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Lecture 7 Design Process

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21 views

Lecture 7 Design Process

Uploaded by

arihonowaman05
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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DESIGN PROCESS

OBSTACLES AND PITFALLS IN THE DEVELOPMENT PATH


GENERAL OBSERVATIONS ON USER INTERFACE
DESIGN
• Nobody ever gets it right the first time.
• Development is chock-full of surprises.
• Good design requires living in a sea of changes.
• Making contracts to ignore change will never eliminate the need for change.
• Even if you have made the best system humanly possible, people will still make mistakes
when using it.
• Designers need good tools.
PITFALLS IN THE DESIGN PROCESS

• No early analysis and understanding of the user’s needs and expectations.


• A focus on using design features or components that are ―neat or glitzy.
• Little or no creation of design element prototypes.
• No usability testing.
• No common design team vision of user interface design goals.
• Poor communication between members of the development team.
DESIGNING FOR PEOPLE: THE FIVE
COMMANDMENTS
The complexity of a graphical or Web interface will always magnify any problems that do occur. Pitfalls can be eliminated if the following design
commandments remain foremost in the designer’s mind.
1. Gain a complete understanding of users and their tasks: The users are the customers. Today, people expect a level of design sophistication from all
interfaces, including Web sites. The product, system or Web site must be geared to people’s needs, not those of the developers.
2. Solicit early and ongoing user involvement: Involving the users in design from the beginning provides a direct conduit to the knowledge they possess
about jobs, tasks, and needs. Involvement also allows the developer to confront a person’s resistance to change, a common human trait. People dislike
change for a variety of reasons, among them fear of the unknown and lack of identification with the system.
3. Perform rapid prototyping and testing: Prototyping and testing the product will quickly identify problems and allow you to develop solutions.
Prototyping and testing must be continually performed during all stages of development to uncover all potential defects. If thorough testing is not performed
before product release, the testing will occur in the user’s office. Encountering a series of problems early in system use will create a negative first
impression in the customer’s mind, and this may harden quickly, creating attitudes that may be difficult to change. It is also much harder and more costly to
fix a product after its release. 
4. Modify and iterate the design as much as necessary: While design will proceed through a series of stages, problems detected in one stage may force the
developer to revisit a previous stage.. Establish user performance and acceptance criteria and continue testing and modifying until all design goals are met.
5. Integrate the design of all the system components: The software, the documentation, the help function, and training needs are all important elements of a
graphical system or Web site and all should be developed concurrently. Time will also exist for design trade-offs to be thought out more carefully.
USABILITY

• The term usability used to describe the effectiveness of human performance.


• The term usability is defined as ;
―the capability to be used by humans easily and effectively,
Where;
easily = to a specified level of subjective assessment,
effectively = to a specified level of human performance.
TEN COMMON USABILITY PROBLEMS;

1. Ambiguous menus and icons.


2. Languages that permit only single-direction movement through a system.
3. Input and direct manipulation limits.
4. Highlighting and selection limitations.
5. Unclear step sequences.
6. More steps to manage the interface than to perform tasks.
7. Complex linkage between and within applications.
8. Inadequate feedback and confirmation.
9. Lack of system anticipation and intelligence.
10. Inadequate error messages, help, tutorials, and documentation.
SOME PRACTICAL MEASURES OF USABILITY

• Are people asking a lot of questions or often reaching for a manual?


• Are frequent exasperation responses heard?
• Are there many irrelevant actions being performed?
• Are there many things to ignore?
• Do a number of people want to use the product?
SOME OBJECTIVE MEASURES OF USABILITY

• How effective is the interface? Can the required range of tasks be accomplished:
 At better than some required level of performance (for example, in terms of speed and errors)?
 By some required percentage of the specified target range of users?
 Within some required proportion of the range of usage environments?

• How learnable is the interface? Can the interface be learned:


 Within some specified time from commissioning and start of user training?
 Based on some specified amount of training and user support?
 Within some specified relearning time each time for intermittent users?

• How flexible is the interface? Is it flexible enough to:


 Allow some specified percentage variation in tasks and/or environments beyond those first specified?
 What are the attitudes of the users? Are they: Within acceptable levels of human cost in terms of tiredness, discomfort, frustration, and
personal effort?
 Such that satisfaction causes continued and enhanced usage of the system?
KNOW YOUR USER OR CLIENT

• To create a truly usable system, the designer must always do the following:
 Understand how people interact with computers.
 Understand the human characteristics important in design.
 Identify the user’s level of knowledge and experience.
 Identify the characteristics of the user’s needs, tasks, and jobs.
 Identify the user’s psychological characteristics.
 Identify the user’s physical characteristics.
 Employ recommended methods for gaining understanding of users.
WHY PEOPLE HAVE TROUBLE WITH COMPUTERS

• What makes a system difficult to use in the eyes of its user? Listed below are several
contributing factors that apply to traditional business systems
 Use of jargon.
 Non-obvious design.
 Non-obvious design.
 Disparity in problem-solving strategies.
 Design inconsistency
RESPONSES TO POOR DESIGN

• Psychological
 Confusion.
 Annoyance.
 Frustration.
 Panic or stress.
 Boredom.

• Physical
 Abandonment of the system.
 Partial use of the system.
 Indirect use of the system.
 Modification of the task.
 Compensatory activity.
 Misuse of the system.
 Direct programming
END OF DESIGN PROCESS
LECTURE 7

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