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Aftereachtaskhasbeenthoughtthroughandsketched,theteamreviewsittoensurethat
itremainstruetothecustomerdataandtheCoolConcepts.Thisensuresthatthedesignac-
counts for the users' strategies, tasks, and issues and that new inventions either support the
users' practice or give them a better way to approach it. A design might change all the ex-
isting steps of an activity and even eliminate whole activities altogether; as long as people
can still achieve their fundamental intents, the change will work. When teams forget or ig-
nore the user's intent, the design is in trouble.
Designwithstoryboardsensuresthedesignaccountsforthecontextofuse.Butthecon-
text is not just the task being supported, or how features are structured and grouped in a
product; the context that matters is the overall life of the user and the way any activity fits
into that life. Storyboarding brings this context into focus for the team during the detailed
design process.
5.3 THE USER ENVIRONMENT DESIGN
Storyboards explore how a design supports the flow of the user's life. But there is another,
equallyimportantaspectofdesign,whichisthe structure of the system :layingouttheparts
of the product so they make sense as a system. Design alternates between these two per-
spectives, first telling stories about a new system, story thinking, then organizing the parts
of the system structurally to see what they imply, which is structural thinking. Contextual
Design provides the UserEnvironment Design (UED)toshowbasic structure andfunction
(Figure 26). The UED can be used to design a new product, show additions to an existing
product, or represent a suite of apps and products that share data in a mobile world. Just as
architectsdrawfloorplanstoseethestructureandflowofahouse,theUEDshowsdesign-
ers the virtual floor plan of their new system.
The UED shows the structure of a product as a set of focus areas , places within the sys-
temthatprovidesupportforcoherentactivities.Afocusareamightbeawindow,webpage,
or screen. The UED shows each part of the system—how it supports the user's activities,
exactly what function is available in that part, how it is organized in an interaction design
pattern, and how the user gets to and from other parts of the system. When complete, the
UED breaks the function and content of the system into coherent places that work to sup-
port all the scenarios of use.
Figure 5.4: A single focus area (left) and interaction design pattern (right). The focus area defines what hap-
pens in the place; the design pattern provides the basic layout for presentation of the place.
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