User-Centered Systems Design: A Brief History - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 49

acknowledge that the boundaries between them are somewhat blurred: our bodies
affect how we act, and our behaviors affect how we participate socially. Thus, all
these factors interact. A key skill for effective human-centered system design is to
understand which factors are central or primary in any design situation and which
are peripheral or secondary.
In the latter part of the topic we provide introductions to some methods that can
be used to guide design and evaluation. These include task analysis, evaluation
methods, and the notation of cognitive dimensions. These methods differ in terms
of their preferred unit of analysis, the kinds of data collected, and the analyses that
are conducted. We finish the topic by providing a framework that will allow you to
integrate your knowledge of the user with the methods in a systematic way.
2.5 Other Resources
There are a lot of helpful texts that can give you some background to the field of
user-centered system design. Some of the texts that we have cited above are
particularly helpful. For more on the history of this field read this topic:
Shachtman, T. (2002). Laboratory warriors: How Allied science and technology tipped the
balance in World War II. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
A classic text that laid many of the basics out for the field of user-centered
systems design is Don Norman and Steve Draper's 1986 text:
Norman, D. A., & Draper, S. W. (Eds) (1986). User centered system design: New
Perspectives on human-computer interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Jack Carroll's summary of Human Computer Interaction in the Encyclopedia of
Human Computer Interaction is a great place to start if you want an overview:
Carroll, J. M. (2009). Human computer interaction (HCI). In Encyclopedia of Human-
Computer Interaction. M. Soegaard & R. F. Dam (Eds.). Aarhus, Denmark: The Inter-
action Design Foundation.
Two good textbook style overviews are:
Sharp, H., Rogers, Y., & Preece, J. (2011). Interaction design: Beyond human-computer
interaction (3rd ed.). Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons Ltd.
Shneiderman, B., & Plaisant, C. (2009). Designing the user interface: Strategies for
effective human-computer interaction (5th ed.). Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.
One of the best introductions to the practice, the how-to's, of user-centered design
is by Elizabeth Goodman, Mike Kuniavsky, and Andrea Moed. They cover basic
techniques and methods that will help you design better interactions. They also offer
case studies and examples that you can compare to your own design situations:
Goodman, E., Kuniavsky, M., & Moed, A. (2012). Observing the user experience:
A practitioner's guide to user research. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufman