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forUse: The Electronic Newsletter of Usage-Centered Design #30 | March 2003 |
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Contents: || 1. Conferences: Deadlines Extended. || 2. Technique: Cowpath Design || 3. Process: Collaboration-in-Context || 4. Design: Patterns Reprise || 5. Learning: Conference Presentations
= = = = = 1. Deadlines Extended Isn’t it always the case. At the last minute we get a flood of proposals to forUSE 2003, the 2nd International Conference on Usage-Centered Design. At the same time we also get a flood of requests for more time. Okay, so we are pushovers. And we want to make sure everyone who is interested can get a shot at presenting in October. So, 31 March 2003 is the new and final deadline for proposals. Tell your friends and colleagues. Details and guidelines are at www.foruse.com/2003/proposals.htm and a submission template is at www.foruse.com/2003/proposal.rtf. Don’t miss this last chance. CHI 2003 has also extended the deadline for discount tutorial registrations. We are conducting a full-day tutorial 7 April 2003 on “Card-Based User and Task Modeling for Agile Usage-Centered Design” (details: http://www.chi2003.org/tutorial-details.html#22) 2. Technique: Cowpath Design When a really smart team of landscape architects want to know where to build walkways, they look for already well worn paths. In fact, the evidence of heavily used shortcuts in a campus or industrial park is always a good clue to where changes are needed. A college professor might be tempted to call this “traffic-driven heuristic design” but we think of it as cowpath design: look for the well traveled cowpaths, then pave over them and you will be guaranteed of a usable and useful layout. By any name, this approach is a process well suited to presentation and interaction design for software and the Web. The well-worn paths for visual and interaction designers to be aware of are the consistent errors or the frequent work-arounds where the spontaneous impulses of users run counter to the constraints of the software or the original plan of the designer. Here’s one example. Does the following scenario sound familiar? You click on a tool or button that launches a dialog box, only to realize it is not the dialog you want or that you need to do something else first. Without thinking and without moving your mouse, you spontaneously click again on the same button to undo your action. What you get is that annoying bong that says you tried a no-no. It’s another “Microsoft moment” when you get that brief flash of irritation that leaves you wondering why Windows has to be so ornery. Hand surveys at conferences have shown that this is an all-but-universal experience, even among “power users” with gobs of experience. The truth is that, even if you “know” this is not the way modal dialog boxes work under modern GUIs, some part of your brain still expects to be able to open and close the dialog with the same widget. This expectation is reinforced by the fact that many tools and buttons work precisely this way--but not if they launch a modal dialog. Not only would users--all users--of Windows make fewer mistakes and have fewer “Microsoft moments,” but they would become more efficient at whatever work they were doing if it would just become a convention that the same button that launched a dialog could cancel it out or close it. Clicking again where your mouse pointer is already located is enormously faster and more convenient than locating, moving to, and clicking on either that miniscule little close button on the title bar or the cancel button buried somewhere in the dialog box itself. To locate cowpaths in need of paving, you do not always have to do extensive field observations or elaborate ethnographic research; you just have to pay attention. Become aware of your own everyday slips. If you find yourself making the same mistake over and over again, consider it as a clue to something wrong with the design of the software you are using. Ordinary users are not always conscious of these myriad passing annoyances, and often they dismiss such problems as their own fault for not doing the right thing. As design and usability professionals, however, we have a responsibility to become more mindful and to look for patterns in our mistakes as clues to general problems in the software we use. Each of them holds a lesson about potential improvement in the user interfaces we use. Of course, we also need to convince Microsoft and Apple, too. 3. Process: Collaboration-in-Context Management is asking for more when your team is already maxed out, you can’t hire, and the budget for outside consultants has been gutted. How can you leverage and continue to expand the skills and productivity of your design and development professionals when there is no money for training? You want to keep expanding their skill set, but with looming deadlines and pressing needs within current projects, you must stay focused and be able to demonstrate immediate payoff. Traditional approaches to training don’t always work very well in this context. Standard training courses may or may not fit with what your team already knows, needs to learn, and is working on right now. With looming deadlines, you can’t really afford to take all your best people off a project for a week to send them through training. Conventional consultants and contract professionals may do the work for you but leave you no more skilled and knowledgeable than when you started. Our own service model has always been based on building long term relationships with a few clients based on close collaboration and custom-tailored training. At the same time, we have become keenly aware of the growing need for focused, efficient, cost-effective ways to work with clients on fixed budgets. With all these issues in mind, we have devised a new service model we are calling Collaboration-in-Context. The service features: * regularly spaced consultation and design collaboration * short, intensive sessions for increased impact * fixed cost scaled to the project and budget * ongoing support over the span of the project * ad hoc training relevant to immediate problems Instead of off-site training disconnected from the context of real work on real design problems, we come to you to work with you on your current project. We help you find better solutions faster, tackling the tough problems together and providing review and input on your work. As opportunities arise, we teach your team what we know in the context of what they are working on through brief, tightly-focused learning experiences. To make the best use of everyone’s time, sessions are regularly scheduled and spaced out, giving your team time to apply what they are learning and giving everyone the time to work and prep for the next collaboration. Between visits, we are available for support and questions as the need arises. To make budgeting and cost control easier, we offer this service on fixed contracts for a set number of units, each unit comprising a day of on-site work with you and your team and a half-day of off-site consultation. On-site days can be scheduled monthly, twice a month, or every 3 weeks, depending on the pace of the project. The service can be surprisingly economical. In exchange for certain concessions, such as a regular schedule and fixed contract in advance, this plan can offer very substantial cost savings over typical consulting. A minimum contract is only 4 units, and on-site sessions can be doubled up for projects needing more intensive support. If you think this might suit your needs, drop me a note for more information and pricing details (lconstantine@foruse.com). 4. Design: Patterns Reprise In response to the piece on design patterns in forUSE #29, Davide Bolchini of the Italian University of Switzerland in Lugano brought my attention to a repository of design patterns that I had missed and should have included among resources available as starting points (see http://www.designpattern.lu.unisi.ch/HypermediaHomePage.htm). He also passed along an interesting paper on design patterns written with Franca Garzotto and Paolo Paolini of Milan Polytechnic. The paper (http://www.designpattern.lu.unisi.ch/PatternsRepository/Pattern/pattern.asp?id=1) presents multimedia navigation patterns, including two (called Guided Tour and Hybrid Collection), which I certainly should have cited as closely related to the Detail View Direct Navigation. Their paper also highlighted for me one of the things that distinguishes our own perspective on design patterns from the mainstream of the patterns movement. Much, though certainly not all, of the work in patterns has attempted to construct representative or even comprehensive catalogs of design alternatives. In our view, the proper function of patterns is not merely to catalog the range of possible solutions but to guide design toward demonstrably best practices. From a usage-centered perspective, some of the patterns presented in the hypermedia repository and elsewhere are problematic because they may represent common or repeated practice but not necessarily good design. For example, the pattern known as Guided Tour enables users to step directly from one item to the next but omits a direct link back to an index. A proper usage-centered design would *always* provide for direct return to the index from each item itself. It is for precisely this reason that we prefer model-driven and principle-based design processes--they more effectively facilitate finding better solutions. The paper also stirred a lively discussion around the office about the merits of design patterns relative to design processes and whether patterns have a proper place in usage-centered design. We hope to return to this subject at the upcoming forUSE 2003 conference. 5. Learning: Conference Presentations Usage-centered design is certainly becoming a hot topic. All of our tutorial proposals to major conferences have been accepted, so for awhile we are going to be traveling a lot. Here is a rundown of the upcoming schedule. Use the links to find out more information, recommend the tutorials to your friends, and definitely drop by and say hello if you are attending any of these events. 7 April 2003 | CHI 2003 | Ft. Lauderdale, FL Constantine, Lockwood “Card-Based User and Task Modeling for Agile Usage-Centered Design” Full-day Tutorial (http://www.chi2003.org/tutorial-details.html#22) 3-4 May 2003 | ICSE 2003 | Portland, OR Constantine “Usage-Centered Design and Software Engineering: Models for Integration” Workshop Paper (http://www.se-hci.org/bridging.html) 5 May 2003 | ICSE 2003 | Portland, OR Constantine, Lockwood “Usage-Centered Software Engineering: An Agile Approach to Integrating Users, User Interfaces, and Usability into Software Engineering Practice” Full-day Tutorial (http://cs.oregonstate.edu/icse2003/) 4-6 June 2003 | 10th DSV-IS Workshop | Madeira, Portugal Constantine Invited Presentation (http://math.uma.pt/dsvis2003/) 22-27 June 2003 | HCI International 2003 | Crete, Greece Windl, Constantine “Usage-Centered Design: Scalability and Integration with Software Engineering” Workshop Paper(http://hcii2003.ics.forth.gr/) 18-22 October 2003 | forUSE 2003 | Portsmouth, NH
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