User-centered approaches to interaction design

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User-centered approaches to interaction design

• By Haiying Deng
• Yan Zhu

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Contents of this talk

• Advantages of involving users in development
• Principles of a user-centered approach
• Ethnographic-based methods
• Participative design techniques

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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.

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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

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Degrees of involvement (cont) Users join the
design team

• Full-time basis
• Advantage
• Consistent input
• Users are familiar with the system and its
  rationale.
• Disadvantage
• Lose touch with other users if the project takes
  many years. Input is less valuable.

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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

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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

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Principles of user-centered approach

• Early focus on users and tasks
• Empirical measurement
• Iterative design

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Principles of user-centered approach (cont)
Early focus on users and tasks

• Users 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

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Understanding users work applying ethnography
in design
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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

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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

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Typical ethnography example

• Background
• Method
• Brief characterization of user community
• Community practices and procedures

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Principles to do the ethnography?

• Being reasonable, courteous, unthreatening, and
  interested in whats happening.

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Design Ethnography

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

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The problem?

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

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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.
  
  
  

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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.

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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

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• 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

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

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Contextual design

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

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Contextual inquiry

• An ethnographic study approach used for design
• Follows an apprenticeship model
• 4 main principles context
• partnership
• interpretation
• focus

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Context inquiry ethnography interview

• Duration
• Intensity
• Participation
• intention

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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.

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Interpretation session

• Interpreter roles
• ---- interviewer
• ---- work modelers
• ---- recorder
• ---- participants
• ---- moderator

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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

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Affinity diagram
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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.

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Design room

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

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Participatory design

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

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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

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PICTIVE (cont.)

• Stakeholders introduce themselves
• Brief tutorials are represented
• Brainstorm designs
• Walkthrough of the design and the decisions

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CARD (Collaborative Analysis of requirements and
Design)

• A form of storyboarding
• Concentrates on a macroscopic view of the task
  flow

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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.

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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.