Glossary of Terms

Ted Nelson: Coined the term ‘hypertext.’ He is also seen as something of a radical figure, opposing authority and tradition. He has been called `one of the most influential contrarians in the history of the information age.’ — iBiblio.

Vannevar Bush: Consider by many to be the Godfather of the World Wide Web, often making reference to his 1945 essay, ‘As We May Think.’ — iBiblio.

Doug Englebart: Wanted to use technology to augment human intellect. He saw technology, especially computers, as the answers to the problem of dealing with the ever more complex modern world and has dedicated his life to the pursuit of developing technology to augment human intellect — iBiblio.

User Experience: An umbrella term used to describe all the factors that contribute to the quality of experience a person has when interacting with a specific software artefact, or system. It focuses on the practice of user centred: design, creation, and testing, whereby the outcomes can be qualitatively tested using small numbers of users.

User Experience Engineer: We use the term ‘engineer’ to imply a software engineering type role, whereby the UX specialist is also required to contribute code, or at least build working software interface prototypes.

Skunkworks: A skunkworks project is one typically developed by a small and loosely structured group of people who research and develop a project primarily for the sake of radical innovation. The term typically refers to technology projects, and originated with Skunk Works, an official alias for the Lockheed Martin Advanced Development Programs (formerly Lockheed Advanced Development Projects). The reference is to the comic strip Li’l Abner and the job no one wanted: to be the inside man at the Skunk Works. — Wikipedia.

Cognetic: Raskin expanded the meaning of the term cognetics in his book The Humane Interface to mean ‘the ergonomics of the mind’. Raskin discouraged using the informal term intuitive in user interface design, claiming that easy to use interfaces are often due to exposure to previous, similar systems, thus the term ‘familiar’ should be preferred. Aiming for ‘intuitive’ interfaces (based on reusing existing skills with interaction systems) could lead designers to discard a better design solution only because it would require a novel approach — Various Sources.

Jef Raskin: Raskin was an American human-computer interface expert best known for starting the Macintosh project for Apple in the late 1970s. He left Apple in 1982 and formed Information Appliance, Inc. to implement the concepts of his original Macintosh concept. The first product was the SwyftCard, a firmware card for the Apple II containing an integrated application suite, also released on a disk as SwyftWare — Wikipedia.

Earcons: An Earcon is a brief, distinctive sound used to represent a specific event or convey other information. Taken as originally intended, Earcons are not a common feature of computer operating systems and applications, and while some include general systems error beeps etc, the original intention of Earcons is to convey more complex information such as that present in the graphic of an icon.

Reductionist: Reductionism can mean either (a) an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or (b) a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents. This can be said of objects, phenomena, explanations, theories, and meanings. Reductionism strongly reflects a certain perspective on causality. In a reductionist framework, phenomena that can be explained completely in terms of relations between other more fundamental phenomena, are called epiphenomena. Often there is an implication that the epiphenomenon exerts no causal agency on the fundamental phenomena that explain it — Various Sources (including Wikipedia).

Affective Computing: Affective computing, coined by Rosalind Picard (circa 1995) is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognise, interpret, process, and simulate human emotional changes.

Coding: Coding is a process for both categorising qualitative data and for describing the implications and details of these categories. Initially one does open coding, considering the data in minute detail while developing some initial categories. Later, one moves to more selective coding where one systematically codes with respect to a core concept — Social Methods Knowledge Base.

Memoing: Memoing is a process for recording the thoughts and ideas of the researcher as they evolve throughout the study. You might think of memoing as extensive marginal notes and comments. Again, early in the process these memos tend to be very open while later on they tend to increasingly focus in on the core concept — Social Methods Knowledge Base.

Group-Think: Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within groups of people. It is the mode of thinking that happens when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives. Group members try to minimise conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative ideas or viewpoints. Antecedent factors such as group cohesiveness, structural faults, and situational context play into the likelihood of whether or not groupthink will impact the decision-making process. The primary socially negative cost of groupthink is the loss of individual creativity, uniqueness, and independent thinking — Wikipedia.

JAWS: ‘Job Access With Speech’ is a computer screen reader program in Microsoft Windows that allows blind and visually impaired users to read the screen either with a text-to-speech output or by a Refreshable Braille display. JAWS is produced by the Blind and Low Vision Group of Freedom Scientific, St. Petersburg, Florida, USA. — Wikipedia.

PET: Positron emission tomography (PET) is nuclear medicine imaging technique that produces a three-dimensional image or picture of functional processes in the body. The system detects pairs of gamma rays emitted indirectly by a positron-emitting radionuclide (tracer), which is introduced into the body on a biologically active molecule. Three-dimensional images of tracer concentration within the body are then constructed by computer analysis. In modern scanners, three dimensional imaging is often accomplished with the aid of a CT X-ray scan performed on the patient during the same session, in the same machine — Wikipedia.

Screen Reader: A screen reader is a software application that attempts to identify and interpret what is being displayed on the screen (or, more accurately, sent to standard output, whether a video monitor is present or not). This interpretation is then re-presented to the user with text-to-speech, sound icons, or a Braille output device. Screen readers are a form of assistive technology (AT) potentially useful to people who are blind, visually impaired, illiterate or learning disabled, often in combination with other AT, such as screen magnifiers — Wikipedia.

Task Completion Time: (TCT) is a measure of the time it takes a user to perform a task (from start to finish). This is a typical metric in usability evaluation — Usability First.

PARC: Palo Alto Research Center, or Xerox PARC, was founded in 1970 as a division of Xerox Corporation, PARC has been responsible for such well known and important developments as laser printing, Ethernet, the modern personal computer, graphical user interface (GUI), object-oriented programming, ubiquitous computing, amorphous silicon (a-Si) applications, and advancing very-large-scale-integration (VLSI) for semiconductors. Xerox PARC (and now PARC) is a mecca human facing thinkers and included three Turing Award winners — Various Sources.

Eat Their Own Dog Food: More correctly ‘Eating your own dog food’, also called dogfooding, is when a company (usually, a software company) uses the products that it makes~—~Wikipedia.

Heuristics: Heuristics are strategies using readily accessible, though loosely applicable, information to control problem solving in human beings and machines. Heuristic (meaning to find or discover) refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. Heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution, where an exhaustive search is impractical. Examples of this method include using a ‘rule of thumb’, an educated guess, an intuitive judgment, or common sense — Wikipedia.

Creatives: A creative person, a person whose job involves creative work; a person who carries out creative work on an advertising campaign say, esp. a copywriter, art director, or designer. (of a person) having good imagination or original ideas — OED.

Mechanical Turk: Was a fake chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. From 1770 until its destruction by fire in 1854, it was exhibited by various owners as an automaton, though it was exposed in the early 1820s as an elaborate hoax — Wikipedia.

Sample Frame: In statistics, a sampling frame is the source material or device from which a sample is drawn. It is a list of all those within a population who can be sampled, and may include individuals, households or institutions — Wikipedia.

Probabilistic: Probability sampling is a sampling technique wherein the samples are gathered in a process that gives all the individuals in the population equal chances of being selected — http://www.experiment-resources.com.

Non-Probabilistic: Non-probability sampling is a sampling technique where the samples are gathered in a process that does not give all the individuals in the population equal chances of being selected — http://www.experiment-resources.com.

Internal Validity: The key question in internal validity is whether observed changes can be attributed to your changes (i.e., the cause) and not to other possible causes (sometimes described as `alternative explanations’ for the outcome) — http://www.socialresearchmethods.net.

External Validity: External validity refers to the approximate truth of conclusions the involve generalizations. Put in more pedestrian terms, external validity is the degree to which the conclusions in your study would hold for other persons in other places and at other times — http://www.socialresearchmethods.net.

Confounding Factors: Confounding variables (or factors) are variables that the researcher failed to control, or eliminate, damaging the internal validity of an experiment — http://www.experiment-resources.com.

Power Analysis: Power analysis allows us to make sure that we have looked hard enough to find it, if there is enough of it there to bother us. The size of the thing we are looking for is known as the `effect size’. Several methods exist for deciding what effect size we would be interested in. Different statistical tests have different effect sizes developed for them, however the general principle is the same — www.jeremymiles.co.uk.

Statistical Validity: In science and statistics, validity has no single agreed definition but generally refers to the extent to which a concept, conclusion or measurement is well-founded and corresponds accurately to the real world — Wikipedia.