Lecture 3

Question 1

What is design?

Answer 1

• Achieving Goals within Constraints • Trade-off
– Which goals or constraints can be relaxed so that others can be met.
• Understand computers
– Limitations, capacities, tools, platforms
• Understand people
– Psychological, social aspects, human error

Question 2

What is User-Centered Design?

Answer 2

Based on:
- Early focus on users and tasks: directly studying cognitive,
behavioural, anthropomorphic & attitudinal characteristics

• Empirical measurement: users’ reactions and performance to scenarios, manuals, simulations & prototypes are observed, recorded and analysed
• Iterative design: when problems are found in user testing in any stage, fix them and carry out more tests

Question 3

User-centered design emphasizes on:

Answer 3

(1) solving the right problem, and (2) solving it in a way that meets human needs and capabilities

Question 4

Four Basic Activities in the design process

Answer 4

– Identifying needs and establishing requirements
(describe and get to know users, describe and analyze tasks, produce requirments)
- Developing alternative sesign
Building interactive version of the design
- Evaluating designs

Question 5

Identify Needs and Establish Requirements. 3 questions?

Answer 5

What, How, and Why?

Question 6

Identify Needs and Establish Requirements: what?

Answer 6

Two aims:

1. Understand as much as possible about the users, tasks, contexts
2. Produce a stable set of requirements

Question 7

Identify Needs and Establish Requirements: How? (4)

Answer 7

• Data gathering activities
• Data analysis activities
• Expression as ‘requirements’ - All of above is iterative

Question 8

Identify Needs and Establish Requirements: Why?

Answer 8

“finding and fixing a software problem after delivery is often 100 times more expensive than finding and fixing it during the requirements and design phase.”
- What do users want? What do users ‘need’?
• Vitamin vs. painkiller

Question 9

Questions to Ask When Establishing Requirements: (4)

Answer 9

• Who is the target user?
• What challenges do they face?
• What current strategies do they use to address these challenges?
• What values influence what they see as an acceptable technology?

Question 10

Establishing Requirements (4 steps)

Answer 10

• Step1: get all the ideas
– What goals and capabilities would this product support?
• Step 2:group logically related ideas under a business goal
– E.g., a high-level goal of “provide better ongoing and active customer service and support without having to go on-site” can be achieved via a collection of lower-level goals/functions such as proactive services, faster responses to requests, etc.
• Step 3: prioritize
– Focus on fulfilling the core critical goals
– E.g., built-in emails? social networking capabilities?
• Step 4: document the results

Question 11

Requirement Statement?

Answer 11

A requirement is a statement about an intended product that specifies what it should do or how it should perform.

Question 12

Different Kinds of Requirements

Answer 12

Functional and non-functional

Data requirements and Environmental

Question 13

Functional requirements?

Answer 13

• What the system should do

Question 14

Non-functional requirements?

Answer 14

What constraints there are on the system and its development

Question 15

Data requirement?

Answer 15

What kind of data need to be stored?

How till they be stored? (database?)

Question 16

Environmental requirements?

Answer 16

― physical environment
― social environment
― organisational environment ― technical environment

Question 17

Data Gathering for Requirements (4 parts)

Answer 17

• Interviews
        Explore issues
• Focus group
        Gain a consensus view
• Questionnaires
        Get initial responses
• Observation
        Understand the nature of tasks and contexts

Question 18

Why is it good to study documentation while gathering data for Requirements? (3)

Answer 18

• Procedures and rules are often written down in manuals
• Good source of data about the steps involved in an activity, and any regulations governing a task
• Good for understanding legislation, and getting background information

Question 19

What is a Context Inquiry (While Gathering Data for requirements)?

Answer 19

• An approach that emerged from the ethnographic approach

• Context: see workplace & what happens
• Partnership: user and developer collaborate
• Interpretation: observations interpreted by user and developer together

Question 20

4 questions that should be answered will gathering data (for requirements)?

Answer 20

• Who is the target user?
• What challenges do they face?
• What current strategies do they use to address these challenges?
• What values influence what they see as an acceptable technology?

Question 21

Modelling Users =

Answer 21

Personas

Question 22

Modelling Users: Personas. (5 points)

Answer 22

• Capture user characteristics
• Not real people
• Should not be idealised
• Bring them to life with a name, characteristics, goals, personal background
• Develop multiple (3/5)

Question 23

Task Descriptions: (Scenarios). What for?

Answer 23

Bridging the gap between user research and design

Question 24

Scenarios. (3 points)

Answer 24

• An informal narrative story, simple, “natural”, personal, not generalizable
• Describe human activities or tasks in a story that allows exploration and discussion of context, needs, and requirements
• Does not explicitly describe the use of software or other technological support to achieve a task

Question 25

Task Descriptions: (Use Cases). What for?

Answer 25

• Focus on lower-level user-system interaction rather than the user’s task itself
• Assume interaction with a system
• Assumedetailedunderstandingoftheinteraction
• Include
- Normal course, i.e. the set of actions that the
- analyst believes to be most commonly performed

  - Alternative courses (when there is more than one option)

Question 26

Essential Use Cases?

Answer 26

— abstract away from the details
— does not have the same assumptions as use cases (e.g., the kind of interaction)
— An essential use cases is a structured narrative consisting of three parts:
- a name that expresses the overall user intention
- a stepped description of user actions,
- a stepped description of system responsibility

Question 27

Make a Example Essential Use Case for Holiday Planner

Answer 27

(see page 62 slide 3)

Question 28

Task Descriptions/analysis?

Answer 28

• Are often often used to envision new systems or devices
• Task analysis is used mainly to investigate an existing situation
• It is important not to focus on superficial activities (what are people trying to achieve? Why are they trying to achieve it? How are they going about it?)

Obs. there are many techniques but the most popular is Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA)

Question 29

Hierarchical Task Analysis?

Answer 29

• Involves breaking a task down into subtasks, then sub-sub-tasks and so on. These are grouped as plans which specify how the tasks might be performed in practice
• HTA focuses on physical and observable actions, and includes looking at actions not related to software or an interaction device
• Start with a user goals which is examined and the main tasks for achieving it are identified

Question 30

Give example of HTA in order to borrow a book from the library

Answer 30

s.66 (föreläsning 3)

Question 31

Example Hierarchical Task Analysis (Graphical)

Answer 31

s.67 (föreläsning 3)

Question 32

Which are the most commonly-used techniques for data gathering? (7)

Answer 32

• Questionnaires
• Interviews
• Focus groups
• Direct observation
• Studying documentation
• Researching similar products
• Contextual inquiry