Presenting: Neuro-Cognitive Usability Studies - A How To Guide at CSUN 2020

Helix Opportunity Founder, David Fazio, has been involved in usability research since 2003, analyzing the use of both hardware, and digital assets. David is also an Invited Expert to the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative Accessibility Guidelines Working Group, Accessible Platform Architectures Working Group, Cognitive Accessibility Task Force, and Silver Task Force. In this "How-To"Session he will share his 15 plus years of experience facilitating user research and development with an emphasis on cognition and neuro-psychology.

This session provides guidance on how organizations can test their digital, and ICT, assets to effectively ensure usability for these user groups. This session will explore tools and techniques that analyze user focus, reveal distractions, and how to gauge mental fatigue, engagement, and a variety of other neuropsychological responses occurring while users engage a particular digital asset or ICT.

Usability studies are an integral component of user-centered design. They provide accurate data through the collection and analysis of direct input on how real users (with and without disabilities) use real products, and services. This process provides design teams with accurate information to create more meaningful products and services. Technologies that analyze the brain’s responses to stimuli provide detailed information about why users make the decisions they do. These techniques better measure a user’s preference, as the verbal response given to the question “Do you like this product?” may not always be the true answer. This insight empowers designers with the knowledge to create products and services designed more effectively and digital assets and ICT focused more on the brain’s response.

Neuro-cognitive consumer research informs designers what the user reacts to, whether it was the colors on the screen, certain visual indicators, or even the sounds activated by specific functionality. Usability and design are profound influences on user satisfaction and, ultimately, business success. Diagnosing usability problems is simple by integrating neuro-cognitive product research methods into the development cycle. Applying these actionable insights can improve users' experiences and website and application performance.

This session explores those unique research methods that objectively measure consumers' attention and spontaneous responses to information and human computer interaction. These insights help developers to effectively design meaningful communication, and user experiences.

These scientific techniques provide insight on how consumers react to different information and user interfaces, and interpretation of their cognitive engagement, in real time. It minimizes recall errors and the social desirability effect while revealing information conventional research methods normally miss. These techniques include:

Brain Wave Mapping.

Mapping users’ brain waves to provide more precise recognition of facial expressions, emotions and conscious thought. Revealing user brain activity provides new insights into both conscious and unconscious actions. Typical user testing requires researchers to prompt users to describe their reactions to what they are seeing or doing. It can be often difficult for users to articulate exactly what they are thinking and feeling. This methodology reveals these reactions taking shape on the screen, informing designers whether or not a page really held a users’ attention, or if a task was frustrating or not. 

Understanding your users’ state of mind and emotions, empowers designers with the necessary data to design environments that can adapt themselves based on a user’s mood or attention level.

Attention and Focus Mapping.

Monitoring, and analyzing attentional processes, compares group behavior, measures stimuli-induced visual responses, and more.

This technique provides better understanding of customer experience and product performance by measuring visual attention to key messages, placement, design, and interaction. It provides compelling objective data that reveals the human behavior behind usability issues. User Experience (UX), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers, and design teams, use this data to evaluate interfaces for the optimal user experience.

Quickly and easily learn where users look and how they behave while interacting with a website or software. This method offers a quick way of detecting and explaining usability issues that will engage designers, developers, and clients in the process. This process provides data on: 

• How users behave when interacting with particular ICT or digital assets;
• Where users expect to find information;
• How users interact with your interface;
• How users interact with the dynamic content on your digital property.

Designers/developers can utilize this information in storytelling to drive design improvements.

The replay or visualization of the research data is perfect for demonstrating the actual user behavior and describing points of critical mass. This data can be used to illustrate a story or express findings in order to help illustrate a point.

The visual maps reflect how users look at a digital property or interface, which key elements they look at, and what areas attract the most attention. This data visualization method communicates the important aspects of visual behavior clearly and powerfully. It accurately reveals:

• What attracts a users’ attention;
• How users typically look at a digital property when executing a task;
• How users distribute their attention over a stimulus;
• What areas of the digital property or design are visually omitted.

You may find the session information at a this link: https://www.csun.edu/cod/conference/sessions/index.php/public/presentations/view/4322