03 Design Process - Establishing Requirements Flashcards
Three fundamental activities of all design processes
- Understanding the requirements
- Producing a design that meets these requirements
- Evaluating the design
User Interface Design is a multi-faceted process (4 points)
- a goal-directed problem solving activity
- an empirical activity
- a creative activity
- a decision-making activity to balance trade-offs
UID goal-directed problem solving is informed by …
intended use, target domain, materials, cost, feasibility
Four approaches to UID are …
User-centered design
Activity-centered design
System design
Genius design
-> in practice, none of these approaches is followed exclusively
User-centered design approach
- User is the only guide to the designer
- The designer’s role is to translate the users’ needs and goals into a design solution
Activity-centered design approach
- Focus on the activities surrounding particular tasks
- Behavior of users rather than their goals is important
System design approach
Holistic design approach focusing on the entire ecology (=system) of use, i.e. the
people, objects, computers, devices, tools, …
Genius design approach
- Relies solely on the experience and creative flair of the designer
- Users are not involved during the process
- Users’ role is to validate ideas generated by the designer
3 key principles of user centered design
- early focus on users and tasks
- empirical measurement
- iterative design
Why Involving Real Users in the Design Process? (3 reasons)
- Functionality (Developers gain a better understanding of the users’ goals)
- Expectation management (Make sure that the users’ views and expectations of the new product are realistic)
- Ownership (Users who feel that they have contributed to a product’s development are more receptive to it)
Design Process: 4 steps
requirements
design
prototyping
evaluation
cycle!
Iterative Design: With each iteration …
Fix _ first, _ later
- Design becomes more concrete and more precise
- Analysis and user feedback focuses on smaller and smaller problems
Fix big design bugs first, small ones later
Danger of iterations, how to solve this
Hill-climbing approach -> risk of getting trapped in local maxima
-> develop many alternatives, realize them as protoypes
IDEO’s design process
- Understand the market, the client, the technology
- Observe real people in real-life situations
- Visualize new concepts and the customers who will use them (rendering or simulation, physical models and prototypes)
- Evaluate and refine the prototypes
- Implement the new concept for commercialization
Important Flavors of User-Centered Design (2)
Contextual Design
Participatory Design / Living Labs
Contextual design: 4 main principles
Context: see workplace & what happens
Partnership: user and developer collaborate; user is expert, designer is apprentice
Interpretation: observations interpreted by user and developer together
Focus: project focus to understand what to look for
What does Participatory Design mean?
Selected users are actively participating in the design process
- > At least one future user is part of the development team
- > can be time-consuming
3 important questions when establishing requirements
- Why develop the system?
- Who are the users?
- What do they want to do with the system?
Why Establishing Requirements?
Requirements definition is the stage where failure occurs most commonly
Fixing errors at a later phase in the design process is very costly
Establishing Requirements Aims and Means
Aims:
Understand as much as possible about users, task, context
-> Produce a stable set of requirements
Means to provide answers:
- Data gathering activities
- Data analysis activities
- Expression as ‘requirements’
Types of Requirements
Functional Non-functional Data Users Environment/Context
Understanding the problem space - 3 questions
Why develop the system at all?
What do you want to create?
What was good and what was bad?
Problem Space - Outcome (2 things)
- Situation of concern (brief text about main goals and constraints)
- Problem statement (brief text that concisely captures intended solution)
- > form of solution
- > type of support it provides
- > users
- > activities it supports
3 user categories (Eason, 1987)
Primary: frequent, hands-on
Secondary: occasional or via someone else
Tertiary: affected by introduction or influencing the purchase
