Engaging Users in Interaction Design: Importance and Techniques

1. Chapter 9: User-centered approaches to interaction design Zhaoqi Chen Scott Castle 05/06/2002

2. Content • Introduction • Importance of involving users • Degrees of involvement • What is user-centered approach • Applying ethnography in design • Coherence • Contextual design • Involving users in design

3. Introduction • User-centered development involves • Finding out a lot about users and their tasks • Using this information to inform design • Data-gathering techniques • Method for naturalistic observation: • ethnography

4. Introduction(2) • Another aspect of user-centered development: • User involvement in the development process. • Different degrees of involvement: • Through evaluation studies (Ch10-14) • Users contribute actively to the design itself – to become co-designer.

5. Importance to involve users • Developers can gain a better understanding of users’ needs and goals, leading to a more appropriate, more usable product. • Non-functionality aspects • Expectation management • Ownership

6. Expectation management • The process of making sure that the users’ views and expectations are realistic. • Ensure that there are no surprises for users when the product arrives. • It’s better to exceed users’ expectations than to fall below them.

7. Techniques for EM • Involving users throughout development • Adequate and timely training

8. Ownership • Users who are involved and feel that they have contributed to a product’s development are • more likely to feel a sense of “ownership”. • more receptive to it when it finally emerges.

9. Degrees of involvement • Users may be co-opted to the design team. • Full-time, part-time • Users may be kept informed through • regular newsletters, or • other channels of communication.

10. Degrees of involvement (2) • Compromise situation for large number of users • Representatives from each user group • Other users are involved through design workshops, evaluation sessions and other data-gathering activities.

11. A well-designed system • Should make the most of human skills and judgment • Should be directly relevant to the work in hand, and • Should support rather than constrain the user.

12. User-centered approach • Principles: • Early focus on users and tasks • Empirical measurement • Iterative design • Olympic Messaging System (OMS) • First reported large computer-based system using these three principles

13. Early focus on users and tasks • User’s tasks and goals: driving force • Users’ behavior and context of use • systems are designed to support them • Users’ characteristics are captured and designed for. • Cognitive aspects • Physical aspects

14. Early focus on users (2) • Users are consulted throughout development • All design decisions should be within • the context of the users • their work, and • their environment

15. Understanding users’ work • Applying ethnography in design • “writing the culture” • Aims to find the order within an activity • Users are observed as they go about their normal activities.

16. Design and Ethnography • The goals of them are opposite • Design is concerned with abstraction and rationalization. • Ethnography is about detail.

17. Framework • Help designers use the presentation of ethnographies • Three dimensions: • Distributed co-ordination • Plans and procedures • Awareness of work

18. Alternative approach • Train developers to collect ethnographic data themselves. • Give the designers first-hand experience • Two methods: • Coherence • Contextual design