Chapter 9: User-centered approaches
to interaction design
From “Interaction design: Beyond
human-computer interaction”
By J. Preece, Y. Rogers, H. Sharp
Presented by:
Xiaohong Bao
Steve Abrams
Introduction
 User involvement in the development
process
 Contents:




Advantages
Principles
Understanding user’s work: applying
ethnography in design
Involving users in design: participatory design
Advantages
 Developers gain a lot for better product by
understanding users better
 Expectation management




Make sure that the users’ views and expectations are
realistic
Support the users’ work more effectively
Help the users to know and understand the product at
the early stage
training
 Ownership
Degrees of involvement
 Full-time or part-time
 Duration of the whole project or a limited
time
 Through newsletters or workshop
 Attending evaluations
Principles
 To design a useful and easy to use computer
system



Early focus on users and tasks
Empirical measurement
Iterative design
Early focus on users and tasks
 User’s tasks and goals are the driving force behind
the development
 Users’ behavior and context of use are studied and
the system is designed to support them
 Users’ characteristics are captured and designed
for.
 Users are consulted throughout development from
earlier phases to the latest and their input is
seriously taken into account
 All design decisions are taken within the context
of the users, their work, and their environment
Involving users in design:
Participatory Design
 Users are actively involved in development.
They design the product in cooperation with
the designers
PICTIVE
(Plastic Interface for Collaborative Technology
Initiatives through Video Exploration)
PICTIVE --- continued
1.
2.
3.
4.
The stakeholders all introduce themselves
Brief tutorials about the different domains
Brainstorming the designs
A walkthrough of the design and the
decision discussed
CARD
(Collaborative analysis of Requirements and Design)
 Takes a more macroscopic view of the task
flow, while PICTIVE concentrates on
detailed aspects of the system
Conclusion
 Involving users in the design process helps with
expectation management and feelings of ownership,
but how and when to involve users is a matter of
dispute
 Putting a user-centered approach into practice
requires much information about the users to be
gathered and interpreted
 Ethnography is a good method for studying users in
their natural surroundings
Conclusion -continued
 Representing the information gleaned from
an ethnographic study so that it can be used
in design has been problematic
 The goals of ethnography are to study the
details, while the goals of system design are
to produce abstractions; hence they are not
immediately compatible
Conclusion –continued 2
 Coherence is a method that provides focus questions
to help guide the ethnographer towards issues that
have proved to be important in systems development
 Contextual design in a method that provides models
and techniques for gathering contextual data and
representing it in a form suitable for practical design
 PICTIVE and CARD are both participatory design
techniques that empower users to take an active part
in design decisions