CS6008 HUMAN COMUTER INTERACTION

UNIT III
Cognitive

MODELS AND THEORIES

Models

Socio-Organizational Issues

and

Stake

Holder Requirements

Communication and Collaboration Models-Hypertext, Multimedia and WWW.

1. Define Cognitive Science.

Cognitive science- is a scientific and interdisciplinary study of the mind with special emphasis on the use
and acquisition of knowledge and information.
2. List out the fields included in Cognitive Science.

Artificial Intelligence

Psychology

Linguistics

Philosophy

Anthropology

Education

3. What is Cognition?
It is derived from Latin base cognition i.e., "knows together" which means the collection of mental
processes and activities used in perceiving, learning, remembering, thinking, and understanding, and the
act of those processes.
4. Define Cognitive Model
A theory that produces a computational model of how people perform tasks and solve problems by using
psychological principles and empirical studies.
5. What is the aim of Cognitive model in Human Computer Interaction?
The aim of cognitive model in Human Computer Interaction is to design and evolution of interface
alternatives.
6. List out the Advantages of Cognitive Model.
Don't need to implement or prototype.
Don't need to test with real users.
7. List out some issues in Goal Vs Task structure.

Granularity

Conflict

Treatment of Error

8. What is GOMS?
GOMS provides a higher-level language for task analysis and UI modeling. It generates a set of
quantitative and qualitative measures based on description of the task and user interface. It provides a
hierarchy of goals and methods to achieve them.

9. List out the Classification of GOMS model.

Predictive

Descriptive

Prescriptive

10. List out the various advantages and disadvantages of GOMS model.
Advantages

It gives qualitative & quantitative measures.

GOMS model explains the results.

It provides less work than user study.

Disadvantages

Assumption made here in GOMS model is extreme expert behavior.

Here the Tasks must be goal-directed.

It does not model problem-solving, exploration, etc.

11. Give the two types of Linguistic Dialogue Models.

Backus- Naur Form (BNF)

Task Action Grammar (TAG)

12. Give the two types of Physical Device Models.

Keystroke-Level Model

Three-State Model

13. Define CSCW.

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work' (CSCW) means that groups will be acting in a cooperative
manner. It is true to some extend level. For example, opposing football teams cooperate to the extent that
they keep (largely) within the rules of the game, but their cooperation only goes so far.
14. Who are stakeholders?
Stakeholders are key to many of the approaches to requirements capture. In an organizational setting, it is
not simply the end-user who is affected by the introduction of new technology. A stakeholder can be
defined as anyone who is affected by the success or failure of the system.
15. List out the different categories of stakeholders.

Primary stakeholders are people who actually use the system the end-users.

Secondary stakeholders are people who do not directly use the system, but receive output from
it or provide input to it.

Tertiary stakeholders are people who do not fall into either of the first two categories but who
are directly affected by the success or failure of the system.

Facilitating stakeholders are people who are involved with the design, development and
maintenance of the system.

16. Give the stakeholders list for airline systems.

Primary stakeholders: travel agency staff, airline booking staff.

Secondary stakeholders: customers, airline management.

Tertiary stakeholders: competitors, civil aviation authorities. Customers' travelling companions,

airline shareholders.

Facilitating stakeholders: design team, IT department staff

17. Define Free Rider Problem.

A system may still not function symmetrically, which may be a problem, particularly with shared
communication systems. One issue is the free rider problem. Take an electronic conferencing system.
18. List out the two common approaches to illustrate the socio-technical models.

CUSTOM

Open System Task Analysis (OSTA)

19. List out the CUSTOM the stage to analysis.

Describe the organizational context, including its primary goals, physical characteristics, political and
economic background.

Identify and describe stakeholders.

Identify and describe work-groups. whether

Identify and describe taskobject pairs.

Identify stakeholder needs.

Consolidate and check stakeholder requirements.

20. List the eight main stages of OSTA.

The primary task which the technology must support is identified in terms of users' goals.

Task inputs to the system are identified. These may have different sources and forms that may constrain
the design.

The external environment into which the system will be introduced is described, including physical,
economic and political aspects.

The transformation processes within the system are described in terms of actions performed on or with
objects.

The social system is analyzed, considering existing work-groups and relationships within and external to
the organization.

The technical system is described in terms of its configuration and integration with other systems.

Performance satisfaction criteria are established, indicating the social and technical requirements of the
system.

The new technical system is specified.

21. Define Rich Picture.

It is a useful tool to aid understanding of situation. It is informal and relatively intuitive. It captures
succinctly the potentially conflicting interests of the various stakeholders and the other influences on a
design situation. It provides an understandable summary of the designer's understanding.
22. Define CATWOE.

Clients: those who receive output or benefit from the system.

Actors: those who perform activities within the system.

Transformations: the changes that are affected by the system.

Weltanschauung: (from the German) or World View - how the system is perceived in a particular root
definition.

Owner: those to whom the system belongs, to whom it is answerable and who can authorize changes to
it.

Environment: the world in which the system operates and by which it is influenced.

23. Define ETHICS.

ETHICS is a method developed by Enid Mumford within the socio-technical tradition. It is distinct in its
view of the role of stakeholders in the process.

24. Define Turn-Taking.

It is the process by which the roles of speaker and listener are exchanged. Back channels are often a
crucial part of this process.

25. Define Latency

There is also the time it takes for a message to get across the network form your machine to the web
server and back. This delay is called Latency.

PART-B

1. Explain in detail about Cognitive Model and its Techniques. (16 Mark)
Cognitive Model and its Techniques
Cognitive Model
Cognitive models represent users of interactive systems.
o Hierarchical models represent a users task and goal structure.
o Linguistic models represent the usersystem grammar.
o Physical and device models represent human motor skills.
o Cognitive architectures underlie all of these cognitive models.

GOAL AND TASK HIERARCHIES

LINGUISTIC MODELS

THE CHALLENGE OF DISPLAY-BASED SYSTEMS

PHYSICAL AND DEVICE MODELS

COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURES
1A. Explain in detail about Goal and Task Hierarchies. (16 Mark)
Goal and Task Hierarchies
It is based on divide-and-conquer.
It models make use of a model of mental processing in which the user achieves goals by
solving divide-and-conquer.
Goals are intentions/aims.
Tasks are actions.

The example can be laid out to expose this structure:

GOMS

Cognitive Complexity Theory (CCT)

Problems and Extensions of Goal Hierarchies

I. GOMS

GOMS means Goal, Operator, Methods and Selection.

A GOMS description consists of these four elements:

1. Goals
These are the users goals, describing what the user wants to achieve. GOMS the goals are taken
to represent a memory pointfor the user, from which he can evaluate what should be done and to
which he may return should any errors occur.

2. Operators
These are the lowest level of analysis. They are the basic actions that the user must perform in
order to use the system. They may affect the system (for example, press the X key) or only the
users mental state (for example, read the dialog box).
There is still a degree of flexibility about the granularity of operators; we may take the command
level issue the SELECT commandor be more primitive: move mouse to menu bar, press center
mouse button.

3. Methods
There are typically several ways in which a goal can be split into subgoals.
For instance, in a certain window manager a currently selected window can be closed to an icon
either by selecting the CLOSE option from a pop-up menu, or by hitting the L7 function key.
In GOMS these two goal decompositions are referred to as methods, so we have the
CLOSE-METHOD and the L7-METHOD,

4. Selection
From the above snippet we see the use of the word select where the choice of methods arises.
GOMS does not leave this as a random choice, but attempts to predict which methods will be
used.
This typically depends both on the particular user and on the state of the system and details about
the goals.
For instance, a user, Sam, never uses the L7-METHOD, except for one game, blocks, where the
mouse needs to be used in the game until the very moment the key is pressed.
GOMS captures this in a selection rule for Sam,

The goal hierarchies described in a GOMS analysis are almost wholly below the
level of the unit task defined earlier.
A typical GOMS analysis would therefore consist of a single high-level goal, which is
then decomposed into a sequence of unit tasks, all of which can be further
decomposed down to the level of basic operators:

II. Cognitive Complexity Theory (CCT)

It was introduced by Kieras and Polson.

The basic premises of goal decomposition.
GOMS and enriches the model to provide more predictive power.
CCT has two parallel descriptions:
one of the users goals and
the other of the computer system (called the device in CCT).
The description of the users goals is based on a GOMS-like goal hierarchy, but is expressed
primarily using production rules.
For the system grammar, CCT uses generalized transition networks, a form of state transition
network.
The production rules are a sequence of rules:

if condition then action

where condition is a statement about the contents of working memory.

If the condition is true then the production rule is said to fire.
An action may consist of one or more elementary actions, which may be either
changes to the working memory, or external actions such as keystrokes.
The production rule program is written in a LISP-like language.

We consider a fragment of the associated CCT production rules.

Some notes on CCT

The rules did not fire in the order they were written.
The rules are all active and at each moment any rule that has its conditions true may fire.
Some rules may never fire; the same rule may fire repeatedly.
The rules can fire simultaneously in parallel model.
The rules may be represented by experts.

III. Problems and Extensions of Goal Hierarchies

The formation of a goal hierarchy is largely a post hoc technique and runs a very real risk of
being defined by the computer dialog rather than the user.
One way to rectify this is to produce a goal structure based on pre-existing manual
procedures and thus obtain a natural hierarchy.

 GOMS defines its domain to be that of expert use, and thus the goal structures that are important
are those which users develop out of their use of the system.
The conceptual framework of goal hierarchies and user goal stacks can be used to express
interface issues, not directly addressed by the notations above.
For instance, we can use this to examine in more detail the closure problem with early
automated teller machines (ATMs) mentioned in the Design Focus box.
These early ATMs gave the customers the money before returning their cards.
Unfortunately, this led to many customers leaving their cards behind.
This was despite on-screen messages telling them to wait.
This is referred to as a problem of closure.
The users principal goal is to get money; when that goal is satisfied, the user does not
complete or close the various subtasks which still remain open:

1B. Explain in detail about Linguistic Models. (8 Mark)

Linguistic Models
The users interaction with a computer is often viewed in terms of a language, so it is not
surprising that several modeling formalisms have developed centered around this concept.
BNF grammars are frequently used to specify dialogs.
The models here, although similar in form to dialog design notations, have been proposed with
the intention of understanding the users behavior and analyzing the cognitive difficulty of the
interface.
They are two types of Linguistic Dialogue models,

BNF

TaskAction Grammar

I. BNF
BNF means BackusNaur Form.
Representative of the linguistic approach is Reisners use of BackusNaur Form (BNF) rules
to describe the dialog grammar.
This views the dialog at a purely syntactic level, ignoring the semantics of the language.

 BNF has been used widely to specify the syntax of computer programming languages, and
many system dialogs can be described easily using BNF rules. For example, imagine a
graphics system that has a line-drawing function.
To select the function the user must select the line menu option.
The line-drawing function allows the user to draw a polyline that is a sequence of line arcs
between points.
The user selects the points by clicking the mouse button in the drawing area.
The user double clicks to indicate the last point of the poly line.
Consider the following example,

The names in the description are of two types:

non-terminals, shown in lower case,
and terminals, shown in upper case.

Non-Terminals
o
o
o

Non-terminals are higher-level abstractions.

It shown in lower case letter.
The non-terminals are defined in terms of other non-terminals and terminals by a
definition of the form,
name ::= expression

The ::= symbol is read as is defined as.

Only non-terminals may appear on the left of a definition.
The right-hand side is built up using two operators + (sequence) and |
(choice).

Terminals
o
o
o

It shown in upper case letter.

Terminals represent the lowest level of user behavior, such as pressing a key, clicking
a mouse button or moving the mouse.
Example: CLICK-MOUSR, MOVE-MOUSE

II. TaskAction Grammar (TAG)

BNF ignores the advantages of consistency both in the languages structure and in its use of
command names and letters.
Taskaction grammar (TAG) making more explicitly.
It uses parameterized grammar rules to emphasize consistency and encoding the users
world knowledge.

 To illustrate consistency, we consider the three UNIX commands:

o cp (for copying files),
o mv (for moving files),
o ln (for linking files).
Each of these has two possible forms.
In BNF, three possible commands would be described as,

Rules here are,

1C. What are the Challenges Present in Display Based Systems. (4 Mark)
THE CHALLENGE OF DISPLAY-BASED SYSTEMS
The hierarchical and grammar-based techniques were initially developed when most
interactive systems were command line, or at most, keyboard and cursor based.
There are significant worries, therefore, about how well these approaches can generalize to deal
with more modern windowed and mouse-driven interfaces.
Pressing a cursor key is a reasonable lexeme, but moving a mouse one pixel is less sensible.
In addition, pointer-based dialogs are more display oriented.
Clicking a cursor at a particular point on the screen has a meaning dependent on the current
screen contents.
This problem can be partially resolved by regarding operations such as select region of textor
click on quit button as the terminals of the grammar.
If this approach is taken, the detailed mouse movements and parsing of mouse events in the
context of display information (menus, etc.) are abstracted away.
Goal hierarchy methods have different problems, as more display-oriented systems encourage
less structured methods for goal achievement. Instead of having well-defined plans, the user is
seen as performing a more exploratory task, recognizing fruitful directions and backing out of
others.
Typically, even when this exploratory style is used at one level.
So, for example, we might consider the high-level goal structure,
WRITE_LETTER
. FIND_SIMILAR_LETTER
. COPY_IT
. EDIT_COPY

1D. Explain in detail about Physical and Device Models? (8 Mark)

Physical and Device Models
There are two types,

Keystroke-Level Model

Three-State Model

I. Keystroke-Level Model
The human motor system is well understood.
KLM (Keystroke-Level Model) uses this understanding as a basis for detailed predictions
about user performance.
It is aimed at unit tasks within interaction the execution of simple command sequences,
typically taking no more than 20 seconds.
Examples of this would be using a search and replace feature, or changing the font of a word.
It does not extend to complex actions such as producing a diagram.
The assumption is that these more complex tasks would be split into subtasks (as in GOMS)
before the user attempts to map them into physical actions.
The task is split into two phases:
o Acquisition of the task, when the user builds a mental representation of the task;
o Execution of the task using the systems facilities.
KLM is related to the GOMS model, and can be thought of as a very low-level GOMS model
where the method is given.
The model decomposes the execution phase into five different physical motor operators, a
mental operator and a system response operator:
Physical Motor:
K - Key stroking
B - Pressing
P - Pointing
H - Homing
D - Drawing
Mental:
M - Mentally preparing
System:
R - System response
The execution of a task will involve interleaved occurrences of the various operators.
For instance, imagine we are using a mouse-based editor.
If we notice a single character error we will point at the error, delete the character and retype it,
and then return to our previous typing point.
This is decomposed as follows:
1. Move hand to mouse H[mouse]
2. Position mouse after bad character PB[LEFT]
3. Return to keyboard H[keyboard]
4. Delete character MK[DELETE]
5. Type correction K[char]
6. Reposition insertion point H[mouse]MPB[LEFT]

 For example, if the time taken for one keystroke is tK, then the total time doing keystrokes is

II. Three-State Model

Buxton has developed a simple model of input devices [53], the three-state model, which captures
some of these crucial distinctions.
He begins by looking at a mouse.
If you move it with no buttons pushed, it normally moves the mouse cursor about.
This tracking behavior is termed state 1. Depressing a button over an icon and then moving
the mouse will often result in an object being dragged about.
This he calls state 2 see the Figure.

If instead we consider a light pen with a button, it behaves just like a mouse when it is touching
the screen.
When its button is not depressed, it is in state 1, and when its button is down, state 2.
However, the light pen has a third state, when the light pen is not touching the screen.
In this state the system cannot track the light pens position. This is called state 0 (see
Figure 12.2).

There is a similar difference in tension between state 0 and state 1.

It is well known that Fitts law has different timing constants for different devices.
Recall that Fitts law says that the time taken to move to a target of size S at a distance D is:

a + b log2(D/S + 1)

1E. Explain in detail about Cognitive Architecture? (8 Mark)

Cognitive Architecture
The concept of taking a problem and solving it by divide and conquer using subgoals is
central to GOMS.
CCT assumes the distinction between long- and short-term memory, with production rules being
stored in long-term memory and matched against the contents of short-term (or working)
memory to determine which fire.
The KLM based on the Model Human Processor (MHP) architecture

The Problem Space Model

Interacting Cognitive Subsystems

I. The Problem Space Model

The problem space model rational behavior is characterized as behavior that is intended to
achieve a specific goal.
This element of rationality is often used to distinguish between intelligent and machine-like
behavior.
In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a system exhibiting rational behavior is referred to
as a knowledge-level system.
A knowledge-level system contains an agent behaving in an environment.
o The agent has knowledge about itself and its environment, including its own goals.
o It can perform certain actions and sense information about its changing
environment.
o The agent behaves in its environment; it changes the environment and its own
knowledge.
We can view the overall behavior of the knowledge-level system as a sequence of environment
and agent states as they progress in time.
o The goal of the agent is characterized as a preference over all possible sequences of
agent/environment states.
The search proceeds by moving from one state to another possible state by means of operations or
actions, the ultimate goal of which is to arrive at one of the desired states.
Once she has identified a problem and a means of arriving at the solution to the problem (the
algorithm), the programmer then represents the problem and algorithm in a programming
language, which can be executed on a machine to reach the desired state.
The architecture of the machine only allows the definition of the search or problem space and the
actions that can occur to traverse that space.
Termination is also assumed to happen once the desired state is reached.
The machine does not have the ability to formulate the problem space and its solution, mainly
because it has no idea of the goal. It is the job of the programmer to understand the goal and so
define the machine to achieve it.
We can adapt the state-based computational model of a machine in order to realize the
architecture of a knowledge-level system.
The new computational model is the problem space model.
A problem space consists of a set of states and a set of operations that can be performed on the
states.
Behavior in a problem space is a two-step process.

First, the current operator is chosen based on the current state and then it is applied
to the current state to achieve the new state.
From the above description, we can highlight four different activities that occur within a problem
space: goal formulation, operation selection, operation application and goal completion.
o

II. Interacting Cognitive Subsystems

Barnard has proposed a very different cognitive architecture, called interacting cognitive
subsystems.
ICS provides a model of perception, cognition and action, but unlike other cognitive
architectures, it is not intended to produce a description of the user in terms of sequences of
actions that he performs.
ICS provides a more holistic view of the user as an information-processing machine.
The emphasis is on determining how easy particular procedures of action sequences become as
they are made more automatic within the user.
ICS attempts to incorporate two separate psychological traditions within one cognitive
architecture.
On the one hand is the architectural and general-purpose information-processing approach
of short-term memory research.
On the other hand is the computational and representational approach characteristic of
psycholinguistic research and AI problem-solving literature.
The architecture of ICS is built up by the coordinated activity of nine smaller subsystems: five
peripheral subsystems are in contact with the physical world and four are central, dealing with
mental processes.
Each subsystem has the same generic structure.
A subsystem is described in terms of its typed inputs and outputs along with a memory store for
holding typed information.
It has transformation functions for processing the input and producing the output and permanently
stored information.
Each of the nine subsystems is specialized for handling some aspect of external or internal
processing. For example, one peripheral subsystem is the visual system for describing what is
seen in the world.

2. Explain in detail about the Socio-Organizational Issues. (8 Mark)

Socio-Organizational Issues

Some of the organizational issues that affect the acceptance and relevance of information and
communication systems.
These factors often sit outside the system as such, and may involve individuals who never use
it.

Cooperation or Conflict?

Changing Power Structures

The Invisible Worker

Who Benefits?

Free Rider Problem

Critical Mass

Automating Processes Workflow and BPR

Evaluating The Benefits

I. Cooperation or Conflict?
The term computer-supported cooperative work(CSCW) seems to assume that groups will be
acting in a cooperative manner.
This is true to some extend level.
For Example, opposing football teams cooperate to the extent that they keep (largely) within the
rules of the game, but their cooperation only goes so far.
People in organizations and groups have conflicting goals, and systems that ignore this are likely
to fail spectacularly.
Before installing a new computer system, whether explicitly cooperative or not, one must
identify the stakeholders who will be affected by it.
These are not just the immediate users, but anyone whose jobs will be altered, who supplies or
gains information from it, or whose power or influence within the organization will increase or
decrease.

II. Changing Power Structures

The identification of stakeholders will uncover information transfer and power relationships
that cut across the organizational structure.
Indeed, all organizations have these informal networks that support both social and functional
contacts.
Technology can be used to change management style and power structures.
The impact of technology must be analyzed before it is introduced in an organization.
In the short term, solutions must be carefully matched to the existing social and organizational
structures.

III. The Invisible Worker

Telecommunication improvement allows functional groups to be distributed over different
sites.
This can take the form of cross-functional neighborhood centers, where workers from different
departments do their jobs in electronic contact with their functional colleagues.
Examples: home-based teleworker.
If the approach in an organization is management by presence, that is you know someone is
working because they are in the office, then there is no way a remote worker is going to be
trusted.

 If, on the other hand, the style is management by objectives, that is you know your
subordinates are working because they are doing their jobs and producing results.
Many video-based groupware systems are intended to create a sense of engagement, of active
participation and social presence.

IV. Who Benefits?

One frequent reason for the failure of information systems is that the people who get the
benefits from the system are not the same as those who do the work.
Another example is shared calendars.
The beneficiary of the system is a manager who uses the system to arrange meeting times, but
whose personal secretary does the work of keeping the calendar up to date.
The lesson is that information systems should aim for some level of symmetry.
If you have to do work for the system, you should obtain some benefit from it.
For the shared calendar, this might involve improving the personal user interface, so that there are
definite advantages in using the online system to plan your time rather than using paper (it could
even print out Filofax pages).
In addition, if people use electronic organizers one could consider integrating these into the
system.

V. Free Rider Problem

A system may still not function symmetrically, which may be a problem, particularly with
shared communication systems.
One issue is the free rider problem. Take an electronic conferencing system.
If there is plenty of discussion of relevant topics then there are obvious advantages to subscribing
and reading the contributions.
When considering writing a contribution, the effort of doing so may outweigh any benefits.
The total benefit of the system for each user outweighs the costs, but for any particular decision
the balance is overturned.
A few free riders in a conference system are often not a problem, as the danger is more likely
from too much activity.
In addition, in electronic conferences the patterns of activity and silence may reflect other factors
such as expertise.
In the real world, such problems are often solved by social pressure, and the free rider reacts to
the collective censure of the group. Increasing the visibility of participantscontributions might
also help these social mechanisms.

VI. Critical Mass

Another issue related to the free rider problem is the need to develop a critical mass.
When telephones were only in public places, their use as a form of pervasive interpersonal
communication was limited.
However, once a large number of people have telephones in their homes it becomes worthwhile
paying to have a telephone installed.
In cost/benefit terms, the early subscribers probably have a smaller benefit than the cost.
Only when the number of subscribers increases beyond the critical mass does the benefit for all
dominate the cost.

 The same is true for all electronics communication systems.

VII. Automating Processes Workflow and BPR

Organizations have many such processes, and workflow systems aim to automate much of the
process using electronic forms, which are forwarded to the relevant person based on pre-coded
rules.
Some workflow systems are built using special purpose groupware, often based on a notation for
describing the desired workflow.
The rigid form of a typical workflow system is an example of global structuring.
A more radical approach to organizational processes is found in business process reengineering (BPR).
Traditionally, organizations have been structured around functions: sales, accounts, stores,
manufacturing.
In BPR these processes are recorded and analyzed.

VIII. Evaluating the Benefits

There are several problems that can arise from the mismatch between information systems and
organizational and social factors.
We could consider the two main factors,
o First one is job satisfaction and information flow.
o Second one is economic benefit.
The benefits from cooperative systems, especially organization-wide systems such as email or
electronic conferencing, are in terms of job satisfaction or more fluid information flow.
Some, such as the video wall are expected primarily to help social contact within the
organization.

3. Explain in detail about Capturing or Stake Holder Requirements? (16

Mark)
Capturing or Stake Holder Requirements
There is a need to identify the requirements within the context of use.
There are several approaches,

Socio-Technical Modeling

Soft Systems Methodology

Participatory Design

Ethnographic Methods

Who are the stakeholders?

Stakeholders are key to many of the approaches to requirements capture, since in an
organizational setting it is not simply the end-user who is affected by the introduction of new
technology.
A stakeholder, therefore, can be defined as anyone who is affected by the success or failure of the
system.
It can be useful to distinguish different categories of stakeholder, and the following
categorization from the CUSTOM approach (see [200]) is helpful for this:

1. Primary stakeholders are people who actually use the system the end-users.
2. Secondary stakeholders are people who do not directly use the system, but receive output
from it for provide input to it (for example, someone who receives a report
produced by the system).

3. Tertiary stakeholders are people who do not fall into either of the first two categories but
who are directly affected by the success or failure of the system (for example, a director whose
profits increase or decrease depending on the success of the system).

4. Facilitating stakeholders are people who are involved with the design, development and
maintenance of the system.

I. Socio-Technical Modeling
The key focus of the socio-technical approach is to describe and document the impact of the
introduction of a specific technology into an organization.
Methods vary but most attempt to capture certain common elements:
o The problem being addressed: there is a need to understand why the technology is
being proposed and what problem it is intended to solve.
o The stakeholders affected, including primary, secondary, tertiary and facilitating,
together with their objectives, goals and tasks.
o The workgroups within the organization, both formal and informal.
o The changes or transformations that will be supported.
o The proposed technology and how it will work within the organization.
o External constraints and influences and performance measures.
There are two common approaches to illustrate the Socio-Technical Models.

 They are,

CUSTOM Methodology

Open System Task Analysis (OSTA)

1. CUSTOM Methodology

CUSTOM is a socio-technical methodology.

It is designed to be practical to use in small organizations.
It is based on the User Skills and Task Match (USTM) approach.
It is forms-based methodology.
They are six key stages to carry out in a CUSTOM analysis:
o

Describe the organizational context, including its primary goals, physical characteristics,
political and economic background.

Identify and describe stakeholders. All stakeholders are named, categorized and described
with regard to personal issues, their role in the organization and their job.

Identify and describe work-groups whether formally constituted or not.

Identify and describe taskobject pairs i.e. Tasks that must be performed and objects used.

Identify stakeholder needs. Stages 24 are described in terms of both the current system and
the proposed system. Stakeholder needs are identified by considering the differences
between the two

Consolidate and check stakeholder requirements against the criteria determined at earlier
stages.

2. Open System Task Analysis (OSTA)

OSTA is an alternative socio-technical approach.
It attempts to describe what happens when a technical system is introduced into an organizational
work environment.
Like CUSTOM, OSTA specifies both social and technical aspects of the system.
OSTA has eight main stages:
o The primary task which the technology must support is identified in terms of users
goals.
o Task inputs to the system are identified. These may have different sources and
forms that may constrain the design.
o The external environment into which the system will be introduced is described,
including physical, economic and political aspects.
o The transformation processes within the system are described in terms of actions
performed on or with objects.
o The social system is analyzed, considering existing work-groups and relationships
within and external to the organization.

o
o
o

The technical system is described in terms of its configuration and integration with
other systems.
Performance satisfaction criteria are established, indicating the social and technical
requirements of the system.
The new technical system is specified.

II. Soft Systems Methodology

The socio-technical models focus on identifying requirements from both human and
technical perspectives.
It assumes a technological solution is being proposed.
Soft systems methodology (SSM) arises from the same tradition.
But takes a view of the organization as a system of which technology and people are components.
There is no assumption of a particular solution,
o The emphasis is rather on understanding the situation fully.
It has seven stages, they are,

1. Rich Picture
Rich pictures are in themselves useful tools to aid understanding of a situation.
The rich picture is informal and relatively intuitive.
It captures succinctly the potentially conflicting interests of the various stakeholders and the other
influences on a design situation.

 It provides an understandable summary of the designers understanding.

It can be easily checked with stakeholders.
It can even be developed collaboratively with stakeholders as part of the consultation process
allowing all parties to contribute to the rich picture sketch.

2. CATWOE
The acronym, CATWOE is,
o Clients those who receive output or benefit from the system.
o Actors those who perform activities within the system.
o Transformations the changes that are affected by the system.
o (from the German) meaning world view. This is how the system is perceived in a
particular root definition.
o Owner those to whom the system belongs, to whom it is answerable and who can
authorize changes to it.
o Environment the world in which the system operates and by which it is influenced.

III. Participatory Design

Participatory design is a philosophy.
It encompasses the whole design cycle.
It is design in the workplace, where the user is involved not only as an experimental subject or as
someone to be consulted when necessary but as a member of the design team.
Users are therefore active collaborators in the design process, rather than passive participants
whose involvement is entirely governed by the designer.
Participatory design has three specific characteristics,
o It is design and evaluation context or work oriented rather than system oriented.
o Secondly, it is characterized by collaboration: the user is included in the design team
and can contribute to every stage of the design.
o Finally, the approach is iterative: the design is subject to evaluation and revision at
each stage.
The participatory design process utilizes a range of methods to help convey information between
the user and designer.
They include,
1. Brainstorming
o The session provides a range of ideas from which to work. These can be filtered using
other techniques.
2. Storyboarding
o It means of describing the users day-to-day activities as well as the potential designs and
the impact they will have..
3. Workshops
o These can be used to fill in the missing knowledge of both user and designer and provide
a more focused view of the design.
4. Pencil and paper exercises
o These allow designs to be talked through and evaluated with very little commitment in
terms of resources.

1. Effective Technical and Human Implementation of Computer-based Systems (ETHICS)

ETHICS is a method developed by Enid Mumford within the socio-technical tradition.
It is distinct in its view of the role of stakeholders in the process.
ETHICS methodology, stakeholders are included as participants in the decision-making
process.
ETHICS considers the process of system development as one of managing change: conflicts will
occur and must be negotiated to ensure acceptance and satisfaction with the system.
It has three levels of participation,
1. Consultative the weakest form of participation where participants are asked for their
opinions but are not decision makers.

 2. Representative a representative of the participant group is involved in the decision-making

process.
3. Consensus all stakeholders are included in the decision-making process.

The design groups then address the following issues and activities,
o Make the case for change.
o Identify system boundaries.
o Describe the existing system
o Define key objectives
o Define key tasks:
o Define key information
o Diagnose efficiency
o Diagnose job satisfaction
o Analyze likely future changes
o Specify and prioritize objectives based on efficiency

IV. Ethnographic Methods

It is very influential in CSCW.

It is a form of anthropological study with special focus on social relationships.
It does not enter actively into situation.
It seeks to understand social culture.

1. Contextual Inquiry
It is an ethnographic approach developed by Holtzblatt.
The model of investigator being apprenticed to user to learn about work.
The investigation takes place in workplace detailed interviews, observation, analysis of
communication, physical workplace, artefacts.
The number of models created,
o It sequence, physical, flow, cultural and artefac.
o It models consolidated across users.
The output indicates task sequence, artifacts and communication channels needed and
physical and cultural constraints.

4. Explain in detail about Communication and Collaboration Models. (16 Mark)

Communication and Collaboration Models

In Groupware systems, such as email or conferencing systems, involve more than one person.

 The field of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) encompasses both specific

groupware systems and the effects of computers on cooperative working in general.
All computer systems, single-user or multi-user, interact with the work-groups and
organizations in which they are used.

FACE-TO-FACE COMMUNICATION

CONVERSATION

TEXT-BASED COMMUNICATION

GROUP WORKING

4A. Explain in detail about Face-To-Face Communication. (8 Mark)

Face-To-Face Communication
It is the most primitive and most subtle form of communication.
The first thing to note is that face-to-face communication involves not just speech and hearing,
but also the subtle use of body language and eyegaze.

Transfer Effects and Personal Space

Eye Contact and Gaze

Gestures and Body Language

Back Channels, Confirmation and Interruption

Turn-Taking

I. Transfer Effects and Personal Space

Face-to-Face communication can carry forward all our expectations and social norms from
face-to-face communication.
People are very adaptable and can learn new norms to go with new media (for example, the use
of over for turn-taking when using a walkie-talkie).
They success with new media is often dependent on whether the participants can use their
existing norms.
Furthermore, the rules of face-to-face conversation are not conscious, so, when they are
broken, we do not always recognize the true problem.
An example of these problems concerns personal space,
o Video may destroy mutual impression of distance.
o The glass walleffect helps.

II. Eye Contact and Gaze

Normal conversation uses eye contact extensively, if not as intently.
Our eyes tell us whether our colleague is listening or not; they can convey interest, confusion
or boredom.
Video may spoil direct eye contact.

 Furthermore, relative frequency of eye contact and who gives wayfrom direct eye contact is
closely linked to authority and power.
A role in establishing rapport between the participants, eyegaze is useful in establishing the
focus of the conversation.

III. Gestures and Body Language

Much of our communication is through bodies gestures (or eyegaze) used for deictic
reference.
The head and shoulders video loses this. This is called deictic reference.
Even the participants are in the same room, the existence of electronic equipment can interfere
with the body language used in normal face-to-face communication.
The fact that attention is focused on keyboard and screen can reduce the opportunities for eye
contact.
Also, large monitors may block participantsviews of one anothers bodies, reducing their ability
to interpret gestures and body position.
Most computer-supported meeting rooms recess monitors into the desks to reduce these
problems.

IV. Back Channels, Confirmation and Interruption

It is easy to think of conversation as a sequence of utterances,
o A says something, then B says something, then back to A.
o This process is called turn-taking and is one of the fundamental structures of
conversation.
However, each utterance is itself the result of intricate negotiation and interaction.
Consider the following transcript,
o Alison: Do you fancy that film . . . er . . . The Green um . . . it starts at eight.
o Brian: Grea
Once it includes the nods, grimaces, shrugs of the shoulder and small noises are called back
channels.
They feed information back from the listener to the speaker at a level below the turn-taking of the
conversation.
Text-based communication, in electronic conferencing, usually has no back channels.

V. Turn-Taking

Turn-taking is the process by which the roles of speaker and listener are exchanged.
Back channels are often a crucial part of this process.
The role of ums and ahs is very important.
They can be used by either participant during the gap to claim the turn.

 So, if Brian wanted to respond in the middle of the utterance, but had not yet framed his
utterance, he might begin um the one . . .. As it was, Brian did not respond, so Alison starts er
which says to Brian Im going to continue, but Im thinking.
Alternatively, Alison could have started to er as soon as she had said the word film.
This would have told Brian not to interrupt.
These turn-offering gaps are just the places where the speaker expects some back channel
response even if no turn exchange takes place.
A total lack of response will be taken, depending on the circumstances, as assent to the speaker,
or perhaps as lack of understanding.

4B. Explain in detail about Conversation. (8 Mark)

Conversation
Most analysis of conversation focuses on two-person conversations, but this can range from
informal social chat over the telephone to formal courtroom cross-examination.
There are three uses for theories of conversation in CSCW,
o First, they can be used to analyze transcripts, for example from an electronic
conference. This can help us to understand how well the participants are coping
with electronic communication.
o Secondly, they can be used as a guide for design decisions an understanding of
normal humanhuman conversation can help avoid blunders in the design of
electronic media.
o Thirdly, and most controversially, they can be used to drive design structuring the
system around the theory.

Basic Conversational Structure

Context

Topics, Focus and Forms of Utterance

Breakdown and Repair

Speech Act Theory

I. Basic Conversational Structure

Consider the conversation between two person,
Alison: Do you fancy that film?
Brian: The uh (500 ms) with the black cat The Green whatsit?
Alison: Yeah, go at uh . . . (looks at watch 1.2 s) . . . 20 to?
Brian: Sure.

The most basic conversational structure is turn taking.

The speech within each turn is called an utterance.
If there is a gap in the conversation, the same party may pick up the thread, even if she was the last speaker.

However, such gaps are normally of short duration, enough to allow turn-claiming if required, but
short enough to consider the speech a single utterance.

 The utterances of the conversation into pairs: a question and an answer, a statement and an
agreement.
The answer or response will normally follow directly after the question or statement and so these
are called adjacency pairs.
We can look at Alison and Brians conversation above as two adjacency pairs, one after the
other.
o First, Alison asks Brian whether he knows about the film and he responds.
o Second, she suggests a time to go and he agrees.
We can codify this structure as: A-x, B-x, A-y, B-y,
o Where the first letter denotes the speaker (Alison or Brian) and the second letter labels
the adjacency pair.

II. Context
Take a single utterance from a conversation, and it will usually be highly ambiguous if not
meaningless: the uh with the black cat The Green whatsit`
Each utterance and each fragment of conversation is heavily dependent on context, which must be
used to disambiguate the utterance.
We can identify two types of context within conversation,

Internal Context

dependence on earlier utterances. For example, when Brian says

masses in the last transcript, this is meaningful in the light of Alisons question and lots of
chocolate?. This in turn is interpreted in the context of Brians original offer of gateau.

External Context

dependence on the environment. For example, if Brian had said

simply do you want one?, this could have meant a slice of gateau, or, if he had been holding a
bottle, a glass of wine, or, if accompanied by a clenched fist, a punch on the nose.
However, there are very similar uses of internal context:
Brian: (Points) That post is leaning a bit.
Alison: Thats the one you put in.

III. Topics, Focus and Forms of Utterance

Alison began the conversation with the topic of roses.
Brian shifts to the related, but distinct, topic of greenfly.
However, for some reason Alison has missed this shift in focus, so when she makes her second
utterance, her focus and Brians differ, leading to the breakdown in communication.
The last two utterances are a recovery which re-establishes a shared dialog focus.
Alison: Oh, look at your roses . . .
Brian: Mmm, but Ive had trouble with greenfly.
Alison: Theyre the symbol of the English summer.
Brian: Greenfly?
Alison: No roses silly!

IV. Breakdown and Repair

When Alison and Brian were talking about Brians roses, they failed to maintain a shared
focus.
Brian tried to interpret Alisons utterance in terms of his focus and failed, or rather the
meaning in that focus was unusual greenfly are the symbol of the English summer? He
then questioned Alison and the confusion was cleared.
This correction after breakdown is called repair.

V. Speech Act Theory

A particular form of conversational analysis, speech act theory, has been both influential and
controversial in CSCW.
Not only is it an analytic technique, but it has been used as the guiding force behind the design of
a commercial system, Coordinator.
The basic premise of speech act theory is that utterances can be characterized by what they
do.
For Example, Im hungry, this has a certain propositional meaning that you are feeling
hungry.
Speech act theory concerns itself with the way utterances interact with the actions of the
participants.
The act of saying the words changes the state of the couple. Other acts include promises by
the speaker to do something and request that the hearer do something.
These basic acts are called illocutionary points.
Individual speech acts can contribute to a conversation.
The basic structure of conversations can then be seen as instances of generic conversations.
One example of such a generic structure is a conversation for action (CfA).

4C. Explain in detail about Text Based Communication. (8 Mark)

Text Based Communication
The major form of direct communication is text based in asynchronous groupware system.
Text-based communication is familiar to most people, in that they will have written and
received letters.

 There are four types of textual communication in current groupware,

1. Discrete directed message as in email. There is no explicit connection between different
messages, except in so far as the text of the message refers to a previous one.
2. Linear participants messages are added in (usually temporal) order to the end of a single
transcript.
3. Non-Linear when messages are linked to one another in a hypertext fashion.
4. Spatial where messages are arranged on a two-dimensional surface.

Back Channels and Affective State

Grounding Constraints

Turn-Taking

Context and Deixis

Pace and Granularity

Linear Text vs Hypertext

I. Back Channels and Affective State

One of the most profound differences between face-to-face and text-based communication is
the lack of fine-grained channels.
Text-based communication loses these back channels completely.
speaker would pause to seek back channel confirmation or to offer the floor, the text speaker
must either continue regardless, or finish the message, effectively passing the turn.
These normally convey the affective state of the speaker (happy, sad, angry, humorous) and the
illocutionary force of the message (an important and urgent demand or a deferential request).
Email users have developed explicit tokens of their affective state by the use of flaming and
smilies, using punctuation and acronyms;
For example,
:-) smiling face, happy
:-( sad face, upset or angry
;-) winking face, humorous
LOL laughing out loud.

II. Grounding Constraints

This grounding process is linked strongly with the types of channels through which the
conversant communicate.
Clark and Brennan describe the properties of these channels in terms of grounding
constraints.
These include,
o 1. Co-temporality an utterance is heard as soon as it is said (or typed);

2. Simultaneity the participants can send and receive at the same time;
o 3. Sequence the utterances are ordered.
o

 In a text-based system, different participants can compose simultaneously, but they lack
cotemporality.
As we saw, even if the messages appear as they are produced, they will not be read in real time.
In addition, the messages may only be delivered when complete and even then may be delayed by
slow communications networks.
Consider this typical interchange during the use of the York Conferencer system,
1. Bethan: How many should be in the group?
2. Rowena: Maybe this could be one of the four strongest reasons?
3. Rowena: Please clarify what you mean.
4. Bethan: I agree.
5. Rowena: Hang on.
6. Rowena: Bethan what did you mean?
The trouble is that the participants in the text-based conference each experienced the
messages in a different order,
Rowena: 2 1 3 4 5 6
Bethan: 1 2 4 3 5 6

III. Turn-Taking

Turn-taking is the process by which the roles of speaker and listener are exchanged.
Back channels are often a crucial part of this process.
The role of ums and ahs is very important.
They can be used by either participant during the gap to claim the turn.
So, if Brian wanted to respond in the middle of the utterance, but had not yet framed his
utterance, he might begin um the one . . .. As it was, Brian did not respond, so Alison starts er
which says to Brian Im going to continue, but Im thinking.
Alternatively, Alison could have started to er as soon as she had said the word film.
This would have told Brian not to interrupt.
These turn-offering gaps are just the places where the speaker expects some back channel
response even if no turn exchange takes place.
A total lack of response will be taken, depending on the circumstances, as assent to the speaker,
or perhaps as lack of understanding.

IV. Context and Deixis

We can identify two types of context within conversation,

Internal Context

dependence on earlier utterances. For example, when Brian says

masses in the last transcript, this is meaningful in the light of Alisons question and lots of
chocolate?. This in turn is interpreted in the context of Brians original offer of gateau.

External Context dependence on the environment. For example, if Brian had said
simply do you want one?, this could have meant a slice of gateau, or, if he had been
holding a bottle, a glass of wine, or, if accompanied by a clenched fist, a punch on the nose.

 As we have seen, even in linear text transcripts, overlap breaks the strict sequentiality of the
conversation, and thus causes problems with indexicals and with context in general.
1. Alison: Brians got some lovely roses.
2. Brian: Im afraid theyre covered in greenfly.
3. Clarise: Ive seen them, theyre beautiful.

IV. Pace and Granularity

The term pace is being used in a precise sense above.

The pace of the conversation is the rate of such a sequence of connected messages and replies.
Clearly, as the pace of a conversation reduces, there is a tendency for the granularity to increase.
Reducing the pace of a conversation reduces its interactivity.
o Face-to-Face: Every few seconds.
o Telephone: Half a minute.
o Email: Hours or Days
In a hypertext-based system one can expand several branches of a conversation tree, but in speech
or in a linear text transcript the conversation follows one branch.
Whatever medium is used, you cannot normally progress down the tree faster than the pace of the
conversation.
To overcome these limitations, people adopt several coping strategies.
The first of these coping strategies is multiplexing. Basically, the conversant hold several
conversations in parallel, each message referring to several topics.

V. Linear Text vs Hypertext

Multiplexed messages can be represented as updates to several parts of the hypertext, thus
reducing the likelihood of breakdown and lost topics.
In addition, if the messages themselves can be mini-hypertexts, then eager messages listing
several possible courses of action can be explicitly represented by the message.

 Even static hypertexts, which have been carefully crafted by their authors, can be difficult to
navigate.
A hypertext that is created on the fly is unlikely to be comprehensible to any but those
involved in its creation.
Conklin and Begeman, themselves associated with the hypertext based argumentation tool gIBIS,
conclude that traditional linear text provides a continuous, unwinding thread of context.
For the asynchronous reader trying to catch up with a conversation, a linear transcript is clearly
easier, but it is precisely in more asynchronous settings where overlap in linear text is most likely
to cause confusion.

4D. Explain in detail about Group Working. (8 Mark)

Group Working
Group behavior is more complex still as we have to take into account the dynamic social
relationships during group working.
We will begin by looking at several factors which affect group working, and then discuss the
problems of studying group working.

Group Dynamics

Physical Layout

Distributed Cognition

I. Group Dynamics
Its organizational relationships such as supervisor/supervisee are relatively stable, the roles and
relationships within a group may change dramatically within the lifetime of a task and even
within a single work session.
For example, studies of joint authoring have found that roles such as author, co-author and
commentator change throughout the lifetime of a document.
This means that systems, such as co-authoring systems, which use a formal concept of role,
must allow these roles to change together with the socially defined roles.
A person may be an author of a book or paper, but never write the words in it, acting instead as a
source of ideas and comments.
A particular case of this is the biographical story where the individual concerned and a
professional writer co-author the book, but only the professional author writes.
A co-authoring system such as Quilt would call the non-writing author a commentatoror a
reviewer, but not an author. One can imagine some of the social friction such naming
will cause.

II. Physical Layout

The designers of Capture Lab, an eight-person meeting room, considered all these features
and many other subtle effects.

 However, the users still had some difficulty in adapting to the power positions in the electronic
meeting room.
At first sight, the electronic meeting room is not unlike a normal conference room.
If the shared screen is a whiteboard or an overhead projector, then the most powerful
position is toward the front of the room.
Managers would normally take this seat as they can then easily move to the whiteboard or
overhead projector to point out some item and draw the groups attention.

III. Distributed Cognition

Traditional views talk about the movement of information between working memory and
long-term memory:
o it is not so difficult then to regard bits of paper, books and computer systems as
extensions to these internal memory systems.
o Similarly, many models of human cognition regard the mind as a set of interacting
subsystems.
o The step to regarding several people as involved in joint thinking is not difficult.

5. Explain in detail about the Hypertext, Multimedia and the World Wide Web. (16 Mark)

Hypertext, Multimedia and the World Wide Web

Hypertext allows documents to be linked in a nonlinear fashion.

Multimedia incorporates different media: sound, images, and video.
The World Wide Web is a global hypermedia system.
Animation and video can show information that is difficult to convey statically.
Applications of hypermedia include online help, education and e-commerce.
Design for the World Wide Web illustrates general hypermedia design, but also has its own
special problems.
Dynamic web content can be used for simple online demonstration.

UNDERSTANDING HYPERTEXT

FINDING THINGS

WEB TECHNOLOGY AND ISSUES

STATIC WEB CONTENT

DYNAMIC WEB CONTENT

5A. Explain in detail about Understanding Hypertext. (8 Mark)

Understanding Hypertext

Hypertext Definition Text, Hypertext and Multimedia

Rich Content

Delivery Technology

Application Areas

I. Hypertext Definition Text, Hypertext and Multimedia

The term hypertext means certain extra capabilities imparted to normal or standard text.
Technical documentation consists often of a collection of independent information units.
It consists of cross references which leads to multiple searches at different places for the
reader.
Hypertext is text which is not constrained to be linear and it contains links to other texts
which is known as hyperlinks.
Hypertext is mostly used on World Wide Web for linking and navigating through different
web pages.
A hypertext consists of two different parts,
Anchor and link
An anchor or node is an entry point to another document.
In some cases instead of a text an image a video or some other non-textual element.
A link or pointer provides connection to other information unit known as target documents.

II. Rich Content

Hypertext systems may also include more dynamic material such as,

Animation

Video and Audio Clips

Computation, Intelligence and Interaction

1. Animation
Animation is the appearance of motion that is created by displaying a series of still images in
rapid sequence.
Animated GIF is a popular type of animation format, which combines several images into a
single GIF file.

2. Video and Audio Clips

Video
Video consists of full-motion images that are played back at various speeds.
Most video is also accompanied with audio.
MPEG is a popular video compression standard defined by the Moving Picture Experts
Group (MPEG).
Streaming video allows a user to view longer or live video images as they download to the
computer from the Web.
Two popular streaming video formats are Windows Media Player and RealVideo.
Audio
Audio can be music, speech, or any other sound.
Common audio formats include WAV, MID, and MP3.
Some Web sites use streaming audio, which allows a user to listen to the sound as it
downloads to the computer.
Two accepted standards for streaming audio on the Web are Windows Media Player and
RealAudio.

3. Computation, Intelligence and Interaction

More interactive hypermedia may contain embedded games or applications.
Hypermedia running on the users own computer may interact closely with other applications; for
example, on a Macintosh HyperCard stacks can control applications using Apple Events, or on a
Windows platform hypermedia can include ActiveX components.

III. Delivery Technology

On the Computer

On the Web

On the Move

1. On the Computer
Some hypertexts, in particular help systems, are downloaded or installed permanently on a
computer.
This has the advantage of instant access and such applications need not use a standard viewer
but may include their own bespoke browsing software.
Many hypermedia systems are supplied on CD-ROM or DVD.

2. On the Web
The World Wide Web is the best-known multimedia hypertext system of all.
The World Wide Web offers a rich environment for the presentation of information.
Documents can be constructed that are very different from paper versions; basic text can be
augmented through the use of hypertext links to other documents, while graphics can easily be
incorporated as pictures, photographs, icons, page dividing bars, or backgrounds.
Pages can also have hypertext links embedded into different regions, which take the user to a
different page or graphic if they are clicked on; these are known as active image maps.
These features allow web pages to become interactive, acting as the interface to the information
as well as its holder.
Example: Many applications have web-base documentation.

3. On the Move
Mobile phones, PDAs (personal digital assistants), and notebook computers have all
increased the demand to have hypermedia available on the move.
Furthermore, across many countries governments have sold franchises for high-bandwidth
mobile services.
Notebook computers can use just the same mechanisms as desktop computers, using CD-ROM or
DVD for standalone material, or connecting to the web through wireless access points or through
modems linked to mobile phone networks.

 However, the fact that the computer is mobile means that location can be used as a key into
context-aware hypermedia showing different content depending on location.
Delivery,
o CD-ROM or DVD (like Desktop)
o Cached Content
o WiFi Access Point
o WAP

IV. Application Areas

There are many applications of hypermedia, too many to describe in detail here.
some example systems are,

Rapid Prototyping

Help and Documentation

Education and E-learning

Collaboration and Community

E-commerce

1. Rapid Prototyping
It is create live storyboards.
It uses Mock-up interaction using links.

2. Help and Documentation

It allows hierarchical contents, keyboard search for browsing.
It just in time learning,
o What you want when you want it.(eg Technical manual for a photocopier)
o Technical words linked to their definition in a glossary.
o It links between similar photocopiers.

3. Education and E-learning

Hypertext and hypermedia are used extensively in educational settings, as they allow varied
subjects to be related to each other in numerous ways so that the learner can investigate the
links between different areas.
In contrast to computer-aided learning (CAL) packages, hypermedia allows a studentcontrolled learning process.
The system includes text, diagrams, photos and so on.
E-learning is letting education out of the classroom
Example : EClass
4. Collaboration and Community
Although strictly not hypertext, the web has become a central platform for collaborative
applications and community.

 These use the hypertext structure of the web to structure and access shared resources and
message areas.

5. E-commerce
For some companies the web is simply another sales opportunity.
Many readers will have used online stores such as Amazon or bought from an auction site
such as eBay.
Hypertexts use of hierarchies, links, images and so on, makes it ideal for displaying certain
kinds of product.
Actual buying and selling requires not only security at the level of the networks, websites,
etc., but also trust.

5B. Explain in detail about Finding Things. (8 Mark)

Finding Things

Lost in Hyperspace

Designing Structure

Making Navigation Easier

History, Bookmarks and External Links

Indices, Directories and Search

I. Lost in Hyperspace
The non-linear structure of hypertext is very powerful, it can also be confusing.
It is easy to lose track of where you are, a problem that has been called lost in hyperspace.
There are two elements to this feeling of lostness.
The first is cognitive and related to content.
The second is related to navigation and structure.
The solution to the former issue is to design the information better.
The solution to the latter is to give users better ways of understanding where they are and of
navigating in the hypertext. To say the solution is disingenuous there is no simple solution.
If we want to provide information that allows complex, unplanned, non-linear access, there will
probably always be problems. However, good design can help!

II. Designing Structure

In a paper format one is stuck with a single structure, which can lead to tensions: for
example, the fact that in this book structural design is discussed in several places.
If multiple structures are used, you have to consider what to do about the common material.

 For example, if we examine a car hypermedia text under engine compartment and get to the fuel
pump, this would also appear in the functional view under fuel system. Such common elements
may be replicated.
This has the advantage that the material can be presented in ways that make sense given their
context, but it can also lead to inconsistencies.
Alternatively we may make links across the hierarchy at some level; for example, the engine
compartment may have a diagram of the engine with a labeled arrow saying fuel pump (fuel
system), which takes you to the description of the pump in the fuel system part of the hypertext.
In all cases it is important that the structure and the naming of parts is meaningful for the
user.

III. Making Navigation Easier

No matter how well designed the site structure is, there will still be problems: because the
user does not understand the structure; or because the user has individual needs that the
designer has not foreseen; or because even a good structure is not perfect.
However, there are various things that can make it easier for users.
Solution is to provide the following,
o Maps
o Recommended Routes
o Levels of Access
o Supporting Printing

IV. History, Bookmarks and External Links

Hypertext viewers and web browsers usually have some sort of history mechanism to allow you
to see where you have been, and a more stack-based system using the back button that allows
you to backtrack through previously visited pages.
The back button may be used where a user has followed a hyperlink and then decided it was
to the wrong place, or alternatively, when browsing back and forth from a central page that
contains lots of links. The latter is called hub and spoke browsing.
For longer-term revisiting, browsers typically support some form of bookmarking of
favorite pages. Both this and, on the web, external links from other peoples sites mean that
users may enter your hypertext at locations other than the top level or home page. On the
web this is called deep linking.
Many websites rely on the user remembering where they have come from to make sense of a
page.
If a page does not adequately show where it fits, then a user coming to it from outside may have
no idea what site it is from, or why they are reading the material.

V. Indices, Directories and Search

Index
It often found ion help, documentation and even books.
Selective: not an exhaustive list of words used.

Directories
It on web index would be huge! So hand chosen sites.
Ex: Open directory project, Yahoo

Web Search Engine

It crawl the web following links from page to page.
Look up in index when you enter keywords to find pages.

5C. Explain in detail about Web Technology and Issues. (6 Mark)

Web Technology and Issues
The web consists of a set of protocols built on top of the internet that, in theory, allow multimedia
documents to be created and read from any connected computer in the world.
The web supports hypertext, graphics, sound and movies, and, to structure and describe the
information, uses a language called HTML (hypertext markup language) or in some cases,
XML (extensible markup language).
HTML is a markup language that allows hypertext links, images, sounds and movies to be
embedded into text, and it provides some facilities for describing how these components are
laid out.
HTML documents are interpreted by a viewer, known as a browser;
there are many browsers,
o Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Opera.
They are following Web Technology Issues,

Web Servers and Web Clients

Network Issues

I. Web Servers and Web Clients

A conventional PC program runs and is displayed on one computer, the web is distributed.
Different parts of it run on different computers, often in different countries of the world.
They are linked, of course, by the internet, an enormous global computer network.
The pages are stored on web servers that may be on a companys own premises or in special
data centers.
Because they are networked, the webmaster for a site can upload pages to the server from
wherever she is.

II. Network Issues

The fact that the web is networked raises a series of issues that can impact on usability.
Network capacity is called bandwidth.
This is a measure of the amount of information that can pass down the channel in a given time.
However, bandwidth is not the only important measure. There is also the time it takes for a
message to get across the network from your machine to the web server and back. This
delay is called latency.
Latency is caused by several factors the finite speed of electrical or optical signals (no faster
than the speed of light), and delays at routers along the way that take messages from one
computer network and pass them on.
This latency may not always be the same, varying with the exact route through the network
traveled by a message, the current load on the different routers, etc. Variability in the
latency is called jitter.

5D. Explain in detail about Static Web Contents. (8 Mark)

Static Web Contents

The Message and The Medium

Text

Graphics

Movies and Sound

I. The Message and The Medium
One thing is often forgotten when web pages are created.
It is of vital importance, and hence will be discussed first.
It is content.

 Content is king
o The message content should be.
o Content appropriate to the audience, timely and reliable.
The Medium
o The medium is page and site design.
o It is printable.

II. Text
Web pages are displayed on many different machines, there are only a small set of fonts that can
be guaranteed to be available: a standard font and a typewriter font (e.g. courier) with bold and
italic versions in different sizes.
Text Style
o

It generic styles universal : Bold, Italic, Fixed, sans

It Specific fonts too, but vary between plarforms.

CSS for the final control.

Font size is various sizes.

Font color is various colors.

Positioning
o

It easy to left, right, justified or centered.

It precise positioning with DHTML but beware platforms.

Different screen size.

III. Graphics
Obtaining Graphics
o

There are a number of sites on the web that contain archives of graphical images,
icons, backgrounds and so on.

There is also paint and image manipulation packages available on almost all
computer systems, and scanners and digital cameras, where available, enable the
input of photographs and diagrams.

Using graphics
o

Graphical images take longer to load than text, and this may become a problem.

The GIF format also allows animated GIFs.

Both GIF (graphics interchange format) and JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts
Group), the most widely used web graphic image formats, can be saved in forms that
allow them to be progressively transmitted.

The JPEG format is optimized for photographic images and makes use of their
properties to offer a higher compression ratio and hence faster loading.

 Icons
o

Icons often appear on web pages, and while there are many available to choose from,
they should be used with care.

On web pages, icons are typically used in one of two ways.

For bullets, decoration, to link to other pages

They are either visual cues, associating some small picture with different parts of the text.

Graphics and Color

o

Using many different colors within graphics may well result in the browsers for older
machines running out of entries in the color map, with unpredictable consequences.

If universal access is required it is therefore still wise, where possible, to restrict

images to a limited number of colors, taken from the standard 216 color web palette,
and to reduce complex color images to simpler approximations.

One further point should be made about graphics: computer screens are typically
limited to a resolution of around 72 dpi (dots per inch), and so either high-resolution
images will have to be displayed much larger than actual size, or the increased resolution
will be forfeited.

IV. Movies and Sound

Movies and sound are both available to users of the web, and hence to page designers.
One problem associated with them is actually obtaining appropriate sound and video clips, as
they usually require some sort of multimedia capability on behalf of the host machine in order to
be able to digitize sound and capture and digitize video.
Video suffers from the same problems as graphics, magnified by an order of magnitude or two; it
can take extremely large amounts of time for a video segment to download.
The need to download movies and sound (see Figure 21.8) puts sharp limits on the length of
clip that can be shown.
Streaming media over the internet, such as RealVideo, RealAudio and CuSeeMe, allow
potentially unlimited sources.
Acceptable streaming video and audio is achieved by a combination of high compression and
large client-end buffers.
The challenges of achieving high quality transmissions (e.g. for video on demand) and low
latency (e.g. for video conferencing) are active research topics in multimedia technology.

5E. Explain in detail about Dynamic Web Contents. (8 Mark)

Dynamic Web Contents
The Active Web
In the early days, the web was simply a collection of (largely text) pages linked together.
The material was static or slowly changing and much of it authored and updated by hand.
As HCI researchers and designers, we can neither ignore nor uncritically accept new
technology in the web.
The active web is here; our job is to understand it and to learn how to use it appropriately.

What Happens Where

Fixed Content Local Interaction and Changing Views

Search

Batch Generation

Dynamic Content

I. What Happens Where

The what happens where question is the heart of architectural design.
It has a major impact on the pace of interaction, both feedback, how fast users see the effects
of their own actions, and feed through, how fast they see the effects of others actions.
Also, where the computation happens influences where data has to be moved to with
corresponding effects on download times and on the security of the data.

The User View

Technology and Security

1. The user view

One set of issues is based on what the end-user sees, the end-user here being the web viewer.

 What changes?
o This may be a media stream (video, audio or animation) which is changing simply
because it is the fundamental nature of the medium. It may be the presentation or view
the user has of the underlying content; for example, sorting by different categories or
choosing text-only views for blind users.
By whom?
o Who effects the changes? In the case of a media stream or animation, the changes are
largely automatic made by the computer. The other principal sources of change are the
site author and the user. However, in complex sites users may see each others changes
feedthrough.
How often?
o Finally, what is the pace of change? Months, days, or while you watch?
2. Technology and Security
The fundamental question here is where computation is happening. If pages are changing, there
must be some form of computation of those changes. Where does it happen?
Client
o One answer is in the users web-browsing client enabled by Java applets, various plug-ins
such as Flash, scripting using JavaScript or VBScript with dynamic HTML layers, CSS
and DOM (Domain Object Model).
Server
o A second possibility is at the web server using CGI scripts (written in Perl, C, UNIX
shell, Java or whatever you like!), Java Servlets, Active Server Pages or one of the other
server-specific scripting languages such as PHP. In addition, client-side Java applets are
only allowed to connect to networked resources on the same machine as they came from.
This means that databases accessed from clientside JDBC (Java database connectivity)
must run on the web server (see below).
Another machine
o Although the pages are delivered from the web server, they may be constructed
elsewhere. For hand-produced pages, this will usually be on the page authors desktop
PC. For generated pages, this may be a PC or a central database server.
People
o Of course, as noted earlier, the process of production and update may even involve
people!

II. Fixed Content Local Interaction and Changing Views

In fact, Java can be used to write server-end software and platform independent standalone
programs!), but the aspect that most people think of is Java applets.
The most common alternatives are JavaScript, Flash and if you are prepared to limit
yourself to Windows platforms, ActiveX plug-ins.

III. Search
The users keywords are submitted to the server using an HTML form, they are compared
against pre-prepared indexes at the server and all matching paragraphs in the book are
returned.

IV. Batch Generation

A low-tech but very secure solution is to generate pages offline from a database and then
upload them to the web server.
Many of Alans earliest web pages were generated in this way from HyperCard stacks.
This is certainly a simple solution as it separates out the task of page generation from that of page
delivery. Pages can be generated directly using many standard database packages such as Access
or HyperCard.

V. Dynamic Content
The mechanisms we have been discussing manage the feedthrough when the database is updated
by some non-web means.
Perhaps the most active web pages are those where the content of the pages reacts to and is
updateable by the web user.
This sort of web application opens up many additional problems.
You may need to add some form of login or authentication.
If credit card numbers are supplied you need to ensure that the web server is secure.

 Going in the direction of greater complexity, many business applications operate an n-tier web
architecture.
This involves multiple layers of software where the outer layers are concerned more with the user
interface and the inner layers more with business functionality.
The user interacts through a web browser with a web server.
The pages are generated using Java Servlet Pages (JSP).
To generate the page the servlets connect to Java Enterprise Beans (JEB) on an enterprise server.
These are components that encapsulate business logic.
These Java Enterprise Beans draw their data from the corporate database using JDBC
connections.