User Interface Design

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Slides available _at_ www.mrl.nott.ac.uk/axc/G64UID/
User_Evaluation.pdf User Evaluation or
provotyping and cooperative analysis
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Exercise

• On a piece of loose paper write down what you
  think the primary aim of user evaluation is you
  may consult a colleague keep it anonymous

• You have 3 minutes

• Hand your pieces of paper to the front I will
  read a selection out, so make them legible

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Learning Outcomes (1)

• Elaborate on understanding of the role of user
  evaluation in design

• Key features of user evaluation
• Learning by doing
• Cooperative analysis
• Provotyping (3 key criteria of cooperative
  analysis)

• Doing user evaluation yourself
• CW2. 4000-5000 word study report
• 30 of overall course mark

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Overview

• Build on previous Participatory Design (PD)
  lecture

• Participatory design at work
• Mocking it up
• From prototypes to provotypes

• Doing PD yourself - key things to attend to when
  doing your coursework

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What is Participatory Design?

• Scandinavian design tradition a reaction to the
  deskilling brought about by the introduction of
  computers

• Seeks to involve workers in the process of design
  workers as a resource (sometimes called the
  Collective Resources Approach)

• Respecifies design and evaluation from a
  product-oriented process to a mutual learning
  process

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The Purpose of PD

• Political or practical?
• Workplace democracy vs. learning by doing

• 3rd Generation, practical methods of learning
• - Adopted prototyping as general research and
  design methodology
• Married ethnography to it (scoping studies)
• And involved intended users in development

• Two important requirements of learning by doing
• 1. Understanding the current organization and
  accomplishment of work (which is where
  ethnography helps out)
• 2. Envisioning through PD new ways to
  accomplish and organize work

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Redesigning Human Activities

• Tradition or transcendence?

• one can focus on tradition or transcendence in
  the artefacts to be used. Should a word processor
  be designed as a traditional typewriter or as
  something totally new? Another dimension is
  professional competence. Should the old skills
  of typographers be what is designed for or should
  new knowledge replace these skills in the
  future? Along the same dimension is the division
  of labour and cooperation. Should the new design
  support the traditional organization in a
  composing room or suggest new ways of cooperation
  between typographers and journalists? There is
  also the contradiction between tradition and
  transcendence in the objects or use values to be
  produced. Should the design support the
  traditional services a library has produced or
  should it support completely new services and
  even new clients? Tradition or transcendence,
  that is the question in design.
• cf. Ehn, Work-Oriented Design of Computer
  Artefacts

• Tradition or transcendence - what do we think?

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The Law of the Excluded Middle

• Either / or what about and?

• Design is always a mater of tradition and
  transcendence
• - As it is always bound by tradition (current
  working practice and organization of work)
• - And committed to transcending tradition in
  order to add value (which necessarily changes
  current working practice and organization of
  work)

• This means that design needs to investigate
  current working practice and the organization of
  work (tradition) as a feature of redesigning it
  (transcending tradition)

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Investigating Work as Feature of Redesigning It

• Mocking IT Up
• cf. Ehn and Kyng, Cardboard computers
  mocking-it-up or hands-on the future

• b) Based on observations of print work and
  embedded in discussions with users about
  functionality of mock up

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Beyond Cardboard Computers

• 2nd Generation mock ups

• b) designers working with end-users to specify
  system functionality

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Exercise

• Same drill write down what you think the
  primary aim of evaluation is and pass it to the
  front, and keep it anonymous

• 3 minutes again

• And Ill read two or three out again

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Evaluation

• Evaluation a gloss on envisioning the future in
  fine functional detail through hands on user
  experience

• Hands on experience provided through the
  production and user elaboration of mock ups

• Mock ups cardboard computers to LoFi/HiFi
  prototypes (which may be handed over to product
  design prototyping as requirements specification)

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Prototyping

• The aim is to make quick and dirty sketches of
  the computer application in order to clarify
  requirements for a new computer system The
  prototypes .. serve mainly as substitute
  specifications for the application and to
  propagate ideas into detailed design activities.
• Cf. Bødker and Grønbæk Design in action from
  prototyping by demonstration to cooperative
  prototyping

• An iterative process prototype evaluate
  prototype evaluate and so on

• Elaborating and refining design through end-user
  evaluation

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Cooperative Analysis

• Nature of end-user evaluation
• To experience is not to read a description of
  the computer application, nor is it to watch a
  demonstration.

- Users are not there to annoy the designers or
to spoil their wonderful designs, but to guide
them, because they know the relevant work tasks.

• Need to work through functionality with users,
  cooperatively analysing it to
• - Identify areas that are sound
• - Identify areas for improvement

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Doing Cooperative Analysis

• Provotyping -

- Artefacts as triggers for discussion of current
practice

• Involves presenting mock ups and/or prototypes as
  a way to address (to do) current practice
• Use study reports to formulate descriptions or
  scenarios of current practice and show how
  prototype addresses it

- This provokes reaction and discussion of
current practice and of the mock ups or
prototypes functionality
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Key Things To Look Out For When Provotyping

• 1. Do users see the sense of the technology?

On encountering a novel technology, users can
rarely see the sense of it. It is not, at first
glance, intelligible to them and its potential
use must therefore be explained. This involves
guiding users through technological functionality
of mock ups and prototypes (in terms of current
practice). Whatever the medium, the first
question is, given that course of explanatory
work, can users see the sense of the technology,
and if so in what ways (what sense do they make
of it), or does it remain unfathomable?
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Key Things To Look Out For When Provotyping

• 2. Do users recognize the relevance of the
  technology to their work?

That users may come to see the sense of the
proposed technology does not mean that they will
recognize it as relevant to their work. If users
are to engage in any meaningful analysis of the
technologys potential utility, and further
elaborate functional demands that may be placed
on it, then they need to be able to recognize the
relevance of the technology to their activities.
The question is, do users recognise the relevance
of the proposed technology and, if so, in what
ways?
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Key Things To Look Out For When Provotyping

• 3. Do users express a desire to appropriate the
  technology?

A prototype recognized as relevant to the
members of a community of practitioners may be
appropriated by that community. That is to say
that the practitioners may call for its
development and implementation. Appropriation
involves preliminary acceptance of the prototype
as a viable socio-technical system of work,
changes and refinements withstanding What changes
and refinements do users ask for?
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Summary

• PD a Scandinavian approach to design that
  emphasizes the inclusion of end-users in design
  through iterative evaluation

• Does inclusion through mocking it up and
  cooperative analysis of prototypes

• Does cooperative analysis through provotyping,
  which focuses on 3 key criteria
• Do users see the sense of the technology and what
  sense do they make of it if so?
• Do users recognize the relevance of the
  technology to their work and what ways is it
  perceived as being relevant?
• Do users wish to appropriate the technology and
  what changes and refinements to they request if
  so?

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Coursework 2. Group Work

• Do-It-Yourself

• Design and evaluate a system
• - One of the 3 settings/systems that we have
  studied
• - Not the one that you have studied (same groups
  though)
• - Assign in tomorrows seminar

• Evaluation
• Done by another group
• Group assigned in tomorrows seminar
• Address 3 key criteria with each group

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CW2. Structure of Report

• A report of 4000-5000 words 30 of overall mark

• A 2 page executive summary

• Description of your design and evaluation work
• Approach taken
• Initial design and how you arrived at it
• Evaluation activities methods used, why, how you
  used them, what they told you
• How the design evolved
• Changes that could or should be made to the final
  specification
• Difficulties, limitations, next steps

• Deadline hand in to School Office Thursday April
  17

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Supporting Documentation

• Slides available _at_www.mrl.nott.ac.uk/axc/G64UID/U
  ser_Evaluation.pdf
• Referenced texts
• Bødker, S. and Grønbæk, K. (1991) Design in
  action from prototyping by demonstration to
  cooperative prototyping, Design at Work
  Cooperative Design of Computer Systems (eds.
  Greenbaum, J. and Kyng, M.), pp. 197-218,
  Hillsdale, New Jersey Lawrence Erlbaum
  Associates.
• Ehn, P. (1988) Work-Oriented Design of Computer
  Artefacts, Stockholm, Sweden Arbetslivscentrum.
• Ehn, P. and Kyng, M. (1991) Cardboard computers
  mocking-it-up or hands-on the future, Design at
  Work Cooperative Design of Computer Systems
  (eds. Greenbaum, J, and Kyng, M.), pp. 169-195,
  Hillsdale, New Jersey Lawrence Erlbaum
  Associates.
• Mogensen, P. and Trigg, R. (1992) Artefacts as
  triggers for participatory design, Proceedings
  of the 1992 Participatory Design Conference, pp.
  55-62, Boston Computer Professionals for Social
  Responsibility.