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By concentrating on meeting the users’ goals and information needs and ensuring the
design enhances the awareness of the overall problem situation, the overall effectiveness
of the design ensures that the reader can comprehend and act on the information in an
efficient manner. Unfortunately, interfaces are inherently difficult to design and more
reflective of creative craft than engineering principles (Myers, 1994), although both
interface design and documentation continue to move toward engineering-type principles
(Weiss, 2002).
This book provides one view of handling the problem of analyzing the situation and
presenting dynamic information for complex open-ended situations. The remainder of
this opening chapter lays out a model of the situation, user goals, and information needs,
and then provides definitions of simple, complicated, and complex situations. As part of
that definition, I consider how designing for a complex open-ended situation requires
changing from a design objective of defining tasks to a design objective of gaining an indepth understanding of the user goals and information needs within specific situations.
The remainder of this book then expands on those complex open-ended design
considerations.
Corporate reports
Example 1:
While I was discussing this book with a potential editor, we were discussing the
monthly reports she (as a senior editor) received. Rather than providing any help
with interpreting the information in the reports, the report designers took the view
of just asking what information was desired and providing a collection of reports
that contained it somewhere. A situation which I’m sure most managers can
identify with. The issues surrounding how the senior editors and publishers
interpreted and worked with the reports each month was deemed too difficult to
address and, thus, outside the scope of report design.
Example 2:
For example, if a marketing analyst for a coffee manufacturer is inquiring into
whether a new espresso product is likely to succeed in this specialized market, she
needs to view, process, and interact with a wide range of multi-scaled data. To
figure out what it will take to break into and become competitive in the high-end
espresso market, the analyst will examine as many markets, espresso products,
and attributes of products as she deems relevant to her company’s goals, and as
many as her technical tools and cognitive capacity enable her to analyze. Looking
at these products, she will move back and forth in scale between big picture and
detailed (“drill-down”) views. She will assess how espresso has fared over past
and current quarters in different channels of distribution, regions, markets, and
stores, and impose on the data her own knowledge of seasonal effects and
unexpected market conditions. For different brands and products—including
variations in product by attributes such as size, packaging, and flavor—she might
analyze 20 factors or more, including dollar sales, volume sales, market share,
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promotions, percent of households buying, customer demographics and
segmentation. She will arrange and rearrange the data to find trends, correlations,
and two-and three-way causal relationships; she will filter data, bring back part of
them, and compare different views. Each time she will get a different perspective
on the lay of the land in the “espresso world.” Each path, tangent, and
backtracking move will help her to clarify her problem, her goal, and ultimately
her strategic and tactical decisions. (Mirel, 2003, pp. 236-237)
By considering report analysis as a complex situation and using dynamic online reports,
the report interpretation methods do not have to outside of scope. The information the
analysts needs exists. The data used to create the standard report is in a or more relational
databases, and textual information such service contracts and memos are in the content
management system. The problem is not a lack of data, but a lack of clear methods and
techniques to connect that data into an integrated presentation that fits the users goals and
information needs.
A model of situation, goals, and information needs
The fundamental focus of this book is not to explain how to answer simple questions, but
how to use web-based systems to address the open-ended questions that arise in complex
situations. But before defining simple and complex situations, I want to layout a model
that relates the user with a situation, goals, and information needs. As I describe the
model, note that the computer system only exists as one of five elements and is relegated
to a supporting role, rather than the central role it often occupies in most models. With
the decentralization of the computer system, the user goals and information relationships
required to understand a situation move to the foreground. As I emphasize throughout the
book, these are the most important aspects for the user and, thus, they must be understood
when designing to address complex situations.
People constantly find themselves in situations which they want to change in some way.
It might be as simple as wanting to get out of the rain to something as complex as having
a company that is behind budget and needing to understand the reasons why and develop
a recovery plan. Often, rather than resulting in a visible change, the situation change can
be purely cognitive, as when a person wants to find out about a particular topic. In this
case, the beginning and ending situations are defined by the change in the person’s
knowledge level about the topic. For example, before you knew nothing about how a
database server worked, now you know as much as you want to know.
The common aspect of the examples in the preceding paragraph and the ones presented
earlier in the chapter, is that they all involve a person with a goal of obtaining
information, interacting with a situation, and changing it. Of course, a person wants to
change the situation in such a way that it meets the goal. As part of interacting with the
situation, the person acquires data from situation, transforms that data into information,
and then, if required, makes a decision about what adjustments to make.
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First, here are definitions of the five elements that make up the model shown in figure
1.3. Then I’ll discuss how they fit together. Chapters 2 through 6 examine each of these
five elements in detail.
Situation
The situation is the current world state which the user needs to
understand. An underlying assumption is that the user needs to
interact with a system to gain the necessary information in order to
understand the situation. In most situations, after understanding the
situation, the user will interact with the situation, resulting in a
change which must be reflected in an updated system.
Goal
The real-world change of the current situation or understanding of
the current situation that the user is trying to achieve. Goals can
consist of sub-goals, which are solved in a recursive manner. Goals
should be considered from the user-situation viewpoint (what is
happening and what does it mean to the user), rather than the
system viewpoint (how can the system display a value for x). The
system provides a pathway for the user to obtain the information to
achieve the goal.
Information need
The information required by the user to achieve a goal. These
information needs often require both information to initially
understand the situation and to access that the goal was achieved.
A major aspect of good design is ensuring that the information is
provided in an integrated format that matches the information
needs required by the user goals. Although a perfect system always
contains the information needed to meet a goal, in reality, the
design must compensate for incomplete information.
People
The central person or persons are the ones with the intention of
interacting with the situation via the information system. The
information system provides them with information relevant to
their goals, which they use to understand the situation.
Other people which may be involved in the situation, but not
working directly interacting with the information system should be
considered as part of the situation itself. In a non-cooperative or
hostile situation, other people may be working to achieve their own
goals that are in opposition to the user’s goals.
System
In general, the system is defined as a computer (web) based
method of providing a user with information about the current
situation. The common use of system can mean either just the
software system, including associated databases, hardware, and so
forth, or a combined view that takes into account the software, the
hardware, and the user. This book considers the system as the
software and hardware.
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Too many systems seem to have a focus that assumes that the
problem has been defined and all that is needed are the details to
address the problem (Allen, 1996). This assumption holds true for
simple situations but fails for complex ones. An objective of this
book is to explain how to tease out the goals and information needs
of ill-defined problems.
Fig. 1.3. Model of situation, people, goals and information needs. Note how the
information from the system forms a vital component of how the user understands
the situation, but the system itself is outside the situation. However, the user sits
squarely in the middle of the situation.
If the model could show a time element, the situation would be shown changing based on
both situation development and user interactions, with the user’s actions aimed at
accomplishing the goals representing the desired transformations (Figure 1.4). Of course,
in most real-world situations, achieving the overall goal requires a recursive process of
having the situation undergo numerous smaller transformations.