Putting the "D" in UCD: User-Centered Design in the ThinkPad Experience Development

This article describes the application of user-centered design (UCD) principles to an existing product line in a focused attempt to reshape customers' attitudes about individual product offerings as well as the product brand as a whole. Examples of user research, design development, and validation are given to demonstrate the challenges of applying participatory design principles, and the methods used by the ThinkPad(r) UCD team to overcome those challenges. Special attention was given in three areas. First, the organizational design, or macro-UCD aspect of a successful product design effort is analyzed. Second, a mobile computer frustrations research project is reviewed as the baseline for the ThinkPad UCD effort. To address the frustrations, 4 UCD initiatives were conceived as part of a product-line redesign: a product line simplification based on common building blocks, a common user interface and aesthetic design language, a battery and power management improvement, and an intelligent user assistance architecture. Results are discussed in terms of improved brand equity, customer satisfaction, marketshare, and product cost savings. Key learning is discussed in terms of the success of the product realized through UCD as well as specific user engineering approaches that proved successful when applied to a mature commercial electronics product line.     

In pursuit of rigour and accountability in participatory design

The field of Participatory Design (PD) has greatly diversified and we see a broad spectrum of approaches and methodologies emerging. However, to foster its role in designing future interactive technologies, a discussion about accountability and rigour across this spectrum is needed. Rejecting the traditional, positivistic framework, we take inspiration from related fields such as Design Research and Action Research to develop interpretations of these concepts that are rooted in PD׳s own belief system. We argue that unlike in other fields, accountability and rigour are nuanced concepts that are delivered through debate, critique and reflection. A key prerequisite for having such debates is the availability of a language that allows designers, researchers and practitioners to construct solid arguments about the appropriateness of their stances, choices and judgements.To this end, we propose a “tool-to-think-with” that provides such a language by guiding designers, researchers and practitioners through a process of systematic reflection and critical analysis. The tool proposes four lenses to critically reflect on the nature of a PD effort: epistemology, values, stakeholders and outcomes. In a subsequent step, the coherence between the revealed features is analysed and shows whether they pull the project in the same direction or work against each other. Regardless of the flavour of PD, we argue that this coherence of features indicates the level of internal rigour of PD work and that the process of reflection and analysis provides the language to argue for it. We envision our tool to be useful at all stages of PD work: in the planning phase, as part of a reflective practice during the work, and as a means to construct knowledge and advance the field after the fact. We ground our theoretical discussions in a specific PD experience, the ECHOES project, to motivate the tool and to illustrate its workings.     

Exploring Design Guidelines of Using User-Centered Design in Gamification Development: A Delphi Study

Gamification has become an increasingly important trend in the field of human–computer interaction (HCI) design. Applying the idea of user-centered design (UCD) in gamification is drawing more and more attention as the gamification design theoretical frameworks referencing UCD have been proposed. However, questions like “How should a gamification project be developed with specific UCD methods?” and “What design guidelines could be applied in the practice of using UCD in gamification project?” remain unanswered. We hereby conducted a Delphi study to explore design guidelines for using UCD in gamification development with knowledge from practice. The Delphi panel recruited for this study included 20 experienced gamification designers, who produced 28 initial guideline items in the pre-Delphi round. After three rounds of addition, modification, and deletion, 35 design guidelines were ultimately identified. Among these, 31 were found process-oriented and in line with the classic UCD processes and the rest four were about collecting feedback from the design user participants. The author discovered that some of the design guidelines showed consistency with existing theoretical frameworks or design principles about gamification and UCD, and meanwhile, some appeared to be different from the known gamification design knowledge. The research results extended and complemented current gamification design field by providing maneuverable guides and a better overall understanding of how to conduct a gamification project with UCD for gamification researchers and practitioners. In addition, by using the Delphi method in the field of gamification, this study provided a reference to future research in HCI design which needed to draw lessons from practical knowledge.     

Creating wheelchair-controlled video games: Challenges and opportunities when involving young people with mobility impairments and game design experts

Although participatory design (PD) is currently the most acceptable and respectful process we have for designing technology, recent discussions suggest that there may be two barriers to the successful application of PD to the design of digital games: First, the involvement of audiences with special needs can introduce new practical and ethical challenges to the design process. Second, the use of non-experts in game design roles has been criticised in that participants lack skills necessary to create games of appropriate quality. To explore how domain knowledge and user involvement influence game design, we present results from two projects that addressed the creation of movement-based wheelchair-controlled video games from different perspectives. The first project was carried out together with a local school that provides education for young people with special needs, where we invited students who use wheelchairs to take part in design sessions. The second project involved university students on a game development course, who do not use wheelchairs, taking on the role of expert designers. They were asked to design concepts for wheelchair-controlled games as part of a final-year course on game design. Our results show that concepts developed by both groups were generally suitable examples of wheelchair-controlled motion-based video games, but we observed differences regarding level of detail of game concepts, and ideas of disability. Additionally, our results show that the design exercise exposed vulnerabilities in both groups, outlining that the risk of practical and emotional vulnerability needs to be considered when working with the target audience as well as expert designers.     

Dashboards to Support Operational Decision Making in Health Centers: A Case for Role-Specific Design

Applying a user-centered design (UCD) process within the framework of a learning healthcare system (LHS), this study unearths role-specific performance measures to support operational and financial decision making in community health centers (CHCs). We first built a multidimensional EHR/Practice Management data warehouse through a large collaborative of seven CHCs in the state of Indiana aimed at improving efficiency and access to care. A UCD process that comprised contextual interviews, card sorting and high fidelity dashboard prototyping was used to uncover over 45 different operational performance measures, many of which were unique and hitherto unknown measures of relevance to different individual roles within a CHC that included frontline staff, providers, clinical support, and executive management. Within the LHS paradigm, the study highlights the value of role-specific performance measurement and their delivery through interactive user-centered visualizations, while continuing to guide the development of future informatics tools.     

Towards user centred design (UCD) in architecture based on immersive virtual environments

This paper describes a generic concept of how to combine the experience of user centred design (UCD) in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) with the traditional approach of participatory design (PD) in an architectural design process. Even if some basic requirements of this generic method are not available yet, this paper will also describe an approach, which enables planners even now to involve end users by using virtual environments (VE) as immersive and spatial prototype. It will be described and illustrated by the way of example using the building project Centre of Virtual Engineering of the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (IAO) in Stuttgart. It demonstrates that the transfer of the UCD approach to architectural planning combined with the provision of an adequate prototype can make a significant contribution towards an increase in quality and performance in building and construction projects.     

Towards methods for evaluating and communicating participatory design: A multimodal approach

Participatory Design (PD) has been proposed as a useful strategy to address pitfalls in the design of serious games for children with special needs. Nonetheless, methodological weaknesses in the analysis of the results of PD workshops may hinder its effectiveness in providing useful and robust design contributions and facilitating communication in multidisciplinary teams. To address this issue we propose the use of multimodal analysis to evaluate participants’ contributions during PD workshops. We present an analysis that was applied in an informant workshop with autistic children, aimed at refining the design of a serious game based on Full-Body Interaction. Results show that multimodal analysis constitutes an effective and coherent method to capture and analyze users’ contributions across a wide range of semiotic resources, thus extending the richness of insights that can be derived from a PD workshop and communicated to the rest of the team. Furthermore, the analysis allowed the identification of fundamental design questions, thus offering a robust empirical ground for supporting dialogue and reflection between multiple stakeholders.     

Requirements Elicitation with and for Older Adults

The study investigated the strengths and weaknesses of existing user-centered design (UCD) methods for eliciting requirements from older adults. A case study in which older people are involved in designing, developing, and evaluating a virtual-garden prototype. Users could potentially employ this device (which has an interface that resembles a real garden) as an empathic information appliance that would provide weather forecasts and help control smart devices and assistive technologies. Creativity-oriented techniques are suggested to designers, developers, and engineers when creating products so that older people are included in the market consideration.     

DB2 Universal Database: A Case Study of a Successful User-Centered Design Program

This case study describes the application of user-centered design (UCD) principles to the development of a complex middleware software product-IBM's DB2(r) Universal Database. Motivated by trade press reviews highlighting ease-of-use problems, a multisite development team utilized IBM UCD to transform ease of use into a featured product attribute. This case study describes the initial application of UCD to DB21 and the positive business results that followed: critical acclaim, increased marketshare and user satisfaction, and increased support and adoption of UCD across the IBM database product family. Although ease-of-use objectives, target markets, and human factors practitioners' roles have evolved over 6 years and multiple versions of the product, DB2 continues to achieve positive results with UCD. In addition to the flexibility of the UCD methodology, other factors that influenced DB2's success included management support, resource commitment, cross-site communication and collaboration, detailed product specifications, and a focus on supporting user tasks.     

User-Centered Design at IBM Consulting

IBM's traditions in human factors are rooted as far back as the 1950s. This article traces and describes how the challenges to the discipline have changed over the last 40 years, based on the personal and professional experiences of the authors. During that span of time, the focus of attention has shifted from traditional knobs and dials hardware, to system and application software, and now to consulting services.

This article discusses these changes and describes how user-centered design (UCD) has become a key component of the IBM Global Services (GS) information technology consulting approach. The UCD component of the GS method is described and illustrated with 2 case study samples from recent engagements.     

A Walk-Up-and-Use Information System for the Sydney Olympics: A Case Study in User-Centered Design

The info information retrieval system was designed and developed for the XXVII Olympic Summer Games held in Sydney, Australia in September 2000. info provided journalists and broadcasters with information for planning their days at the games and producing their coverage of Olympic events. The user-centered design (UCD) team from the IBM Storage Systems Group was invited to work with the info system for the 2000 games and was able to do extensive UCD work, including working with journalists, broadcasters, and sports researchers from North America, Europe, and Asia. Throughout the development cycle the UCD team worked closely with the info programming team located in Madrid, Spain and with other teams in Sydney, Australia. Later, the UCD team joined a large cast of volunteers and professionals in providing support for info at the Sydney games. This opportunity allowed the UCD team to make observations and collect data on the usability of the system, and these indicate that info was indeed easy to use and that customers were very satisfied with the system. info's success was due to an extensive multidisciplinary team that included visual designers, human factors and human-computer interaction specialists, user research specialists, developers, marketers, IBM executives, and an active customer sponsor. The project demonstrates that application of UCD methods can improve product usability even when challenged with extremely dispersed teams and immovable deadlines.     

A KE-LSA approach for user-centered design

In today’s highly competitive business environment, most successful companies use ‘user-centered’ design techniques, to create products that meet user needs. Designers have used traditional user-centered design techniques, with some degree of success. However, in today’s market, companies need more accurate, more advanced user-centered design techniques, to mass produce customized products for individual users. This study introduces a new KE-LSA approach for user-centered design. Prior techniques used Kansei engineering (KE) for product design. Prior techniques used latent semantic analysis (LSA) for document indexing. The KE-LSA approach uses KE and a KE-LSA semantic space for individually customized product design. A case study is used to describe the KE-LSA approach. The case study uses the KE-LSA approach to match Kansei values for individual users’ needs to cell phone designs for each user. The case study also determines accuracy for matching KE-LSA designs to each user’s actual choice for a cell phone. In the case study, an iterative KE-LSA approach matched designs to users’ choices, with 82.3% overall accuracy. The iterative KE-LSA approach improved overall accuracy 11.4%, compared to a traditional iterative KE-QT1 approach. The KE-LSA approach improves matching accuracy for mass producing individually customized cell phone designs. Therefore, this study improves individually customized product design and product quality.     

Knowledge acquisition in ecological product design: The effects of computer-mediated communication and elicitation method

In the mid 1980s, a cluster of HF professionals described a new paradigm in which technology would be designed for a better fit not just with individual users but also with organizational systems and dynamics. The term 'Macroergonomics' took hold to describe this broadening of perspective. This concept was a manifestation of the holistic design philosophy and values of the user-centred design (UCD) paradigm, but tended to place more emphasis on how technology fit into organizational systems than on either design or on individual use of technology. While the benefits in the quality of work life that were expected to result from paying more attention to how organizations managed technology and technological change were many, the track record has been disappointing. The promotion of a focus on the organizational context of technology did not lead directly to practical application or make companies more humane for either their workers or for external customers. Today, however, with the maturation and broadening application of user-centred design approaches, the time is ripe to apply them to the design of information systems within companies as vigorously as they are being applied to products and systems intended for consumers.     

Knowledge acquisition and interface design

Describes tools, techniques, and concepts to optimize user interfaces. The best way to ensure that a software system is friendly and works is to base it on the intended users' mental models (how they view the world), knowledge structures (what they know and how they have organized it), and work processes. The author uses a team of engineers to systematically acquire and analyze user and domain knowledge and to translate that knowledge into user-interface design decisions. This front-end analysis method, combined with knowledge-acquisition techniques, lets one build user-centered systems     

Templates for Search Queries: A User-Centered Feature for Improving Web Search Tools

A template for search queries was developed based on user-centered design principles and was proposed to assist users in formulating Web search queries. The user-centered design was characterized by predefined search queries organized as a hierarchy. Two experimental search engines and browsers were developed: One was based on currently available search engines and the other was based on the user-centered template design. An experiment was conducted to test the effectiveness of the template design. The dependent variables were (a) the number of relevant Web sites identified during a 1-hr test period, (b) the time to find the first relevant Web site, and (c) satisfaction. The independent variable was type of search engine. The experimental results indicated that the user-centered template design improved users' search performance by 70% and satisfaction of use by 23% as compared to the current search engine.     

Comprehensive change management concepts. Development of a participatory approach

During the last years, many change projects in organizations did not have the planned success. Therefore at first, the causes for these failures and the success factors contributing to organizational change have to be discussed. To get better results, a comprehensive change management concept has been developed and tested in an ongoing research project. By using concepts for an integrated assessment and design of organizations, an approach for analyzing the current situation has been elaborated to identify “lack of integration” in the change initiatives of a company. To realize an integrated overall approach of modernization by harmonizing different methods and concepts, first, one has to prove their relationship to policy and strategy (vertical harmonization). The second step is to take into account the fact that there has to be a logical fit between the single concepts (horizontal harmonization). But even if all elements are logically coherent, that does not mean that the people working in the company also see this coherence. Therefore, in addition to the “logical fit”, one has to examine the “psychological fit”. In the end, a concept for analyzing the status quo in an organization as a result of “objective data” and “subjective data” originated.

Subsequently, instruments for harmonizing different modernizing concepts have been applied. As part of the comprehensive change management concept participatory ergonomic approaches have been used during the project. The present study shows this approach in the case of one company.     

A new user-centered design approach: A hair washing assistive device design for users with shoulder mobility restriction

This study utilized a user-centered design approach as the foundation for a new Assistive Device (AD) design process. Observation and evaluation results from a Usability Context Analysis (UCA) was used to improve the analysis of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT Analysis) and the matrix of Threats, Opportunities, Weaknesses, and Strengths (TOWS matrix), resulting in two assistive device design methods named AD-SWOT and AD-TOWS. Thus, an AD-design process, tailored for designing assistive devices, was both established and tested. Owing to the information gained from using the design processes and evaluating product efficiency with various cases in the early part of the research, it was decided to use the AD-design process for the entire design process. Using this process, an adjustable hair washer for physically disabled individuals to wash their hair using normal postures was developed. Furthermore, the method derived in this study can also be applied to users suffering from single-sided shoulder-joint mobility disabilities, such as frontal flexion, scapular plan elevation, and restricted abductors.     

Design for experience innovation: understanding user experience in new product development

In providing a better experience to users in terms of product usage, we focus on the important concept of a user-centred design (UCD), and explore a new approach to user experience (UX), with the effort to understand experience-driven innovation. Based on the conceptual framework of experiential network and the results of multiple case studies covering 643 successfully designed products or services providing an optimised UX, we categorise the UX context into the following four representative types: individualisation, combination, integration, and ecosystem. Furthermore, we identify the essential UCD concepts that reflect the core needs and expectations of users in each of the designed contexts, that is, specialty, usefulness, usability, and fluency. Finally, we discuss the dynamic concepts that help achieve a successful experience innovation. We expect these findings to play a crucial role in the development of novel design concepts or strategies, not only to better understand the needs of contemporary users, but also to better understand the dynamics of innovation.