Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
According to the 103 survey respondents, the top five UCD methods easily applied in practice included:
(1) informal usability testing, (2) user analysis and profiling, (3) evaluations of existing systems, (4)
low-fidelity prototyping, (5) heuristic evaluations, (6) task identification, (7) navigation design, and (8)
scenario-based design. To summarize, practitioners tend to use those methods that are most flexible, infor-
mal, and least structured. The use of these “low hanging fruit” UCD methods reflects that in practice,
actives are in fact driven by time, money, and the attention, which the process is given by key stakeholders.
7.3.2.1.6 Summary
While not all of these techniques and tools will be discussed in detail, representative methods that are
particularly popular with UCD practitioners will be chosen for review. These tools and techniques
will be summarized, followed by a summary section discussing how ergonomics, human factors, and
HCI researchers and practitioners can get from this initial phase of understanding users and their
work to leveraging and incorporating this new knowledge into the actual design of work tools.
As will be seen, all of these methodologies and techniques, while somewhat interrelated and in some
ways redundant, comprise the initial activities of the UCD process (i.e., understanding the work system).
All of these methods can be used to help examine, understand, and model the users, their needs, and their
work. It is this intimate knowledge of the work system that helps to drive ergonomic design. These user-
centered methods, techniques, and activities directly concern the documentation or modeling of the user
and their work. At the heart of all of the aforementioned methods and techniques is the focus on human
users — their abilities, needs, work context, and work.
7.3.2.2 Contextual Design: A Summary Example
7.3.2.2.1 Why Contextual Design?
The process of contextual design has been selected as an example of the UCD (and RE) process, because it
represents a comprehensive approach to the RE process including both requirements elicitation and
requirements analysis and modeling techniques as well as a defined process for how to use this data
to define system requirements and spark design alternatives. Contextual design, a holistic and customer
-focused design process popularized by Beyer and Holtzblatt (1998, 2003), or variants on the process, is
one commonly used approach to UCD. The choice to give this procedure a more detailed summary stems
from its inclusion of variants of all major RE activities wrapped up in one prescribed procedure. While
contextual design (Beyer and Holtzblatt, 1998) is by no means the only solution to RE or UCD approach,
it contains all the integral elements of the process of taking information about users, their needs, their
work, and so on and translating into a data-driven design. According to Holtzblatt, “contextual
design is a full front-end design process that takes a cross-functional team from collecting data about
users in the field, though interpretation and consolidation of that data, to the design of product concepts
and a tested product structure
...
” (2003, p. 942).
7.3.2.2.2 Procedural Overview
The process of contextual design begins with, albeit abbreviated, the process of defining the overall
problem or goal being addressed, doing background and market research, setting the project focus
and scope, and establishing parameters of the process (e.g., selecting a team, tailoring method to
resources, project planning, and scope).
Additionally, the contextual design process stresses the importance of selecting an appropriate and
representative user population keeping in mind the possible variability with their working environment,
their work role and importance as a stakeholder, and considers the nature of the work practices to be
studied (Stage 1). While the Contextual Design Manual (Beyer and Holtzblatt, 1998) provides relatively
little detail on these stages of the process, there is considerable detail in laying out the rules and pro-
cedures for collecting data from users (Stage 2). In fact, the fundamental component of the contextual
design process is the contextual inquiry. Contextual inquiry is the process of interviewing and interacting
with the customer or user within the actual context of their work (Beyer and Holtzblatt, 1995; Holtzblatt
and Jones, 1993).
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