Human-Computer Interaction - Essay Example

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Name Institution Tutor Date Introduction In the recent years, the computer has formed a crucial part of the society. It changes the life of an individual and the community at large. Even though different individuals commonly use the computer as means of communication, humans have consistently used computers to come up with several inventions and designs. Many individuals at homes spend most of their time in front of a monitor. This will help them explore and find new ways of solving their problems. The new designs, principles, and concerns have significantly impacted the lives of individuals in various ways. This paper explores how the increased awareness of Human Computer Interaction design, principles and concerns has affected the successful development of dashboards in systems to support management decision-making. Background Human-computer interaction (HCI) is a research area that was created in 1980s in the computer science that embraced cognitive science and the human factor engineering. Human Computer Relation has steadily and rapidly expanded in the last three decades. It has attracted many professionals from other disciplines and incorporated several approaches and concepts. HCI aggregates a collection of different fields of practices and research in human informatics. The Human Computer Interaction has produced different paradigms and epistemologies that can be incorporated into the productive and vibrant project (Joongyeon and Kwanghee, 2014). The dashboard is a visual display of most necessary information needed in order to achieve the business objectives. The dashboard is arranged and consolidated on the screen to enable monitoring of information at a glance. Business dashboards are used just for the automobile dashboards. Under the hood of the vehicle; there can be several processes that hinder the performance of the vehicle. The dashboard can summarize the events by use of visualizations to give the driver peace of mind and make the driver concentrate on operating the vehicle (Joongyeon and Kwanghee, 2014). In the business of today, the tendency is keeping more data. The data is so much that it can be accurately is described as “Big Data”. Extracting and managing real value from the data is a major challenge facing the business organization. In finding an accurate way of simplifying data distribution and analysis, most organizations find an appropriate way of handling data overload. The business organization may use the dashboard to store data. This provides efficiency in extracting and distribution of various data (Hevner and Ping, 2011). Advantages of dashboard According to Rouse (2014), dashboard allows the business organization to Identify negative trends. Active management should comprise of twofold aspects that are stimulating and activating positive aspects, and influence and reducing adverse impacts. The second fold is more important and crucial. However, before the managers think of the positive trends, they should focus on eliminations of the negative trends. That is what dashboard perfectly does (Rouse 2014). Again, the dashboard allows resign from the static reports. Static reports are considered to be relic today; they are often replaced with different an interactive report that provides deep insight and clear in formations. Dashboards promote the creation of new reports; the employees are hence relieved from walking with tabular data sheets that are not understandable. The new reports provide comfort and effort in the performance of the company. New reports are not only a matter of comfort, but also a matter of time and effort what are also necessary in the case of company's performance (Joongyeon and Kwanghee, 2014). Dashboard also helps in correcting the negative trends in the organization. Once the manager has recognized the negative trends, they should be able to correct them. The dashboard helps in eliminating the harmful patterns due to its ability to modify the concrete factors on the trend (Joongyeon and Kwanghee 2014). Again dashboard can be used to Measure the parameters of the company. It is always difficult to measure the real performance of the company. At some point, the performance may seem to be good from the outside, but from the inside, the situation can be different. Deep analysis enables the managers to react to the inefficiencies before it interferes with the normal operation of the organization (Joongyeon and Kwanghee, 2014). The dashboard helps to improve the performed analysis. Availability of pure data is not enough to trace or identify all the irregularities. What is not clear in the value’s spreadsheets might come out this is due to the graphic visualization of the analysis. Dashboards support the visual presentation of the company’s performance (Rouse, 2014). Dashboard is capable of improving the new decisions made b the business. Improving the efficiency of decisions is common to all organizations. Dashboard supports decision making by providing better information. As to this, better and sound decisions are made and influence the performance of the company (Joongyeon and Kwanghee, 2014). A dashboard increases the efficiency and productivity of the employees in any business organization. Dashboards facilitate the work in the enterprise. This result into productivity as less time is wasted on collateral tasks .In most instances they are automated (Joongyeon and Kwanghee, 2014). Dashboards also save time due to the less report required from the workers. In the days back, separate reports were being requested from the employees, today, information is contained in one dashboard. This helps to reduce time .employees are hence able to concentrate on their goals but not on the collateral aspects such as multiple reports .dashboard only concentrate on, what is more, useful to the business organization (Rouse , 2014). According to Rouse (2014) Dashboards also allow for quick learning maintenance. Dashboards are not only intuitive, but learning how to operate them takes less time. This will give the employees easy time in running the dashboard (Rouse, 2014). Finally, a dashboard helps to determine the strategies and goals as a whole. In the business of today, there is no luck or accidents. All the operations should be perfect throughout. This will enable the managers to pay maximum attention to the general company’s strategies. Modern dashboards being the link between business data, and the manager have to facilitate the invention of the new strategy and improving and controlling the current ones (Jayanthi, 2008). Usability is one of the great concerns of the HCI. HCI is concerned with making different systems easy to use and to learn. The usability will make the systems easy to remember, effective to use and efficient to use. Displays that are designed wrongly are difficult to use and often cause errors and frustrations in the workplace.HCI proposed several principles to support the concern of usability. The first principle is learnability. This is where the new users can interact with the system and achieve maximum performance. The designs should be predictable. Individuals should be able to determine the future actions based on the past operations of the organization. They should be able to synthesize the effects of the past actions (Hevner and Ping, 2011). Principles The first principle is early focused on the task and the users. There should be a consideration on how many users are supposed to perform a given task. The organization should be able to determine the appropriate user .a person or an individual who has not used the interface before is not a valid user. In addition, there should be the determination of the task the user is to perform and the task to be done (John, 2014). The next principle is the empirical measurement. There should be a test of the interface early with the users who are in contact with the interface daily. The results may vary from one employee to another.There should be the establishment of quantitative usability that will help specify the number of individuals who perform a given task.The time duration they take to complete the task and the errors they make when performing the task (Hevner and Ping , 2011). Theories related to HCI and designs The first theory is the activity theory. This theory is used by the HCI to study and define the context in which the interaction between the humans and the computer takes place. The theory provides a framework for reasoning about different actions in these circumstances (Hevner and Ping 2011). The HCI also proposes User-centered design. This is a design is widely used philosophy .it suggests that the users are supposed to take a center stage of all the computer systems. Designers, users, and technical practitioners do work together to provide the wants, limitations and needs of the users and create appropriate systems that help to address such elements. The user-centered designs project is always informed by the ethnographic environmental studies where the workers interact with different systems (John 2014). HCL also proposes principles of user interface designs. These are seven principles that need to be considered at any time during the user interface design. They include tolerance, visibility, affordable, simplicity, consistency, feedback and structure (Smith and Gavriel, 2011). Another design is value sensitive design. This is a method for creating technology that accounts for the value of the individuals who are directly using the technology, as well as those individuals who are affected b the technology directly or indirectly. The value sensitive design uses three important processes that include, empirical, conceptual and technical. The conceptual investigations are meant to understand and articulate different technological stakeholders as well as the values of the stakeholders or any value conflict that may arise due to the use of the technology. The empirical investigations are quantitative and qualitative research designs that are used to inform understanding of the designers of the values, needs, and practices of the users. While technical investigations involves analysis of how different individuals use different technologies or different designs of different systems that support the values identified empirical and conceptual investigations (John, 2014). HCI also advocates for the replacement of memory with visual information. The user is not to retain the necessary information in the long term memory or the working memory. A checklist or any other display can help individuals by easing the use of their memory. However, the use of memory can be of importance to the user in eliminating the need to reference some knowledge across the world. For an effective design, the use of the users’ knowledge on his or her head and the knowledge in the world should be balanced for an effective design (Hevner and Ping 2011). Again the principle of predictive aiding proposed by the HCI is of great importance to the users. The proactive actions are more effective than the reactive actions. The display should try to eliminate any cognitive that is a task that is resource demanding and replace them with a perceptual task that are simple in order to reduce the users mental resource. This will enable to think of the possible future outcomes, not just the current conditions (Hevner and Ping 2011). The principle of consistency is also a major principle of the HCI. The older displays can be used to influence and improve the new displays if in any case they are designed consistently. The long term memory can trigger appropriate actions .a design should recognize this fact and use consistency among its displays (John 2014). How the principles, concerns, and designs affect the development of dashboard in management decision-making The dashboard can apply the concern of usability. All data in any business organization should be stored in a way they can be easily interpreted. Business intelligence tools go far beyond bar graphs and dial and can produce any sophisticated graphics such as scatter plots that always move with time, it has sparklines that display several points of data. These graphics can not only show in formations, but they can also be customized using different themes and colors that match the brand of the business organization. Easy interpretation of data will help in making decisions in the business organization; the manager can interpret different data more efficiently and make good and proper decisions in the business (Yogesh, 2005). The principle of flexibility also influences the operation of the dashboard. The new dashboard provides more flexibility in reporting than the existing systems. They can provide more flexibility than Access or Excel. The dashboard can dynamically display data from a variety of perspectives. This is possible since data is loaded from the source to the warehouse in real time. This improves the management of the business (Yogesh, 2005). Again the principle that advocates for the replacement of the memory with the visual information has influenced the development of dashboards. The Modern dashboard can move data into a virtual storage, cache or a separate warehouse data, creating a sufficient different database. This will enable the managers to manipulate data for analysis without any interference on the original databases. This allows the managers to access all the relevant in formations that will help in making proper decisions (Yogesh, 2005). The principle of predictive aiding has led to the development of iDashboards. This is a valuable tool for the management of the business organization. In is a data visualization tool that enables the business organization to analyze and monitor their programs while creating scenarios of “what if” for strategic planning. It allows the manager to personalize dashboard of individuals without mush training. iDashboard allows the business organization to allow their staff create personal dashboards that contain great visualization for planning and analysis. This will enable the manager to pass different decision adopted by the management to various members of the staff in the organization (Yogesh, 2005). Again the user based design of the HCI has enabled the development of the dashboard.It has led to the development of IT developed dashboards which has embedded different workflows for easy use. Workflows are often integrated with the IT advanced dashboards. This mimics and simplifies various steps a user may take if in any case they try to extrapolate answers from different reports.Instead of taking more days or hours making calculations from one report to another.The IT developed provides a more elaborate system by just clicking the button, and their calculations are made. The answers are provided in seconds. Through this, important business decisions can be made effectively this will help increase the productivity of the company (Oosterhout et al., 2009). With this embedded workflows, together with the role base views, the company employee is able to decide on whether to make or to cancel different orders, stock different types of merchandise due to the new trends they see or increase the sales floor staffing. The managers can use the dashboard to make different decisions for the whole business. The worker may also use the same dashboard in making decisions for other specified areas in the business organization (Mullins and Komisa, 2009). The principle of interface design is more importance to the development of dashboards, it advocates for simplicity, tolerance, visibility and affordability of the displays. This has bought simplicity in the modern dashboard. A data of the business organization is compressed into an IT developed dashboard or the Dashboard app this saves time and resources for the business organization. This has simplified in formations that used to take several hours. Calculations and multiple reports can be analyzed with ease in a matter of moments. Different data from other sources can be incorporated in the dashboard app. The dashboard enables the business organization to pull all information to from various departments no matter the location of the department. Through this, the business can be aligned, and an easy task enables the decision makers to improve their sales (Markus and Ina 2007). Again the simplicity and visibility of the dashboards allows it to provide for an adequate and accurate dissemination of information according to the role of those individuals viewing the dashboard. The Single dashboard is created by the business organization to incorporate the whole line of the business from the senior management down to lower positions. This will enable the organization to save time and resources by using just one dashboard in the entire organization. This provides room for effective decision making in the business organization where all members of the organization are brought together using one dashboard (Mullins and Komisa 2009). Modern dashboard technology allows decision makers to access data quickly. Dozens of information are put together in a single, visual, easy consumable representation. This ability to put different information together has been the high achievement of the business intelligence and has helped improve dashboard. Previously, a dashboard was considered as a high-level scorecard few big gauges and was only used by the senior managers in the organization. Today, the dashboards are more interactive and provide a self-contained environment that provides different answers to several questions for the business operators. This will help in making business decisions. The managers can run their IT developed dashboard into which the data from other report are visualized and interlinked (Markus and Ina 2007). With the developed dashboards, metrics, KPLs, and key business attributes are always aligned with the entire business organization. Due to this, there is the availability of information throughout the business organization in logical and consistent manner. This is important in making all the organs of the business organization to work together and help the company to achieve good decision making in the organization (Mullins and Komisa 2009). Again the new principles and designs have led to the introduction Tableau in the dashboards. Tableau can run from the companies database with little or no modeling required. It assumes all the data to be reported is in a single database. It also allows for quick deployments .it needs only five clicks if the current data of the organization is sufficient. The business organization can also decide to restructure their data model in memory. Since every individual knows that a picture is worth around one thousand words, Tableau uses this concept as a basis for the product. The tool is very visual, and it allows different organizations to access their data while answering various questions. The tool can translate different data into different graphics that can get manipulated in drop and drag interface. Tableau offers all of its materials for training online for free. It hosts webinars regularly to keep all members up to date. Tableau is a perfect and excellent for organizations that lack IT departments but in need of a tool that can visualize and creates quick deployment. Since the information is manipulated in a way all members can understand, it makes decisions easy to make in the organization (Beyond Dashboards, 2014). Conclusion The interaction between humans and the computer has lead to a considerable success in the development of dashboards in systems to support management decision-making. Through the interaction, different principles, designs and concerns have been identified; these principles and concerns have significantly improved the development of dashboard in the business organization improving the decision-making ability of the managers. The developed dashboards are simple and easy to use. They are user based, and the employees find easy time in using dashboards. Dashboards are crucial for all the business organizations in the world. It helps increase the profitability of the business through sound decisions. 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