Summary: Putting It All Together - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 397

level where they feel comfortable discussing these sorts of issues with people from
the other disciplines involved in systems development.
Shared representations are an important part of the development process, but
they can be expensive to produce. It is therefore important to find ways to make
them more valuable through reuse, for example. One way of doing this is by
applying lessons from one design to subsequent designs on related projects.
On the surface, the RD-ICM may appear to encapsulate a relatively complex
theory of how systems should be created. It attempts to capture best practice and
what many developers already do, highlighting that development is not a simple,
linear, one-size-fits-all process. There are enough facets to the RD-ICM that it
appears to have the same sort of level of complexity as a programming language or
even a cognitive architecture. Although learningto use the RD-ICM approach takes
time and effort, the fact that it takes explicit account of human factors currently
makes it possibly the best model to use for development.
14.5 Building on the Foundations
At this point you should know much more about users than you did when you
started reading this topic. We hope that we have convinced you of the importance
of understanding users and that, as a result, you are now more sensitive to the ways
that users think and behave.
There is a lot to learn, and while we have presented you with a lot of infor-
mation, we continue to learn more about users as new technologies emerge and
give rise to new ways of working. Even with the new technologies and new ways
of working, it is important to think of them in terms of particular users doing
particular tasks in a particular context. The information we have presented in this
book should allow you to start to do that in a principled way, enabling you to
design usable systems and to justify why you have designed them in a particular
way. The Implications for system design sections should help here. Note, however,
that in this topic we have only really scratched the surface of what there is to learn
about people, tasks, and contexts. If you want to find out more about any of the
topics we mention, the lists of Other resources should provide a good starting
point. Cynics might say that ''Keep in mind that a year in the lab can save you an
hour's reading. That is, spending a little time looking at previous work can save a
lot of time needlessly duplicating known results.
One implicit lesson that we hope you have learned is that developing systems
draws on multiple disciplines. We are not expecting software designers to become
fully fledged psychologists, but we hope that our topic sensitizes software
designers to the psychological issues (about users) that need to be considered. We
also hope that it provides a foundation for useful dialog across disciplines during
system design.
You should also have tools for finding out information when the information is
not yet published. The short exercises at the end of most chapters on gathering data