Integrating usability analysis and metrics into the development process

UXPA-MN: CogTool Webinar with Dr. Bonnie John

Demonstrations

These demonstrations are short Flash movies designed to help you learn the basics of working with CogTool. The following demonstrations will use the interfaces and tasks introduced by Nielsen and Phillips at CHI ’93 (N&P93). The full paper describing the interfaces and tasks is available at the ACM Digital Library

Here’s a list of links to existing demonstrations:

• Preparing CogTool – How to download and install CogTool on a PC. Although the demonstration itself is on a PC, there are instructions for downloading and installing on a Mac as well (This demonstration is independent of N&P93).
• Introduction to CogTool – How to start CogTool, specify the hardware used in a design, and an overview of CogTool’s project window.
• Create a suite of tasks – How to create several tasks for which you will make task execution time predictions on several proposed designs.
• Create the N&P Dialog Box design – Create the first design used in N&P93, a dialog box design. This first demonstration shows how to import background images to use a guide for the placement of widgets.
  • Create a cascading menu – Use the standard menu widget to create a cascading menu similar to the one used by N&P. Although this demonstration uses a screenshot of the N&P interface as a guide for placement and contents of this menu, this same widget can be used alone to create any menu system without a background image.
  • Create transitions from cascading menus – Shows how transitions can be drawn from cascading menus and how they look in the design view after being created.
  • Create buttons – Use the standard button tool to create some buttons. This demonstration also shows the difference between a rendered widget and a non-rendered widget.
  • Create non-interactive widgets – Use the standard non-interactive widget tool to create an area on the screen that contains information that can be looked at, but cannot respond to user actions. These widgets are used when a user has to look at various places to get information to enter into a text box (as in the N&P93 task) or visually monitored (for example, the altitude display in an airplane cockpit).
  • Create a text box – Use the standard widget to create an empty textbox and show how it looks with no background image.
  • Type into an empty text box using a keyboard transition – Create a new frame by copying the one we just made, which will be the result of typing text into an empty textbox. Add click and keyboard transitions to mimic the procedure of typing text into an empty textbox.
  • Create transitions from buttons and overlapping widgets – Shows how to create a transition from a button to a new frame that changes what’s on the screen. It shows how widgets can overlap.
  • Demonstrate a task and get a prediction of time to perform that task – This shows how to get a quantittive a prediction of the time to execute one number look-up on the dialog box design.
  • Create “editable” text widgets – Use text widgets to mimic the behavior of editable text. NOTE: this demonstration user hover-and-click to approximate a drag operation. CogTool_v1.0 now includes press and release mouse actions and you should use these to model a drag operation.
  • Demonstrate a second task and get a prediction of the time to perform that task.
• Create the N&P93 PopUp Design and context menus – Shows how to make a second design to compare to the first design on the same tasks. This Pop-Up design uses context menus.
• Demonstrate tasks on a second design and compare predictions
  A quick look at the HCIPA version of CogTool. To get to the behavior shown in this demonstration, you must enable the HCIPA features through the Preferences menu item. On the PC, Prefenences is in the File menu. On the Mac, it is in the CogTool menu. Once you have selected the Preferences menu itme, check the HCIPA checkbox to enable the HCIPA version of CogTool. This demonstration starts with an HCIPA model already entered to show how it will look when complete. It then creates the same model again to show you how it was built using this version of HCIPA.
  (Demonstrations of what is enabled if you select “Enable research commands” will be developed eventually if the researchers need them.)

These demonstrations were created in Wink , a free presentation and tutorial tool for the PC.