GUI Design: User Centered Design

 

System-Centered Design

  • What can I easily build on this platform?
  • What can I create from the available tools?
  • What do I as a programmer find interesting?

User-Centered Design

  • Design is based upon a user’s
    • abilities
    • real needs
    • context
    • work
    • tasks
    • need for usable and useful product

Good User-Centered Design Rules:

  1. The result of a good design is a satisfied customer
  2. The process of design is a collaboration between designers and customers. The design evolves and adapts to their changing concerns, and the process produces a specification as an important byproduct
  3. The customer and designer are in constant communication during the entire process

Participatory Design Issues:

Problems:

  • intuitions wrong
  • interviews etc not precise
  • designer cannot know the user sufficiently well to answer all issues that come up during the design
  • hard to get a good pool of end users expensive, reluctance ...
  • users are not expert designers don’t expect them to come up with design ideas from scratch
  • user is not always right don’t expect them to know what they want

Good Features:

  • designers should have access to representative users END users, not their managers or union reps
  • users are excellent at reacting to suggested system designs designs must be concrete and visible
  • users bring in important “folk” knowledge of work context knowledge may be otherwise inaccessible to design team
  • greater buy-in for the system often results
Contextual interviews + site visits interview users in their workplace, as they are doing their job discover user’s culture, requirements, expectations,…

Explain designs

describe what you’re going to do

get input at all design stages all designs subject to revision

important to have visuals and/or demos people react far differently with verbal explanations

Use Sketches

focuses on high-concepts not details

Use Storyboards

helps to show interactions, progression

(can use multimedia tools to facilitate)

1. Initial Screen

2.After Scanning the Stroller in with its barcode

3. Slecting a different color to order

4. Ready to place the order

 

Create Virtual Response

usefull for testing systems that don't exist

Human simulates system response

  • interprets user input according to an algorithm
  • controls computer to simulate appropriate output
  • uses real or mock interface
  • virutal responder sometimes visible, sometimes hidden “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”