Introducing User-Centered Systems Design - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 24

We believe that understanding users is fundamentally important and often leads
to more usable systems. There are costs as well as benefits associated with
studying and understanding users, however, and it is important to realize when you
should decide to stop analyzing the users and start building your system. A risk-
based approach to development can help inform this decision. We explain this
more fully in the Chap. 14 that you might wish to preview.
The information about users' design related capabilities can be organized using
the ABCS framework to encapsulate people's physical shape, how they perceive,
how they think, and how they interact with other people. This simple abbreviation
can be used to remember the information and to guide your considerations during
system design. Chapters 3 - 10 cover these levels.
We also introduced the idea of cognitive architectures, which can be used to
develop models that simulate how people perceive, think, and act. Although we
used the ACT-R architecture as an exemplar, other cognitive architectures could
also be used to organize and apply knowledge about users. We take up this
approach again in the Chap. 14 .
1.6.1 Structure of the Rest of the topic
You can think of the topic as being divided into four parts. The first two chapters
introduce the notion of user centered design and examine the underlying history.
The second part of the topic ( Chaps. 3 - 10 ) examines specific characteristics of
the user. Our perspective draws heavily on psychology. We focus on the sensory
and cognitive, information processing, aspects of the user, partly because this is
where our expertise lies, but also because much interaction requires people to
sense, understand, communicate, and learn. We limit our discussions to the topics
that are most relevant to designers while also offering pointers to those people who
want to read more about these topics.
The third part of the topic ( Chaps. 11 - 13 ) introduces some methods that can be
used to inform and evaluate design. This is an active area of application and
research, and there are now so many different approaches that it would be
impossible to cover them all here.
The topic concludes with a short summary ( Chap. 14 ). This highlights how you
can organize what you have learned about users and notes some possible directions
that are currently being explored to apply it.
On completing this topic you will have acquired an understanding of humans
and their behavior when interacting with complex, interactive systems. You will
have sufficient grounding to be better able to design systems that take appropriate
account of your users, their tasks, and the context in which they perform those
tasks. You will be able to justify how (and why) a particular design is appropriate
from a conceptual level down to a practical level, using the toolbox of methods
and techniques that we have placed at your disposal.