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Second International Conference on Usage-Centered Design

TOPIC - Research & Teaching

PRE-CONFERENCE TUTORIALS
SUNDAY - 19 October

B1 - 9:00a-5:00p

From Usage-Centered Design to Object-Oriented Design

Robert Biddle, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Usage-Centered Design has introduced new principles for beginning the design of user interfaces. This tutorial teaches you how these same ideas can be used to link to Object-Oriented Design of systems. In particular, you will learn how task cases can work together with responsibility-driven design to increase guidance during design and increase traceability between requirements and design. This also turns out to be a good way to learn object-oriented design, and for user interface designers and system developers to learn more about each others’ world. The tutorial also shows how these techniques relate to ideas in agile methods and to object-oriented design patterns.

MONDAY

M22 - 11:00a-12:30p

Forum: Research and Teaching

Robert Biddle, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (Moderator)

This session presents multiple short presentations on current work by those teaching and doing research in the area of usage-centered design and modeling, evaluation techniques, and tool support.

Learning and Doing Expert Evaluation: A Dilemma in Teaching User-Centered Design

Jarinee Chattratichart, Diana Cave, Andreea Vaduva, London Metropolitan University

User-interface design courses are often run within a single semester, a time span too short for students to be able to correctly apply the theoretical knowledge acquired through lectures and the literature throughout the whole design process. This presentation reports on our student-centered approach to teaching user-interface design to undergraduate students with a focus on the dilemma that by the time requirements gathering and design solution phases are satisfactorily completed there is little time left for evaluating the design solutions. Further we face the challenge in which knowledge about and application of expert review methods must be effectively introduced to students who are by definition non-experts. This paper presents case studies highlighting the difficulties students experienced with actually using a heuristic evaluation method in evaluating their web design solutions and how these problems could be overcome using HE-Plus, an extended version of the heuristic evaluation method.

Cognitive Walkthroughs vs. Usability Testing: Experiences Using Evaluation Techniques to Improve Design

Yong Liu, Indiana University

This paper presents a case study based on developing a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) administration GUI for the Active Spaces project at Indiana University using both a Cognitive Walkthrough approach and usability testing to improve the design. The report discusses the evaluation procedure, the initial design and the usability-improved design of the GUI. The predictions made by the Cognitive Walkthrough evaluation are then compared with the actual usability problems found in empirical usability tests. The strength and weakness of the two methodologies and their respective task scenarios are discussed. Based on the analysis, suggestions are made as to how to improve the effectiveness of the two evaluation methods while highlighting the problems that still remain open.

Re-engineering the Usability Engineering Process: Essential Requirements for Tool Support

Peter Messner, Manfred Tscheligi, Verena Giller, CURE - Center for Usability Research & Engineering

The landscape of specialized software tools supporting the many activities of usability engineering or similar processes (e.g., usage-centered design) looks rather bleak, if not desert-like. Oases do exist – tools that support the conduction of specific tasks such as building task models, logging user behavior during testing, or building lo-fi and hi-fi prototypes - but these tools hardly exchange data, nor are they organized in an integrative manner. The work-in-progress reported on aims at defining requirements for an integrated tools suite. It is based on drawbacks and improvement potentials identified through re-engineering of the usability engineering process. We describe the basic object models for process activities utilizing the concept of essential use cases and their translation into work products. These work products are the central building blocks for realizing usability engineering process activities and are the main components to be supported by an integrated tools suite. The resulting architecture supports flexible and modular development of these work products.

TUESDAY - 21 October

T21 - 10:30a-12:00n

Forum: Usability Processes and Practices

Robert Biddle, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (Moderator)

This session of short presentations explores new ways to integrate and refine usability and software engineering approaches to improve the quality of software design and development.

Usability and Other Quality Aspects Derived from Use Cases

Daniel Kerkow, Kirstin Kohler, Jörg Dörr, Fraunhofer IESE

Usability is one of several quality aspects (also referred to as nonfunctional requirements) according to ISO 9126. The elicitation of those during an early phase of the development is crucial in information systems as well as in embedded systems. Despite the practical importance of usability and additional aspects like performance and maintainability, there is rarely any guidance on how to determine and capture these requirements. We present an approach to elicit usability requirements in concert with supplementary requirements based on a use case-based specification of functional behavior. The approach has been proven in a case study with one industrial customer. It is based on a real system dealing with a mobile, interactive application to allow users monitor production activities, manage physical resources and access information.

Heuristic Evaluation Plus: Toward Usage-Centered Expert review for Website Design

Jarinee Chattratichart, Jacquelin Brodie, London Metropolitan University

To date, comparative studies have not been able to convince the HCI community as to the reliability of “discount” usability methods such as heuristic evaluation compared to traditional usability testing. The main cause for this is a perceived lack of focus on the part of the expert evaluator(s). This lack of focus arises partly from carrying out a review without the involvement of users and their tasks - leading to a restricted understanding of the context of use. In this presentation we describe our method - HE-Plus, which extends heuristic evaluation through contextualization. We report on our studies that compared results obtained from heuristic evaluation, HE-Plus, and usability testing of the same websites and demonstrate how HE-Plus can help make heuristic evaluation more usage-centered, and hence, yield more reliable results.

Usage-Centered Design and the OPEN Process Framework

Brian Henderson-Sellers, James Hutchison, University of Technology, Sydney

Usage-Centered Design supplies a unique and comprehensive approach for the presentation and interaction design of user interfaces. Since it does not address either detailed software design (e.g. internals of objects) or larger scale project management issues, it needs to be complemented and supplemented. This paper describes the OPEN Process Framework (OPF), which offers that larger scale integrative approach. Based on a meta-model, the OPF supports method engineering but is deficient in its support of the HCI issues for which usage-centered design provides excellent support. Therefore we examine the ways in which the OPEN Process Framework and usage-centered design can co-exist in a mutually supportive environment..

WEDNESDAY - 22 October

W21 - 10:30a-12:00n

Forum: Putting Usage-Centered Design to Work

Lucy Lockwood, Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd. (Moderator)

This session of experience reports explores the perils, pains, and payoffs of usage-centered design in practice. It draws on the experiences of people who have been applying usage-centered design in a variety of settings to a range of problems.

Usage-Centered Map Design for Mobile Services: Combining Empirical and Theoretical Findings

Alexander Zipf, University of Applied Sciences, Mainz, Germany

Interactive maps on the web and on mobile devices have become a frequently used new type of user interface. In order to enhance the usability of such an interface and to help users to understand the information presented, both the design of the map and the paradigms for interacting with the content need to be considered and formalized. Interactive maps need to be generated according to the actual usage and tasks. This requires that the tasks and usage be clearly identified. For example, for each task we need to determine what is to be displayed, how it is to be displayed and to what degree of detail. Further research deals with identifying and formalizing how factors like user preferences, interests and the situational context dynamically modify usage centered map design and interaction. First work on identifying typical tasks for mobile map applications as well as process models and user types is under way. This presentation discusses these efforts and how the results may be integrated into a general framework.

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Full Program

Pre-Conference Tutorials

Plenary Sessions

Short Presentations

TOPIC THREADS -

User Performance & Performance Support

XP/Agile Methods

Design Patterns

Research & Teaching