User-centered approaches

to interaction design
 Overview
•Why involve users at all?
•What is a user-centered approach?
•Understanding users’ work
—Coherence
—Contextual Design
•Involving users in design
—PICTIVE
—CARD
 Why involve users at all?
•Expectation management
• Realistic expectations
• No surprises, no disappointments
• Timely training
• Communication, but no hype
•Ownership
• Make the users active stakeholders
• More likely to forgive or accept
problems
• Can make a big difference to
acceptance and success of product
 Degrees of user involvement
•Member of the design team
— Full time: constant input, but lose touch with
users
— Part time: patchy input, and very stressful
— Short term: inconsistent across project life
— Long term: consistent, but lose touch with users

•Newsletters and other dissemination devices

— Reach wider selection of users
— Need communication both ways

•Combination of these approaches

 How Microsoft involves
users
Users are involved throughout development
•‘activity-based planning’: studying what
users do to achieve a certain activity (task)
•usability tests e.g. Office 4.0 over 8000
hours of usability testing.
•internal use by Microsoft staff
•customer support lines
 What is a user-centered approach?

User-centered approach is based on:

– Early focus on users and tasks: directly studying
cognitive, behavioral, 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, fix them and carry out more tests
 Early focus on users and tasks
• Users’ tasks and goals are the driving force behind the
development
• Users’ behavior and context of use are studied and the
product is designed to support them
• Users’ characteristics are captured & designed for
• Users are consulted throughout development, from
earliest phases to the latest, and their input is seriously
taken into account
• All design decisions are taken within the context of the
user, their work and their environment
 Understanding users’ work
•Understanding users’ work is significant
•Ethnography:
from anthropology
‘writing the culture’
participant observation
•Difficult to use the output of ethnography in
design
Framework for using ethnography in design

•Distributed co-ordination: distributed nature of the

tasks & activities, and the means and mechanisms by
which they are co-ordinated
•Plans and procedures: organisational support for the
work, such as workflow models and organisational
charts, and how these are used to support the work
•Awareness of work: how people keep themselves
aware of others’ work
 Coherenc
e
•A method which offers appropriate questions to help
address these key dimensions
•For example:
—Distributed Coordination: How is the division of labor
manifest through the work of individuals and its co-
ordination with others?
—Plans and procedures: How do plans and procedures
function in the workplace?
 Contextual
Design
•Developed to handle data collection and analysis
from fieldwork for developing a software-based
product

•Used quite widely commercially

•Contextual Design has seven parts:

Contextual inquiry, Work modelling,
Consolidation, Work redesign,
User environment design,
Mock-up and test with customers,
Putting it into Practice
 Contextual Inquiry
•An approach to ethnographic study where user is expert,
designer is apprentice
•A form of interview, but
—at users’ workplace (workstation)
—2 to 3 hours long
•Four main principles:
—Context: see workplace & what happens
—Partnership: user and developer collaborate
—Interpretation: observations interpreted by user and
developer together
—Focus: project focus to help understand what to look
for
 Work
Modeling
In interpretation session, models are drawn from the
observations:
•Work flow model: the people, communication and
co-ordination
•Sequence model: detailed work steps to achieve a
goal
•Artifact model: the physical ‘things’ created to do
the work
•Cultural model: constraints on the system from
organizational culture
•Physical model: physical structure of the work, e.g.
office layout
 Consolidatio
n
•Each contextual inquiry (one for each user/developer
pair) results in a set of models
•These need to be consolidated into one view of ‘the
work’
•Affinity diagram
—Organizes interpretation session notes into common
structures and themes
—Categories arise from the data
—Diagram is built through induction
•Work models consolidated into one of each type
 Participatory
Design
•Scandinavian history
•Emphasises social and organisational aspects
•Based on study, model-building and analysis
of new and potential future systems
 Participatory Design (contd)
•Aspects to user involvement include
—Who will represent the user community?
Interaction may need to be assisted by a
facilitator
—Shared representations
—Co-design using simple tools such as paper or
video scenarios
—Designers and users communicate about
proposed designs
—Cooperative evaluation such as assessment of
prototypes
 Benefits of Participatory
Design
“Computer-based systems that are poorly suited to how
people actually work impose cost not only on the
organisation in terms of low productivity but also on the
people who work with them. Studies of work in
computer-intensive workplaces have pointed to a host
of serious problems that can be caused by job design
that is insensitive to the nature of the work being
performed, or to the needs of human beings in an
automated workplace.”

[Kuhn, S. in Bringing Design to Software, 1996]

 PICTIVE
•Plastic Interface for Collaborative Technology
Initiatives through Video Exploration

•Intended to empower users to act a full

participants in design
 PICTIVE (contd)
•Materials used are:
—Low-fidelity office items such as pens,
paper, sticky notes
—Collection of (plastic) design objects for
screen and window layouts

•Equipment required:
—Shared design surface, e.g. table
—Video recording equipment
 PICTIVE (contd)
•Before a PICTIVE session:
—Users generate scenarios of use
—Developers produce design elements for the
design session

•A PICTIVE session has four parts:

—Stakeholders all introduce themselves
—Brief tutorials about areas represented in the
session (optional)
—Brainstorming of ideas for the design
—Walkthrough of the design and summary of
decisions made
 CAR
D
•Collaborative Analysis of Requirements & Design
•Similar to PICTIVE but at a higher level of abstraction:
explores work flow not detailed screen design
•Uses playing cards with pictures of computers and screen
dumps
•Similar structure to the session as for PICTIVE
•PICTIVE and CARD can be used together to give
complementary views of a design
 Summary
• User involvement helps manage users’ expectations &
feelings of ownership
• A user-centered approach has three main elements: early
focus on users, empirical measurement and iterative
design
• Ethnography is useful for understanding work, but can be
difficult to use in design
• Coherence and Contextual Design support the use of
ethnographic data in design
• Participative design involves users taking an active part in
design decisions
• CARD and PICTIVE are example techniques
 Exercis
e
This exercise is to be done in pairs.

Consider a website application for booking theatre or cinema

tickets online
(a) Think about how you would design such a site, and sketch out
some ideas
(b) Run a CARD session with a colleague acting as a ‘user’ to map
out the functional flow of the website
(c) Ask your colleague to produce some scenarios of how the
system may be used. Meanwhile, prepare some ‘empty’ templates
for a PICTIVE session for this system, using paper, sticky notes and
pens
(d) Run a PICTIVE session to develop the online booking system
collaboratively, using PICTIVE.