CHAPTER 3

Managing Design Processes

Book: Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction,
Fifth Edition
Ben Shneiderman & Catherine Plaisant
in collaboration with
Maxine S. Cohen and Steven M. Jacobs

Addison Wesley
is an imprint of
[slides modified by S. Dascalu for CS 420/620 classroom use at UNR, Fall 2012]

© 2010 Pearson Addison-Wesley. All rights reserved.

 Outline
• Organizational Design to Support Usability
• The Four Pillars of Design
• Development Methodologies
• Ethnographic Observation
• Participatory Design
• Scenario Development
• Social Impact Statement & Legal Issues
• Development Processes [+]

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Organizational Design to Support Usability
• Design is inherently creative and unpredictable.
Interactive system designers must blend
knowledge of technical feasibility with a mystical
esthetic sense of what attracts users.
• Carroll and Rosson design characterization:
– Design is a process, not a state.
– The design process is nonhierarchical.
– The process is radically transformational.
– Design intrinsically involves the discovery of new
goals.

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Organizational Design to Support Usability
• Usability engineering has evolved into a recognized
discipline with maturing practices and a growing set of
standards
• Usability engineers and user-interface architects,
sometimes called the user experience (UX) team are
gaining experience in organizational change
• There are numerous papers and reporting addressing
return on investment (ROI) for usability testing
• The Usability Professional's Association (UPA) holds
annual meetings called the “World Usability Day”

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 Four Pillars of Design

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 Four Pillars of Design

• User Interface Requirements

– Soliciting and clearly specifying user requirements is a
major key to success in any development activity
– Laying out the user-interface requirements is part of
the overall requirements development and
management process
– User interface requirements describe system behavior
• Ethnographic Observation
– Identifying and observing the user community in action
– Discussed later
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 Four Pillars of Design

• Guidelines documents and processes

Each project has different needs, but guidelines should be
considered for:
– Words, icons, and graphics
• Terminology (objects and actions), abbreviations, and
capitalization
• Character set, fonts, font sizes, and styles (bold, italic,
underline)
• Icons, graphics, line thickness, and
• Use of color, backgrounds, highlighting, and blinking
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 Four Pillars of Design (cont.)
– Screen-layout issues
• Menu selection, form fill-in, and dialog-box formats
• Wording of prompts, feedback, and error messages
• Justification, white space, and margins
• Data entry and display formats for items and lists
• Use and contents of headers and footers
– Input and output devices
• Keyboard, display, cursor control, and pointing
devices
• Audible sounds, voice feedback, touch input, and
other special devices
• Response time for a variety of tasks
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 Four Pillars of Design (cont.)
– Action sequences
• Direct-manipulation clicking, dragging, dropping,
and gestures
• Command syntax, semantics, and sequences
• Programmed function keys
• Error handling and recovery procedures
– Training
• Online help and tutorials
• Training and reference materials
• Command syntax, semantics, and sequences
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 Four Pillars of Design (cont.)

Guidelines creation should be a social process within an organization

to help it gain visibility and build support
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 Developmental Methodologies

IBM’s Ease of Use development methodology

specifies activities by roles and phases
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 Rapid Contextual Design

From Holtzblatt, et al., Rapid Contextual Design:

A How-To Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design

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 Ethnographic Observation
• Preparation
– Understand organization policies and work culture
– Familiarize yourself with the system and its history
– Set initial goals and prepare questions
– Gain access and permission to observe/interview

• Field Study
– Establish rapport with managers and users
– Observe/interview users in their workplace and collect
subjective/objective quantitative/qualitative data
– Follow any leads that emerge from the visits
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 Ethnographic Observation (cont.)

• Analysis
– Compile the collected data in numerical, textual, and
multimedia databases
– Quantify data and compile statistics
– Reduce and interpret the data
– Refine the goals and the process used

• Reporting
– Consider multiple audiences and goals
– Prepare a report and present the findings
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 Participatory Design

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 Participatory Design (cont.)

Controversial
• More user involvement brings:
– More accurate information about tasks
– More opportunity for users to influence design
decisions
– A sense of participation that builds users' ego
investment in successful implementation
– Potential for increased user acceptance of final
system

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 Participatory Design (cont.)
• On the negative side, extensive user involvement may:
– Be more costly
– Lengthen the implementation period
– Build antagonism with people not involved or whose
suggestions rejected
– Force designers to compromise their design to
satisfy incompetent participants
– Build opposition to implementation
– Exacerbate personality conflicts between design-
team members and users
– Show that organizational politics and preferences of
certain individuals are more important than technical
issues
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 Participatory Design (cont.)

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 Scenario Development

Day-in-the-life scenarios:
• Characterize what happens when users perform typical
tasks
• Can be acted out as a form of walkthrough
• May be used as basis for videotape
• Useful tools
– table of user communities across top, tasks listed
down the side
– table of task sequences
– flowchart or transition diagram
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 Social Impact Statement for Early Design
Review

Describe the new system and its benefits

• Convey the high level goals of the new system
• Identify the stakeholders
• Identify specific benefits

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 Social Impact Statement for Early Design
Review
Address concerns and potential barriers
• Anticipate changes in job functions and potential layoffs
• Address security and privacy issues
• Discuss accountability and responsibility for system
misuse and failure
• Avoid potential biases
• Weigh individual rights vs. societal benefits
• Assess trade-offs between centralization and
decentralization
• Preserve democratic principles
• Ensure diverse access
• Promote simplicity and preserve what works
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 Social Impact Statement for Early Design
Review
Outline the development process
• Present and estimated project schedule
• Propose process for making decisions
• Discuss expectations of how stakeholders will be
involved
• Recognize needs for more staff, training, and hardware
• Propose plan for backups of data and equipment
• Outline plan for migrating to the new system

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 Legal Issues

Potential Controversies
• What material is eligible for copyright?
• Are copyrights or patents more appropriate for user
interfaces?
• What constitutes copyright infringement?
• Should user interfaces be copyrighted?
• Evolving public policies related to:
– Privacy
– Liability related to system safety/reliability
– Freedom of speech

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 + [Heim 2007]
Development Process: Waterfall Model

• Traditional SE
model (waterfall)
• Emphasis is on
systematic, step-wise
development
• Applicable when
requirements are
well-known
• Doesn’t cope well
with change

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 + [Preece et al,2007]
Development Process: Basic HCI Model

• Typical HCI model. Note that emphasis is on iteration,

evaluation, and alternative versions.

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 + [Heim 2007]
DUE: Discount Usability Engineering
• Nielsen suggested that the number of problems P that
could be identified from a usability test with n users can
be calculated according to the following equation:

P = N [1-(1-L)n]
where:

N = total number of usability

problems in a design
L = proportion of usability
problems discovered with a
single participant (31%)
n = number of users
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 + [Heim 2007]
Development Process: DDE Framework
• DDE (Discovery, Design, Evaluation) Framework

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 Questions / Exercise

1. How would you apply four pillars of design into your interface design?
2. What are principles of interactive design?
3. Solve all exercises and challenges in Reference Book 02.

Additional References
• Heim, S., The Resonant Interface: HCI Foundations for Interaction Design, Addison-Wesley, 2007.
• Jennifer Preece, Yvonne Rogers, and Helen Sharp, Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer
Interaction, Wiley & Sons, 2007.
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