User-centered Design Practitioners Research Articles

Context of Use: The Final Frontier in the Practice of User-Centered Design?

Abstract User-centered design (UCD) practitioners in industrial context are often faced with multilevel factors that hinder their effort to involve users in the context of use, and so meet one of the core UCD principles. Seen the heterogeneous and dynamic context of mobile system use, applying this principle becomes more challenging. Based on in-depth interviews with various mobile practitioners in Finland and the Netherlands, we explore the core factors that affect UCD practitioners in meeting this challenge. Our findings confirm the impact of the professional–client relationship as a key factor that inhibits the involvement of users. Novelty aspects, e.g. practitioners’ unfamiliarity with the users and the perceived innovativeness of the designed system, largely explain the involvement of users in situ. Interestingly, these conditions are not idiosyncratic to mobile computing. We discuss the contextual factors’ implications on UCD and emphasize alternative strategies that support practitioners in their effort to involve users.

Beyond User-Centered Design: Applicable Concepts from Complementary Approaches

In human factors, and especially in the area of computer system design, practitioners often employ a design approach or design philosophy called user-centered design (UCD). This paper provides an introduction to three complementary approaches (Quality Function Deployment, Front End Loading, and Service-Oriented Project Management) that originated in different domains and are primarily used by business development and project management. These approaches are then compared to UCD to determine whether UCD practitioners may be able to complement these approaches as well as incorporate new perspectives, strategies, or principles to enhance their application of UCD in system design. The principles from these other approaches may provide UCD practitioners with guidance to create a more robust approach to incorporating the human element into system design, and the tools and methodologies that accompany each approach could enhance UCD practices in the future.

Getting Software RITE

In traditional software development environments, many designers don't routinely put their software in front of users. If the ultimate measure of well-designed software is how effectively it serves its intended purpose, then validating that it does so is critical, and the sooner the better. Many user-centered design practitioners do this with usability testing. A formal usability test is a rather sciencey affair. It involves a number of different people in different roles. This paper deals with software design validation. This test-fix-test-fix cycle continues until the software starts to feel pretty tight. This approach is called RITE (Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation).

People, Organizations, and Processes: An Inquiry into the Adoption of User-Centered Design in Industry

The aim of this article is to improve our understanding of user-centered design (UCD) adoption and provide accordingly useful advice to the UCD community. UCD adoption was investigated through a Web survey. The results show that the early involvement of UCD practitioners in the product life cycle is more frequent compared to 10 years ago. It is also true that the methods and the techniques employed have shifted their focus from summative evaluation to rapid development cycles and from quantitative to qualitative evaluation methods. Based on the survey, there are several organizational factors UCD practitioners and their management should consider. UCD should be part of the business strategy and supported by higher management. Usability goals must be set through competitive analysis and practitioners should be rewarded if goals are reached or exceeded. For bespoke systems, usability goals should be explicitly discussed with the customer. Special attention should be paid to communication inside and outside the company so as to clarify the outcomes and benefits of the UCD approach.

Extending the Usability of Heuristics for Design and Evaluation: Lead, Follow, and Get Out of the Way

User-centered design practitioners have often relied on discount usability engineering methods using heuristics. Top 10 lists of design and evaluation heuristics have proliferated during the 1990s, leading to a plethora of heterogeneous heuristic guidelines for a multitude of user interfaces. A simple, unified set of heuristics that might be applicable across different technologies, understood between disciplines, and equivalent to metrics used to measure ease of use can be beneficial. Lead, follow, and get out of the way (LF&G) theorizes that the optimal human-computer interaction (HCI) experience is analogous to a facilitative learning relation-Like a good teacher, mentor, or coach, the usable user interface leads the user to successful completion of tasks and goals; follows the user's progress and provides appropriate feedback and information when needed; and gets out of the way of the user to allow efficient and effective completion of tasks as the user attains mastery of the system, its concepts, and operations. A set of 18 heuristics grouped under the 3 general principles of the title are provided for use across the tasks of design guidance, development refinement, and end-user evaluation of computer systems. This article provides background into the development of LF&G, case studies on its use in real-world product design and development, and directions for further research needed to develop this approach into an empirically based method for defining, describing, designing, and predicting the ease of use of interactive human-computer systems.

Skills needed by user-centered design practitioners in real software development environments

User-centered design (UCD) of human-computer interfaces--including task flow and documentation---is gaining acceptance in software development organizations. But managers who want their organizations to start using UCD often do not know what characteristics to look for, in candidates for hiring or retraining to fill UCD roles; this article can help. It has the recommendations from participants in a CHI '92 conference workshop on this topic. The 16 workshop participants were UCD practitioners and managers from companies and a few universities across the United States, Canada, and Sweden. This article first describes some typical roles of UCD practitioners in software development organizations. There follows a list of attributes that UCD practitioners should have. Some attributes should be had by all practitioners, regardless of their subspecialties. The most important of those universal attributes are of three types: knowledge that can be acquired formally (e.g., of the human-computer interaction literature, cognitive processes, experimental design, rapid prototyping), skill that can be gotten from experience (e.g., estimating resources needed to do a job, commitment to users, understanding of the software development process, negotiating ability, enjoyment of working on teams, ability to really listen), and attributes that are harder to acquire (e.g., tenacity, flexibility). Every practitioner needs other characteristics as well, but their importances differ by the practitioners' subspecialties (e.g., a design team leader needs team management skills).