|| Contents:
|| 1. Design: Best of the Best. [RESULTS]
|| 2. Rebuilding: Next Steps. [ACTION]
|| 3. How-To: Tailored Training [LEARNING]

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* Performance-Centered Design Platinum Award of Excellence 2001 - STEP 7 Lite
* Jolt Award for Product Excellence 1999 - Software for Use
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1. "Enormously Impressive."
Usage-centered design is a proven industrial-strength process for producing world-class results. The power of this approach was confirmed when the joint entry by industrial giant Siemens AG and Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd., was awarded first place - the Platinum Award of Excellence - in the annual Performance-Centered Design Competition sponsored by the On-Line Learning and Performance-Support Conference.

Entries were judged on six criteria, including support for best practices; establishing or aiding in goals; minimizing terminology translation or interpretation; providing access to supporting and learning resources; focus on tasks, processes, and natural flow of work; and stretching the performance-centered-design/electronic-performance-support-systems paradigm.

The winning design, Siemens' Step 7 Lite (see http://foruse.com/pcd/), is a sophisticated new integrated development environment (IDE) for programming automation applications. Through usage-centered design and extensive use of instructive interaction, Step 7 Lite achieves a breakthrough in support for programming the specialized computers (PLCs, or programmable logic controllers) used to control industrial automation equipment. The resulting tool is a complex product made simple by usage-centered design. One judge in the design competition described the system as "enormously impressive,...a wonderful stretching of the EPSS paradigm."

For an idea of the scope of this two-year-plus development project, consider that the initial task model included 342 use cases supporting 19 different user roles! The initial user interface design included abstract prototypes (content models) for 25 distinct interaction contexts and detailed visual and interaction designs (annotated paper prototypes) for 18 core interaction contexts covering 90% of the most important task cases. This design was completed and ready for the first usability inspection in just 14 weeks from the first team meeting!

The multinational design team was headed in Germany by Helmut Windl, now director of the Siemens Usability Competence Center in Nurnberg, and included Helmut Fritz, Harald Gebauer, Wolfgang Sperl, and Eberhard Ohlert. Collaborating with them was our consulting team headed by Larry Constantine and including consulting associates James Noble, from New Zealand, and Meilir Page-Jones.

Usability in the broadest sense was the primary objective for the design. The idea was to simplify complex automation programming projects through an IDE with an elegantly tailored user interface. The IDE needed to be easy to use and immediately understandable by beginning PLC programmers and yet be efficient and flexible in the hands of experts or advanced users. Reducing PLC programming errors was also an important goal.

Based on the task model, the user interface architecture was organized to collect related tools and information together according to how these were most likely to be used. Efficiency was improved not only through a close fit to the supported tasks but also through reduced usage overhead, especially the "mousing around" associated with window management, such as resizing, moving, or locating various windows or views (see http://www.foruse.com/newsletter/foruse14.htm).

Throughout, the visual structure of the user interface fit closely with the actual or logical structure of the information and objects being represented. To be easily understood even by beginners after only brief exposure or limited practice, we used instructive interaction (see http://www.foruse.com/newsletter/foruse2.htm), a body of techniques for making innovative user interfaces self-teaching. One judge in the competition singled out a particular feature of instructive interaction, saying, "The cascading tool-tips are very cool." (See our book, Software for Use [http://www.amazon.com/) for more details on cascading tool-tips. They are demonstrated in the screen-cam recording of the Step 7 Lite system; link at http://foruse.com/pcd/.)

Even from early in the project, the payoff from usage-centered design became evident. For scenarios representing a typical mix of real-world tasks, user steps were cut in half. In the first usability inspection, user surrogates with domain knowledge but without experience with prior versions of the tool found most parts of the design easily and immediately understandable and were able to complete all tasks in a mix of representative scenarios. At that stage, 117 usability defects, mostly minor and easily fixed, were identified. A handful of more serious defects also proved to be easily corrected.

Extensive usability tests of the beta release in both the United States and Germany proved the robustness of the design. Overall, the system achieved the highest level of measured usability of any product ever tested by the American lab!

For more on this ground-breaking design, take a look at our winning entry at http://foruse.com/pcd/. Helmut and Larry will be at the On-Line Learning/Performance-Support Conference (http://www.performancesupport.com/) in Los Angeles to receive the award and demonstrate the system.

And how did the award-winning team at Siemens learn to do usage-centered design? See item 3. below.

2. Priority Steps
In the aftermath of the terrible events of 11 September, so many are wondering what to do next. After the first concerns for the victims and survivors, we must move from destruction to construction and begin to think of rebuilding. As business and professional people, we have some special contributions to make. If you want to learn more about what a growing cadre of people are doing, turn to http://www.incent.com/. As you will see on our home page, we have committed to The Holtzblatt Affirmation, and we hope you will join us in helping to renew our world.

3. Learning How to Do It Yourself
You can learn how to create winning designs. No new public seminars are scheduled at this time, and it may now be more difficult for many of you to travel for awhile, but we can come to you! We design and deliver customized training on usage-centered design in classes tailored to meet the needs and interests of each client. We have taught scores of classes around the world, ranging from a 1-day overview for managers to comprehensive 5-day hands-on training for designers and developers. Many of our clients invite us back repeatedly. Tell us about your training needs in usability, user interfaces, and usage-centered design. Just send us email: mailto:llockwood@foruse.com.

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