User-Centered Design An Integrated Approach

by Vredenburg, Karel; Isensee, Scott; Righi, Carol

• ISBN13: 9780130912954
• ISBN10: 0130912956
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-12-13
• Publisher: Prentice Hall

Summary

User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approachwill help you optimize your customers' total experience with any technology product or service - from purchase and installation through support, upgrades, and beyond. Karel Vredenburg, Scott Isensee, and Carol Righi, the field's leading experts, present methods, techniques, case studies, and CD-ROM-based tools for introducing, deploying, and optimizing UCD to make products that are simpler, more elegant, more powerful, and more profitable.

Author Biography

THE AUTHORS have used this book's techniques to design everything from mainframe computers to the Olympics Web site.

KAREL VREDENBURG, Architect and Corporate Champion for User-Centered Design at IBM, led the creation of the integrated version of UCD presented in this book.

SCOTT ISENSEE, user interface architect at BMC Software, is a former senior member of IBM's user interface architecture group. He holds 42 U.S. patents, and is co-author of The Art of Rapid Prototyping.

CAROL RIGHI, President of Righi Interface Engineering, Inc., has worked in HCI since 1984 and specializes in user-interface design and design education.

The authors run a popular workshop series titled Practical UCD: How to Introduce, Deploy, and Optimize User-Centered Design.

Table of Contents

Foreword	xvii
Preface	xxiii
Acknowledgments	xxv
Introduction	xxvii
Taking Stock	1	(18)
Your Current Organization and Products	6	(3)
Your Preliminary Road Map	9	(5)
Dealing with the ``Yeah, Buts...''	14	(5)
But Making Usable Products Is Expensive	15	(1)
But We Have a Schedule to Meet	15	(1)
But Our Users Care More About	16	(1)
But We Only Have a Small Team	16	(3)
The Integrated Approach	19	(40)
What's in a Name?	20	(3)
How Is Our Integrated Approach to UCD Unique?	20	(3)
What Are the Benefits of Integrated UCD?	23	(1)
What Types of Projects Can Benefit from the Approach?	24	(1)
What's the Primary Target of UCD?	25	(3)
The Six Principles of UCD	28	(13)
Setting Business Goals	28	(1)
Understanding Users	29	(3)
Designing the Total Customer Experience	32	(2)
Evaluating Designs	34	(3)
Assessing competitiveness	37	(2)
Managing for Users	39	(2)
Multidisciplinary Design and User Feedback	41	(7)
Multidisciplinary Design Specialists	41	(3)
Design	44	(1)
Architecture	45	(1)
Information	45	(1)
Leadership	45	(1)
Team Member Responsibilities and Skills	45	(2)
User Feedback Methods	47	(1)
Project Optimization	48	(6)
Providing Universal Access with UCD	54	(3)
Summary	57	(2)
Introducing the Approach	59	(46)
Make the Message Simple	60	(2)
Spend Time on Education	62	(8)
Awareness	63	(5)
Executive	68	(1)
Introductory	69	(1)
Advanced	69	(1)
Get On ``Every Train Leaving the Station''	70	(3)
Get the Right and Best Skills	73	(3)
Include the Right Methods	76	(2)
Carefully Select a Pilot Project	78	(1)
Identify a Champion	79	(2)
Advocate for Ease of Use and UCD	80	(1)
Performance Plans	80	(1)
Specialist Knowledge	80	(1)
Tracking	81	(1)
Optimize Your Organization Structure	81	(1)
Ensure That Your Specialized Staff Stay Technically Vital	82	(1)
Secure Appropriate Funding	83	(6)
Staffing	84	(1)
Tools and Infrastructure	84	(1)
Competitive Product Acquisition	84	(1)
Participant Expenses	85	(1)
Recruiting	85	(1)
Web Participants	86	(1)
Lab Participants	87	(1)
Project Plan Support	87	(2)
Create the Infrastructure	89	(3)
UCD Lab	89	(1)
Test Participant Rooms	89	(1)
Observation Rooms	89	(2)
Control Panel	91	(1)
Track Progress	92	(1)
Recognize and Celebrate Success	93	(1)
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate	93	(2)
The History of UCD at IBM	95	(4)
Origins of UCD at IBM	96	(1)
Introduction Strategies	96	(1)
Transition	96	(1)
Organization	97	(2)
Teams	99	(1)
Frequently Asked Questions	99	(6)
What is a Simple Description of UCD?	99	(1)
What Is the Distinction Between Ease of Use and UCD?	100	(1)
Is the Goal to Have Developers Automatically Incorporate UCD into Their Timeline?	100	(1)
Some People Talk About Usability Testing. Is That the Same Thing as UCD?	100	(1)
Can You Explain How Certain UCD Tools Can Benefit Designers?	101	(1)
Is UCD Only Appropriate for Products with Pervasive Graphical User Interfaces?	101	(1)
Doesn't UCD Involve a Lot of Heavy Process and Complicated Methods?	101	(1)
Who Needs to Know about UCD in an Organization?	102	(1)
Does UCD Involve Decreasing Management Control over Projects?	102	(1)
Do All Product Teams Need to Invest in UCD at the Same High Level?	102	(1)
What Is Presented in UCD Executive Review Meetings?	103	(1)
How Should Fix Rate Models and Ease of Use Objectives Be Determined?	103	(1)
What Are the Top Five User Problems After You Fix All Level 1 Problems?	103	(1)
Do User Problems Have to Come from Users?	103	(1)
What If My Organization Has Four Levels of Severity of Problem?	104	(1)
What If My Project Doesn't Have a True UCD Multidisciplinary Team?	104	(1)
What Is the Difference Between UCD and Market Research?	104	(1)
Deploying the Approach	105	(62)
Linear or Iterative?	105	(2)
Planning Phase	107	(14)
Describing Market and Audience	107	(2)
Logistical Planning	109	(1)
Recruiting	109	(1)
Scheduling	110	(1)
Legal Issues	110	(1)
Reimbursement	110	(1)
Requirements Gathering and Prioritizing	110	(1)
Functional Requirements	111	(1)
Usability Requirements	112	(5)
Sizing and Scheduling	117	(1)
Creating the UCD Plan	118	(1)
UCD Project Plan and Status	118	(3)
Concept Phase	121	(29)
Task Analysis	122	(1)
Hierarchical Task Analysis	123	(4)
Use Cases	127	(1)
Determining Actors	127	(1)
Specifying Use Cases	128	(2)
Contextual Inquiry	130	(1)
Competitive Evaluation	130	(2)
User Profiles	132	(1)
OVID	133	(2)
Prototyping	135	(1)
Reasons to Prototype	135	(3)
Low-Fidelity Prototypes	138	(3)
High-Fidelity Prototypes	141	(4)
Comparison	145	(1)
Managing Iteration	145	(4)
Design Walkthrough	149	(1)
Detailed Design and Development Phase	150	(13)
Prototyping	151	(1)
Heuristic Evaluation	151	(2)
Usability Walkthrough	153	(1)
Usability Test	153	(3)
How to Perform a Usability Lab Test	156	(1)
Designing the Test	156	(1)
Selecting Participants	157	(2)
Developing Tasks	159	(1)
Preparing Materials	160	(1)
Data Collection	161	(1)
Data Analysis	162	(1)
Design Guideline Development	162	(1)
Early-Ship Evaluation	163	(1)
Life-Cycle Management Phase	163	(4)
Customer Satisfaction Survey	163	(3)
Benchmark Assessment	166	(1)
Postmortem Evaluation	166	(1)
Optimizing Your Implementation of the Approach	167	(38)
Education, Performance Support, Organizational Learning	168	(7)
Multidisciplinary Communication and Collaboration	175	(1)
Recruiting Participants	175	(4)
Participant Recruiting Database	177	(2)
Web-Enabled Studies	179	(8)
Synchronous Virtual Testing	181	(1)
Asynchronous Web Surveys	182	(5)
UCD Lab Tools	187	(3)
Automated Usage Capture	190	(1)
Information Analysis and Interpretation	191	(1)
Tracking Progress	191	(3)
Future Trends	194	(4)
Methodology Integration	198	(4)
Story-Based Design	198	(1)
Scenario-Based Design	199	(1)
Model-Based Design	199	(1)
Integration	200	(2)
Keeping Abreast of Improvements	202	(3)
Appendices	205	(22)
Bibliography	227	(4)
Index	231	(8)
About the Authors	239	(4)
About the CD	243	(4)
IBM License Agreement	247

Excerpts

Preface Do you want to change what people say about your product or system, referring to it as "elegant, simple, and powerful" rather than "ham-fisted, ugly, and unusable"? Or perhaps they're not saying anything at all. Then this book is for you. It provides an integrated approach to User-Centered Design (UCD) with an emphasis on using UCD to make products easy to buy, learn, and use. It focuses on designing a compelling "total customer experience"--everything a customer sees, hears, and touches about a product or system. The integrated version of User-Centered Design, described in this book, was initially developed at IBM in the early 1990s by Karel Vredenburg. A team of experts at IBM continuously worked with the first author to improve this version of UCD. It is currently in its third major version. Scott Isensee and Carol Righi were instrumental in the evolution of the approach not only while they were at IBM but also after they left the company. Since leaving IBM, Scott has applied UCD effectively to the design of the i-opener information appliance at NetPliance and currently implements UCD at BMC Software. Carol formed her own company, Righi Interface Engineering, Inc. She has led UCD projects both while at IBM and now as a consultant for clients such as Chrysler, MetLife, and the Usability Professionals' Association and has taught User-Centered Design classes to major corporations. We continue to run a highly popular workshop entitled, "How to Introduce, Deploy, and Optimize User-Centered Design in Your Organization." This book is a distillation of our collective experience and that of our colleagues in introducing UCD to many hundreds of companies and deploying it on a few thousand projects over the past 10 years. We have used the approach to design products ranging from mainframe computers to integrated circuits, notebook computers to Web appliances, database software to speech recognition software, Web site portals to the Web site for the Olympics, and we have used it on consulting projects worldwide for many industries, including healthcare, finance and banking, aerospace, insurance, automotive, and retail. We sincerely hope that you enjoy reading the book and applying the information contained within it.