User Centered Design

Question 1

What is user centered design

Answer 1

• Iterative Design
• Early focus on users and tasks
• User testing

Question 2

Tradition Soft Eng Process: Waterfall model

Answer 2

• Requirements
• Design
• Code
• Integration
• Acceptance
• Release

Question 3

Iterative Design

Answer 3

• UID is risky and hard to predict sucess
• UI is refined by repeated trips around the cycle: evaluate > design > implemenet
• We wont get it right first try

Question 4

Spiral model

Answer 4

• Radial dimension corresponds to the cost of the interaction e.g. paper sketch
• Make early iterations as cheap as ppossible

Question 5

Early prototypes

Answer 5

• Detects usability problems

- Cheap paper sketches instead of wasting days coding

Question 6

Techniques for Understanding Users and Tasks

Answer 6

• User interviews and observation

- Reason for analysis: I’m not the user and we need to find out who the user is

Question 7

Know your user

Answer 7

• Learn: age, gender, culture, education, physical limitations and computer experience
• Jumping too quickly into design leads to wishful thinking
• Describe what you want users to be than what they are

Question 8

Multiple Classes of Users

Answer 8

• Applications have different types of users: by role and by characteristics
• Do a user analysis for every class

Question 9

Identify user’s goals

Answer 9

• Identify individual tasks in the problem and decompose them into subtasks and think about abstracting them to goals

Question 10

Common Erros in Needfinding

Answer 10

• Thinking from the system’s point of view rather than the user’s
• Bogging down in what users do rather than why they do it