Naile Burcu Hacioglu

Title: Establishing Design Principles to Combat Over-reliance on Day-to-Day Technologies and Cognitive Decline

Supervision Team: Hyowon Lee, DCU / Maria Chiara Leva, TU Dublin

Description: The concept of “usability” in the field of Human-Computer Interaction strives to make our technologies better fit to our tasks, by improved efficiency, ease of use and satisfaction. Most of the web services and apps we use today in our everyday lives try to save our mental efforts in recall (e.g. reminder app), vigilance (e.g. notification), arithmetic (e.g. calculator app), spatial cognition (e.g. GPS step-by-step instruction), etc. While the immediacy and convenience is one of the main reasons we use these in the first place, increasing anecdotal and scientific evidences suggest that an extended reliance to these tools can result in negative consequences in our cognition. Through a series of iterations of brainstorming, interaction sketching/design and usability testing, this project will construct a new set of usability principles and guidelines for designing new user-interfaces that minimise the potentially negative impact of over-reliance to day-to-day technologies.