Project assignment user-centered system design

Using

Deborah J. Mayhew

”The usability engineering lifecycle”

By

Group II

Jesper Lundgren

[

Kjell Tillstrand

[

Jonas Öberg

[

Martin Axelsson

[

2003-12-09

Dedicated to the 120.000 people

who risked their lives building Manhattan

during the years 1942-1944[1]

Comprehensive Project Planning

Parts

Tasks

Iterations

Time planning

REQUIREMENT ANALYSIS

User Profile

Contextual Task Analysis

Usability Goals

Platform Capabilities/Constraints

General Design Principles

DESIGN/TESTIN/DEVELOPMENT

Work Reengineering

Conceptual Model Design

Conceptual Model Mock-ups

Iterative Conceptual Model Evaluation

Screen Design Standards

Screen Design Standards Prototyping

Iterative Screen Design Standards Evaluation

Style Guide Development

Iterative Screen Design Standards Evaluation

Detailed User Interface Design

INSTALLATION

User Feedback

Comprehensive Project Planning

Parts

The process is divided into three parts:

  • Requirements analysis
  • Design/Testing/Development
  • Installation

Tasks

Each part of the process includes different usability tasks. See picture below:

Iterations

The task of the Design/Testing/Development part is divided into three levels, which are iterative. There is also one iteration over the first and second part.

The security system will need four iterations on first level, three iterations on the second level, and two iterations in the third level. Notice that there will be no iteration over the first and second part.

Time planning

Part/Task (iterations) / Usability time (Hrs) / User time (Hrs) / Management time (Hrs)
REQUIREMENT ANALYSIS
User Profile / 112 / 0 / 0
Contextual Task Analysis / 272 / 66 / 0
Usability Goals / 170 / 20 / 26
Platform Capabilities/Constraints / 44 / 22 / 0
General Design Principles / 28 / 0 / 0
Total REQUIREMENT ANALYSIS / 626 / 108 / 26
DESIGN/TESTIN/DEVELOPMENT
Work Reengineering (4 iterations) / 352 / 18 / 0
Conceptual Model Design (4 iterations) / 816 / 0 / 0
Conceptual Model Mock-ups (4 iterations) / 320 / 0 / 0
Iterative Conceptual Model Evaluation (4 iterations) / 576 / 0 / 0
Screen Design Standards (3 iterations) / 540 / 0 / 0
Screen Design Standards Prototyping (3 iterations) / 456 / 0 / 0
Iterative Screen Design Standards Evaluation (3 iterations) / 432 / 0 / 0
Style Guide Development (1) / 272 / 0 / 0
Detailed User Interface Design (2 iterations) / 97 / 0 / 0
Iterative Detailed User Interface Design Evaluation (2 iterations) / 288 / 0 / 0
Total DESIGN/TESTIN/DEVELOPMENT / 4052 / 18 / 0
INSTALLATION
User Feedback / 102 / 0 / 0
Total INSTALLATION / 102 / 0 / 0
Total / 4877 / 126 / 26

REQUIREMENT ANALYSIS

User Profile

The user profiles should describe the specific user characteristics relevant to the user interface design. E.g. computer literacy, expected frequency of use, level of job experience. This information is later used in the creation of the user interface to make it as well adapted to the users as possible and it will also be used to identify major user categories for study in the Contextual Task Analysis task.

Roles

The usability engineer will be responsible for this task. We have decided to find an outside company to do the legwork for us though.

Possible methods.

  1. A step-by-step procedure
  1. Determine user categories
  2. Determine relevant user characteristics
  3. Develop a draft questionnaire
  4. Get management feedback on the draft
  5. Revise the questionnaire
  6. Conduct a pilot questionnaire with the interviews
  7. Revise the questionnaire
  8. Select a user sample
  9. Distribute the questionnaires
  10. Design data entry/analysis
  11. Enter data
  12. Summarize data
  13. Interpret data
  14. Present results
  1. Interview representatives who know the user for Profile data summary template.

Selected method

The step-by-step method gives us a more complete picture of the user of our system. We know there are a number of systems on the market and almost everyone in our community is a user of a system like this of some sort. This will make it easier finding users. We don’t have any particular organisation we are designing the system for and we want the system to be flexible and configurable enough to provide protection for different organisations and different types of architectures. We should analyse what kind of organisations and architectures we are designing the system for and try to find that kind of users for our questionnaires. Management feedback in our case will be feedback from the organisation that has decided to construct this system. It can be an outside party or an in-house one, like a marketing dept.

Level of effort

We believe we can let a professional pooling team find users and distribute questionnaires, they may also design the questionnaire. Our job will be to come up with the correct questions and to define our user groups. After the pilot and the full questionnaires have been conducted we have to interpret the data and present the results.

Step / Usability team time (Hrs)
Determine target architectures and organisations / 10
Profiling users in these / 20
Develop a draft questionnaire / 10
Get management feedback on the draft / 2
Revise the questionnaire / 6
Find and hire pooling company / 10
Let pooling company gather info in pilot / 0
Revise the pilot questionnaire / 6
Let pooling company gather full info / 0
Interpret data / 24
Present results / 24
Total time / 112

Artefacts

The results are stored in the style guide for review in later usability tasks. The information will be used throughout the lifecycle especially when we are deciding our usability goals and in the contextual task analysis.

Contextual Task Analysis

In contextual task analysis the users current responsibilities, workflow patterns and conceptual frameworks is studied, this resulting in a description of current task and workflow and an understanding and specification of underlying goals. These will be used to set usability goals and drive work reengineering and user interface design

Roles

The leader of this task is a user interface designer. He/she has a team of user interface designers and usability engineers. There are also users involved in two of the steps.

Possible methods.

  1. A step-by-step procedure
  1. Review requirements specifications
  2. Meet with project team members
  3. Meet with user representatives
  4. Identify and document key actors and use cases
  5. Conduct contextual observations/interviews
  6. Document the work environment analysis
  7. Construct task scenarios
  8. Document the task analysis
  9. Identify basic user tasks
  10. Take a fist pass at current user task organization model
  11. Obtain a current user task organization model
  1. Affinity diagram
  2. Observations/Interviews
  3. Multi Dimensional Scaling method
  4. Trajectroy Mapping

Selected method

The team will use the step-by-step procedure and iterate on the steps 5, 6, 7 and 8 until the data is complete.

Level of effort

We divide our team into two groups working parallel with the step-by-step procedure for the best efficiency.

Step / Usability time (Hrs)
(two goups sharing all tasks) / User time (Hrs)
Review requirements specifications / 24
Interview project team / 16
Interview user reps / 16 / 8
Identify key Actors/Use Cases / 8
In-context observations / 80 / 40
Work Environment Analysis / 24
Task Scenarios / 16
Task Analysis document / 24
Low-level tasks / 16
First pass task model / 8
Obtain user task model / 32
Document user task model / 8
Total time / 272 / 66

Artefacts

The results are stored in the style guide for review in later usability tasks.

Usability Goals

A collection of goals for the project are developed:

- Qualitative goals, reflecting usability requirements, extracted from the UP and the CTA.

- Quantitative goals, defining minimal acceptable user performance and satisfaction criteria based on the most important qualitative goals. These usability goals focus later design efforts and form the basis for later iterative usability evaluation.

Roles

The usability engineer is the one who is going to head this task, the User interface designer and everyone else in the design team and all stakeholders are also to be part of this task.

Possible methods.

  1. A step-by-step procedure
  1. Refer to the user profile
  2. Refer to the contextual task analysis
  3. Research business goals
  4. Identify and draft qualitative usability goals
  5. Prioritize usability goals
  6. Formulate quantitative usability goals
  7. Document prioritized usability goals
  8. Conduct user/management review
  9. Establish benchmark data for relative quantitative goals

The method

Hopefully everyone in the team by now have a good picture of how our user groups looks like (user profile) and what the problem the system should address looks like (contextual task analysis). The literature does not specify any other method then the step-by-step one although we are quite sure there are some variants of this method. In our case we will have to make different levels of goals for our different user group and the different architectures we are designing for. Were high security is needed we might have to sacrifice or lower some of the usability goals we have for a system that is not as secure.

Level of effort

Step / Usability team time (Hrs) / User time (Hrs) / Man. Time (Hrs)
Refer to the user profile / 6
Refer to the contextual task analysis / 6
Research business goals / 12 / 6
Identify and draft qualitative usability goals / 12
Prioritize usability goals / 6
Formulate quantitative usability goals / 6
Document prioritized usability goals / 24
Conduct user/management review / 8 / 8 / 8
Establish benchmark data for relative quantitative goals / 90 / 12 / 12
Total time / 170 / 20 / 26

Artefacts

Whenever we do design we are to refer to the goals we have specified here, these goals are to be documented in the product style guide. The style guide is then refereed to through out the project.

Platform Capabilities/Constraints

The user interface capabilities and constraints (e.g. windowing, direct manipulation, colours etc) is determined by the technology platform chosen for the product (e.g. apple, Microsoft windows, Linux, product-unique platforms) These capabilities and constraints are documented and will define the possibilities for user interface design.

The documentation from these first four Requirements Analysis tasks is collected in a work product called the product Style Guide. This document will be increased as the project goes on.

Roles

The leader of this task is a user interface designer. There should also be usability engineers working close together with technical staff.

Possible methods.

  1. A step-by-step procedure
  1. Identify all relevant aspects of all HW and SW platforms
  2. Review any platform documentation
  3. Interview technical staff
  4. Document platform capabilities and constraints

The method

This method is a straightforward method that will notify the team on what capabilities and constrains the platforms of the system will have.

Level of effort

Step / Usability time (Hrs) / User time (Hrs)
Identify HW/SW platform(s) / 10 / 10
Review platform documentation / 10
Interview technical staff / 6 / 6
Document Platform Capabilities and Constrains / 12
Validate Platform Capabilities and Constrains / 6 / 6
Total time / 44 / 22

Artefacts

The results are stored in the style guide for review in later usability tasks.

General Design Principles

Relevant general user interface design principles and guidelines available in the Usability Engineering literature are gathered and reviewed. They will be applied during the design process to come, along with all other project-specific information gathered in the first four tasks.

Roles

In this task there should be a user interface designer who should take primary responsibility for gathering and reviewing written resources, arranging schedules and budgets for the involvements of outside consultants during design process.

Possible methods.

  1. A step-by-step procedure
  1. Review any relevant high-level style guides
  2. Locate and review other resources offering general design principles
  3. Knowledge base tool etc.

Selected method

There is no general-user-interface-design-principles-tools that will make this job for us. We therefore put some time into this to make good design from the start.

Level of effort

Step / Usability time (Hrs)
Identify/review high-level Style Guides / 12
Locate/review other resources / 16
Total time / 28

Artefacts

The results will be used in conjunction with all output from the Requirements Analysis tasks to take first passes at design at each level, but they will not be stored in the style guide for review in later usability tasks.

DESIGN/TESTIN/DEVELOPMENT

LEVEL 1

Work Reengineering

Here all data from Requirements Analysis (phase one) is used to redesign user tasks at the level of organization and workflow to streamline work and exploit the capabilities of automation. No user interface design is involved in this task, just abstract organization of functionality and workflow design.

Roles

The leader of this task is a user interface designer, who gets help from the user profile & contextual task analysis team.

There are also users involved validating work models.

Possible methods.

  1. A step-by-step procedure
  1. Reengineer the current user task organization model and task scenarios
  2. Validate and refine the reengineered task organization model and reengineered task sequence models
  3. Document the reengineered task organization model and reengineered task sequence models
  1. Beyer & Holtzblatt
  2. Hackos And Redish
  3. Rosson And Carroll
  4. Trajectroy Mapping

Selected method

The team will use the step-by-step procedure to structure their future work here.

Level of effort

Step / Usability time (Hrs) / User time (Hrs)
Reengineer work models / 48
Validate work models / 24 / 18
Document work models / 16
Total time / 88 / 18

Artefacts

The results are stored in the product style guide.

Conceptual Model Design

Based on all previous tasks, initial high-level design alternatives are generated. At this level, navigational pathways and major displays are identified, and rules for the consistent presentation of work products, processes and actions are established. Screen design detail is not addressed until design level 2.

Roles

The task leader for this part will be a user interface designer. There will also be the team members working with user profiles, contextual task analysis team and work reengineering.

Possible methods.

  1. A step-by-step procedure
  1. Define the conceptual model as either product or process oriented
  2. Clearly identify product or processes
  3. Design presentation rules for products or processes
  4. Design rules for windows.
  5. Identify major displays
  6. Define and design major navigational pathways
  7. Document alternative conceptual model designs in sketches and explanatory notes
  1. Malinowski and Nakakoji

Selected method

The team will use the step-by-step procedure to make the rules that makes the lower level design of the security system consistent.

Level of effort

Step / Usability time (Hrs)
Design products/processes / 48
Design rules for windows / 36
Identify major displays / 36
Define navigational pathways / 36
Document design / 48
Total time / 204

Artefacts

The results of conceptual model design are stored in the product style guide.

Conceptual Model Mock-ups

Paper-and-pencil or prototype mock-ups of high-level design ideas generated in the previous task are prepared, representing ideas about high-level functional organization and Conceptual Model Design. Detailed screen design and complete functional design are not in focus here.

Roles

The interface designer is the one responsible for this task. And we will use small teams to develop different mock-ups with different functionality for our user groups. All teams are to have at least one person that was part of the user profiling and contextual task analysis. At this stage the mock-ups are going to be low fidelity so there is no need to get anyone from outside the project to get expertise. We see no need to involve the users in this stage.

Possible methods.

  1. A step-by-step procedure
  1. Select the functionality
  2. Sketch the user interface design
  3. Build mock-ups
  1. Changing degree of fidelity

Level of effort

Step / Usability team time (Hrs)/team
Select functionality / 8
Sketch design / 12
Prototype design / 24
Total time / 80

We will have at least tree teams working with different mock-ups.

Selected method

We do the step-by-step method, remembering that we have different user groups and different architectures we try to make mock-ups that address the different functionality and user requirements. The sketches we do are low fidelity and should be easy implemented and altered.

Artefacts

The mock-ups themselves are artefacts of this usability task.

Iterative Conceptual Model Evaluation

The mock-ups are evaluated and modified through iterative evaluation techniques such as formal usability testing, in which representative end users attempt to perform representative tasks with minimal training and intervention, imagining that the mock-ups are a real user-interface. This and the previous two tasks are conducted in iterative cycles until all major usability bugs are identified and engineered out of level one (conceptual model) design. Once a Conceptual Model is relatively stable, system architecture design can commence.

Roles

The task leader for this part will be a usability engineer. The leader should have an assistant that helps him/her with both planning and executing of the evaluation. The assistant should be and user interface designer. Of course other team members should help out and help out as observers.

The task will also use some users to participate as test-users.

Possible methods.

  1. A step-by-step procedure
  1. Decide on ease of learning/ease of use focus for the test
  2. Decide on user and task focus for the test
  3. Design test tasks
  4. Design the test and develop test materials
  5. Design and assemble the test environment
  6. Recruit/schedule pilot test users
  7. Run pilot test
  8. Revise test procedures and materials
  9. Recruit/schedule test users
  10. Conduct the test
  1. Run the test and collect the data
  2. Summarize data
  3. Analyse/interpret data
  4. Draw conclusions/formulate recommended design changes
  5. Document/present results
  1. Remote evaluations
  2. Heuristic Evaluation
  3. Guideline Reviews
  4. Pluralistic walk-troughs
  5. Consistency inspections
  6. Cognitive walk-troughs
  7. Formal usability inspections

Selected method