Abstract

By focusing on usage rather than users and abstract rather than realistic models, designers can more quickly capture the essence of user needs and derive innovative designs that better support those needs. This hands-on tutorial covers techniques for rapid abstract prototyping based on simplified user role and task models.

Learning Objectives:

Participants will learn how to apply efficient “agile” modeling techniques to quickly build simple but powerful abstract models that capture users’ relationships with a system, their intended tasks, and the content and organization of an effective user interface. They will emerge with an understanding of the distinct features and advantages of a usage-centered design process and the power of abstract models to drive and organize visual and interaction design.

How the Tutorial Will Be Conducted

The tutorial will use the presenters’ characteristic hands-on approach to learning, a carefully choreographed combination that alternates illustrated lecture-discussion style presentation of concepts and demonstration of techniques with hands-on application to a real-world case problem. Hands-on practice will be supported by active coaching and consultation from the tutorial leaders and will be followed by class review and discussion of the work and the process.

Participant Knowledge and Experience

This tutorial is targeted toward practicing usability and design professionals interested in expanding their repertoire of modeling and design techniques. Participants should be familiar with basic usability principles and have practical experience in visual and interaction design for real-world software or Webbased applications. Some knowledge or prior experience in user and task analysis is helpful but not absolutely required. The tutorial will serve as an introduction to usage-centered design as well as to abstract prototyping and related abstract modeling techniques.

History

This tutorial is based on highly-rated previous tutorials and incorporates updated material and techniques. Earlier related tutorials were present at CHI 2000, OOPSLA 2001, and OOPSLA 2002. While core material on usage-centered design has been refined through extensive real-world experience and feedback from earlier tutorials, this proposal focuses on original contributions and their connections with closely related alternatives and introduces new and highly refined techniques developed in recent practice, with significant pedagogical improvements based on public seminars and contracted client training.

Content Overview

Models are essential parts of the toolkit of most usability and design professionals and core components of nearly all organized design approaches. User profiles, personas, scenarios, and other descriptive models help professionals to capture, explore, analyze, elaborate, and validate their understanding of users and the tasks they need to perform. Paper prototypes enable designers to express, explore, and evaluate design alternatives without committing to implementation.

Usage-centered design, a proven, industrial-strength design approach, employs the power of abstract models to speed the modeling process and guide designers toward innovative solutions that are closely tuned to the real needs of users. Simplified abstract models help distill the essence of the relationships between users and a system, their intentions in these relationship, and the content and organization of a user interface that simply and straightforwardly supports those intentions.

This tutorial will focus on “agile” modeling techniques that exploit the inherent flexibility and conceptual power of low-tech media such as ordinary index cards and Post-it notes to construct minimalist models that provide maximum payoff for improving designs. A variety of these techniques will be explained and applied. Abstract models of user roles, task cases, and abstract prototypes based on canonical abstract components will be compared and contrasted with other modeling techniques, such as personas, user profiles, scenarios, user stories, and low-fidelity prototypes.

Covered Topics

• Usage Usage--centered and user user--centered design
  • Overview of a model-driven design process
  • Relationships among role, task, and content models
  • Model-driven derivation of visual and interaction designs
  • Usage-centered, model-based exploration
• Beyond paper prototypes: traditional and novel low low--tech tools
  • Managing chaos with holding bins
  • Card-based modeling: cognitive and pragmatic advantages
  • Basic techniques: card-storming, affinity clustering, prioritizing, coordination clustering and other specialized categorizations
• Users, actors, user roles, personas, and user profiles
  • Concise and efficient modeling based on relationships
  • Generating a provisional user role inventory
  • Ranking user roles by occupancy and functional priority
  • Refining user role models through affinity clustering and role elaboration
  • Role-support analysis
• Tasks, use cases, scenarios, and stories
  • Writing abstract dialogs
  • Elaborating task models: workflow, preconditions, extensions, inclusions, rules and constraints
  • Ranking techniques for card-based task models
  • Combining and comparing alternative rankings
  • Affinity clustering and task model refinement
• Bridging the gap from task models to design
  • Cooperation clustering of tasks into interaction contexts
  • Content inventories, abstract prototypes, and canonical abstract components
  • Deriving visual and interaction designs from abstract models

Instructors' Biographies

Larry Constantine is a pioneer in software engineering who now focuses on software and Web usability and usage-centered design methods. In a career spanning four decades, he has had over 150 papers published plus 16 books, including the 1999 Jolt Award winner, Software for Use (Addison-Wesley). An award-winning visual and interaction designer (Performance-Centered Design Competition 2001) as well as a respected teacher, he has taught in 17 countries around the world.

Lucy Lockwood is an internationally respected consultant and trainer who draws on nearly 20 years experience in programming and project management. Her practice centers on software usability and technical teamwork, and she has contributed many of the core concepts and techniques in usage-centered design. A top-rated speaker, she has taught around the world and has keynoted major conferences. She is the author of more than a dozen published papers and co-author of the award-winning book, Software for Use (Addison-Wesley, 1999).