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Second International Conference on Usage-Centered Design

Short Presentations

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, 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

Lucy Lockwood, Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd. (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. (Additional presentations to be announced.)

Usability and Other Quality Aspects Derived from Use Cases

Daniel Kerkow, Kirstin Kohler, 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.

WEDNESDAY - 22 October

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.

Integrating Usage-Centered Design into the Centers for Disease Control Development Process

Ralph Lord, Northrup Grumman Mission Systems

Since October 2001 when letters containing aerosolized Anthrax were discovered in the US Postal system, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and their contractors have been developing new software systems to improve the agency’s ability to prepare for and respond to bio-terror events. The agency has also been working to standardize on a CDC version of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for its software development activities. As a member of the Software Process Engineering Group formed to customize the Unified Process, Ralph Lord led an effort to integrate usage-centered roles, activities and artifacts into both the CDC-UP and ongoing development projects. This report discusses the proposed role of “User Experience Analyst” in the CDC-UP and highlights some of the bio-terror software projects which have been positively impacted by usage-centered design activities.

Case Study: From Use Cases to User Interface Using UML

Chris Armstrong, ATC Enterprises, Inc.

This case study shows how to successfully apply Highsmith’s Adaptive Team Collaborative Process to the rapid definition of a user interface model from software requirements expressed as use cases. Over several weeks, a state organization was assisted in launching a project to build a web-based portal for the state’s supreme, appellate, and local jurisdiction judiciary. The externally viewed portal services were captured in a use case model. From the use case model, a user interface content and navigation model was developed in the Unified Modeling Language (UML). This report will also review how these models were captured in Rational Rose and Rational RequisitePro and how the project’s consumables were generated automatically from the tool repository.

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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