03 Design Process - Establishing Requirements Flashcards
Three fundamental activities of all design processes
- Understanding the requirements
- Producing a design that meets these requirements
- Evaluating the design
User Interface Design is a multi-faceted process (4 points)
- a goal-directed problem solving activity
- an empirical activity
- a creative activity
- a decision-making activity to balance trade-offs
UID goal-directed problem solving is informed by …
intended use, target domain, materials, cost, feasibility
Four approaches to UID are …
User-centered design
Activity-centered design
System design
Genius design
-> in practice, none of these approaches is followed exclusively
User-centered design approach
- User is the only guide to the designer
- The designer’s role is to translate the users’ needs and goals into a design solution
Activity-centered design approach
- Focus on the activities surrounding particular tasks
- Behavior of users rather than their goals is important
System design approach
Holistic design approach focusing on the entire ecology (=system) of use, i.e. the
people, objects, computers, devices, tools, …
Genius design approach
- 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
3 key principles of user centered design
- early focus on users and tasks
- empirical measurement
- iterative design
Why Involving Real Users in the Design Process? (3 reasons)
- 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)
Design Process: 4 steps
requirements
design
prototyping
evaluation
cycle!
Iterative Design: With each iteration …
Fix _ first, _ later
- 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
Danger of iterations, how to solve this
Hill-climbing approach -> risk of getting trapped in local maxima
-> develop many alternatives, realize them as protoypes
IDEO’s design process
- Understand the market, the client, the technology
- Observe real people in real-life situations
- Visualize new concepts and the customers who will use them (rendering or simulation, physical models and prototypes)
- Evaluate and refine the prototypes
- Implement the new concept for commercialization
Important Flavors of User-Centered Design (2)
Contextual Design
Participatory Design / Living Labs
Contextual design: 4 main principles
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
What does Participatory Design mean?
Selected users are actively participating in the design process
- > At least one future user is part of the development team
- > can be time-consuming
3 important questions when establishing requirements
- Why develop the system?
- Who are the users?
- What do they want to do with the system?
Why Establishing Requirements?
Requirements definition is the stage where failure occurs most commonly
Fixing errors at a later phase in the design process is very costly
Establishing Requirements Aims and Means
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’
Types of Requirements
Functional Non-functional Data Users Environment/Context
Understanding the problem space - 3 questions
Why develop the system at all?
What do you want to create?
What was good and what was bad?
Problem Space - Outcome (2 things)
- Situation of concern (brief text about main goals and constraints)
- Problem statement (brief text that concisely captures intended solution)
- > form of solution
- > type of support it provides
- > users
- > activities it supports
3 user categories (Eason, 1987)
Primary: frequent, hands-on
Secondary: occasional or via someone else
Tertiary: affected by introduction or influencing the purchase
Stakeholder definition
everybody who is affected by or has an influence on the system
Elements of a Persona
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
Problems with users needs
Users rarely know what is possible
Users can’t tell you what they ‘need’ to help them achieve their goals
Task Analysis - 3 Steps
- Gather data (Observe and interview users about how they solve tasks with existing solutions.)
- Analyze data (Make sense of the data by structuring and prioritizing)
- Extract and model requirement
How to Ask Questions
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
Techniques for Investigating and Extracting Requirements
Scenarios
Use Cases
Object/Operation Analysis
Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA)
Use Case Diagram: Elements
Use cases (ellipse)
Actors (stick figure)
System (box, optional)
Associations (solid lines)
Hierarchical Task Analysis
The starting point is a user goal
Tasks are subdivided into subtasks
The result is a graphical box-and-line notation
