Welcome TC518: Usercentered Design Tuesday, 6:1510:00

1
Welcome TC518 User-centered DesignTuesday,
615-1000

• Dr. Jennifer Turns
• Assistant Professor
• Technical Communication
• University of Washington

• Ms. Anita Salem
• Founder
• Principal Consultant
• SalemSystems, Inc.

2
Mapping out Day 1

• Introductions
• Tell me about yourself
• Go over syllabus
• Finding potential project teammates
• Introduction to User-centered design and
  usability
• Lecture
• Two activities
• Revisit syllabus focus on readings
• Project
• Overview of activities
• Group formation and project selection

3
Tell me about yourself
Please record the following information on an
index card

• General
• Name (and preferred way to address you)
• Best way to contact you (e.g., email, phone,
  etc.)
• Place of employment
• Domains of interest (e.g., medicine, e-commerce,
  etc.)

• Going Deeper
• Self-characterization Indicate your level of
  agreement with the following statements by
  recording low, medium, or high for each
• I consider myself a designer
• User considerations are critical to my work
• Evaluation criteria What criteria you would use
  to evaluate
• a hair dryer
• a website
• Design process Write down the sequence of five
  or so major steps one should go through in
  developing and evaluating a new computer system
  for end users.

4
Getting a sense of the class
Already are designers
Already prioritize user issues
5
Syllabus Learning Objectives

• Following the course, students may need to
• Do user-centered design activities
• Sell user-centered design activities
• Plan user-centered design activities (and make
  choices)
• Continue to educate themselves
• By the end of the course, students will be able
  to
• Critically discuss the concept complexities of
  UCD
• Identify and explain a variety of factors
  motivating/enabling UCD
• Plan and execute activities that collectively
  instantiate a UCD process
• Identify areas of scholarship useful in design to
  address user needs
• Class elements
• Project (70)
• Readings and discussion (10)
• Final exam (20)

6
Syllabus Detailed schedule
TOPIC C
TOPIC D
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Syllabus - Class Structure
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3

• HW
• Readings
• Online Discussion
• Project Work

• HW
• Readings
• Online Discussion
• Project Work

Share results from project exercise 1 (topic B)
Share results from project exercise 2 (topic C)
Discuss New Concepts via Readings (topic A/B)
Discuss New Concepts via Readings (topic C)
Discuss New Concepts via Readings (topic D)
Discuss project exercise 1 (topic B)
Discuss project exercise 2 (topic C)
Discuss project exercise 3 (topic D)
8
Syllabus Project (70)

• Description
• Follow a user-centered design process to explore
  the redesign of a product/process of your
  choosing.
• Examples Students may redesign
• Blood pressure cuff in local drugstore
• Informational website for engineering educators
• Check-out process for Internet retailer
• Instructions/documentation for photo processing
  software
• Educational toy designed for 5 year old
• Student Responsibilities
• Project exercises (7, weekly homework,
  collectively 20 of grade)
• Project deliverables (2, significant milestones,
  each 25 of grade)
• Review/advisory board participation

9
Syllabus - Readings discussion (10)
10
Syllabus Weekly schedule
11
Syllabus Course Design Principles

• Assumptions
• Learning involves construction of knowledge
• Students are diverse, and have knowledge to offer
• Principles
• Provide varied ways for students to learn
  demonstrate knowledge
• Ensure students have opportunity to learn from
  each other
• Manage participant burden
• Elements
• Practice user-centered design activities
• Reflect on user-centered design activities
  through discussions
• Learn from perspectives of others
• Various interactions w/ readings (summarize,
  discuss, synthesize)

12
Activity 1 Lets move around

• Your task
• Identify one or more domains that interest you
• Find/meet other students who share domain
  interests
• Talk about
• Your motivations for taking this class and
• Nature of your interest in the specific domain.
• Motivation for this activity
• Projects involve teams
• Teams organized around domains
• Project easier if teams have prior domain
  knowledge
• Team formation (project selection) by end of
  class

13
Activity 2a Difficult Products

• Individually Think about some product/ process
  that you have found to be difficult
• What was the nature of the difficulty and the
  consequences?
• What might be included as part of a users
  experience with the product?
• Group Share your experiences.

14
User-centered Design

• User-centered design is what you do to achieve
  usable systems
• Usability is the way a user-centered design
  product is evaluated
• We will talk about usability then about
  user-centered design

15
Defining Usability

• The extent to which a product can be used by
  specified users to achieve specified goals in a
  specified context of use with effectiveness,
  efficiency and satisfaction (ISO 9241-11)
• The measure of the quality of the user
  experience when interacting with something
  whether a web site, a traditional software
  application, or any other device the user can
  operate in some way or another (Nielsen)
• Usability means that the people who use the
  product can do so quickly and easily to
  accomplish their own tasks (Dumas and Redish)

16
Defining Usability (Barnum, p. 6)
17
Benefits of a usable system
(Maquire, p. 589)
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Usability and User Experience

• Usability stems from entire user experience
• Device Interface Visual, tactile, input
  devices
• Support manuals
• Packaging
• Computer system
• Workspace
• Each of these aspects of a product/process can be
  redesigned to enhance usability

19
Recap and apply

• Recap
• Usability definitions and dimensions
• Benefits of usable systems
• Aspects of the user experience
• Links to activityconsidering your difficult
  products
• What does usability look like?
• What would be the benefits of usability?
• What would be included the comprehensive user
  experience?
• What would we need to know in order to design?

20
Activity 2b Difficult Products (cont.)

• Discuss the following in groups
• Suggest and justify one redesign to this system.
• What did the designers fail to take into account,
  such that the original design was difficult? Why
  might the considerations not have been taken into
  account?

21
UCD - Historical context

• Pre-1975
• Computing systems with specialized interfaces,
  expert users,
• Severe limitations in terms of interface,
  computing power!
• 1977 Release of Apple II with graphical
  interface
• 1985 Gould and Lewis promote User-centered
  Design
• 1988 Norman and Draper, User-centered System
  Design
• 1990s
• Interest in field methods,
• Rapid increases in computing power and options,
• Emergence of prototyping tools,
• Global marketplace,
• Internet
• 1999 ISO standards for human-centered design
• 2001 Special issue IJHCI, Human-centered design
• 2002 Special issue IJHCI, User-centered design
  at IBM

22
User-centered design

• Goal Achieving usable systems
• But what is it?
• Principles
• Process
• Philosophy
• All of the above
• Something else?
• Questions
• How does user-experience design compare to other
  types of design such as software design,
  navigation design, interface design, interaction
  design, learner-centered design, and
  usage-centered design?
• How does a user-centered design process compare
  to other design processes such as the waterfall
  model and extreme programming

23
Principles for UCD

• Early focus on users
• Empirical measurement
• Iterative design

Gould and Lewis (1985)
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Assumptions behind principles

• 1 Usability is an important goal.
• 2 Users are difficult to predict variable, and
  hard to pin down.

25
Principles are undervalued(Gould and Lewis,
1985)

• Not worth following
• Confusion with similar but critically different
  ideas
• User diversity is underestimated
• User diversity is overestimated
• Belief that users do not know what they need
• Belief that ones job does not require it or
  permit it
• Belief in the power of reason
• Belief that design guidelines should be
  sufficient
• Belief that good design means getting it right
  first time
• Belief that the development process will be
  lengthened
• Belief that iteration is just fine-tuning
• Belief in the power of technology to succeed

26
UCD Process and Products
(Maquire, p. 589)
Plan UCD Decisions about which methods to use
Specify context of use Description of users,
tasks, context, problems
Specify user/org rqmts Statements about what
the design should fulfill
Evaluate against rqmts Data on how well system
meets expectations
Produce Design Solutions System specifications
27
Methods available at UCD stages
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Activity 2b Difficult Products (cont.)

• Discuss the following in groups
• Suggest and justify one redesign to this system.
• What did the designers fail to take into account,
  such that the original design was difficult? Why
  might the considerations not have been taken into
  account?
• And
• What process might you follow to explore
  potential redesigns?
• What would you want to know in order to do the
  redesign?

29
Where are we going from here

• The design of this class students will get
• Experience user-centered design
• Exposure to choices, tradeoffs, other examples
• Information and sources for more information
• Information from the readings
• Selection of topics
• Selection of sources

30
Syllabus Project, Overview

• Description
• Follow a user-centered design process to explore
  the redesign of a product/process of your
  choosing.
• Examples Students may redesign
• Blood pressure cuff in local drugstore
• Informational website for engineering educators
• Check-out process for Internet retailer
• Instructions/documentation for photo processing
  software
• Educational toy designed for 5 year old
• Responsibilities
• Project exercises weekly homework
• Project deliverables significant milestones
• Review/advsiory board

31
Syllabus Project, Structure

• Project Exercises (7)
• Almost weekly homework
• Graded credit/no credit, collectively worth 20
  of grade
• Scaled to fit one week,
• One page limit.
• Project Deliverables (2)
• Each worth 25 of grade
• Summarize project progress, mediate next steps
• One as paper, one as presentation
• Advisory/Review Board
• Students will serve on the advisory/review board
  for other students.

32
Project - Structure
33
Project Group Element

• Groups of 4-6 students will jointly work on a
  shared product/process.
• Each student will complete each project exercise
  independently (and be graded independently).
• On the day the exercise is due, students will
  share the results with their group.
• As project moves forward, each student can use
  information created by any group member in making
  their own decisions.

34
Exercise 1 Comparative Evaluation

• Task Decide which of two products is better
• Using the product you are proposing to redesign
  and one competitor for this product, conduct an
  analysis to determine the conditions under which
  you believe each solution might be better for
  users and why.
• Prepare A one-page summary describing
• The two solutions,
• The results of your analysis, i.e., the
  conditions under which each is better for the
  user and why, and
• Potential implications for redesign.
• Bring to class Copies of summary for
• Each team member
• Instructors

35
Wrap-up where weve been

• Introductions
• Tell me about yourself
• Go over syllabus
• Finding potential project teammates
• Introduction to User-centered design and
  usability
• Lecture
• Two activities
• Revisit syllabus focus on readings
• Project
• Overview of activities
• Group formation and project selection

36
Activity 3 Project Selection

• Within your domain group
• Select a shared product/process that will be the
  basis of your term-long project1.
• Give to instructor the team product info.
• Discuss strategies for exercise 1 (with aim of
  having a broad cross section of information next
  week).

1Caveat There will still be time to change next
week, although this is not optimal