03 Design Process - Establishing Requirements

Question 1

Three fundamental activities of all design processes

Answer 1

• Understanding the requirements
• Producing a design that meets these requirements
• Evaluating the design

Question 2

User Interface Design is a multi-faceted process (4 points)

Answer 2

• a goal-directed problem solving activity
• an empirical activity
• a creative activity
• a decision-making activity to balance trade-offs

Question 3

UID goal-directed problem solving is informed by …

Answer 3

intended use, 
target domain, 
materials, 
cost, 
feasibility

Question 4

Four approaches to UID are …

Answer 4

User-centered design
Activity-centered design
System design
Genius design

-> in practice, none of these approaches is followed exclusively

Question 5

User-centered design approach

Answer 5

• User is the only guide to the designer

- The designer’s role is to translate the users’ needs and goals into a design solution

Question 6

Activity-centered design approach

Answer 6

• Focus on the activities surrounding particular tasks

- Behavior of users rather than their goals is important

Question 7

System design approach

Answer 7

Holistic design approach focusing on the entire ecology (=system) of use, i.e. the
people, objects, computers, devices, tools, …

Question 8

Genius design approach

Answer 8

• Relies solely on the experience and creative flair of the designer
• Users are not involved during the process
• Users’ role is to validate ideas generated by the designer

Question 9

3 key principles of user centered design

Answer 9

• early focus on users and tasks
• empirical measurement
• iterative design

Question 10

Why Involving Real Users in the Design Process? (3 reasons)

Answer 10

• Functionality (Developers gain a better understanding of the users’ goals)
• Expectation management (Make sure that the users’ views and expectations of the new product are realistic)
• Ownership (Users who feel that they have contributed to a product’s development are more receptive to it)

Question 11

Design Process: 4 steps

Answer 11

requirements
design
prototyping
evaluation

cycle!

Question 12

Iterative Design: With each iteration …

Fix _ first, _ later

Answer 12

• Design becomes more concrete and more precise
• Analysis and user feedback focuses on smaller and smaller problems

Fix big design bugs first, small ones later

Question 13

Danger of iterations, how to solve this

Answer 13

Hill-climbing approach -> risk of getting trapped in local maxima

-> develop many alternatives, realize them as protoypes

Question 14

IDEO’s design process

Answer 14

1. Understand the market, the client, the technology
2. Observe real people in real-life situations
3. Visualize new concepts and the customers who will use them (rendering or simulation, physical models and prototypes)
4. Evaluate and refine the prototypes
5. Implement the new concept for commercialization

Question 15

Important Flavors of User-Centered Design (2)

Answer 15

Contextual Design

Participatory Design / Living Labs

Question 16

Contextual design: 4 main principles

Answer 16

Context: see workplace & what happens
Partnership: user and developer collaborate; user is expert, designer is apprentice
Interpretation: observations interpreted by user and developer together
Focus: project focus to understand what to look for

Question 17

What does Participatory Design mean?

Answer 17

Selected users are actively participating in the design process

• > At least one future user is part of the development team
• > can be time-consuming

Question 18

3 important questions when establishing requirements

Answer 18

• Why develop the system?
• Who are the users?
• What do they want to do with the system?

Question 19

Why Establishing Requirements?

Answer 19

Requirements definition is the stage where failure occurs most commonly

Fixing errors at a later phase in the design process is very costly

Question 20

Establishing Requirements Aims and Means

Answer 20

Aims:
Understand as much as possible about users, task, context
-> Produce a stable set of requirements

Means to provide answers:

• Data gathering activities
• Data analysis activities
• Expression as ‘requirements’

Question 21

Types of Requirements

Answer 21

Functional
Non-functional
Data
Users
Environment/Context

Question 22

Understanding the problem space - 3 questions

Answer 22

Why develop the system at all?
What do you want to create?
What was good and what was bad?

Question 23

Problem Space - Outcome (2 things)

Answer 23

1. Situation of concern (brief text about main goals and constraints)
2. Problem statement (brief text that concisely captures intended solution)
   - > form of solution
   - > type of support it provides
   - > users
   - > activities it supports

Question 24

3 user categories (Eason, 1987)

Answer 24

Primary: frequent, hands-on
Secondary: occasional or via someone else
Tertiary: affected by introduction or influencing the purchase

Question 25

Stakeholder definition

Answer 25

everybody who is affected by or has an influence on the system

Question 26

Elements of a Persona

Answer 26

Persona Group (i.e. web manager)

Fictional name

Job titles and major responsibilities

Demographics such as age, education, ethnicity, and family status

The goals and tasks they are trying to complete using the product

Their physical, social, and technological environment

Question 27

Problems with users needs

Answer 27

Users rarely know what is possible

Users can’t tell you what they ‘need’ to help them achieve their goals

Question 28

Task Analysis - 3 Steps

Answer 28

1. Gather data (Observe and interview users about how they solve tasks with existing solutions.)
2. Analyze data (Make sense of the data by structuring and prioritizing)
3. Extract and model requirement

Question 29

How to Ask Questions

Answer 29

Clear and simple, not too broad

Affording logical answers

Users don‘t always answer truthfully

No leading/suggesting questions that make assumptions!

No unconscious biases, e.g. gender stereotypes

Question 30

Techniques for Investigating and Extracting Requirements

Answer 30

Scenarios
Use Cases
Object/Operation Analysis
Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA)

Question 31

Use Case Diagram: Elements

Answer 31

Use cases (ellipse)
Actors (stick figure)
System (box, optional)
Associations (solid lines)

Question 32

Hierarchical Task Analysis

Answer 32

The starting point is a user goal

Tasks are subdivided into subtasks

The result is a graphical box-and-line notation