User-centered approaches to interaction design

1. User-centered approaches to interaction design By Haiying Deng Yan Zhu

2. Contents of this talk • Advantages of involving users in development • Principles of a user-centered approach • Ethnographic-based methods • Participative design techniques

3. Why is it important to involve users? • Better understanding of users’ needs and goals, thus more appropriate and more useable product. • Expectation management • making sure that the users’ views and expectations of the new product are realistic. • exceed users’ expectations • Adequate and timely training • Ownership: involvement makes users more respective to the product.

4. Degrees of involvement • Users join the design team • Full-time basis or Part-time basis • For the duration of the project or for a limited time only • Users are not team members but kept informed through newsletters or other channels of communication • Compromise situation

5. Degrees of involvement (cont) Users join the design team • Full-time basis • Advantage • Consistent input • Users are familiar with the system and it’s rationale. • Disadvantage • Lose touch with other users if the project takes many years. Input is less valuable.

6. Degrees of involvement (cont) Users join the design team (cont) • Part-time basis • User is co-opted for whole project • Advantage: • input consistent • Remain in touch with other users • Disadvantage: too stressful to the user • Need to learn new jargon and handle unfamiliar material • Fulfill original job concurrently • User is co-opted for limited period • Advantage: less stressful • Disadvantage: input is not consistent

7. Degrees of involvement (cont)How actively users should be involved? • more successful projects have direct links to users and customers • user studies produce benefits outweigh the costs of conducting them. • high user involvement has negative effect

8. Principles of user-centered approach • Early focus on users and tasks • Empirical measurement • Iterative design

9. Principles of user-centered approach (cont) Early focus on users and tasks • User’s tasks and goals are the driving force behind the development • Users’ behavior and context of use are studied and the system is designed to support them. • Users’ characteristics are captured and designed for • Users are consulted throughout development from earliest phases to the latest and their input is seriously taken into account • All design decisions are taken within the context of the users, their work and environment

10. Understanding users’ work: applying ethnography in design

11. What is ethnography? • literally means “writing the culture” • a broad-based approach in which the users are observed under their normal activities • Documented and rationalized experience • Make the implicit explicit

12. What can ethnography do? • Studying the context of work and watching work being done can reveal information that might be missed by other methods that concentrated on asking about work away from its natural setting

13. Typical ethnography example • Background • Method • Brief characterization of user community • Community practices and procedures

14. Principles to do the ethnography? • Being reasonable, courteous, unthreatening, and interested in what’s happening.

15. Design & Ethnography • Design: concerned with abstraction and rationalization • Ethnography: interested in details.

16. The problem? • Representing the information gleaned from an ethnographic study so that it can be used in design is hard.

17. A framework • The distributed co-ordination: the distributed nature of the tasks and the activities • The plans and procedures: the organizational support for the work. • The awareness of work: how people keep themselves aware of others’ work.

18. Two supporting methods: • Coherence: presents the data from an ethnography study based around a set of “view points” and “concerns”. • Contextual design: provides a structured approach to gathering and representing info from fieldwork with the purpose of design.

19. Coherence • 3 viewpoints and a set of focus questions associated with each of them • 4 concerns and a set of focus questions associated with each of them

20. Viewpoints: dimensions • Focus questions: Distributed coordination: how clear are the boundaries.. Plans and procedures: how do they function? How do they fail….. Awareness of work: how does the spatial organization support the interaction? How do workers organize the space around

21. Concerns: ---- paperwork and computer work ---- skill and the use of local knowledge ---- spatial and temporal organization ---- organizational memory

22. Contextual design • Contextual inquiry • Work modeling • Consolidation • Work redesign • User environment design • Mockup and test with customers • Putting it into practice

23. Contextual inquiry • An ethnographic study approach used for design • Follows an apprenticeship model • 4 main principles: context partnership interpretation focus

24. Context inquiry & ethnography interview • Duration • Intensity • Participation • intention

25. Work modeling • Work flow model: the people involved and the communication and coordination that takes place. • Sequence model: the detailed work steps to achieve a goal. • Artifact model: the physical things created to do the work. • Cultural model: constraints on the system caused by organizational culture. • Physical model: the physical structure of the work.

26. Interpretation session • Interpreter roles: ---- interviewer ---- work modelers ---- recorder ---- participants ---- moderator

27. Consolidating the models • Why: to get a more general model of the work, one that is valid across individuals • How: use affinity diagram, which organize the individual notes captured in the interpretation sessions into a hierarchy showing common structures and themes

28. Affinity diagram

29. The aim of consolidation on different models: • Work flow Models: identify the key role. • Sequence Models: identify what really needs to happen to accomplish the work • Artifacts Models: show the common approaches to organize and structure the work • Physical Models: show the commonality of physical structures • Cultural Models: show the set of common influencers within the organization.

30. Design room • A physical environment with all the work models available. • An important element of Contextual Design.

31. Participatory design • Involve users in design actively • PICTIVE(Muller 1991) and CARD (Tudor 1993)

32. PICTIVE (Plastic Interface for collaborative Technology Initiatives) • To let users fully participate in the design • To improve knowledge acquisition • Concentrates on detailed aspects of the system

34. PICTIVE (cont.) • Stakeholders introduce themselves • Brief tutorials are represented • Brainstorm designs • Walkthrough of the design and the decisions

35. CARD (Collaborative Analysis of requirements and Design) • A form of storyboarding • Concentrates on a macroscopic view of the task flow

37. Summary • Involving users in the design process helps with expectation management and feelings of ownership, but how and when to involve users is a matter of dispute. • Putting a user-centered approach into practice requires much information about the users to be gathered and interpreted. • Ethnography is a good method for studying users in their natural surroundings • Representing the information gleaned from an ethnographic study so that it can be used in design has been problematic.

38. Summary (cont.) • The goals of ethnography are to study the details, while the goals of system design are to produce abstractions; hence they are not immediately compatible. • Coherence is a method that provides focus questions to help guide the ethnographer towards issues that have proved to be important in systems development. • Contextual design is a method that provides models and techniques for gathering contextual data and representing it in a form suitable for practical design. • PICTIVE and CARD are both participatory design techniques that empower users to take an active part in design decisions.