Chapter 9: User-centered approaches to interaction design

Chapter 9: User-centered approaches to interaction design From “Interaction design: Beyond human-computer interaction” By J. Preece, Y. Rogers, H. Sharp Presented by: Xiaohong Bao Steve Abrams

Introduction • User involvement in the development process • Contents: • Advantages • Principles • Understanding user’s work: applying ethnography in design • Involving users in design: participatory design

Advantages • Developers gain a lot for better product by understanding users better • Expectation management • Make sure that the users’ views and expectations are realistic • Support the users’ work more effectively • Help the users to know and understand the product at the early stage • training • Ownership

Degrees of involvement • Full-time or part-time • Duration of the whole project or a limited time • Through newsletters or workshop • Attending evaluations

Principles • To design a useful and easy to use computer system • Early focus on users and tasks • Empirical measurement • Iterative design

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 earlier 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 their environment

Involving users in design: Participatory Design • Users are actively involved in development. They design the product in cooperation with the designers

PICTIVE(Plastic Interface for Collaborative Technology Initiatives through Video Exploration)

PICTIVE --- continued • The stakeholders all introduce themselves • Brief tutorials about the different domains • Brainstorming the designs • A walkthrough of the design and the decision discussed

CARD(Collaborative analysis of Requirements and Design) • Takes a more macroscopic view of the task flow, while PICTIVE concentrates on detailed aspects of the system

Conclusion • 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

Conclusion -continued • Representing the information gleaned from an ethnographic study so that it can be used in design has been problematic • 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

Conclusion –continued 2 • 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 in 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

Chapter 9: User-centered approaches to interaction design