CS 544 User Centered Design

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CS 544User Centered Design

• Participatory Design, Contextual Inquiry

Acknowledgement Some of the material in these
lectures is based on material prepared for
similar courses by Saul Greenberg (University of
Calgary), Ravin Balakrishnan (University of
Toronto), James Landay (University of California
at Berkeley), monica schraefel (University of
Toronto), and Colin Ware (University of New
Hampshire). Used with the permission of the
respective original authors.
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System centered design
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System centered design

• What can be built easily on this platform?
• What can I create from the available tools?
• What do I as a programmer find interesting to
  work on?

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User Centered System Design

• Design is based upon a users
• abilities and real needs
• context
• work
• tasks
• Golden rule of interface design
• Know Thy User

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User Centered System Design

• An approach which views knowledge about users and
  their involvement in the design process as a
  central concern
• Involving users, can include anything from
• Observing users working practices as part of
  collecting system requirements, to
• Using psychologically based user modelling
  techniques, to
• Including user representatives on the design team

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User Centered System Design

• Goulds 4 principles
• Early, continual focus on users
• Direct contact through interviews,
  observations, surveys, participative design to
  understand cognitive, behavioral, attitudinal,
  and anthropometric characteristics of users and
  their jobs.
• Early, continual user testing
• Early on, intended users do real work with
  simulations and prototypes their performance and
  reaction s are measured qualitatively and
  quantitatively
• Iterative design
• System (functions, user interface, help system,
  reading material, traning approach) is modified
  based upon result so fuser testing
• Testing cycle is repeated
• Integrated design
• All aspects of usability evolve in parallel
• All aspects of usability under one focus.

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Participatory Design

• Problem when user has a limited role in the
  design
• designers intuitions can be wrong
• interviews etc not precise
• designer cannot know the user sufficiently well
  to answer all issues that come up during the
  design
• Solution
• designers should have access to pool of
  representative users
• END users, not their managers or union reps!

The user is just like me
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Participatory Design

• Users become first class members in the design
  process
• active collaborators vs passive participants
• Users considered subject matter experts
• know all about the work context
• Iterative process
• all design stages subject to revision
• Scandinavian approach to collaborative design
• Cultural homogeneity, a welfare state inclined
  toward empowering rather than replacing
  workers, and codetermination laws that grant
  workers a voice in technologic innovation in
  their workplaces
• Building unique systems within specific user
  organizations
• Contrast with North America where interest is
  from developers of commercial products

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Participatory Design

• Up side
• users are excellent at reacting to suggested
  system designs
• designs must be concrete and visible
• users bring in important folk knowledge of work
  context
• knowledge may be otherwise inaccessible to design
  team
• greater buy-in for the system often results
• Down side
• hard to get a good pool of end users
• expensive, reluctance ...
• users are not expert designers
• dont expect them to come up with design ideas
  from scratch
• the user is not always right
• dont expect them to know what they want
• conservative bias to perpetuate current practices
• dont expect them to fully exploit the potential
  of new technologies

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Participatory Design of a Portable Torque
Feedback Device

• Goal increase the quality of presence for
  chemists using a molecular modeling application
• Presence quality of human-computer interaction
  that makes systems more transparent to the user,
  makes greater user of the sense, and makes the
  abstract concrete
• from a generic 2-D joystick to a smaller simpler
  cheaper specialized 1-D torque-feedback device
• No finished product, financial cutbacks, economic
  reality

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Methods for involving the user

• At the very least, talk to users
• surprising how many designers dont!
• Interviews
• used to discover users culture, requirements,
  expectations, etc.
• contextual inquiry
• interview users in their workplace, as they are
  doing their job
• Explain designs
• describe what youre going to do
• get input at all design stages
• all designs subject to revision
• important to have visuals and/or demos
• people react far differently with verbal
  explanations
• Learn their job!

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Ethnography

• Research ethnographers attempt to understand a
  workplace through immersion in and extended
  contact with it and through a subsequent analysis
  of this experience
• Most useful very early in development, build an
  understanding of existing work practices thorough
  enough to illuminate the possibilities for and
  implications of introducing technology
• Principal cost is time
• Ethnographers are not trained as designers,
  trained to interfere as little as possible with
  the community
• Ethnographic studies most often provide warnings
  detailed descriptions of work practices that
  new technology may disrupt
• E.g., Lucy Suchman, formerly at Xerox Parc,
  ethnography of air traffic controlers

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Contextual Inquiry

• Approach that falls squarely between observation
  and interview
• Intensely interviewing people while they work
• Principles
• Context
• the best way to understand work practice is to
  talk to people in their actual work environment
• people speak about their work in abstractions
  often presenting an idealized model
• difference between summary information and
  ongoing experience most people do not
  conceptualize their work, they just do it!
• access ongoing experience being present in the
  work context leads to more information

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• Principals (contd)
• Partnership
• users are the experts they are the ones doing
  the work!
• share control during the inquiry users have the
  information we want to know
• creating shared meaning to prevent
  self-listening, share design ideas as they occur
• reflection and engagement engagement occurs
  through active listening and reflection occurs
  when we stop t consider and integrate information
  into our evolving understanding
• Focus
• not trying to understand the full organizational
  culture
• maintain focus in order to complete the inquiry
  in a reasonable amount of time

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• Conducting a contextual interview
• Identify customers
• Arrange visit (typically one day)
• Select initial users (consider roles you want to
  cover)
• Use multiple interviewers if possible (to cover
  as many users as possible, to bring different
  perspective)
• Set the focus before the interview
• Structure the interview
• Introduction establishing a relationship
• Ongoing work inquiry users works, interviewer
  observes and occasionally asks questions
• Wrap up summarize what was learned, ask if
  possible to call with further questions, invite
  user to forward further comments

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• Analyzing contextual inquiry information
• Transcribe the interview
• Fix the focus of analysis
• Record understandings coding transcripts or
  Post-It notes
• Description of users work
• Flow or structure of the work
• Description of problems in their work
• Description of problems with the computer tools
• Design ideas that emerge from understanding of
  their work
• Questions for subsequent interviews
• Structure the understanding affinity diagramming

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Readings and References

• Chapter 3 Introduction BGBG 187 195
  (Considering Work Contexts in Design)
• Good, M. (1992). Participatory Design of a
  Portable Torque-Feedback Device,
  http//portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid142750.142
  895, (Reprinted in BGBG p. 225 - 232)
• Holtzblatt, K., and Jones, S. (1993). Conducting
  and Analyzing a Contextual Interview (Excerpt
  reprinted in BGBG p. 241 - 253)