiary stakeholders in the system because they are the once who design and develop the system. If they fail to deliver the system which satisfied the user requirements and also perform the tasks in user friendly manner the entire system will fail.

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3.1.2 WHAT IS THE STAKEHOLDER ANALYSIS AND WHY

According to the Schmeer (2001) Stakeholder analysis is a process of systematically gathering and analyzing qualitative information to determine whose interests should be taken into account when developing and/or implementing a policy or program. As mentioned earlier in this chapter the stakeholders are one of the major parts of the project so it is really important to have a good idea about the stakeholders and their interests towards the business and to the system. Ultimately the system will depend on the how far the system can fulfill the stakeholder requirements. Stakeholder analysis is identifying the key stakeholders of the organization or the system and measuring the interest of them, also it is the way to find the influence of each stakeholder groups to the system. And stakeholder analysis is mainly about identifying the relationship of each stakeholder and issues they have. Stakeholder analysis will help to identifies the following main points in a project, 

which human resources or organizations to take account of in development



Groups that should be encouraged in order to take the best out from them.



what are the roles they should play and what are the stages they have to involved in



who to build and take care of relationships with



who to update and seek the advice about the project



Ways to shrink the negative impacts on susceptible and disadvantaged groups.

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3.1.3 WHEN TO USE STAKEHOLDER ANALYSIS

Stakeholder analysis can be done in any stage of the project life cycle but it is wise to do the analysis at the very early stage of the project, because it will give a clear idea about the relationships and influence groups of the company. At times it is good to do the stakeholder analysis in every steps of the life cycle. It will give a good picture of who should be involved in the particular life cycle step and who should be responsible in the relevant life cycle step. So it will be an advantage to the project even though it takes time and money of the project. Schmeer (2001)

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3.1.4 HOW TO DO THE STAKEHOLDER ANALYSIS

According to the Boutelle (2004) there are 3 main steps in the stakeholder analysis. Recognize the key stakeholders in the company First step of the stakeholder analysis is to identify who are the real stakeholders to the project (system), have to consider each and every person who will affected by the system and who will might have a strong opinion on the project. It is a must to meet up these key stakeholders of the company in order to get their ideas, these ideas may be positive or negative, but those ideas will have an immense value when doing the requirement analysis. 1. Assessing the impact and importance of each stakeholder as well as the possible impact of the system on each and every stakeholder a. Prioritize stakeholders

It is always good to have a table to fill the data which is taken from the users. By using the following table it is very easy to identify and draw the stakeholder interest chart and also to key in the data.

Stakeholder Ideas Name of the stakeholder Ex: Tharanga Nuwan

Stakeholder state

Influence

Interest in the System

Connection to the system

Tertiary

High

Low

Use the system in order to get the reports of the company.

Source:(Authors work)  High Influence, High Interest – Some stakeholders in the company will have a high influence as well as high interest over the system. It is very important to take their ideas and view point to the system because most of the time these stakeholders will use the system daily.

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 Low Influence, High Interest - The stakeholders who are low influence over the project but have a high interest on the project can be a very valuable sources of the information. They will provide the past details about the company and they will help the project team to gain the domain knowledge. It is good to meet these stakeholders first in order to gain the knowledge. 

 High Influence, Low Interest – This category is one of the vital categories of the stakeholders, because they won‟t pay or dedicate their time for the project thinking that they won‟t affect by the system or the project. But it is the really important to keep the focus on this category because they have a high influence over the project. As an example these people will be the in charge of the accepting the system in final stage. So in order to get their attention to the project it is really important to provide them the information about the project or the system and keep them update every day.  Low Influence, Low Interest – These people will not have a considerable impact or interest on the project, as a result of that these people can be ignored when considering the ideas and view points of the stakeholders.

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3.1.5 MATRIX FOR PRIORITIZING THE STAKEHOLDERS OF A COMPANY

Following table will give a good indication of the influence of the stakeholders

Source: Anon. (nd)

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Venn diagrams

In stakeholder analysis Venn diagrams are used in order to represent the connectivity and the activities which stakeholders are involved in the system. By using the Venn diagrams the developers can analysis can get a clear idea of the relationships among the stakeholders. Following Venn diagram shows the main stakeholders of the company and their relationship with each other. Other Programmers

Companies

Government Managers NGO

Source:

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(Authors work)

Spider diagram

Spider diagrams are mainly used to represents the activities in the system according to their values. Following diagram illustrate the main activities of a bill processing system and their values regarding to the system.

Source:

(Authors work)

b. Recognize stakeholder viewpoints There are so many ways to recognize the stakeholder viewpoints, those methods will be discussed in the latter part of this documentation.

2. Recognize the finest way to engage stakeholders a. Add in stakeholder viewpoints into design of the system. 

Main benefit of the stakeholder analysis is to gain the ideas and requirements form the users and also to get the permission from the stakeholders in very early stage of the project.



By spending the time with the users, understanding their requirements will give a huge advantage in design a system which satisfied most of the user requirement.

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3.1.6 STAKEHOLDER ANALYSIS MATRIX

Stakeholder Analysis Matrix

Name of the stakeholder

Customers (age

of

Stakeholder Influence state

Primary

High

Interest in

Connection to the

the System

system

High

10-

Use the system in order to order the food and to

12)

experience

the

new

technology.

Customers (age

of

Primary

High

High

13-

Use the system to order the food and to make the

19)

payments,

also

experience

the

to new

technology. They want to see a new item every day

and

like

to

experiments

do

using

system.

Customers (age

of

Primary

High

High

20-

Use the system to order the food and to make the

25)

payments,

also

experience

the

to new

technology.

Customers

Primary

Medium

Low

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Use the system to order

(age

of

26

the food and to make the

and above)

Waiter

payments

Primary

Medium

High

Use the system to check the orders and to check the bills.

Manager

Secondary

Medium

Medium

Get the reports about the menus and payments

Customers

Secondary

High

High

Will get a receipt as a feedback

when

they

make the payments.

Waiter

Secondary

Medium

High

Will get a receipt when the customer‟s ordered the food.

Manager

Tertiary

Medium

Medium

Branch

profit

increased

when

get the

system work properly.

Waiter

Tertiary

High

High

They

will

have

less

work when the system works properly.

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Customers

Tertiary

High

High

Ordering the food and drinks is really easy by using the system

Waiting for a failure of Competitors

Tertiary

High

High

the system and also they are keeping the eye on the plus point of the system.

Developers

Facilitating

High

Medium

Design and develop and maintain

the

system

according to the user requirements. And they may have to re develop the system if user wants a new feature. (Authors work)

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THE ROLE OF THE PRIMARY KEY STAKEHOLDERS Customers (All age groups) – Customers are the main stakeholders in this project, for the reason that they are the people who always interact with this proposed system. This proposed system is 100% depend on the user interaction (how they react to the situations, what are their preferences and how they key in data to the system). This system is proposed to build in order to give a good satisfactory service to the customers so it is really important to satisfy all the customer needs by using this system. As a result of above reasons customer is our main target and they are the key stakeholder of this system Waiter – Waiter is also a main key stakeholder of the system because they are the people who handle the one end of the system. They always interact with the system in order to get the orders which customers made. So waiters play a main role in our proposed system. So we consider them as primary key stakeholders.

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THE ROLE OF SECONDARY STAKE HOLDERS Manager – Manager of the branch will get the reports from the system and they will also get the payment details of the customers. They have the ability to get the menu details as well as the items sold per a day. Due to those reasons we consider manager of the company will be a secondary stakeholder of our proposed system. Customers (All age groups) – As managers mention in above paragraph, customers also get the printed bill from the system. So we consider the customers as secondary stakeholders in this system. Waiter – waiters also will get a printed bill and printed order item list. . So we consider the customers as secondary stakeholders in this system.

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THE ROLE OF TERTIARY STAKE HOLDERS Manager – if the system is successful and efficient more customers will come to the restaurant and profit of the restaurant will get increased. So manager will get benefited by the system.

Customers (All age groups) - If the proposed system is successful and efficient, people can order the food fast and they may save their time. So customers also get benefited by the system Waiter – If the proposed system is successful and efficient, waiters can get the orders fast and they may save their time as well as customers. So waiters also get benefited by the system Competitors – one of the biggest tertiary stakeholders in a company. In industry each service providers want to attract the customers more to their restaurants. So they use various methods to attract the customers to their restaurants. One way is using high technology to serve customers fast. This system is also a part of that high end technology. If the system is successful and efficient then the more customers will attract to the restaurant and competitors will be affected by it. So we consider the competitors as Tertiary stakeholders in this system

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THE ROLE OF FACILITATING STAKE HOLDERS Developers – developers are the people who are responsible in develop the system to satisfy the user requirements. They will design the system according to the user request and they will try to cover all the user requirements as well as GUI. So the successfulness of the system will highly depend on developers.

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3.2 USER PROFILING AND REQUIREMENT ANALYSIS 3.2.1 USER PROFILING “According to Boutelle (2004) of identifying and categorizing your user audience, gathering their statistics and then producing a user persona for each individual” User profiling is one of the most important factors in developing a user satisfactory system When categorize the important factors to a system users will be at the top of that categorized list because user is the one who use the system daily in order to perform their works effectively and efficiently with less effort. So it is really important to gather the user requirements and their views on the future system and on the current system which they are using at the moment. This should be done at the very early stage of the project because only by identifying the user requirements and their needs will make the system success and designers and the architectures will not be able to design or develop the prototypes or any other part of the system without user requirements.

3.2.1.1 WHAT IS USER PROFILING?

User profiling is the way of identifying the user requirements and their needs regarding the system and what are the main activities they want to perform by using the system and how they are doing that particular activity currently and will the user like to change the way that they perform that activity or will they have good ideas or suggestions on the way they perform the activities.

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3.2.1.2 HOW TO PERFORM THE USER PROFILING? There are many ways to perform the user profiling. In following topic call „Data Gathering Methods‟ will discuss the way of performing the user profiling.

3.2.2 DATA GATHERING

Data gathering is collecting the relevant data to the project from the relevant stakeholders. Data gathering is key point of the analysis. Data gathering is performed mainly to identify the user requirements, their expectations from the system also to identify the current system of how it work, how users perform their work, what are the main steps of performing the particular task, also to identify who are the people responsible of it, what are the current problems and are there any benefits from current system? There are various ways of performing a data gathering. Following are the main methods of data gathering. 1. Observations 2. Interviews 3. Document Reviews 4. Workshops or focus groups 5. Questionnaires

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3.2.2.1 OBSERVATIONS

Observation is an excellent method of gathering data from working environment. Generally observations are done in order to gather the data about the current system, because some users may not express their ideas freely to another person; but observing their behavior at work will give a good idea about the current system. For the most part observation is done in combination with another data gathering method such as interviews to fill the gaps. Observations will help to verify the user comments about the current system and to verify the way that the current system works. It is always good to have an expert nearby so the expert can say what to look for. There are many advantages as well as disadvantages in observation. Kendall et al,(nd)

Advantages  Can gather the data about the current system  Can collect the data about how the people react to the situations  Can Verifies the observed data from other sources  Can collect the data about the peoples relationships with works  Can gather the true feedback of the users when they use the system  Can identify the steps of how the things done currently Disadvantages  Users will be nervous during the observation time. So the real behavior will not be able to identify form the users.  Communication errors with the user will lead the analyzer to wrong conclusion.  Selecting observing sample is very tricky.  Ethical issues. (Mainly with women‟s)

Kendall et al,(nd)

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3.2.2.2 INTERVIEWS

Interview is another good method of gathering the data from the user. Interviews are conduct on one-on-one or with a small group of user. It is always good to have a small number of groups so everyone will ave a space to express their ideas. Interviews can be performed in any stage of the data gathering but is good to have interviews in the stage of the performance analysis stage. Even though the interviews take lots of time of the employees it is really good technique because it give the space to gather specific information from the users. It is always advised to prepare questionnaire before the interview take place and let the user to answer the questions by taking their own time. Interviews always fail because the interviewer tries to prove his opinion to the interviewee and always try to get the desired answer form the interviewee. Kendall et al,(nd)

Main steps to have a good interview 1. Selection of the correct person to interview and inform him about the interview. 2. Make questions for the interview. 3. Do the interview with the person. 4. Document the fact and information gathered during the interview in proper way. 5. Recheck the data gathered during the interview. 6. Do the necessary corrections in documentation and sign-off the interview. Main goals of an interview 1. To gather information about the company 2. Can Provide information to the user 3. Can gather information about the functions of the current system 4. Can verify the data which are gathered previously 5. Can identify the problems in current system 6. Can gather information about the processes.

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Things should do in an interview and things should not do in an interview 1. Do not guess anything before perform an interview. 2. Do not get in to pre opinion. 3. Do not give your opinion to the user. 4. Ask both open and closed questions during the interview. 5. Make the verifications at the right moment. 6. Do not argue with the interviewee anytime and respect to his ideas. 7. Be professional and the same time try to be friendly with the interviewee. 8. Never interpret when the interviewee express their ideas. 9. Listen actively in order to give an impression to the user that the facts are really important. 10. Let the interviewee do the majority of the talking 11. Always control the interview and target on the subject. 12. Finished the interview during the allocated time period. 13. Finished the interview in positive manner Advantages  Enable to learn things that cannot be directly observed.  Allow inquiring if the answers are not clear.  High response rate.  Can see the real user expression.  Increase the accuracy of data gathering.  Allow more detail questions to ask  interviewees are not influenced by others  Can gather the sensitive data.

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Disadvantages 

Time consuming.



Sometimes costly.



Communication errors.



Sometimes people will not express their real feeling.



Can only interview limited users (focus group is low).

Kendall et al,(nd)

3.2.2.3 DOCUMENT REVIEWS

Most of the organizations keep records of their activities such as bills, user manuals, and reports. Review of these records will provide lots of details about the company. These records will provide the data about the current system and how the current system works and what are the reports, outputs which current system generate to the user and what are the inputs that should give in order to get the valid output from the system and what are the steps that user should follow to perform a activity. Document review is somewhat like an observation, however document review will give valid details about the current system and sometimes these documents will provide very sensitive data about the previous systems. Kendall et al,(nd) Advantages 

The documents will give a plenty of details about the current system.



Data will be valid.



Data will be in details.

Disadvantages 

The documents might be not valid.



The documents might be Outdated.



The documents may be changed. [ 33 ]

3.2.2.4 WORKSHOPS OR FOCUS GROUPS

This is also a good way to gather data from the stakeholders; this is also a part of observation process. Focus group discussion will provide wide-angle views of what people think about the current system and what their common needs. Workshops usually involved in small number of people around 8-12 and its main purpose is to discuss a one particular topic and gets the feedback from everyone. Participants will be free to express their ideas and this will be really good to identify the common and sensitive issues that system has. Kendall et al,(nd) Advantages 

Will give a good idea about the user requirements.



Data will be in details.



Can see the real user expression.



Increase the accuracy of data gathering.



Allow more detail questions to ask



Can gather the sensitive data.

Disadvantages 

Time consuming.



Sometimes costly.



Communication errors.



Sometimes people will not express their real feeling in front of others.

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3.2.2.5 QUESTIONNAIRES (SURVEYS)

Questionnaires are used to gather data from the large number of people and when it is impossible to meet every one of them face to face. Like interviews, surveys can also be conduct in formal or informal way. Questionnaires are built in very simple way that people can understand questions very easily. There are main three types of the questions which will be described in the latter part of this documentation. Kendall et al,(nd) Advantages  Can have a good idea about the question because it will have various feedbacks from the user.  People will express their ideas freely in open end questions.  Can get the feedback from large group of people in a smaller time. (sample group is high)  Low cost.  Interviewee can answer the question by taking his own time

Disadvantages  People might not response.  No control over the response  Low probability of getting detailed feedback.  No space to clarify the doubts.  People will give the wrong feedbacks  Language communication errors will direct to a wrong answer.  May be time and recourse consuming.

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THE METHODS OF MAKING QUESTIONS FOR SURVEYS/INTERVIEWS

In Surveys and interviews main thing is questions. If the questions are incorrect and they are prepared in ineffective manner then the output will never be successful. So it is a waste of money and the time of both interviewer and the interviewee. For that reason questions has an immense value in surveys and interviews. There are mainly 3 type‟s questions. 1. Multiple-choice question 2. Open-end questions 3. Close-end questions

Kendall et al,(nd)

3.2.2.6 MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTION

Multiple-choice questions are made in order to get a certain answer from the user. User will not express their ideas about the question because user only has to pick an answer from the set of given answers. These questions are really important when evaluating the questioners and interview details. Kendall et al,(nd)

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3.2.2.7 OPEN-ENDED QUESTIONS “According to Changing Mind website (2010) an open question is likely to receive a long answer” Open end questions are designed to get a long and meaningful answer from the user. These types of questions will lead the user to give a long answer about the topic so the user will take some time to answer the questions. Open questions are great tool to promote creative thoughts and problem solving skills, for the reason that these questions will give reasonable response time to the interviewee and also these questions will make a strong bond between the interviewer and the interviewee. By using the open-end questions interviewer can gather lots of data about the current system and interviewee will express their views freely. Open-end questions typically begin with words like “Why”, “Describe”, “how”, As a example 

Describe me what you think about the current system?



What is it you like about the proposed system?



Why would you say this system is a good one?



How do you plan to accomplish your business plans?

Let the interviewee to talk more and listen to their ideas and their view points. Interviewee will control the interview most of the time.

Advantages 

Can gather the interviewee's words which are a sign of his education, values, and attitudes.



Provide lots of details



Give more attention for the interviewee.



Valuable if the interviewer is not ready for the interview.

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Disadvantages 

Might take too much time to gain relevant information



May provide too much unrelated data about the system



Perhaps lose the control of the interview.

3.2.2.8 CLOSE-ENDED QUESTIONS “According to Changing Mind website (2010) a closed question can be answered with either a single word or a short phrase”. Closed end questions are designed in order to get a straight forward answer from the user. These questions will limit the number of possible answers from the user and these questions are mostly used in order to prove a point or to clarify a user given answer. These questions will give precise details that are required. These questions will not reveal much about the users but these questions will test their understanding about the current and proposed system. Close-end questions typically begin with words like “Is”, “Do”, “When”, As a example 

Do you like the current system?



Do you like the proposed system?



Is the current system good?



Do you have a business plans?

Let the interviewee to talk more and listen to their ideas and their view points. Interviewee will control the interview most of the time. Advantages 

Possibly will save the interview time.



|Be able to control the interview



Can easily compare interviews with other

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

Only will get the relevant data.



Be able to cover a huge area quickly.

Disadvantages 

Boring for the interviewee.



Will not be able to get detailed information.



Fail to build a bond between interviewer and interviewee.

Following table will give a good idea about the close-ended questions and open-ended questions.

Open-Ended Question

Close-Ended Question

Describe me what you think about the current

Do you like the current system?

system? What is it you like about the proposed system?

Do

you

like

the

proposed

system?

Why would you say this system is a good one?

Is the current system good?

How do you plan to accomplish your business

Do you have a business plans?

plans?

(Authors work)

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Source: Kendall et al, (nd)

THE STRUCTURES OF MAKING QUESTIONNAIRES FOR SURVEYS/INTERVIEWS There are main 3 types of structures, which are 1. The pyramid structure 2. The funnel structure 3. The diamond structure

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3.2.3 THE PYRAMID STRUCTURE

The pyramid questions are start with very detailed close-ended questions and end in open-ended questions. These questions are really important to warm up the interviewees about the particular topic Close-ended Questions

Start

(Source: Authors work) End Open-ended Questions

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THE FUNNEL STRUCTURE

Funnel structured questions are start with general open-ended questions and Concludes in closeended questions. Provide an easy way to start the interview and interviewee will be more relaxed. These questions are really important when the interviewees are really emotional about the topic. Open-ended Questions

Start

End Close-ended Questions

(Source: Authors work)

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THE DIAMOND STRUCTURE The diamond structured questions are starting with close-ended questions and then more general issues are examined and conclude in close-ended questions. These types of questions are combination of pyramid and funnel structure and these questions will take time to get an answer.

Start Close-ended Questions

Open-ended Questions

Main Point

(Source: Authors work) End Close-ended Questions

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3.3 THE SAMPLING METHODS Sometimes the entire population will be relevantly small and the researcher can include the whole population to the study. These types of researches are called as “census” studies since the data is gathered from each and every member of the population. But in generally it is really hard to interview or study each and every member of the company. So it is a need to select small number of people to represent the entire company. This method is called as sampling. According to the statpac website there are main 2 types of sampling. It is probability or nonprobability sampling. Probability sampling has sub categorize a) Random sampling b) Systematic sampling c) Stratified sampling

Non-Probability sampling has sub categorize a) Convenience sampling b) Judgment sampling c) Quota sampling d) Snowball sampling

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3.3.1 RANDOM SAMPLING

Random sampling is the easiest way of probability sampling. Each member of the population is equal and everyone has an equal chance of been selected. First select the right population for the sampling then give a number to each of them and finally select numbers randomly. This method is good when the selected population is relatively small.

3.3.2 SYSTEMATIC SAMPLING Systematic sampling method also called as nth name selection technique. This is done similar to the random sampling. After the required population is been selected every nth record is selected from the list. This method is user in order to select specific number of users.

3.3.3 STRATIFIED SAMPLING

Final probability sampling method is stratified sampling and this also called as cluster sampling. Selected population is divides into groups according to a common characteristic these groups are called as clusters. A random sample is taken from the one or more selected groups. This sampling method is used when the selected population has less influence over the system.

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For do the research we have selected customers according to the random sampling method because it is impossible to make a data profile to each and every customer in the pizza hut and it will be a waste of money and the time. So by using the random sampling method we have selected 20 customers in different age groups. Our main target is the customers who are around age of 15-21, because they are the people who like to visit fast food restaurants regularly. And also by using random sampling we selected the 5 waiters to do our research and we did a good observation on them and also we did a good observation on customers as well. Customers – we select 20 customers randomly in order to collect data for our system. 1st we observe them very carefully, how they behave and how they react in the pizza hut. And then we gave them a questioner. Most of the people rejected to fill the questioners because they are on a hurry to go back to their works. But finally we able to get the data from 20 customers of pizza hut.

Waiters- waiters reject to give the data in formal interviews because they have been instructed to not to give company details to outsiders. So we couldn‟t able to do the formal interviews with them. But we manage to ask some questions and we manage to gather some data from them. Observation session help us very well to understand how the pizza hut system works.

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3.4 QUESTIONER GIVEN TO CUSTOMERS 1. What age group do you belong to? Below 12 12-18 19-30 31-50 Above 50

2. What type of restaurant do you usually tend to visit? Fast

food

Restaurants Café Pubs Casual Dining 3. From Sri Lanka‟s leading restaurants, which do you prefer? McDonalds

Dominos Pizza

KFC

Dine-mor

Pizza Hut

Harpos Pizza

Other

……………………………………… (State the name)

You may select more than one

4. What is the reason for you to select that rest aurant(s)? Good Food

Attractive

Good

Convenient

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Service Clean

Reasonable Prices ……………………………………… (State the reason)

Other

You may select more than one

5. Are you willing to pay more for a restaurant because of good service? Yes No

6. Do you leave a restaurant because of bad service from waiters? Yes Sometimes No

7. How often do you go through the menu before ordering? Always Not

very

thoroughly Very thoroughly

8. How often do you order something new other than what you have eaten before? Always Rarely

9. Is there a particular reason for that?

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10. Which of the following methods do you prefer? A Menu on the wall Menu book Touch

screen

Menus

11. What is your level of computer knowledge? Very Basic Intermediate Expert 12. Are you familiar with touch screens? Yes No

13. Would you enjoy a restaurant which uses touch screens to make orders? Yes No 14. If “No” state your reasons.

15. In your point of view do you think using touch systems for ordering? (Problems/Advantages)

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3.5 EVALUATION OF THE QUESTIONNAIRE This questioner is done in order to get the customers ideas and their likes and dislikes. This was based on pyramid structure where we start in close ended questions and move into open ended questions. Final questions are based on the answers which they given in the start of the questioner. And it helps us to identify the expectation of the customers. Question 1 – question one is based on to get the idea about the age group. By using this question it is very easy to analyze the age groups and their preferences. Question 2 and Question 3 – this question is mainly giving an idea about the user preference about the restaurant. To check he is a pizza hut customer or not. By using this question we were able to categorize their need and we were able to prioritize them. If they are a regular pizza hut customer we have given them a high priority to them because they are the people who are going to use the proposed system in future. Question 4 – This question is giving us the idea of the reason for the customer attraction to the restaurant and these questions help us to categorize the users according to their likeness in the restaurants. Question 5-6 – using high technology mean restaurant has to spend more money to maintain the equipments in the restaurant. So it will affect to the prizes of the food in the restaurant. So this question identifies that weather the customers willing to pay more money for better service. If the customers will not be like to pay more for better service this system will fail. So it is really important to keep a good eye on answers of this question.

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Question 7- 8-9 – this question is based on to identify the user‟s behavior when they want to order the food. We did a good observation too. Outcome of this question will help us to build and design the system. If the customs pay more attention on new items in the menu, then we have to build our system according to that. Every time user uses the system we have to show them the new items. So this question help the developers to get the user preference and user requirements. Question 10-11-12 – these question will give us the idea how we should design the system and what user like and their computer knowledge. Do they like to change into new technology and do they still want to use the old method to order the food. If they want to use the old method, developers can develop a system which will more similar to the old method but which will use high technology.

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3.6 RESULTS ANALYSIS

Question 1

This shows that most of the people come to pizza hut is around age of 12-18 and to 19-30. So our main focus should be on those age groups and developers should put more attention on this age groups requirement.

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Question 2

This shows most of the people like to go to fast food restaurants. For reason that they like to get a fast and quick service form the restaurants so can do their work without a delay. So developers should design the system in order to give a good and fast service to the customers. If the system take so much time to response and it is so complicated then the customers will not be come to the restaurant.

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Question 3

This question shows that pizza hut is the leading restaurant in Sri Lanka and the reason that they already use a semi touch screen system to order the food. As a result of that they were able to give a good and quality service to the customers which increase the customer satisfactory level.

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Question 4

In this question we have given choices to the customers of the pizza hut and they have selected the reasons for their visit to the particular restaurant. They have select good food and reasonable price as the top 2 priorities and for the 3rd option they have selected the good service. This is really an important fact on this proposed system. Main reason to implement this system is to give a good service to the customers. So it is really important to get the user response about the service of the restaurant and what they are looking from the restaurant.

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Question 5

Entire system will depend on this question, because if the restaurant going to implement this proposed system it will cost lots of money. So the prices of the food will definitely get increased with the technology, if the customers willing to pay a reasonable amount for the service then company/restaurant can implement the system. If the customers will reluctant to pay extra amount then the company won‟t be able to maintain the system and it will make a bad name impact on the company. But the response we got form this survey was really good. 75% of the people like to pay extra amount of money to get a good service from the restaurant. So it is a really good pulse point to the developers. By analyzing this question restaurant can make the budget high and can purchase the more equipment to the company.

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Question 6

This question and its answers clearly illustrate that most of the people around 50% is expect a good service from the restaurants and around 90% people will leave the restaurant due to the bad service of the waiters. So it clearly shows that if the restaurant wants to increase the number of customers they should give a good service to the customers. Above question also a good question for the developers who is going to develop proposed system. Because people highly expecting the good and fast service from the waiters. So it is really important for the developers to develop the system simple and with less complication.

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Question 7

This illustrate that most of the people check the menu before they ordering the items. So it is really important for the developers to develop the system to give a good usability for the customers to navigate through the menus. It should be very simple and user should be able to check the food items and their prices without making lots of clicks.

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Question 8

Most of the people like to taste the new items in the restaurant. Most of the people like to have a change. So as developers, they should be considering about good method to show the customers what are the new items available in the restaurant so the customers can identify them easily. Otherwise customers will not be able to identify the new items in the restaurant.

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Question 9

Most of the people prefer to have a touch screen system. When we talk to them they said that it is easy for them to make the order rather than waiting for a waiter to come and take down the order. They also mention that it will reduce their waiting time on the restaurant. 75% of the people like to use the touch screen system which is a really good point for the pizza hut when they implement this system.

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Question 10

Even though touch screen system is high technological system people who have an intermediate knowledge can handle the system, so 86% of the customers coming to the pizza hut have that knowledge. So it is not been a big problem of how to operate the system but how ever most of the people said they are really like if the developers use single click method because they don‟t like to use double click..

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Question 11

This question highly relevant to the previous question 20% of the people only familiar with the touch screen technology. But as mention above questions this proposed system is very simple one and it should have video tutorials which user will guide through the system. So the user will not be facing much difficulty because they have been guided throughout the process.

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Question 12

Most of the people do like to use the touch screen system because it saves lots of waiting time in the restaurants. Normally in a busy day if a customer enters to the pizza hut then they should wait around 5-10 min till a waiter comes to him to take the order down. So by using this system customers can reduce that waiting time. So people like to use a touch screen system.

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3.7 TASK ANALYSIS “Task analysis analyses what a user is required to do in terms of actions and/or cognitive processes to achieve a task”

(http://www.usabilitynet.org/tools/taskanalysis.htm) It is really important to do a task analysis in order to identify the current system tasks as well as the future system tasks. For the reason that by identifying the tasks of the system, developers can easily understand the main process of the system and they may have the ability to understand main tasks in the current system as well as the future system.

For our project we have decide to use the hierarchy chat task analysis. Where each step will represent a one particular task and it is look like a tree. Each branch will have its own sub branches. If the user wants to perform a certain task they should follow the particular branch in order to fulfil the task.

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3.8 REFERENCE

Anon, 2010, Open and Closed Questions, Changing Minds [Online], available from: http://changingminds.org/techniques/questioning/open_closed_questions.htm, [Accessed 9th February 2010]. Anon,nd, Sampling Methods, Sampling Methods[Online], available from: http://www.statpac.com/surveys/sampling.htm, [Accessed 9th February 2010]. Anon.nd, STAKEHOLDER ANALYSIS, Guidelines for Concept Note [Online], available from : http://www.cphp.uk.com/downloads/GN%20Stakeholder%20Analysis%20Form.pdf, [Accessed 9th February 2010]. Boutelle.j, 2004, Understanding Organizational Stakeholders for Design Success,boxesandarrows[Online],available from : http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/understanding_organizational_stakeholders_for_design_s uccess.com, [Accessed 9th February 2010] Kendall et al,nd, Systems Analysis and Design, Information Gathering: Interactive Methods [Online], available from: wps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/1597/1636070/PPT04.ppt , [Accessed 9th February 2010]. Schmeer.k, 2001, Stakeholder Analysis Guidelines, Kluwer Academin, London.

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SUBMITTED BY: Thaveesha Gamage (CB)

INTAKE: HF09B1 SE

MODULE CODE & TITLE: CE00306-2-HCIU

ASSIGNMENT TITLE: Individual Assignment

SUBMITTED TO: Ms. Jina Daluwatta

DATE DUE: 09th February 2010 Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology [ 68 ]

4.0 USABILITY GOALS AND USABILITY ENGINEERING Usability is one of the main aspects which need to be considered in the process of Computer application development. Though we only discuss about the usability in this area of HCI, it‟s a subject which has a span throughout a lot of commercial areas since its principals and practices are considered as a help to make the output a success. According to Sharp, et al(2007) Usability in general, is the process of ensuring a product is easy to learn, effective to use and enjoyable from the user‟s perspective. Furthermore, it says that it involves optimization of the interaction of people with the product to make sure the activities they carry out at their day to day life to be efficient. Furthermore, they say that More specifically, usability is broken down into the following goals:  Effective to use (effectiveness)  Efficient to use (Efficiency)  Safe to use (Safety)  Having good utility (Utility)  Easy to learn (Learnability)  Ease to remember how to use (memorability). Effectiveness is a very general goal and refers to how good a product is at doing what it is supposed to do (Sharp, et al 2007; p21) . Efficiency refers to the way a product supports users in carrying out their tasks. An example of where this kind of efficiency mechanism has been employed efficiently is in online shopping. Once users have all the necessary personal details in an online form to make a purchase, they can let the web site save all their personal details then if they want to make another purchase at that site, they don‟t have to re-enter all their personal details again. A highly successful mechanism patented by Amazon.com is the one-click option, which requires users only to click a single button when they want to make another purchase (Sharp, et al 2007; p21).

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Safety involves protecting the user from dangerous conditions and undesirable situations. For example, where there are hazardous conditions- like X-ray machines or chemical plantsOperators should be able to interact with and control computer-based systems remotely. To make interactive products safer in this sense involves (i) preventing the user from making serious errors by reducing the risk of wrong keys /buttons being mistakenly activated and (ii) providing users with various means of recovery should make errors. Other safety mechanisms include undo facilities and confirmatory dialog boxes that give users another chance to consider their intentions (Sharp, et al 2007; p21).

Utility refers to the extent which the product provides the right kind of functionality so that users can do what they need or want to do. An example of a product with a high utility is an accounting software package that provides a powerful computational tool that accountants can use to work out tax returns. An example of a product of low utility is a software drawing tool that does not allow users to draw freehand but forces them to use a mouse to create their drawings, using only polygon shapes (Sharp, et al 2007; p22). Learnability refers to how easy a system is to learn to use. It is well known that people don‟t like spending long time learning how to use a system. They want to get started straight away and become competent at carrying out tasks without too much effort. This is especially so for interactive products intended for everyday use, and those used infrequently. To a certain extent, people are prepared to spend longer learning more complex systems that provide a wider range of functionality, e.g. web authoring tools, word processors. In these situations, CD-ROM and online tutorials can help providing step-by-step material with hands-on exercises. However many people find these difficult to relate to the tasks they want to accomplish. A key concern is determining how much time users are prepared to spend learning a product. It seems a waste of a product provides a range of functionality which the majority of users are unable or not prepared to spend time learning how to use (Sharp, et al 2007; p22, 23).

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Memorability refers to how easy a product is to remember how to use, once learned. This is especially important for interactive products that are used infrequently. If users haven‟t used an operation for a few months or longer, they should be able to remember or at last rapidly be reminded how to use it. Users shouldn‟t have to keep relearning how to carry out tasks. Unfortunately, this tends to happen when the operations required to be learned are obscure, illogically or poorly sequenced. Users need to be helped to remember how to do tasks. There are many ways of designing the interaction to support this. For example, users can be helped to remember to remember the sequence of operations at different stages of a task through meaningful icons, command names and menu options. Also, structuring options and icons so they are placed in relevant categories of options, e.g. placing all the drawing tools in the same place on the screen, can help the user remember where to look to find a particular tool at a given stage of a task (Sharp, et al 2007; p23).

4.1 IMPORTANCE OF USABILITY Whether it‟s a website or and normal day to day application, designing it according to the usability methods is a key factor in the process of making the product more user-friendly. It may be possible to build a bug free fully functioning system but incorporating it with user-cantered design principles will result in a better- improved product in several areas. (Windows User Interface Technical Articles. Usability in Software Design. Microsoft Corporation October 2000)

One of the main attributes that determines the common acceptability of any product is usefulness. In this we measure if the actual goals of the product can be achieved by the actual uses the product is capable of. Usefulness is further broken down into two interrelated parts called utility and usability. Utility refers to the amount of tasks or the task which are able for the product to perform. As the number of tasks a product can perform increases, the utility of that product increases. Both qualities have to be balanced in order to make a good user friendly product. Usability Testing helps the Developers to check how easy the product is for users to get the specified task done.

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(Windows User Interface Technical Articles.Usability

in

Software

Design.

Microsoft

Corporation website 2010)

4.2 THE USABILITY ENGINEERING LIFE CYCLE The Usability Engineering Life Cycle Helps the Product Developers to build a good, fully functioning and reliable solution with the aid of its set of stages. According to Nielsen (1993) given below are the stages of the usability life cycle model. 1. Know the User a. Individual user Characteristics b. The Users current and desired Tasks c. Functional Analysis d. The evolution of the user and the job 2. Competitive Analysis 3. Setting Usability Goals a. Financial impact analysis 4. Parallel design 5. Participatory design 6. Coordinated design of the total interface 7. Apply guidelines and heuristic analysis 8. Prototyping 9. Empirical testing 10.Iterative design a. Capture design rationale 11.Collect feedback from the field user.

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4.2.1 KNOW THE USER This is the first step of the usability process. In this stage, users‟ which the system is being designed is carefully studied. The developers have to visit and examine the customer environment both logical and physical ways in order to get an idea on how the product should be developed. Determining and identifying the intended customer base is a must at this stage and it can be done quite easily in most of the situations since they can be identified as concrete individuals. The developers can check on attributes such as age, educational background, and work experience, previous work experience etc. in order to get a good knowledge and a good understanding for the development of the appropriate user interfaces and functions (Nielsen, 1993: p73, 74).

4.2.2 COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

In order to create a good product, it is recommended to analyze existing products heuristically according to established usability guidelines and to perform empirical user testis with these products (Bachman 1989 cited in Nielsen 1993: p79). The systems which are on the market today go through a great amount of research and testing in order to make a good working system and it‟s much more effective to compare a realistic system rather than comparing it with other prototypes. Users can perform real time tasks while and give their ideas on the competing system and the developers get the chance to have a good understanding on the development of the functionality and new methods which needs to be added to the new system (Nielsen 1993: p78, 79).

If several competing products are available for analysis, a comparative analysis can be performed based on their differing approaches to various user interface design issues for the kind of product being studied. The team can get new ideas for the designing system (Marchionini, 1989 cited in Nielsen 1993. P79)

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4.2.3 GOAL SETTING

Al the steps in the usability engineering lifecycle cannot be given the same level of priority. This makes the developers to arrange their priorities on the basis of the analysis of the users and their tasks (Nielsen 1993). Different systems contain different types of functions and features thus the structure of the application development process needs to be prioritised differently. For an example, in a food ordering system, its better to concentrate more on the interface of the system in order to give the user the full interactivity within the system where as in a banking system it is better to concentrate more on the inner functionalities of the system. Before starting the designing of the new interface, it is important to discuss the usability metrics of interest to the project and to specify the goals of the user interface in terms of measured usability (Chapanis and budurka. 1990 cited in Nielsen. 1993: p80).

For each usability attribute of interest, several different levels of performance can be specified as part of a goal-setting process (Whiteside et al. 1988 cited in Nielsen. 1993: p80).

Usability goals are reasonably easy to set for new versions of existing system or for systems that have a clearly defined competitor on the market. In an existing system, either it‟s recreating an existing part or recreating a new function within the context of the existing usability methods. So the implementation will be done according to the goals the system was previously implemented in order to maintain the familiarity of the system. The current usability level can be determined as the minimum acceptable usability and the improvement which is made to satisfy the users‟ requirement can be determined as the target usability level. For completely new systems on the other hand, it‟s much harder to set usability goals. Good approaches for this would be as follows.  Create a set of sample tasks and get the opinion of the specialists in the usability engineering field to get an idea of the time it‟s going to take the users to perform them.  One can get the minimum acceptable level by asking user. But this method is not highly recommended as to users opinions can vary and can lead to the end product being user friendly. (Nielsen. 1993: p81) [ 74 ]

4.2.4 PARALLEL DESIGN

According to Nielsen et al (1993, 1994) it is often a good practice to start the design with a parallel design process. At this stage, a number of pilot designs are being created by different designers. The systems can be developed by individual designers or groups of designers, in critical projects which needs more attention and usability. The goal of parallel design is to explore different design alternatives before one settles on a single approach that can be developed in further detail analysis. Figure below shows the concept in a much easy to understandable manner. Original product concept

Parallel design versions

Iterative design versions

Original Product concept

Figure 1: A conceptual illustration of the relation between parallel interactive designs. Source: Nielson 1993: p86.

A project can have three or four designers involved in parallel design process. If the product is much critical there are times where companies tend to devote entire teams for this until the final stage of the design in some cases. Since parallel design is more about generating rough drafts of [ 75 ]

the basic design ideas it is more preferable to have designers work individually rather than large number of teams. The designers should not discuss their designs with each other. It is very important to employ parallel design for completely new systems since it‟s hard to find information in order to determine the best possible interface. (Nielsen 1993: p85, 86, 87)

4.2.5 PARTICIPATORY DESIGN

According to Kensing and Munk-Madsen( 1993 cited in Nielsen 1993: p88) even though the advice to “Know the user” may have been followed before the start of the design phase, one still cannot know the user sufficiently well to answer all issues that come up in doing the design. Instead of going for assumptions and guessing, designers should have access to a pool of representative users after the start of the design phase. As the development of the application progresses, developers come across sections where they will need further information in order to create the functions or the graphical implementation according to the usability goals defined to the system. In such cases if the team tends to build them according to the assumptions the development team tends to take, chances are the sections may not work according to the actual user needs thus it‟s important to have actual set of user representatives who will guide the developers in the process of development(Nielsen. 1993: p88). Furthermore, it is important to have access to the users who will actually be using the system. Users at times raise questions that the development team has not even dreamed of asking. Users participating in a design process are sometimes referred to as subject matter experts or SME‟s. They are very good at reacting to concrete designs they do not like or that will not work in practice. So the designers should present these systems in a prototype basis rather than going for systems with voluminous specifications. In the early stages of the design it can be presented as paper mock-ups or simply a few screen designs. It‟s not just about asking users what they want. The purpose is to get the idea on the usability of the system as the development progresses. As the product reaches the final stages, it gets more complex and the functions will become advanced and at this stage it is highly important to maintain focus on developing the system since there‟s a considerable chance on the developers being dragged out of the goals which are being used. For larger projects it is good to periodically refresh the pool of users who participate [ 76 ]

in the project since the opinions they have might not be that representative with the average user population as the system development progresses. There are trade-offs involved in changing user representatives but it should be kept in mind to keep the number of pool changes to a minimum number of times during a project. (Nielsen. 1993: p88)

4.2.6 COORDINATING THE TOTAL INTERFACE

Coordination comes through the practice of the consistency in all the elements throughout the project. Consistency is not just measured at a single point in time but should apply over successive releases of a product so that new released are consistent with their predecessors. To achieve this it is necessary to have some centralized authority for each development project to coordinate the various aspects of the interface. This can be done by a single person in usual terms but when it comes to very large projects a committee structure would be more appropriate (Nielsen. 1993: p90). According to Bellantone and Lanzetta (1991 cited in Nielsen,1993 p91), in addition to these formal coordination activities, it is helpful to have a shared culture in the development groups with common understanding of what the user interface should consist of.

4.2.7 GUIDELINES AND HEURISTIC EVALUATION

Guidelines are a set of principles for which should be followed during the development of a project. In any given situation, several different levels of guidelines should be used. Such as 1. General guidelines- applicable to all user interfaces 2. Category specific guidelines- for the kind of system being developed 3. Product specific guidelines- for the individual product can be taken as such levels of guidelines. The difference between standards and guidelines is that a standard specifies how the interface should appear to the user whereas a set of guidelines provide advice about the usability characteristics of the interface. Hopefully a given standard will

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follow most of the most of the traditional usability guidelines so that the interfaces designed according to the standard will also be as usable as possible (Nielsen, 1993, p: 91, 92).

There are a lot of guidelines given by researches, international groups etc. Choosing the right guideline is up to the designing team since the each and every one will not be applicable to the system. It would be a good practice to set a two or three groups to check on the different user guidelines and then select the most appropriate set of guidelines to follow. This may not be a good practice for small projects but for more critical and large scale projects it is more suitable to go through this technique. The reason to this would be because the designers will be building the system mainly based on this system and if the chosen guidelines are making the system look out of the desired user frame, the usability of the final system would drop down and can result in partial success. Even the users who are involved in the process of participatory design have a chance of being misled in their ideas since they have to give their opinions within the guidelines the design team is following.

4.2.8 PROTOTYPING

Early Usability evaluation can be based on prototypes of the final systems that can be developed much faster and much more cheaply. It‟s not a good way to start full-scale implementation efforts based on early user interface designs. The entire idea behind prototyping is to save on the time and cost to develop something that can be tested with real users. There are types of prototypes which are developed based on the stage of development. It can have either a limited number of features and full functionality within those features which is called Vertical Prototyping and the other method having a large number of features with a limited number of functionality within each of it called Horizontal Prototyping. One of the advantages of this type of prototyping is that they can be often implemented fast with the use of various prototyping and screen design tools and that they can be used to determine how good the entire interface is going to be intact as a whole. (Nielsen 1993: p 93, 94, 95)

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There are other ways of making prototypes faster. Such as 

Placing less emphasis on the efficiency of the implementation.



Accepting less reliable or poorer quality code. Though there can be bugs and crashes and may distract users during testing it won‟t be a big issue as to it‟s purely made upon the basis of prototyping.



Using simplified algorithms that cannot handle all the special cases



Using a human expert operating behind the scene to take over certain computer operations that would be too difficult to program.



Using a different computer system than the eventual target platform.



Using paper Mock-ups instead of a running computer system.

Can be taken into consideration (Nielsen, 1993: p96, 97). Several prototypes can be used together in one especially cheap prototype or as alternative prototypes. Prototypes may sometimes be used for a special form of participatory design called interactive prototyping where the prototype is developed and modified as on the fly as a test user comments on its work spots. A prototype is a form of design specification and is often used as a major way of communicating the final design to developers. Unfortunately, the prototype can be over specified in some aspects that are not really intended to be part of the design. Basically one needs to be aware that not every aspect of the prototype should be replicated in the final system , and the designers should inform developers about which aspects of the prototype are international and which are arbitrary(Nielsen 1993: p 97, 98, 99).

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4.3 USABILITY GOALS Establishment of usability goals on a project has two main purposes. 1. Designers can create the user interfaces according to the specified set of usability goals given for the system. In order to maintain on the creation of the specified user requirements (Mayhew 1999) In the words of Mayhew (1999) it‟s said for Example if all designers understand and agree that ease of use for experienced users is much more important than ease of learning for novices, design efforts can focus on alternatives that seem most likely to provide ease of use- that is speed and efficiency. Usability goals should thus drive all user interface design decisions.

2. The second main purpose of usability goals is to use it as acceptance criteria during usability the process of usability evaluation, especially towards the end of the design process. Once a section of the application is developed, the team takes the selected usability goals for the application to the consideration and move on to the next section. This makes it easy to keep the system specifications and the required user functions being built and avoid problems which can be met during the evaluation process. (Mayhew 1999; P).

Usability goals are mainly based on the user profile and the contextual task analysis. They are also made on general business goals as well. They can derived from marketing groups, technical support groups, competitive analysis or jus informed opinion. The selection of usability goals has to be done very carefully since it has a huge effect on the development of the required solution. According to Wixon and Wilson(1997 cited in Mayhew 1999: P 125) for example it won‟t be necessary to concentrate on ease of learning goals for a system which is going to be used by people who are going to be well trained and which going to use frequently. Space shuttle systems, air traffic control systems can be considered as such systems. But for systems such as

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online ordering systems, bank teller machines etc. are systems which the ease of learning has to be a vital usability aspect hence considered as a usability goal. Through even sources such as marketing groups, competitive analysis or even jus informed opinion we can originate usability goals (Wixon and Wilson 1997 cited in Mayhew 1999; p126).they can be considered as the main driven force behind the construction of the proposed design from the interface to the system functionalities. Usability goals can be broken down into several categories. Out of them the broadest categories would be Qualitative Usability goals and Quantitative Usability goals. The advantage of categorising them in these two is the ability to form a good amount of goals which can be identified specifically.

4.3.1 QUALITATIVE USABILITY GOALS

Qualitative user goals are made to guide the design. As the name says it is used to maintain the required quality of the end solution. The main focus here is to design the system according to the specifications gathered to the user profiles and task analysis which is conducted in the beginning stage of the project. Qualitative usability goals can be very useful in the beginning stages of the project design. In the interface development stage which is the beginning stage in most of the situations, it‟s important to follow the qualitative usability goals in order to begin the project going within the right track (Mayhew 1999; p126). Examples for qualitative usability goals can be given as follows 1. The designed solution should support individuals who are occupied in a noisy environment and which a lot of information can be seen on the screen, to remind them and keep them intact with the system without from getting distracted. 2. The system should be able to be handled by people with different ages. The required message should be conveyed to the user. 3. The designed system should support differently able people.

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4.3.2 QUANTITATIVE USABILITY GOALS

Goals which have a quantitative task to be achieved are called quantitative usability goals. Though qualitative goals are hard to be determined if they have been achieved by the end of the system design. Quantitative goals on the other hand can be determined if they have been fulfilled since they are so widely spread throughout the development of the whole system hence they can be regarded as objective and measurable. These goals have a clear measurement of performance and as a result of that developers can keep in mind to make sure they do the designing according to the required quantitative target. Examples for such goal are as follows 1. Experienced users should take no longer than 3 minutes on average to finish conducting a transaction.(For a bank teller machine) 2. Novice users should take no longer than 5 minutes on average to complete a transaction. 3. (For a computer Game)A novice player should take no longer than 20 minutes to completely gain the knowledge on the basic movements of the character. 4. An expert player should be able to finish any stage of the game other than the final part within an average time of 3 hours. 5. (For a university online library system) a novice student (A first time student) should be able to understand the gain the knowledge of the system within a time period of 5 minutes. 6. A normal student should have the advantage of viewing a pdf file within a maximum time of 3 minutes.

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4.3.3 TYPES OF QUANTITATIVE USABILITY GOALS

1. Ease-of-use goals- Takes a look at the use of the system by the users who are well experienced and trained to use the product. It checks on the performance users achieve through the use of the product. Developers basically focus on the attributes such as speed, efficiency and flexibility which an experienced user obtains (Mayhew 1999; p128). 2. Ease-of-learning goals- the main focus on this type of goals is to determine the usability level of first time users. This can be applied even to the users who do not use the system very much frequently. In other words ease-of-learning goals measure the length and the slope of a user‟s learning curve that is still in the process of mastering the application (Mayhew 1999; p128). 3. Absolute goals- this type of goals have a specific number for the attribute it‟s being referred to. Both ease-of-use goals and ease-of-learning goals fall to this category since they have a specific numbered value for the job the goal is made for (Mayhew 1999; p128). 4. Relative goals- relative goals refer to the performance achieved by a user using the built system with comparison to another system which the individual has been using before. It can be an older version of the same system, a manual process or a different system which does the same process. Example can be such as 1. Experienced users should take less time to do a money transfer from another account compared with the time taken to do the same at bank X. 2. A normal user should be able to create a Page with Frames within a less amount of time as compared with the previous version. (Mayhew 1999; p128)

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5. Performance goals- this type concentrates on the actual user performance in a system. Usually the measurements for performance goals are time to complete a certain tasks, number of errors or type of errors that is made by a system etc (Mayhew 1999; p128). 6. Preference goals- preference goals take a look at the amount of preferability a user has compared with another similar system or maybe even a previous version of such a system, based on the previous experience the person has gained in the past. Thought it seems like this cannot be measured, it is possible to measure an amount of preference a system can offer to a user since it‟s a choice a user makes thus it‟s possible to determine if the user is satisfied with the system (Mayhew 1999; p128). 7. Satisfaction Goals- Satisfaction goals refer to the user‟s amount of satisfaction in a certain interface of the system. This can be measured in a scale starting from the lowest satisfaction to the highest satisfaction (Mayhew 1999; p129). Examples as follows. 1.

Beginner user must rate the satisfaction with the ease of learning of the game as at 7 on average on a scale given from1 to 10 where 1 being poor and 10 being extremely good.

2.

A first time user must rate the satisfaction with the ease of using the teller machine for money withdrawal as 3 on a scale given from 1 to 5 where 1 being “too much time consumed” and 5 being “very less time consumed”.

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4.4 PRIORITISING USABILITY GOALS It is very important to carefully select and organize the set of usability goals which is required to create the correct, required system. Whether if it‟s a simple function or a complex task to be achieved, the development team must first understand the scope of usability goals which supports the team to the maximum level at development stage. For a completely new system, it‟s recommended to concentrate on setting up goals that takes a look at the tasks which is been included in the system. For a newer version of the system, it‟s more useful to consider on goals which talks about the functional properties of the system (Mayhew 1999; p130). It should be mentioned that usability goals has to be finalised alongside with the opinions given by the user‟s, or company managers and project manages of the client side. The whole system development is done based on these goals and it very important to carefully select the right type of goals which is needed to build up the required system. Even the aspects of project planning such as feasibility in all aspects (technical, economical, social etc.) can have a major impact if the goals are not selected carefully (Mayhew 1999; p130). After the usability goals are identified, the next thing to do is to prioritize the usability goals. It‟s better to consider the goals that are going to contribute a lot to the success of the project and put them to the highest priority level. The least important goals can be achieved later on and can be put to a lower priority level (Mayhew 1999; p130).

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4.5 APPLYING OF THE USABILITY ASPECTS TO THE GIVEN SITUATION. In order to conduct the competitive analysis with subject to the food ordering systems, the following two sites were taken for the task of competitive analysis in order to gain a good picture on the similar systems and the behavior of them in the market. 1. Pizzahut UK website (http://www.pizzahut.co.uk) 2. Dominos Pizza website (http://www.dominos.com/home/index.jsp)

The criteria section was changed according to the attributes which was taken into consideration on behalf of the usability of a system. Given below is the competitive analysis conducted for the above mentioned sites.

Criteria

learnability





Competitor A

Competitor B

www.pizzahut.co.uk

http://www.dominos.com/home/index.jsp

Easy to remember the

Names of the items are

type of food u need to

memorable but some are too long

have because of the

and the user might find it difficult

menus which are been

to keep it in mind due to the

set up.

variety of items .

Easily understandable



Both English and Spanish

language is provided and

languages have been provided

can be understood by a

hence making the user who

person with a standard

doesn‟t know English use the

level of English

system as well.

knowledge. 





Step by step menus [ 86 ]

All the food menus are well explained with the given toppings

enable the user to

and easily can be referred to

complete the order without missing any steps. Interface design



Colour combinations of



the interfaces are been

form pages which makes user

designed according to

easily accessible to the pages.

the theme colours of the



system and comfortable

too much white space on it.

Animated banners make the site livelier and give

Making it look a bit less filled. 

the user the active

show the food items are simple

text fonts used are fancy and clear to the human

pictures. 

eye and is easily

Main options such as go

Text fonts are well used and the language is easy to understand for

readable to the user. 

Animated banners are not present in the page and the icons which

feeling of the site. 

Colour combinations are easy to the human eye but the page has

to the human eye. 

Simple interface design with tab

the user. 

back to the home page

Has a big number of links and they are clearly visible to the

help menu are clearly

user.

shown on the top of the page and though they appear small in font size they can still be seen. Utility



User can easily select the



Has only limited number of tasks

vide variety of tasks

to be selected. But the gives tasks

from delivery to even

are provided with variety of

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ordering a table at a outlet near to the user

functionality. 

etc. 

toppings are given as well but the

User can select the

user needs to go to the page after

desired set of additional

giving the delivery location.

requirements such as



toppings to be put to. 

Additional requirements such as

Provides a customer service link with all the common questions

Provides a help page

and answers but it‟s down below

where a user can look

the page making it a disadvantage

into the information

for the user.

regarding the ordering and other topics such as finding a nearest location, ordering a table etc. Safety



Users can do the



Users can do their payment

payment from a credit

through credit card of using gift

card or at the time of

cards as well.

delivery.

memorability





Easy to remember names



Easy to access menu tabs are

and menus are given for

designed making the user go

the user to elect their

through the food items within the

food

same page without opening new page for a new menu.

Text fonts used in the site makes the user‟s



text fonts used are formal text

mind be intact of the

fonts and give the site a much

items and has a chance

random looking site look making

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effectiveness





Efficiency





of keeping reminded of

the user feel the formality within

the item.

the system.

Users can order any type



A big variety of food items are

of food item given at the

given in the menu hence the user

local outlet of the

is given with the ability to select

customer

from big range of products.

The FAQ site provides



With size of small text and

users with common

formal fonts, makes the site

questions making it easy

effective to the human eye and

for a user to refer to a

with the too much information

problem and provides

given in the system makes the

feedback section for

user feel uninterested about the

specified user problems.

item.

User can either select



Set menus are not provided and a

from a menu or go select

great amount of items are given

a quick set menu for a

on the menu. This might make

given price.

the selection of the desired item take time.

Users can select food according to the age of



Menus are not divided according

the individuals such as

to the age limit or any other

kids and adults.

property of the food items.

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4.6 FACTS GATHERED FROM THE COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS 

The final system should have simplified menus for the user to order food items. This has to range from pizzas to beverages.



The interfaces of the application should consist of colours which are domain to the company and should be arranged in a pleasing way to the human eye.



Font sizes and font types should be set in a way that the customer would enjoy ordering the food using the system.



The application should support old people on selecting food items using the system using the touch screen.



Users should be provided with help to learn the application if the individual is using it for the first time and should have the ability to request employee assistance if needed.



The application should contain the ability to do the payment using credit card or to request for a cash payment according to the user‟s choice.



Animated icons and banners should be put on the system in order to give the user a good experience and information on latest items.



Tool tips should be put up in order to provide user with simplified information regarding the options.

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4.7 USABILITY GOALS DETERMINED FOR THE CURRENT SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT.

4.7.1 QUALITATIVE USABILITY GOALS 

The system should be able to be operated by all types of individuals from children to old people. The customer base for the company is wide and it should be considered to make sure all the people who come to the pizza hut should have the capability of easily using the system (High priority).



The system should be an eye catching and efficient application. Since this is going to be the main way of ordering food at the table, it should help the staff to give the order within a short period of time so that the customer will be satisfied and feel a good difference and an improvement in the service (High priority).



The systems should contain as much as interactivity as possible with the customer. The system acts as a waiter and it should be able to give the user the scenes of liveliness and should not make the customer feel bored using the application (High priority).



The system should provide user to select a payment method of their choice. A customer should have the freedom to choose to pay by the Credit card or by cash (High priority).



The system should have the ability to show information in all three languages. The systems should provide an option for the customer to choose their preferred language from Sinhala, Tamil or English (High priority).



The user should contain a help section if the customer wishes to learn about the system if he or she is using it for the first time. Since it‟s a new concept and a new way of operation, a person would feel uncomfortable in order (High priority).

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4.7.2 QUALITATIVE USABILITY GOALS 

The error ratio into the number of system operation should be at least 1 per 1 million operations.



The number of false operations conducted by a novice user should per operation should be less than or equal to 3.



The system should be able to provide an order for a particular user within a ½ of the time taken to give the same order using the manual system.



The time taken for a novice user (completely new to the system) to complete a task using the system (assuming the order was a regular size pan pizza) should be less than or equal to 6 minutes.



The time taken for an expert user (has placed over 10 order using the system) to complete a task using the system (assuming the order was a regular size pan pizza) should be less than or equal to 2 minutes.



The time taken for a user to learn the normal ordering operations of the system should be less than 3 minutes.



The time taken to complete a payment for the order (after the customer pays the amount using a valid credit card) should be less than or equal to 3 minutes.

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4.8 CRITICAL ANALYSIS As our assignment we were given to create an interactive application using any kind of an authoring tool of choice. We decided to create an interactive food ordering system to the pizza hut which is based on the touch sensitive technology and includes all the features which a food ordering system has to offer. It‟s a new concept as since the job of the waiter is being reduced to jus serving the food to a particular customer ordered. The application contains all the basic operations such as order food, check for new offers and pays the bill through the use of credit card if the user wishes to do so. It‟s mainly operated through the use of a card which is used to operate the system and in cases where a card holder has two or more individuals (e.g.: children) along with him/her they can have the advantage of choosing or ordering food on behalf of them as well. Since it‟s a conceptual solution we were able to come up with a good efficient and user friendly solution within our knowledge limits. In the personal opinion I‟m satisfied with the solution while we were able to come up with but there are ways of improvement which can be further achieved in terms of usability aspects which we followed throughout the whole process. Many more features can be and has to be added in order to make it a safe reliable system which customers would be highly satisfied and enjoy using it as a new concept in the restaurant industry. If we take a look at the functions and the implementation of the system in a context of usability criteria, it would be easy to talk about the system in a critical manner. On the context of learnability, the users are provided with help and tool tips in order to learn the functions which are developed to make an order. The help is provided all three languages making it accessible for all the users in different language backgrounds. It would have been much better if the system was equipped with a language such as Spanish or French in order to make it easy for foreign customers specially Europeans who do not use English as a secondary language that much. When talking about the system according to the effectiveness of the system, the users get the ability to place an order without any delay on waiting for waiter assistance. In the normal system a customer will have to wait till a waiter comes and take down the order and at times due to the lack of staff and the increased amount of customers, the time for a waiter‟s assistance can be long and there can be times when a person would lose his or her appetite because of the time taken to take down the order. With this system, users can place the order and the waiter job is to [ 93 ]

jus serve the order to the customers‟ table hence the productivity rate of the company can be increased due to the number of orders that is fulfilled during a time period compared with the manual system. But the development of the inner functions of the system has to be very accurate since it should be able to handle the huge amount of orders placed through the system. The food ordering system offers an efficient solution as it makes the process of placing an order more efficient and less time is consumed compared with the manual system. Menus are placed in a much easier way with information required for the user to place the order and it‟s easy for the user to decide on what he/she is going to select and place the order. the time consumption is reduced in a lot of way ranging from the time that a customer has to wait to place an order to the time taken to pay the bill is drastically reduced since most of these functions can be performed through the system hence making it much efficient than the use of a manual system. The achievement of utility in the system can be talked as a good achievement as to it has simply made user perform a valuable process without any kind of a latency or constrain. One of the most powerful features of this system would be the ability to perform a transaction through credit cards. The user can instantly do the billing without waiting for the waiter to produce the bill in order to pay which can take a considerable time if the place happens to be busy at a particular moment. But there can be more implementations done in the system in order to increase utility of the system. The system can be added with improvements for differently abled people such as voice recognition method to say the order by talking or by using an eye movement recognition tools to which can support the differently abled. It may sound unorthodox but these implements should be made in order to make it a good system that supports all the people without the barriers of physical ability. Memorability wise the system is designed even for the users who would use the system very rarely it is easy to keep in track of the functionalities of the application since the operations are easy to remember and even to revise again if the user happens to be a rare user. The menus are created with eye catching graphical interfaces while protecting the company theme color combinations and it‟s easy for the user to recall the items and the menus are given in a simpler manner with most relevant details for the user to select and place the order of their choice. At the conclusion I would like to say that this system can make a big difference in the restaurants and as well as in the field of human computer interaction as it is a new concept to be implemented and that it can be made with carefully examination of the usability criteria and [ 94 ]

through the use of modern usability engineering techniques to give the user a better solution in order to full fill their day today needs.

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REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY Sharp, H., Rogers, Y. and Preece, J. (2007) Interaction Design : Beyond human-computer interaction, 2nd edition, John Wiley and sons Ltd. (October, 2000) Windows User Interface Technical Articles: Usability in Software Design. Microsoft Corporation (online) available: http://msdn.microsoft.com/enus/library/ms997577.aspx#uidesign_topic2 (Accessed on 2nd February 2010) Nielsen, J., (1993) Usability engineering, Morgan Kaufman Publishers. Mayhew, D. J., (1999) The Usability Engineering lifecycle: a practitioner‟s handbook for user interface design, Morgan Kaufman Publishers. (August 21, 2006) Dan brown, competitive analysis, Digital web magazine (online), available: http://www.digital-web.com/articles/competitive_analysis (Accessed on 07th February 2010).

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SUBMITTED BY: Nuwanthi Illukkumbura (CB002926)

INTAKE: HF09B1 SE

MODULE CODE & TITLE: CE00306-2-HCIU

ASSIGNMENT TITLE: Individual Assignment

SUBMITTED TO: Ms. Jina Daluwatta

DATE DUE: 09th February 2010

Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology [ 97 ]

5.0 DESIGN AND PROTOTYPE 5.1 WHAT IS DESIGN According to Dix et al. (2005, p193), the word design can be stated with a simple definition. “achieving goals within constraints” Here the word goals, according to Dix et al. (2005, p193), refers to the purpose to which the system is being built, who are the targeted users and what the users will want from the system. Constraints are restrictions that need be considered during the development life cycle such as time, resources, standards, costs and risks. Of course identifying these are not enough for the project to be successful. Developers should identify trade-offs. Trade-offs is choosing which goals or constraints can be crossed out so that several other goals can be satisfied. Trade-offs is important to consider because it helps designers to come up with alternative methods which are able to satisfy several constraints than a previous method undertaken. Good designers will always think, is there a better solution than this, if I pick this alternative will I be able satisfy more requirements, are there any more alternative solutions Designing is not limited to one design solution or limited to a single try. Designs are changed over and over again and drawn again and again according to new information they receive throughout the entire development process. When designing a system it is important to focus on the main entities of HCI. That is humans and computers. It is very essential to understand both their natures to develop a successful system. As human beings they are fast learners and also it is very likely for them to make mistakes and these mistakes could become fatal errors or lead to a critical failure. Computers on the other hand are not perfect either. If humans give them wrong data they will always return wrong information, and due to a human error it is also possible for an entire computer system to fail. It is in the designer‟s hands to prevent the user from making such mistakes or errors. A good design will not lead the user to cause such errors. With that said, it is very clear the importance of design. (Dix, et al.2005:193)

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5.1.1 DESIGN PROCESS According to Dix et al. (2005), the process of interaction can be broken into 5 stages as graphical shown by the diagram in Figure. 

Requirements: Requirements can be gathered from the users through interviews, observations, documents, questionnaires, ect. Any one or more of those techniques can be used as seen suitable to gather information from the user to identify their preferences, their tasks, how they do it, with what do they do it and what are their requirements.



Analysis: Analysis is the stage where the requirements gathered from the user are further evaluated to identify key problems and requirements. At this stage a task analysis can be performed to recognize where the user is involved and what roles can the system play and where the system will get into the picture.



Design: At this stage designers should evaluate how the identified requirements and solutions can be translated into a system. Here they should focus on principles, standards, how to design for different users, different methods which can be undertaken for the user to interact with the system.



Iteration and Prototyping: Prototypes can be used to get the user‟s feedback on the design and modify the design accordingly.



Implement and Deploy: Once the users are satisfied the final product can be completed and deployed. Documentation and creation of manuals can follow afterwards.

Guidelines Principles

Scenarios Task Analysis

Requirements

Analysis

Design

Precise Specification

Implement and Deploy

Interviews Ethnography

Dialog Notations

what is there vs. what is wanted

Prototype Evaluation Heuristics Interaction Design Process

(Source: Dix et al.2005, p195) [ 99 ]

Architecture Documentation Help

5.1.2 DESIGN FOR THE USER In most cases a system is not targeted for a single user. Designers therefore should determine to whom the system they are building is for, and what kind of skill level the users have. A good designer will not believe the user has the same capabilities as he does. They should understand that different users have different skill levels and they should determine how people in different skill levels respond.

5.1.2.1 NAVIGATION DESIGN It is the navigation design which defines the structure of the system. According to Dix et al.(2005) there are two kinds to observe.  

Local Structure Global Structure

Local Structure It is important to let the user know where they are headed and whether they are heading, is where they want to be. With this in mind Dix et al.2005 states 4 things users will look and think when they are using an application or a website. “Knowing where you are Knowing what you can do Knowing where you are going- or what will happen Knowing where you have been- or what you‟ve done.” (Dix et al.2005: p 205) Letting the user know where they are is important since it will help them decide where to go next. In some applications or websites there is a dedicated space which shows in which page the user was last and which page they are now and sometimes where they will go next. This is very useful when they are in some sort of procedure like booking a ticket, applying for a web mail account or ordering a pizza. The user can clearly identify where they are now and where they will go next or what they were doing last.

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The position where the user is on the application or website can be shown in a bar, usually on the top or sometimes on the bottom of the screen. Below as an example the procedure to order a pizza online is shown. Initially the user will be on the home page. From the Home page they can select whether they want to go to order a pizza, soups or beverages (or any other item). Pizza will have several types to choose from. Once a dish is selected they can go to the order screen to make the order. For the ease of the user, where the user is now and where the user was before can be easily identified by the following navigation bar. Home

Pizza

Veggie Pizza

Order

This can be shown to let the user know where they are by displaying the current page they are on as the last. Taking the example above, if the user was on the page for Pizza then the navigation bar will appear like this. Home

Pizza

The last element labels the current position of the user Or if the user is to follow some kind of predefined procedure the steps that needs to be followed can be shown in a bar and to indicate where the user is right now can be shown by highlight the point where the user is from on the procedure. Yahoo this type of technique on procedures like locating a mail account when the user has forgotten their password. Figure shows how Yahoo helps the user realize the procedure they have to follow to get their password replaced.

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(Source: Yahoo, 2010)

Why this type of designs is made is because as human beings we get uneasy and restless when we think that something is going on and on forever. A real life example is, if a movie goes on and on for a long time they will be impatient and agitated to know the end soon. It is good practice to show boundaries for the user when designing. When the user sees the steps they need to follow before hand, they know what they have to do and they‟ll know when to expect the results for the action they took. It is also very important to let the user know what they can do from where they are. This means, what links or buttons are available which they can click to navigate from where they are. When having links or buttons it is important to let the user know that it is something clickable. Websites used to have hyperlinked text in blue and underline but new websites today which are created using new, advanced software uses other methods to indicate hyperlinked text like by adding roll over effects. Buttons which are clickable can be indicated by highlighting it in a different color and buttons which are not clickable can be shown in gray. Below are two examples for those incidents. Windows operating systems follows the practice of graying the text on the buttons which are disabled and enabled buttons‟ text is usually displayed in black as seen in figure below. The figure shows how Microsoft Word 2007 highlights buttons which are clickable when the mouse pointer in moved on top of it.

Disabled Enabled

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Highlighted

Knowing “where you are going” is also very important. Why a user uses a system is to get a job done. When they are on the process of doing so, they will not like surprises or time consumption on their way. This can be minimized by letting the user know where they can go next. It is not in the book of good design practices to make the user click a button to find out what it will do and have them go back if that‟s not what they want. It is always more effective if the user can know what it will do before they have to test it. Of course it is not advised for designers to give long descriptions on everything on the screen to give the user a better understanding. But there are several techniques designers follow to give on screen help like tool tips. And it is very important to name buttons or hyperlinks with a suitable name which is visible and will communicate what will happen if it was clicked to the user. Once a user has performed some sort of action they would like the system to report them whether what they have done did what they wanted to do or whether the system was unable to do it.

Global Structure According to Dix et al. 2005, this is the structure of the overall system. Usually a system can be shown in a hierarchical representation. For example a system in a DVD/CD renting shop would have a hierarchical structure to define relationships between entities as follows.

(Source: Author‟s Work)

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Structuring the hierarchy of screen depends on the use of the screens. Taking the above example of the DVD/CD renting shop, here the information is structured as shown in figure above to ease the use. If the shop manager wants to add a new customer they will simply look under “Customer” to add a new record whereas to add a new movie that came to their stock, he would simply know to look under “Inventory” for an option to add the new arrival.

5.1.2.2 SCREEN DESIGN Screen design is another important aspect in designing an application. When designing a screen, designers should identify to what purpose is the screen catering, what information the screen is expected to give, what the user have to do in this screen to get what they want. To make it easier for the users several techniques introduced by Dix et al.(2005: p212) are explained below.

Grouping Related Items In the example we took before of the DVD/CD renting shop, information related to the customer are grouped together and is given the name “Customer” and the information related to inventory control is grouped together and is called “Inventory”. Therefore it can be said that related items should be grouped together. Separating these related items can be done using different colors as seen in figure below or using borders also known as “Frames” or “Group Boxes” in programming languages such as Visual Basic. Here in the figure below is shown a small portion of a person‟s bio-data. This has grouped together and has separated personal data such as name, date of birth and personnel telephone number from the occupation related information such as the occupation, company name, and company telephone number. Also once these related items are grouped, these groups, text fields and buttons should be in a particular order where the user will understand what needs to be done first. For example if a user is filling out a form they would be more comfortable with a layout as seen in figure below instead of having a layout which has text fields here and there and at every corner.

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First Name Last Name Date of Birth Tel.

Occupation Company Name Tel.

Alignment Alignment of items is also important since it will separate certain information. The diagram below extracted from Dix et al. (2005: p214) will explain how alignment helps users get a better understanding.

(Source: Dix et al. 2005: p214) Here in the images presented by (ii) and (iii) clearly helps the user identify the writer‟s surname and the first name whereas the image shown in (i) is quite difficult to identify if there is a large number of people. Even the table of contents of these report is aligned in such a way that users will quickly understand where they will have to look to find what they want.

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(Source: Dix et al.2005: p215). ) When having multiple columns the space between the two columns comes into consideration when both have some sort of relationship. In both Table of contents and figure above have a relationship with the In the table of contents the chapter name is accompanied by the page number and in one column represents the names of food items on sale in a shop, accompanied by its price shown on the right hand side of the screen. Of course when the distance between the two columns is enormous it is difficult to trace between the numbers and the items on the list as illustrated as (i)But when there is some kind of support or aid to track between the two columns, it is easier. How it‟s made simple is shown by (ii) and (iii) .The image shown in (iv) is a good method to use when the numbers are looked at frequently.

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Space Space is also an important feature in designing. Space can be used to show separations between items or text or even to highlight certain things on the screen. Dix et al. (2005: p216) has shown three ways space can be used to separate, structure and highlight.

(Source: Dix et al.2005: 216). )

Designing Forms The most complex type of layout to design is forms. This needs much more analysis than any other type of screen. In forms, designers should understand how to organize the order of how the user will enter information, decide what information they should enter, how it‟ll be easier for them to enter, will they understand the structure of the form, how to structure the form so that users can easily understand where what should be entered and will they understand to provide the correct information to the correct field. These should be looked into before creating a form. Alignment matters in form designing.

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First Name Last Name Tel. Address

First Name Last Name Tel. Address

To make it easier for users to understand where the information should be entered, some designers follow the practice of having the title on top of the text box as seen below. First Name

Last Name

(Source: Author‟s Work) [ 108 ]

Consistency Consistency matters. As human beings users are fast learners and also very resistant to change. Once they get used to a particular environment they prefer the environment not to change. This is why each layout should be built according to the same standards. Consistency can be applied within an application or a couple of related applications. Microsoft Office applications have the same set of rules, layouts, and standards. They are not only consistent within the application but all the applications together are also consistent.

(Source: Ms Office, 2010) [ 109 ]

Microsoft Office applications have buttons with consistent labels not just within the application but also between related applications such as Power Point, Access, Excel, ect. Ms Word

Ms Power Point

Bold Italics Underline (Source: Ms Office, 2010) Figure is a screen shot from Ms Word whereas the shown in the Figure is a screen shot from Ms Power Point. The buttons to turn text to “Bold”, “Italics”, “Underline”, to change the font, font size, color and increase/decrease font size in Ms Word are all indicated by the same labels in Ms Power Point. This is because users who are used to Ms Word will find learning Ms Power Point easier since they now identifies what the button does.

Shapes/Appearances Shapes of a particular object define what the person can do with the object. For example the circle shape of the steering wheel of a car tells whoever drives it that it can be turned. In a similar way the appearance of an object in a computer system also tells the user what they can do with it.

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If there are buttons which takes on the shapes shown in Figure, usually on the very top or very bottom of the screen, users simply understands that it means they can navigate left or right.

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5.2 DESIGN CONCEPTS 5.2.1 SHNEIDERMAN’S “EIGHT GOLDEN RULES OF INTERFACE DESIGN” Strive for Consistency Consistency is important. Humans may learn fast but they prefer to be in an environment that they are used to. Change can have negative effects on the user. In an application or a website once the user is familiar with the layout they will have no problem finding their way through that page again. If the application or website uses the same icons, labels, layouts, shortcuts, color schemes and placements of items consistently users will have no difficulty getting a task done if they navigate away from where they are to another screen on the same system or website. But if the layouts aren‟t consistent the users will have to learn and get familiar with the entirely new layout, all over again. This will take off precious time of the user who is trying to get a job done. Enable frequent users to use shortcuts Depending on the system, its users can vary from expert users to novice users. Expert users might not want to waste their time browsing through menus to find what they want. Instead they might prefer something faster like shortcut keys or commands. Even being novice users once the user is comfortable with the system they‟d prefer to get their frequently done jobs, done faster. This is where the need for shortcuts comes in. Offer informative feedback Once an action is given to the system to perform the user would expect some kind of response from the system stating whether the command the user gave was successful or not. Feedback can be given in various ways for different purposes. Microsoft Office applications use a separate bar at the bottom of the screen to show the status of current application. This bar can be used to convey messages in the form of text, icons or progress bars.

Icon to start recording a macro (Source:

Progress bar to show a file being saved.

Ms

Word, [ 112 ]

2010)

Design Dialogs to yield closure Designs should be made in a way that there should be a beginning, middle and an end so that the user will not feel it is endless. As an example let‟s take the steps involved in changing your Facebook password. Beginning: Go to “Account Settings” and click change password.

Middle:

Enter

the

old

password

and

the

new

password

on

the

given

End: Once password is changed a message will appear to confirm the process is over.

(Source: Facebook, 2010)

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fields.

Offer error prevention and simple error handling Users might not be able to understand the error a system throws. Therefore the design itself should prevent the user from causing an error to occur. If an error does occur the system should help the user to recover from the error instead of leaving them stressed and confused. The system should provide information and links to show how the user can recover from the error. Permit easy reversal of actions Users should be allowed to do some kind of roll back on their activities. Any web browser allows users to go back to where they were before. This is seen as a way to encourage users to navigate through the application or website because they know if they made a mistake they can roll back and start all over again.

Support internal locus of control

Forward Back (Source: Mozilla Firefox, 2010) Support internal locus of control Humans would like to feel in control. So in a computer system, rather than the human being the one who provides the answers, it should be designed in a way that the users are the ones in control, and the ones who are commanding the computer. Not the other way round. Reduce short-term memory load A user‟s short term memory capacity is not enough to contain a massive amount of information or conduct large processes. Good screen designs will reduce the load the user has to remember by “keeping displays simple, consolidating multiple page displays and providing time for learning action sequences.” (Dix et al.2005: p283) (Bell University, 1998 cited Schneiderman, 2004)

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5.2.2 NIELSON’S GUIDELINES Visibility Options on a particular screen should be visible to the user. If not they will have to waste time they can use to acquire information on searching how to get the job done. Different designers have come up with alternative and creative ways in which they can make everything visible to the user. Most common practice would be not to make the screen too crowded. It is good to have everything in one page so that the user doesn‟t have to remember a lot or navigate into multiple pages. But crowding one screen only makes it difficult for the user to find their way through the page and also make them feel stressed. Feedback Feedback comes in many different forms and for different purposes. In computer terms feedback is given to users to inform them of the results, progress, completion and abortion of a process or action that they have performed. Once a user has performed an action they expect some sort of feedback. How the feedback is given depends on what and how large the process is. In processes which are not large and which doesn‟t consume much time will give instant feedback, usually through message boxes. Below figure shows the message box which prompts in Ms Word when the user clicks the close button with an unsaved document open.

(Source: Ms Word, 2010)

If the system processes something larger like moving a large file to another folder in the computer, progress bars are used to help the user identify how much more does he have to wait, how much of the process is done. Such a progress bar is shown in below.

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(Source: Windows XP, 2010) Constraints Constraints are a sort of limitation than is applied to minimize the user making errors. Errors caused by users can be led to unimaginable errors. Therefore it is good practice to minimize these errors by applying validations and automating user input by including combo boxes, radio buttons, check boxes, list boxes or drop down menus. Mapping Mapping is the placement of objects in a way that the user will understand how to use it. Consistency Consistency is using the same layouts, structure and other components such as labeling buttons and what buttons do, throughout the entire application or website. Consistency is thoroughly explained previously. Affordance Once a person takes a look at a certain object they will understand how to use that object. This is called affordance. (Nielson, c.1990)

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5.3 TYPES OF DESIGN After analyzing users, tasks, requirements and usability goals, the next step in the HCI life cycle is to design the system or application. The design stage can be mainly divided into 2 parts, Conceptual design and Physical design. 5.3.1 CONCEPTUAL DESIGN According to Potosnak (2001) conceptual design is, “construction of the ideas or concepts that a user needs to learn about what a product is, what it can do, and how it is intended to be used”. Once users and user requirements are identified the next task is set for the designers. Designers are entrusted to have these requirements gathered designed in the form of a user interface. Building the conceptual design is first started by defining to what purpose the system or application is being designed. Next is to identify what and where the users will be involved in the system, and how the system can be designed in order to satisfy their requirements. Constraints and objectives should be defined in order to design a proper interface with less repeating activities, let the user to be more in control, and provide feedback. Next few steps involve defining what the users will need, the tasks they will have to perform and design the user interface based on these findings. If we illustrate the steps followed in conceptual design it will look as follows.

(Source: Potosnak, 2001)

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5.3.2 PHYSICAL DESIGN In the conceptual design designers have identified the purpose for the system, the user‟s requirements and what can be included in the design so that those requirements can be satisfied. Next in this stage of the project the conceptual design should be balanced with the physical design. The conceptual design is creativity and alternative methods decided to solve user problems and meet requirements all pooled together. Physical design is the actual stage where it is decided whether these ideas or designs can be implemented. For example, a team which is designing an interface for a mobile phone can design beautiful, user friendly and creative interfaces which satisfy the user but after designing the next step would be to decide if these interfaces can be displayed in the small screen of the mobile phone. (Rogers et al. 2007: 551)

5.4 WHAT IS USER CENTERED DESIGN? As the name defines it, User Centered Design is where the designing stage of the application or website is focused on user involvement. At each predefined points a prototype is presented to the end-user and the contractors to receive their comments, feedback and to identify areas which seems confusing or difficult to the end-user. (Bell College, 2005) Parallel Design Once the user requirements and problems are identified all the designers in the designing team are to create and present different designs for this common system. This is a very useful method to identify an efficient way to overcome problems that were identified in the current system and alternative methods that can be used to satisfy user requirements since several ideas and approaches will be brought up by the designers. (Usability.gov, n.d) Participatory Design Parallel designs can be tested with users and elements which are approved by the users can be combined together to create one system. The participatory design is created with several

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stakeholders getting together and discussing the useful aspects of previous designs and things that can be added. Participatory design is the foundation to start designing for the final product. Participatory designs are useful since it increase the chances of finding problems, and a diverse pool of solutions in different people‟s point of view can be acquired. (Gaffney, 1999) Iterative Design This stage is where a prototype of the participatory design is first built and presented to the end-user. Once the prototype is tested with user, evaluation, feedback and new problems identified are documented. According to these discovering the prototype is further evolved into a newer version and is again presented to the user for further feedback and problem identification. This stage keeps repeating till the user is satisfied and the contract come to a mutual agreement that the final product is ready to be published.

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Requirements Gathering and Analysis

Parallel Design

Participatory Design

Iterative Design

Modify

First Evaluation

Prototype

Final Product

(Source: APIIT lecture slides, 2010) [ 120 ]

Prototype

5.5 PROTOTYPE 5.5.1 WHAT IS PROTOTYPING? Prototyping is a way of letting the primary stakeholders get used to or get to know the look, behavior and functionality of a system before the final product is made. At different stages of the system development life cycle, according to different requirements a suitable type of prototyping is selected. Prototyping can be paper based or software which can be used to test with users before implementing the final product. Why prototyping is useful is because it is a very effective way to communicate with the users or the contractors (also known as stakeholders). Rather than explain the functionality or the appearance of the system verbally, prototypes can help to let the user test the product and learn it so that they can give informative feedback. This is also an opportunity for the designers to identify the capabilities, limitations of the system, problem areas, clarify confusions and get honest feedback from the user by observing their behaviors towards the system. Prototypes are given to users so that designers can evaluate the user‟s behavior and areas that needs to be modified in the prototype. Once problems are identified, designers will build a second prototype with the identified problems solved to evaluate it for the second time. According to Dix et al. (2005: p220), “This type of evaluation intended to improve designs, is called formative evaluation.” Formative evaluation will be done iteratively till the users and the designers are satisfied with the prototype. This is when the final product will be made. Then comes the summative evaluation, “which is performed at the end to verify whether the product is good enough” (Dix, et al. 2005:220)

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5.5.2 TYPES OF PROTOTYPING There are several types of prototyping techniques but all of them can be categorized into to two main types.  Low fidelity prototyping  High fidelity prototyping (Bell College, 2005) Low fidelity prototyping This type of prototyping focuses more on letting the user get an idea about what the system will look like rather than how it will function. Functionality in this type of prototyping is usually less or no functionality at all. Low fidelity prototyping is usually used at the very earliest stages of the design life cycle almost as early as when developing the conceptual design. This is because since it is not costly or very time consuming to build, this type of prototyping can be used to cater changes in the design endless times until the user is satisfied. There are several types of Low fidelity prototyping as well. (Rogers et al. 2007: 531)

Sketches/Paper based Prototyping The simplest form of prototyping is the paper based or sketching prototyping techniques. This type of prototyping can be used if the application that is being modeled for the end-user does not require a lot of functionality and does not need to display complex information to the user. This sort of prototyping is only limited to paper designs which can be later evolved with corrections. Paper based prototyping is usually used at the very early stages of the development life cycle since more detailed prototypes with interactivity is more suited for later stages. Paper based prototypes will show placement of buttons, text fields, combo boxes, list boxes, tabs and labels so that the user can identify the behavior of the system. Users usually interact with this type of prototypes visually and orally. This is a very useful method for designers to identify areas which confuses the user, broken navigation, and missing options. It is also very convenient prototype since corrections can be easily made to the design. (Thomson, 2009 )

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Storyboarding In storyboarding, a series of screens which are sketches of the system are drawn to show the procedure a system follows when the user wants to perform a certain task. Storyboarding can be hand drawn images of the screens or can be drawn using drawing software such as Flash, Photoshop or Illustrator. This series of screens are usually described as to what will happen if the user clicked a particular button that‟s shown in the screens.

Index Cards These are small rectangular cards which has different screens drawn on them. Users can interact with these cards by touching the paper surface. The response for the action the user will be shown by another card or orally told by the instructor. (Rogers et al. 2007: 531)

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High fidelity prototyping Instead of using paper based prototypes which can be easily modified but are not even close to the final product, high fidelity prototypes are more detailed and are very near to the finishing product. These types of prototypes are made using special software such as Visual Basic, Flash or SmallTalk. High fidelity prototypes are useful for designers to test their new ideas and to identify technical problems and it is also very useful to get user comments since it is more understandable. (Rogers et al. 2007: 535) Computer based  Vertical prototyping It only implements the very important features and omits most features. In other words it‟s fully focused on the functionality of the system and it allows users to carry out real tasks.  Horizontal prototyping Even though screens are fully compatible, users will not be able to perform real tasks since this type of prototyping focuses on the system‟s interface rather than functionality.  Scenario Features and functionality in this kind of prototype is reduced and the users can only interact with the system in predefined paths.

Wizard of Oz In wizard of Oz prototyping the user is given the impression that they are interacting with the actual computer system (or a functioning prototype) but without their knowledge they are actually interacting with another human being whose responding to their requests. (Bell

College,

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2005)

6.0 REFERENCE

Bell

College(2005),

Prototyping,

[Online]

available:

http://hamilton.bell.ac.uk/btech/hci/hcinotes17.pdf [Accessed 10 Jan 2010]

Bell College (2005), Guidelines and Standards [Online] http://hamilton.bell.ac.uk/btech/hci/hcinotes16.pdf [Accessed 7 Jan 2010]

available:

Bell

available:

College

(2005),

User

centered

Design,

[Online]

http://hamilton.bell.ac.uk/btech/hci/hcinotes12.pdf [Accessed 7 Jan 2010]

Dix, Alan., Finlay, Janey., Bowd, Gregory.D., Beale, Russell., (2005) Human-Computer Interaction, 3rd Edition, Pearson Education, Ltd

Thomson, Reynard (2009). What Is Software Prototyping?, [Online] available: http://www.reynardthomson.com/what-is-prototyping.html [Accessed 7 Jan 2010] Rogers, Yvonne., Preece, Jenny., Harp, Helen., (2007) Interaction Design, 2nd Edition, John Wiley & Sons Ltd: England.

Gaffney

(1999)

Usability

Techniques

,[Online]

available:

http://www.infodesign.com.au/ftp/ParticipatoryDesign.pdf [Accessed 7 Jan 2010]

Usability.gov(

n.d),

What

is

parallel

design,

[Online]

available:

http://www.usability.gov/design/paralleldesign.html[Accessed 7 Jan 2010]

Potosnak,

Kathy(2001)

What

Is

Conceptual

Design? [Online]

http://www.interfaceconcepts.com/concept.htm [Accessed 7 Jan 2010]

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available:

7.0 BIBLIOGRAPHY Ambler, Scott.W., (2009). User Interface Design Tips, Techniques, and Principles, [Online] available: http://www.ambysoft.com/essays/userInterfaceDesign.html [Accessed 7 Jan 2010]

AskTog

(n.d).

First

Principles

of

Interaction

Design,

,

[Online]

available:

http://www.asktog.com/basics/firstPrinciples.html [Accessed 7 Jan 2010]

8.0 TESTING 8.1 HEURISTIC EVALUATION Heuristic evaluation, developed by Nielsen and Mohlich(1990) is a technique used by designers to test if their designs cater usability. According to Nielsen(1990), he has identified 10 heuristics. Visibility of system status Users should be aware of the status of the system, that is they should receive informative feedback from the system. This is generally useful once the system has performed a task for the user; the user should be informed whether the task was completed, failed or still progressing. As discussed in Design and Prototype, the status of the running system or the status of the system after an action has been performed can be shown in various ways. Match between system and the real world A system is usually targeted for a large, diverse group of people. Knowledge and skill differs from human to human. Taking this into consideration, designers must understand that, not always do their users have expert knowledge. Therefore a designer should always concentrate on its novice users. User control and freedom Users are prone to make errors. As intelligent creatures, users also learn from these mistakes. A good system design will not discourage a user to move further after making a mistake. It is good

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practice to include some sort of roll back (undo) mechanism in the system so that users can go back to where they were. Consistency and standards As discussed in previous chapters, consistency in a system or application is important. Consistency is not only having the same colors and layouts throughout the application. It is also having consistent patterns to get a certain job done. For example, if the user sees a certain button in one screen and sees the same button with the same labeling in the next screen, the user believes that the button will perform the same actions as the previous one. If it didn‟t this is a cause to surprise the user.

Error Prevention Instead of waiting for the user to make a mistake, as a good designer you will predict the kind of mistakes a user can make and take action accordingly. Recognition rather than recall Short term memory capacity of the user is limited. It is unacceptable to let a user remember many things. Good designs will keep their screens simple and allow on screen help, or allow users to retrieve information they are looking for easily. Flexibility and efficiency of user Even though novice users might prefer to get their jobs done slowly and carefully in the traditional way, expert users might want to get things done faster by using short cut keys or invisible commands. Aesthetic and minimalist design Always include the most wanted information. If all the unnecessary information are also displayed it will minimize the incidence of users noticing the important information. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors Once an error has occurred, users should be guided as to how to recover from the error instead of abandoning them. Help and documentation

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In rare occasions, when the system is straightforward it is unnecessary to provide documented help. But it is always healthier to provide users with help as to how to use the system. (Nielsen,

1990)

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8.2 FORMATIVE TESTING According to Rogers et al (2007, p 588) When a product is evaluated during design to find out if the solution has been able to meet the requirements of the user which was able to meet earlier in the stage is called formative testing. This method of evaluation covers a wide area of the design from the very beginning of the development of the system sketches to finalizing the perfect working solution and continuing to maintain the product. Key roles of Formative testing Based on the facts according to Allen Nan(2003) we can define the key features of formative testing according to the computer application standards. They are 1. Rapid feedback. Mainly provide continuous feedback on the systems‟ efficiency of conflict management and resolution work. While the project is still continuing, this provides feedback on the development of the application. 2. Documentation. A formative testing process can document how a application is is progressing in its development the techniques used and the impact made in the beginning and middle sections of work. It can be highly useful in a later time to review documentation of the progress of the development in order to do any further development in upcoming versions of the project. 3. Planning. Formative evaluation helps planning and allows for revision of or recommitment to plans. When a formative evaluation process shows the application has been going out of the scope, the people who are in charge of the work has the ability to revise their plans in order to continue with the new additions or to master the existing functions. 8.2.1 TYPES OF FORMATIVE EVALUATION There are many types of evaluating methods such as observations, interviews, surveys, analysis etc. which can be a par in the process of formative evaluation. within the range of formative evaluation, there are four primary goals for formative evaluation approaches which each of it will more or less emphasize on the requirement and the objectives of the program. 1. Planning evaluation. Planning evaluation simplifies and determines the plans of the project. This involves checking if the goals and timelines are appropriate. It checks for [ 129 ]

the suitability of the goals and timelines and if the methods implemented to reach the requirements. Furthermore, a planning evaluation can lay the ground work for future formative and summative evaluations by developing indicators (Allen Nan, 2003). 2. Implementation evaluation. This step concentrates on the focuses on the subject to which a program is proceeding according to the schedule. Designers can check on their application development of the product if they find out the team is going out of the scope of development (Allen Nan, 2003). 3. Monitoring evaluation. This action is conducted by an external source of evaluation during the time of the development. The observer may choose to monitor implementation of a conflict resolution project by way of like going through a workshop, having discussion with the people in the project. For long-term conflict resolution work, a monitoring evaluation can provide a funder useful reassurance that money is being well spent (Allen Nan, 2003). 4. Progress evaluation. This determines the progress of the system. The main goals of the system should work as a benchmark for the purpose of measuring the system progress. Information obtained through this can be used in a summative evaluation later on (Allen Nan, 2003).

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8.0 CRITICAL DISCUSSION AND APPLICATION OF DESIGN AND PROTOTYPE 8.1 REQUIREMENTS The main target is to let the user be fully in control of the system, and to eliminate the problems identified in section 2.1.

8.2 ANALYSIS

8.3 DESIGN Since the system we‟re building is based on touch screens we have looked into some design rules that designers follow to design interface for touch screens. When designing for a touch screen use large buttons. As the designer, they wouldn‟t know the size of the user‟s fingers since it differs from one another. So it is always better to design for a user with large fingers. It is also important to have sufficient space between buttons so that users will not accidently click another button which is placed nearby. Buttons should be labeled in a way that the user will understand what the button does. It is always better to use words, rather than symbols to label a button.

(Source: Strauss, 2009) Touch screen systems should be kept simple and straight forward, especially when they are being designed for a group of diverse users. Multiple windows, multiple clicks, drag and drop should be limited to reduce complexity of the system since it is not always that a user will understand

[ 131 ]

how to deal with it. Also do not overwhelm the user with many choices. It will be difficult for them to understand what they really have to do to get a job done. In our case we‟re designing an ordering system so as to omit the reason to call a waiter. Therefore it is important to guide the user through the application and provide on screen help as much as possible. (Tyco Electronics Corporate Website, 2009 and Strauss, 2009) Strauss , Morgan. (2009) Labeling Touchscreen Interfaces, [Online]. Available http://blog.guifx.com/2009/07/15/labeling-touchscreen-interfaces/ [Accessed on 7 Jan 2010]

Tyco Electronics Corporate Website (2009) Touchscreen Application Tips, [Online]. Available http://www.elotouch.com/Support/TechnicalSupport/10tips.asp [Accessed on 7 Jan 2010]

[ 132 ]

8.3.1 PARALLEL DESIGN At this stage our group members have drawn three different parallel designs for the entire system. 8.3.1.1 Tharanga Nuwan Chandrasekera

Welcome To Pizza Hut Select your language ENGLISH

SINHALA

TAMIL

URDHU

OK

Cancel

Users have to select the language 1st in order to use this system, after user has selected preferred language, entire system will change it to that particular language.

[ 133 ]

Welcome To Pizza Hut

Enter the Number of Persons:

OK

Cancel

After table get switch on it will prompt a one question to get the number of users which have come to eat. Table is divided into 6 parts virtually. Only 6 people can sit around the table and chairs have been fixed to weight sensors, which will identify what are the places that people are seated, and according to that; table will restart again. If the person who got the card can order the menus for the others or he can give that right to other partners. If the card holder wants he can set the budgets to the each person or he can set a budget to the table.

[ 134 ]

Main Menu: Pizza Hut

PIZZA

RICE

SOFT

STARTERS

DRINK FOOD

OTHER

DRINK OK

Cancel

This system will be a complete touch system base one. So user can select the necessary food items by pressing the symbol. Every item is been represent by using letters as well as using animated pictures. So anyone can feel and understand what they are going to order. These menus will be interactive and has lots of animations which will give a good feel about the food to the user. It will give a good impact on the user as well as to the restaurant. As User clicks the DRINK button it will take the customer to a new screen which will show the real size image of the glass, so user will be aware of what he/she going to order.

[ 135 ]

Drinks Menu: Pizza Hut

OK

Cancel

This screen will show the drinks which are available currently in the restaurant. So user will be able to select one drink using touch system. When user select a particular drink user will take to a new screen which will show a real time animation to that drink, which will give a better feeling to a user.

[ 136 ]

Drinks Menu: Pizza Hut

120/=

OK

Cancel

User can select the drink and he can see the drink which they going to buy and price of it. This is completely touch system so user will not be get board when using it.

[ 137 ]

FINAL ORDER: Pizza Hut Person 2

Person 1

Person 3

Pizza

1

Pizza

1

Pizza

2

Coca Cola

1 Coca Cola

2

Fanta

1

REOR

REOR

DER

DER

REOR DER Cancel

ORDER

REOR DER

3220/=

Card holder will get a final menu of the each user. So he can accept it or he can reject it and asked that person to reorder it. After he is satisfied with the order he can approved the order. Then entire table order will send to the kitchen.

[ 138 ]

8.3.1.2 Nuwanthi Illukkumbura

The first time a customer walks into the restaurant they will be given a card. This card will be then placed on the table somewhere in front of where the person is sitting. A family would only get one card. The table will be divided into 6 equal areas for each member who‟s sitting as shown in Figure 1. When this card is placed somewhere in the area that belongs to the card holder, the table will be activated.

[ 139 ]

English

isxy,

First it will show a screen which will allow the customer to select the language he/she wishes. This is shown in Figure 2. This screen will appear on everyone‟s screen. Once the language is selected the menu will be shown. The menu screen differs from the card holder‟s screen to the other members.

[ 140 ]

Cheese Pizza Rs. 2000

Cheese Pizza Rs. 2000

Cheese Pizza Rs. 2000

Cheese Pizza Rs. 2000

Cheese Pizza Rs. 2000

Cheese Pizza Rs. 2000

A screen similar to the above will appear for the card holder. Along with the menu items there is a sidebar as well. An enlarged version of the sidebar is given below. When the “Set Budget” button is pressed a screen will pop up as shown in the figure below. The user can enter their budget and hit the submit button. Once the button is clicked they will be taken back to the menu screen, but this time only dishes that fit their budget will appear. In the “List of Order” section all the orders approved by the other members will appear. If an order needs to be cancelled the card holder can simply click, drag and drop it off the list. The total amount of this whole list will appear on the small area reserved for that purpose. When the “Send Order” button is clicked the order will be sent to the restaurant staffs who evaluates these orders and a feedback message will appear on the screen as shown below. [ 141 ]

Set Budget

1

2

3

2 Cheese Pizzas

4

5

6

4 Chicken Pizzas

7

8

9

0

Submit

List Of Orders

1 Veggie Pizza

Your Order has been sent.

Total

Thank You!! 

Send Order

[ 142 ]

Cheese Pizza Rs. 2000

Cheese Pizza Rs. 2000

Cheese Pizza Rs. 2000

Cheese Pizza Rs. 2000

Cheese Pizza Rs. 2000

Cheese Pizza Rs. 2000

This is the screen which appears for all the other members. It simply has all the menu items as in Figure 5. Customers can navigate through these menu items using the next, previous arrows. To enlarge menu item users can simply click on them.

[ 143 ]

Cheese Pizza

Rs. 2000

Ingredients : 2 teaspoons olive oil, 1 cup fat-free bottled pizza sauce, 2 cups (8 ounces) shredded partskim mozzarella cheese, 1/2 cup (2 ounces) grated fresh Parmesan cheese

Order

An enlarged menu item looks as shown in Figure 6. It includes the name, price and ingredients of the item. The purpose of including ingredients is because, in case a customer was allergic to some sort of food or spice, they can simply check it here. If the customer wants to order the enlarged item they can click the “Order” button, and the order will be added to the “Order List” of the card holder‟s.

[ 144 ]

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

The restaurant will have a layout of how the tables are placed in the restaurant. This is shown in a touch screen. When an order is sent by a table, that particular table will be highlighted in some color to indicate an order has been received.

To check the order the staff member has to click the colored table and a screen like in Figure 8 will appear.

[ 145 ]

Table 4 2 Cheese Pizza

Rs. 4000.00

4 Chicken Pizza

Rs. 6000.00

1 Veggie Pizza

Rs. 2000.00

Total

12,000.00

Print

This screen shows the order made by the selected table and the total amount to be charged. If a customer wants to make another order after the first order it will be added to this list. Finally when the customer is to make payments the print button can be clicked and the bill for that customer will be printed. After the print button is pressed, the temporary data that was saved for that table will be cleared, and will be ready for a new entry.

[ 146 ]

8.3.1.3 Thaveesha Gamage

Welcome

Swipe the Scene1 of 5

Card

Description: This is the welcome screen which appears on the table.

[ 147 ]

Welcome

Select the table positions if there are multiple people

Screen 2 of 5 Description: after the customer swipes the card the customer has ta select the table positions if there are any more members who are coming with him/her. We assume that the tables used are rectangular in shape.

[ 148 ]

Welcome Special

Menu

offers

Scene 3 of 5 Description: in this screen the customer can access the menu to order items and can also check in the special offers which the restaurant does timely.

[ 149 ]

Beverage

Starters

Place the

Pizzas

Total

order

Scene 4 of 5 Description: once the customer accesses the menu, he can choose from the different food items to order from the section given on the top of the screen. Once a tab is clicked a drop down interface comes and the food items related to the section is appeared. The grand total is shown on the bottom right corner of the screen.

[ 150 ]

Back to the

Bill

menu

A banner or advertisement of the company

Scene 5 of 5 Description: once the customer has done the order he can either go back to the menu to make another order or go on to request to produce the bill.

[ 151 ]

8.4 CRITICAL DISCUSSION ON PARALLEL DESIGN As a group of three members we have identified the problems and requirements of the users and gave the task to each member to come up with separate designs to solve this. As shown before we have 3 design solutions at hand. After further analysis and discussions we have extracted the useful elements from each design.

Tharanga Nuwan Chandrasekera

Nuwanthi Illukkumbura

Taveesha Gamage

Users should be allowed to select an Users should be allowed to Users should be allowed to appropriate language.

select

an

appropriate select an appropriate language.

language. When there is the need for two bills Orders made by the other There should be a welcome to be generated from the same table, members of the table will be screen which will not only be two cards will be placed. Once card collected

to

a

central acting as a screen saver but

holder will have to tell the system location and the card holder also instructing the user to the number of people who belongs will be capable of sending or place the card on the table to to his bill

deleting an order made by use the system. someone else.

The final set of orders should be The system should allow the displayed in a separate screen rather user to enlarge the pizza. than from a bar on the side of the screen.

[ 152 ]

8.5 PARTICIPATORY DESIGN

After the parallel designs were evaluated, components that were identified as useful from the parallel designs and the components that are missing or thought to be useful were pooled together to form the participatory design. The participatory design is based on these findings. There should be some method to show the user to drop the card on the table to see the system. This is where the welcome screen is useful. The welcome screen will instruct the user to place the card on the table to activate the table. Instead of having to choose the language at the very first time the system starts up, it is better if the language could be changed back and forth throughout the system. Therefore a separate row on the top of the screen is dedicated for the user to select the language they want. Users might find it difficult to find the structure of the system. So as to avoid this, another dedicated row will be included to show the users navigation behavior. The navigation bar will show the previous pages and the current page the user is on. The page names will be in the form of buttons and these will be linked to its page, so instead of backing up a couple of times they can click on the page they want to go to. A sidebar is included on the cardholder‟s screen where the cardholder will be able to see the orders made by his fellow members and the orders he has made. The side bar will include the names of the items set to order, their quantities, price for each item and the total price. There will be a button called “SEND ORDER”. Once all orders are made by the group, that button can be clicked to send the order to the kitchen. The feature to enter the budget of the customer has been removed since it will limit the user‟s spending and it could be shown as a disadvantage for the company. The parallel designs have not mentioned how to let the user select the quantity and the size of the pizza (between small, regular and large). A separate screen will be added to the system to attend to the problem. Even if the system is made for ordering, payments are made manually. So to call a waiter, the system will have a button which will alert the kitchen that the particular table needs a waiter to attend to. This can be used to call the waiter when making payments.

[ 153 ]

Another button will

be available for the user to get help regarding how to use the system. The help button will provide them video tutorials. With these identified the first low fidelity prototype is assembled.

8.4 ITERATION AND PROTOTYPING 8.4.1 LOW FIDELITY PROTOTYPE 8.4.1.1 STORYBOARDING Screen No.

1/6

Buttons

Language Buttons: Sinhala, English and Tamil, Navigation Bar Buttons:

Screen Name

Main Menu

Main Menu, Side bar Buttons: Send Order, Call Waiter and Help, Menu Buttons: Pizza, Pasta, Soups, Drinks, ect. Navigation Buttons: Next, Previous (If required). Links to Page

From the welcome screen.

Links from Page

Pizza page, Pasta page, Soups page, Drinks page and Help page.

Description

This is the main menu. From here the user may select the type of dish they would like to order.

[ 154 ]

Screen No.

2/6

Buttons

Language Buttons: Sinhala, English and Tamil, Navigation Bar Buttons:

Screen Name

Pizza

Main Menu, Pizza, Side bar Buttons: Send Order, Call Waiter and Help, Menu Buttons: Veggie, Chicken, Sausage, Seafood, Beef, ect. Navigation Buttons: Next, Previous (If required). Links to Page

Main Menu >> Pizza

Links from Page

Veggie page, Chicken page, Sausage page, Seafood page, Beef page and Help page.

Description

This page includes all the different types of Pizzas available in the restaurant. Customers can select their taste for pizza in this page.

[ 155 ]

Screen No.

3/6

Buttons

Language Buttons: Sinhala, English and Tamil, Navigation Bar Buttons:

Screen Name

Veggie Pizza

Main Menu, Pizza, Veggie Side bar Buttons: Send Order, Call Waiter and Help, Menu Buttons: Cheese and Onion, Cabbage, Broccoli, ect. Navigation Buttons: Next, Previous (If required). Links to Page

Main Menu >> Pizza >> Veggie

Links from Page

From this page the users will be taken to the dedicated page for the dish. There the user can select the size, quantity and order the pizza.

Description

This displays all the dishes available in the restaurant which belongs to the category “Veggie”.

[ 156 ]

Screen No.

4/6

Buttons

Language Buttons: Sinhala, English and Tamil, Navigation Bar Buttons:

Screen Name

Cheese and Onion Pizza

Main Menu, Pizza, Veggie, Cheese and Onion Side bar Buttons: Send Order, Call Waiter and Help, Menu Buttons: Enlarge Pizza, Small, Regular, Large, Increase quantity, Decrease quantity, Add to List. Links to Page

Main Menu >> Pizza >> Veggie >> Cheese and Onion

Links from Page

Users can return to the menu.

Description

In this page users can select the size of the pizza they want. They can select between “Small”, “Regular” and “Large”. Also the users can select the quantity of the item they want by increasing, decreasing the value using the arrow buttons.

[ 157 ]

Screen No.

5/6

Buttons

Language Buttons: Sinhala, English and Tamil, Navigation Bar Buttons:

Screen Name

Help

Main Menu, Help Side bar Buttons: Send Order, Call Waiter and Help, Menu Buttons: How to order a Pizza, How to order soups, How to order drinks, How to order pasta, How to call a waiter. Links to Page

Links to this page is available throughout the entire system.

Links from Page

How to order a Pizza video, How to order soups video, How to order drinks video, How to order pasta video, How to call a waiter video, Main Menu.

Description

This screen holds links to all the tutorials.

[ 158 ]

Screen No.

6/6

Buttons

Language Buttons: Sinhala, English and Tamil, Navigation Bar Buttons:

Screen Name

Video Tutorial

Main Menu, Help Side bar Buttons: Send Order, Call Waiter and Help, Menu Buttons: Video Links to Page

Help >> Select required tutorial

Links from Page

Main Menu, Help

Description

This provides video tutorials on how to use the system.

[ 159 ]

8.4.2 HIGH FIDELITY PROTOTYPE 8.4.2.1 COMPUTER BASED PROTOTYPING (HORIZONTAL) After evaluating the low fidelity prototype for problem areas, a high fidelity prototype has been made with all problems cleared. Some areas that were identified missing in the low fidelity prototype are as follows,

Once users are in the process of ordering a pizza it is difficult for them to switch to another category like pasta immediately. To overcome this, a separate navigation bar is used which has links to the main dishes such as Pizza, Pasta, Soups and Drinks. There is another navigation bar on top of the screen which will link to the pages the customer has passed. This is added so as to make the system flexible for the customers.

According to the previous designs the card holder will have a separate side bar. This will consume a lot of space from the card holder‟s screen. If it should be placed as in the previous design some options such as having a button to delete an order should be omitted and rely on other techniques such as drag and drop. So as to overcome this problem, the “Shopping Cart” technique used in most websites is used here as well. Therefore a new button is introduced to the screen, with the shopping cart label.

When this button is clicked a separate window will be opened to show the same information that was represented in the order bar.

[ 160 ]

8.4.2.1.1 Navigation Design Local Structure To allow users easily identify where they are right now, we have used a navigation bar on top of the screen which indicates where the customer was before and where the customer is right now on the system.

Main Menu

Pizza

Where the user

Where the user is right

was before

now, is highlighted

With this type of navigation bar, users can easily identify where they were before as well.

In every screen, on buttons which are clickable, a tool tip will be labeled on the button to inform the user that it should be clicked. Also the buttons will be animated so as to grab the user‟s attention (usually shining effects) and to show it is something interactive.

Buttons are named in a way to give the user an idea as to where the particular button will take them. Since it‟s a touch screen machine and tool tips cannot appear as a roll over effect, labels on buttons are usually verbs which will indicate where it‟ll take the user rather than symbols. Of course symbols are used in certain buttons such as Help which most people today are familiar, is indicated with a question mark. Also it is common understanding that a bell will be used to call someone. Hospitals usually have a small button by the bed with a bell symbol on it to call a nurse into the room. Of course, being in a restaurant that someone who is being summoned would be a waiter.

[ 161 ]

Global Structure Pizza Hut Ordering System

Set Seating

If cards are more

Arrangement

than one

Home

Pizza

Type 1

Type 2

Pasta

Type 3

Drinks

Soups

View Order List

Help

[ 162 ]

8.4.2.1.2 Screen Design Strategies After considering facts, guidelines, rules gathered on user interface design, such as, 

Grouping related items



Space



Alignment



Consistency



Shapes/ Appearance



Visibility



Match between system and the real world



Offer informative feedback



User control and freedom



Error Prevention



Reduce short-term memory load



Support internal locus of control



Permit easy reversal of actions



Design Dialogs to yield closure

Screen Name

Buttons

Application of Design Theories

Welcome

-

This screen will instruct the user to place the given

Screen

card on the screen to activate the table. This screen which is what the user sees the very first time will guide the user as to how to start using the system.

Seat



Placement

The

seats

on

the When more than one card (Maximum two) are

screen will be in the placed on the screen, a pop up with the seating 

form of buttons.

arrangement of the table will be shown so that the

Language buttons.

user can select in which seats the members who belong to him or her are. Different users are familiar or comfortable with [ 163 ]

different languages. Therefore 3 main languages used in Sri Lanka have been added to the system This bar is consistent throughout the entire application. This is to allow the user to change the language whenever they want.

When a seat is clicked it will be highlighted to indicate that it is selected. Main Menu



Top Navigation Bar The main menu is the first screen the user will see buttons

after the system has been activated.



Language buttons.

As said before the language buttons are consistently



Side Navigation bar added to all the screens. buttons.

The Side Navigation bar includes links to all the



Top Navigation bar dishes available in the restaurant such as, Pizza, Drinks, Soups and Pasta. buttons.



Play video.

Top navigation bar includes a button to go to Home



Call waiter.

screens. The purpose to use the top navigation bar



Help.

is to let the user identify where they were before and where they are now. Also since the bar is linked to the page it displays, users can also click and navigate to the page. All the buttons which are clickable will have a shining effect to grab the user‟s attention and to convey that it is something the user can interact with. Indicated by a question mark the help button has to be clicked twice for the button to activate. This is to avoid, the user mistakenly pressing the button Indicated by a Bell the “Call Waiter” button has to be clicked twice. This is to avoid, the user mistakenly pressing the button. [ 164 ]

Pizza Screen



Top Navigation Bar The different types of pizzas will be available on buttons: Home, Pizza. this screen.

Individual Screens

for

dishes



Beef Pepproni

Top navigation bar includes buttons to go to Home



Chicken Spicy

and Pizza Screens.



Chillie Beef

Buttons for Beef Pepproni, Chicken Spicy, Chillie



Super supreme

Beef,



Chicken Hawaiian

Super supreme, Chicken Hawaiian and Chicken



Chicken Hurricane



Call waiter



Help



View Orders



Top Navigation bar

Here the user can set the quantity, size and add the



Side navigation bar

order to the shopping cart.



Language buttons

Users can select the size of the pizza, between



Select size

small, regular and large.



Decrease quantity

The increase, decrease buttons allows the user to



Increase quantity

browse through numbers to set the quantity of the



Add



Call waiter



Help



View Orders

Hurricane when clicked will go to the individual screens for separate dishes.

pizza they want to order. Top navigation bar will show links to Home, Pizza and the individual screen. The add button will add the order to the shopping cart. Once the order has been made the “View Order” button will blink to indicate the user that an order is available inside the cart. The side navigation bar and the language bar will be consistent as mentioned before.

View Orders



Cancel Order

This will display detailed information such as

[ 165 ]



Remove

quantity, name, price and total price of all the



Send Order

orders. Customers if seen finalized can also send



Back

the order to the kitchen.



Top Navigation bar

The “Cancel Order” button will cancel the entire



Side navigation bar

order.



Language buttons

The “Remove” button will appear in front of every



Call waiter

dish, and can be used to remove a particular dish



Help



View Orders

from the list. “Send Order” button will send the order to the kitchen. The Side navigation, top navigation, language bars, call waiter, help and view order buttons will be consistent as in all screens.

Call Waiter



Call Waiter

This will display that the waiter has been called. A feedback will be given to the user saying that their request has been fulfilled, and they will be navigated back to the menu.

Help



Top Navigation bar

This screen provides video tutorials of how to order



Side navigation bar

a pizza, drinks, soups, pastas and how to call a



Language buttons

waiter.



Call waiter

When the tutorial buttons are clicked a pop up will



Help

show a video tutorial of the application.



View Orders



How to order Pizza



How to order Soups



How to order Drinks



How to order Pasta

[ 166 ]



How to call a waiter

Items which are related to each other are grouped together. Below are the lists of features that are grouped together. 

Language buttons are placed together.



Links to navigate between dishes are placed together.



Links which shows the navigation path of the user are grouped together.



List of items are grouped together.

 Features added for assistance such as Help and Call Waiter are grouped together. Grouped items are separated from one another, using sufficient space and alignment. The system uses language which can be easily understood by the users. Since the system is being built for diverse users, it is important to use language which is easily understood by the customers. To ease understanding, we have used descriptive names such as, “View Order”, “Call Waiter”. Symbolic approaches are also used to convey messages to the user. Buttons

Description

A button used to call a waiter has a bell as its label since in most countries the bell is a symbol to call someone.

The button used to get help has a question mark as its label. A question mark symbolizes a question. Most applications on the computer and the internet use the question mark to convey questions will be answered in that link.

[ 167 ]

In real life, a shopping cart is used to gather all the items needed and are bought once everything needed are inside the cart. The same concept can be applied for computer based systems as well. A consistent layout is used throughout the entire application.

Language Selection Navigation bar to show the path

Navigation bar for the

Main Body

dishes

Call Waiter

View Order List

Help

Not only the placing of items but also, colors, animations, effects, naming and actions of buttons, navigation from one page to another, procedures such as ordering a pizza, ordering soups, ordering drinks, ordering pasta are also consistent throughout the system. [ 168 ]

Special Case If a particular table is required to generate two bills, two cards will be given. When these cards are placed on the screen one user will get a screen with seating arrangement of the table. Here the customer can select where the members who belong to them are so that the system will accurately place the orders in the correct shopping cart.

[ 169 ]

Main Menu

On the right hand side of the menu, the navigation bar will appear. It contains links to all types of dishes available in the restaurant. In the middle, shown by the image of the television is a video clip of Pizza Hut to keep the customers entertained. The buttons which appear on the bottom left hand corner are used to call a waiter and to browse the help tutorials. Call waiter is indicated by a button which has a bell as the label and Help is indicated with a question mark. Users can also select a language they are comfortable with throughout the entire application.

[ 170 ]

Pizza Menu

In the menu page, different types of pizza will be listed as seen above. This screen will have a new button called the “View Order”, indicated by a shopping cart. Also the navigation bar on the top now shows a link to the Home, also known as Main Menu page. The buttons are made to be large so that they will fit the largest finger size. Also, an acceptable amount of space is left between the buttons to avoid a button getting pressed, mistakenly. A tool tip saying “Click” is also available on the buttons which respond to a single click to indicate that it is something clickable. For buttons like Call Waiter, to avoid the button being pressed mistakenly, the button only navigates from the page once it is double clicked. At the first click a tool tip will appear as shown below.

[ 171 ]

Pizza Dish Screen

This screen is a dedicated page for the dish. Here the user can select the quantity and the size of the pizza. According to the user‟s selection the total price will be shown. Once the user decides to order it they can click the “Add” button, indicated by a “+” symbol. When that particular button is clicked, the order will be added to the “Shopping Cart”. How the order will be sent to the shopping cart will be shown by an animation, and the shopping cart, or the “View Order” button will start blinking, once it receives an order. This is to help the user realize that they can view their orders when that button is clicked.

[ 172 ]

View Order Screen

On this page, all the orders made by the members of the table are shown in detailed. The information presented in this screen includes the total number of quantities ordered from each dish, the total price for a particular set from a dish and the overall total of the order. The card holder can remove certain dishes from the table, cancel the entire order and start all over again or send the finalized order to the kitchen. To remove a dish, a “Remove button” will be available on the screen. If a particular dish has 2 orders, that is, say there are three Cheese and Onion regular pizzas in the list. The customer wants to reduce the quantity to one. To do so, the customer only has to click on the “Remove” button twice. If it is one dish he or she wants to remove a single click on the button will do so.

[ 173 ]

Help and Tutorials

The help and tutorial button will include video tutorials of how to use the touch system. Tutorials will include, 

How to order a Pizza



How to order Pasta



How to order Soups



How to order Drinks



How to call a waiter

[ 174 ]

9.0 WORKLOAD MATRIX No

Task

Tharanga

Nuwanthi

Thaveesha

Chandrasekera

Illukkumbura

Gamage

1.0

Introduction

33.33%

33.33%

33.33%

2.0

Problem Background

33.33%

33.33%

33.33%

3.0

User

Profiling

&

Task 100%

Analysis 4.0

Usability

Goals

&

100%

Competitive Analysis 5.0

Design & Prototype

100%

6.0

Testing

33.33%

33.33%

33.33%

7.0

Critical Discussion on User 33.33%

33.33%

33.33%

33.33%

33.33%

33.33%

33.33%

33.33%

33.33%

Profiling & Task Analysis 8.0

Critical

Discussion

on 33.33%

Usability Goals & Competitive Analysis 9.0

Critical Discussion on Design 33.33% & Prototype

10.0

Critical Discussion on Testing

33.33%

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10.0 REFERENCE Strauss , Morgan. (2009) Labeling Touchscreen Interfaces, [Online]. Available http://blog.guifx.com/2009/07/15/labeling-touchscreen-interfaces/ [Accessed on 7 Jan 2010]

Tyco Electronics Corporate Website (2009) Touchscreen Application Tips, [Online]. Available http://www.elotouch.com/Support/TechnicalSupport/10tips.asp [Accessed on 7 Jan 2010]

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