Introducing User-Centered Systems Design - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 25

Table 1.8 Some remaining problems in contemporary system design
• The size of systems and diversity of users and tasks are increasing. How are we to find,
represent, and use this information?
• The complexity of the systems is increasing: users do not always get adequate feedback on what
is going on, and cannot see the internal state of the system. Norman ( 2013 ) provides further
examples. How are we to keep users informed without overwhelming them with information?
• The nuances of social and organization factors and the communication of these nuances through
computer supported communication are not fully understood and predictable. How can
designers get and use this information? How can it be represented?
• How can we improve the usability of designer's tools to help them improve usability for users?
• Studies of the user need to go beyond recommendations about the design of technology—can
we offer a conceptual basis for these recommendations? One approach is to create a unified
theory of how users behave, but this theory has not yet been fully created or made available
for automatic application
• With further understanding come questions about lower and higher levels. Once we know how
users work in small groups we can see that larger groups also have influence as do previous
groups who used the system. What is this information and how do we include this
information?
• Esthetics and emotions are difficult factors to explain and quantify. Users, particularly users of
personal and home technologies, generally care about how the system looks and what pleasure
it gives them, sometimes irrespective of how it works or how well it works. In these areas,
then, esthetics is closely related to acceptability, and there is some evidence of a high
correlation between esthetics and usability (e.g., Tractinsky 1997 ). The inter-relationship
between usability, functionality, emotional responses, and esthetics, however, still needs to be
worked out
1.6.2 Future Work
You should now be aware that there is a lot to be learned about users. While
technology can change rapidly basic user capabilities and characteristics change
slowly, if at all. It is important to be aware of critical user characteristics, their
relative importance for a design, and their likelihood of change over time.
There is also much more that needs to be learned. As you read the rest of this
topic, you should become aware of the remaining problems, some of which are
listed in Table 1.8 .
1.7 Other Resources
Here we note some further topics and online resources.
The topics by Christopher Wickens (Wickens et al. 1998 ; Wickens and
Hollands 2000 ) provide more details than this topic does. These topics focus more
on human factors and physical engineering of workplace.
The topics by Preece et al. ( 2002 ) and Dix, Finlay, Abowd, and Beale, both
titled Human-Computer Interaction, and Interaction Design: Beyond Human-