Objectives:

Prototyping tools make it easier to explore a design space, so that many different ideas can be generated and discussed. However, evaluating those ideas to understand whether they are better, as opposed to just different, is still an intensely human task. User testing, concept validation, focus groups, design walkthroughs, all are expensive in both people's time and real dollars.

Just as crash dummies in the automotive industry save lives by testing the physical safety of automobiles before they are brought to market, cognitive crash dummies save time, money, and potentially even lives, by allowing designers to automatically test their design ideas before implementing them. Cognitive crash dummies are engineering models of human performance that make quantitative predictions of human behavior on proposed systems without the expense of empirical studies on running prototypes.

When cognitive crash dummies are built into prototyping tools, design ideas can be rapidly expressed and easily evaluated.

This Tutorials reviews the state of the art of predictive modeling and presents a tool, CogTool, that integrates rapid prototyping with modeling. Participants will use their own laptops to prototype an interactive system and create a model of skilled performance time on that prototype. The course ends with a review of other tools and a look to the future of predictive modeling.

Content and Benefits:

Participants in this course will

• Understand the state of the art and the future of predictive human performance modeling.
• Learn to prototype in CogTool, a free software tool for rapid prototyping, sharing design ideas, and predicting human performance on those ideas.
• Learn to make quantitative predictions of skilled execution time and how to use these predictions for benchmarking, competitive analysis, and requirements setting.
• Walk away with the skills to use CogTool on their company's projects.

Target audience:

Usability professionals and software developers who want to evaluate alternative designs alternatives. No prior knowledge of prototyping, psychology or predictive human performance modeling is required.