Design Design Exercise

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DesignDesign Exercise

• The light bulb goes on

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Socio-Technical Models

• USTM User Skills and Task Match
• Stakeholders
• Primary -- The systems users
• Secondary -- People who get system I/O (eg. Get
  reports, fill in forms)
• Tertiary -- Affected by success/failure of system
• Facilitating -- Design, development, maintenance

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Socio-Technical Models

• Airline booking example
• Primary
• Travel agents, airline booking staff
• Secondary
• Customers, airline management
• Tertiary
• Competitors, stockholders, FAA
• Facilitators -- IT staff, design team

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USTM Activities

• Describe organizatiopnal context
• Identify stakeholders
• Motivation, disincentives, skills, power
• Identify workgroups
• Collections of people
• Identify task-object pairs
• Identify Stakeholder needs

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Soft Systems Methodology

• Gather data about the organization
• Understand by observation the way the
  organization
• Develop root definitions
• CATWOE

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Soft Systems Methodology

• CATWOE
• Clients -- Customer
• Actors -- Travel agency staff
• Transformations -- Clients request
  transformed into seat on flight profit
• Worldview -- Higher profits through more
  efficient sales
• Owner -- Airline management
• Environment -- FAA, Contract law...

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Agenda

• Challenges
• Idea generation
• Design principles

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Design

• How do we come up with new (good) designs for
  interactive systems?
• Why is it so difficult?

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Why is Design Difficult?

• 1. Increasing complexity/pressure
• Number of things to control has risen
  dramatically
• Display is increasingly symbolic/artificial
• Feedback is more complex and subtle
• Errors are increasingly serious/costly

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Why Difficult?

• 2. Marketplace pressures
• Time is money
• Adding functionality (complexity) is now easy and
  cheap
• Adding controls/feedback is expensive
• Design usually requires several iterations before
  success

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Why Difficult?

• 3. People often consider cost and appearance over
  human factors design
• 4. Creativity is challenging

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Good Bad Designs

• Examples

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Good Design

• Invites person to use it properly
• Ball -- throwable
• Doorknob -- graspable
• Visual affordance
• The perceived and actual fundamental properties
  of an object that help convey how it should be
  used -- (Don Norman)
• Complex things need explaining
• Simple things should not

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Guidelines for Design

• 1. Provide a good conceptual model
• User has mental model of how things work
• Build design that allows user to predict effects
  of actions
• 2. Make things visible
• Visible affordances, mappings, constraints
• Remind person of what can be done and how to do it

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Idea Creation
How do we create and develop new interface ideas
and designs?

• Ideas come from
• Imagination
• Analogy
• Observation of current practice
• Observation of current systems

• Borrow from other fields
• Animation
• Theatre
• Information displays
• Architecture
• ...

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Interface Metaphors

• Metaphor - Application of name or descriptive
  term to another object which is not literally
  applicable
• Use Natural transfer - apply existing knowledge
  to new, abstract tasks
• Problem May introduce incorrect mental model

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Metaphor Creation (1)

• Prepare
• What functions are needed
• What are users problems?

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Metaphor Creation (2)

• Generate
• Use metaphor that matches users conceptual tasks
• Given choice, choose metaphor closest to way
  system really works
• Ensure emotional tone is appropriate to users

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Metaphor Creation (3)

• Evaluate
• Evolve

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Idea Creation

• Methods for creating and developing interface
  ideas
• Turn off your natural critique mechanism!
• ?

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Idea Creation Methods

• 1. Consider new use for object
• 2. Adapt object to be like something else
• 3. Modify object for a new purpose

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Idea Creation Methods

• 4. Magnify - add to object
• 5. Minimize - subtract from object
• 6. Substitute something similar

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Idea Creation Methods

• 7. Rearrange aspects of object
• 8. Change the point of view
• 9. Combine data into an ensemble

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Iterate on Design

• Redesign system
• in light of initial user impressions
• pay attention to common complaints
• Be prepared to...
• Abandon bad ideas!!
• Its just an idea, not a measure of your worth!

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Quotable Quotes Practice

• The secret to having good ideas is to have many
  ideas -- Bill Buxton
• Youve got 100,000 bad drawings inside you.
  Youre here at art school to get them out. --
  Chuck Jones
• Design takes practice!!

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Quotable Quotes

• Where principle is put to work, not as a recipe
  or as a formula, there will always be style --
  Le Corbusier
• Every curve and line has to have real meaning
  it cant be arbitrary. -- Frank Lloyd Wright

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Design Guidelines/Principles

• General guidelines (rules of thumb) to help
  create more usable systems
• Can be subtle, even contradictory

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Design Principles

• 1. Use simple and natural dialog in users
  language
• Match users task in a natural way
• Avoid jargon, techno-speak
• Present exactly info that user needs
• Less is more!

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Design Principles

• 2. Strive for consistency
• Sequences, actions, commands, layout, terminology
• Makes more predictable
• Dialog boxes all having same closure options

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Design Principles

• 3. Provide informative feedback
• Continuously inform user about what is occurring
• Most important on frequent, substantive actions
• in file
• How to deal with delays?
• Special cursors
• Done graphs

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Design Principles

• 4. Minimize users memory load
• Recognition is better than recall
• Make visible!
• Describe required input format, include example
  and default
• Date _ _ - _ _ - _ _ (DD-MM-YY)
• Use small of generally applicable cmds

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Design Principles

• 5. Permit easy reversal of actions
• Undo!
• Reduces anxiety, encourages experimentation

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Design Principles

• 6. Provide clearly marked exits
• Dont want the user to feel trapped
• Examples

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Design Principles

• 7. Provide shortcuts
• Enable frequent users to perform often-used
  operations quickly
• Keyboard mouse
• Navigation between windows/forms
• Reuse

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Design Principles

• 8. Support internal locus of control
• Put user in charge, not computer
• Can be major source of anxiety

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Design Principles

• 9. Handle errors smoothly and positively
• 10. Provide useful help and documentation
• (More to come later in course on these two)

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Design Workshop

• Teams of 5
• Design a Thermostat
• 1 Temperature per hour