http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/User-Centered-Design/Methods A listing of the most recently indexed works about Articles and User Centered Design and Methods in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/User-Centered-Design/Methods http://tc.eserver.org/35505.html http://tc.eserver.org/35505.html Personas are a powerful tool for helping you to better understand the needs of your users. In this comic, drawn exclusively for Think Vitamin, you’ll learn more about Personas and how they’ll revolutionize the way you design and build web sites. http://tc.eserver.org/35507.html http://tc.eserver.org/35507.html The usefulness of personas in defining and designing interactive products has become more widely accepted in the last few years, but a lack of published information has, unfortunately, left room for a lot of misconceptions about how personas are created, and about what information actually comprises a persona. Although space does not permit a full treatment of persona creation in this article, I hope to highlight a few essential points. http://tc.eserver.org/35509.html http://tc.eserver.org/35509.html Using "personas" forces us to think carefully about who our customer is for each product — what they need and want and how they'll use it. We've come up with a few personas, and each one has a name and personality. Even for a book on business planning, for instance, "Sally Startup" has different needs than does "Vic Venture." http://tc.eserver.org/35271.html http://tc.eserver.org/35271.html One of the key characteristics of a manipulation technique versus related techniques like transformation is that the underlying data remains unchanged. The main thing we’re doing is changing the relationship - logical or physical - that one piece of data has with another. Reorganizing the data helps us to identify patterns that may otherwise not be apparent. In fact, it is almost certain that most patterns won’t be visible at first glance. Let’s start by taking a more detailed look at some of the processes that contribute to the manipulation of data. http://tc.eserver.org/35098.html http://tc.eserver.org/35098.html I believe designers gather data to understand the personas that represent the users for whom they are designing a user interface. This is quite similar to the way actors must develop an understanding of their characters. So, developing their character-building and storytelling skills can help designers—just as it does actors. http://tc.eserver.org/35105.html http://tc.eserver.org/35105.html It's easy to bias study participants, whether in user testing or in card sorting, if they focus on matching stimulus words instead of working on the underlying problem. http://tc.eserver.org/34947.html http://tc.eserver.org/34947.html Now that I have your attention, I’ll tell you up front that what Janea follows is not a rant. It’s not even a statement for or against Triplett political correctness. It’s a caution–words of warning about the creation of personas and the practice of user profiling. Even if one calls it the development of an archetype or ideal type, it is still a stereotype. http://tc.eserver.org/34949.html http://tc.eserver.org/34949.html Having worked with personas before the method ever came to be known as personas there are, from my research and practical experience, three important areas that have to be considered: the data material, engagement in the personas descriptions, and buy-in from the organization which is part of the development process whether it is redesign or a development from scratch. This is the rationale behind my development of 10 steps to personas, an attempt to cover the entire process from initial data gathering to ongoing development. http://tc.eserver.org/34456.html http://tc.eserver.org/34456.html The use of personas as a method for communicating user requirements in collaborative design environments is well established. However, very little research has been conducted to quantify the benefits of using this technique. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using personas. An experiment was conducted over a period of 5 weeks using students from NCAD. The results showed that, through using personas, designs with superior usability characteristics were produced. They also indicate that using personas provides a significant advantage during the research and conceptualisation stages of the design process (supporting previously unfounded claims). The study also investigated the effects of using different presentation methods to present personas and concluded that photographs worked better than illustrations, and that visual storyboards were more effective in presenting task scenarios than text only versions. http://tc.eserver.org/34465.html http://tc.eserver.org/34465.html The key principal of UCD is integrating users that represent the profiles of the target user group/s into the development process. Typically, friends, family and (most definitely) colleagues are not representative of the target user base! However, they’re nearly always free with advice. But the validity of this advice is often questionable. In order to integrate unbiased user feedback into the process the following are key steps in a UCD process. http://tc.eserver.org/33113.html http://tc.eserver.org/33113.html Outlines some common objections to doing user research and provides some defense against them. http://tc.eserver.org/32800.html http://tc.eserver.org/32800.html One powerful design tool, personas, can help provide a framework for building Intranets that will satisfy a variety of needs. Effectively developed and used, personas enable Intranet teams to hone in on user needs and build interfaces and user experiences that end-user audiences can and will use. http://tc.eserver.org/32356.html http://tc.eserver.org/32356.html Usability practice needs a procedure to identify, record, count, and highlight tool switch events for study. This paper describes one that supports the trained observers on which User-Centered Design relies to detect problems and causes, and evaluate design changes. http://tc.eserver.org/31588.html http://tc.eserver.org/31588.html A downward trend in survey response rates is often blamed on the fact that people simply become tired of taking surveys. Butthere are ways to avoid the malaise setting in, says Angela Sinickas, a key one being making sure thatpeople feel their opinions are actually being listened to. Here she shares three common causes of survey fatigue and how to deal with them. http://tc.eserver.org/31069.html http://tc.eserver.org/31069.html Focus groups are a powerful means to evaluate services or test new ideas. Basically, focus groups are interviews, but of 6-10 people at the same time in the same group. One can get a great deal of information during a focus group session. http://tc.eserver.org/30638.html http://tc.eserver.org/30638.html Creating a product that has a logical information structure is critical to the success of the product. A good structure helps users find information and accomplish their tasks with ease. Card sorting is one method that can help us understand how users think the information and navigation should be within a product. http://tc.eserver.org/30297.html http://tc.eserver.org/30297.html If you're just going to guess on the personas, why bother? Just design for yourself, like the 37Signals team does. However, when you do the field studies, you create relationships with the people in your research. You can return to those people and ask them questions. You can learn about the things they do. http://tc.eserver.org/30006.html http://tc.eserver.org/30006.html Activity modeling is a systematic approach to organizing and representing the contextual aspects of tool use that is both well-grounded in an accepted theoretical framework and embedded within a proven design method. Activity theory provides the vocabulary and conceptual framework for understanding the human use of tools and other artifacts. Usage-centered design provides the methodological scaffolding for applying activity theory in practice. In this Technical Paper, activity theory and usage-centered design are outlined and the connections between the two are highlighted. Simple extensions to the models of usage-centered design are introduced that together succinctly model the salient and most essential features of the activities within which tool use is embedded. Although not intended as a tutorial, examples of Activity Maps, Activity Profiles, and Participation Maps are provided. http://tc.eserver.org/30007.html http://tc.eserver.org/30007.html User role models are compared in detail with the popular user modeling technique of personas. User roles offer a more compact, more focused means of capturing and exploring those aspects of users most relevant to interaction design. The advantages and limitations of the approaches are considered and a combined strategy is described. http://tc.eserver.org/29940.html http://tc.eserver.org/29940.html You do research to better understand your users, but exactly what is it that you want to find out about them? That's the first question you need to ask, and its answer dictates which research methods you should use, since specific methods are tailored to finding specific types of information. http://tc.eserver.org/29621.html http://tc.eserver.org/29621.html Participatory communication is most often applied to development communications--a field of practice rooted in the modernization efforts of the U.S. post World War II. Similar to participatory design, popular definitions and models of participatory communication provide a lens through which the efficacy of user-centered communications may be viewed. At Indiana University, we have had success in increasing the usability and usefulness of communication products by including end users, their advocates, and related stakeholders in cross-functional teams. The adoption of new systems used at Indiana University was fueled by communications strategies, plans, and products that resulted from a participatory approach. http://tc.eserver.org/29510.html http://tc.eserver.org/29510.html Personas are detailed descriptions of imaginary people constructed out of well-understood, highly specified data about real people. We believe that when you use data to create personas, and use personas in a thoughtful way during the product development process, you will: increase your product's usability, utility, and general appeal; streamline your team's processes and improve your colleagues' abilities to work together; enable your company to make business decisions that help both your company and your customers; improve your company's bottom line. http://tc.eserver.org/29473.html http://tc.eserver.org/29473.html Words of warning about the creation of personas and the practice of user profiling. Even if one calls it the development of an archetype or ideal type, it is still a stereotype. http://tc.eserver.org/29475.html http://tc.eserver.org/29475.html The individual components of a persona are described and an example persona relating to the SecureCam case study is provided. http://tc.eserver.org/29474.html http://tc.eserver.org/29474.html I feel that creation of user persona is nothing but realistic stereotyping or a simplified outline of the user. The word 'realistic' is more important as realism can be achieved only through user study. (I am not referring to the fictional personas applicable in futuristic technologies). Humorists, cartoonists and filmmakers are gifted with the art of stereotyping. But they tend to exaggerate a lot. Therefore the personalities they render appear like caricatures. We must avoid caricatured user personas. While stereotyping, you generalize and oversimplify. And when you do that you pick or eliminate some details. That makes all the difference. http://tc.eserver.org/29271.html http://tc.eserver.org/29271.html Personas are a useful tool, but they need to be built with care. It's very easy to write a persona which on a quick glance looks good, but is actually not. http://tc.eserver.org/28682.html http://tc.eserver.org/28682.html The design community keeps making a lot of noise about designing for people/users/customers. However, while this notion is well-intentioned and even conceptually correct, I find much of it boils down to empty rhetoric. What exactly are we doing? More user research? More usability testing? Certainly these are valid approaches to finding out about people's needs, but they're only a small part of an optimal solution. Are we using hollow tasks and tools like personas and scenarios? Those approaches typically take design farther away from the people for whom we are designing products rather than closer. How about focusing on usability and the user experience? That gets at only part of the issue and tends to come from the perspective of the product--as opposed to the more universal needs and desires of actual people. http://tc.eserver.org/28075.html http://tc.eserver.org/28075.html What are the best ways to measure customer satisfaction? Wiley shares some of her ideas. http://tc.eserver.org/26544.html http://tc.eserver.org/26544.html Buying new clothes and looking at current fashions is usually much more interesting and exciting than digging through one's closet or laundry hamper. However, there is a lot one can learn by stopping and taking a minute to examine one's own clothes. http://tc.eserver.org/26121.html http://tc.eserver.org/26121.html As most of us know by now, customer personas and scenarios are vehicles for helping an organization continuously keep their customers in their line of sight. Traditional segmentation identifies and categorizes a current or potential audience based upon common characteristics, including demographics, attitudes, behavior, transactions, frequency of interaction, spend, and more. They are discovered by “doing the math,” which may include data aggregation, cluster analysis, factor analysis, and other statistical methods applied to large sample sets. And then segments are given catchy names like Savvy Skeptics, Active Balancers, Indulgent Nutritionist, or Trade-Uppers. When done right, segments are statistically derived from the analysis and synthesis of quantitative data and are a solid foundation for customer understanding. http://tc.eserver.org/25605.html http://tc.eserver.org/25605.html Buying new clothes and looking at current fashions is usually much more interesting and exciting than digging through one’s closet or laundry hamper. However, there is a lot one can learn by stopping and taking a minute to examine one's own clothes. http://tc.eserver.org/24570.html http://tc.eserver.org/24570.html Technical communicators have recently become interested in user-centered design (UCD) for designing and evaluating technical genres. Yet, a critical examination of the field methods of UCD suggests that they suffer from unintegrated scope: an undesirably limiting focus on a particular level of scope (either the macroscopic level of human activity or the mesoscopic level of goal-directed action) in their theoretical underpinnings and data collection and analysis. This focus is often paired with the assumption that this particular level of scope causally affects what happens at the other levels. Both the focus and the assumption are at odds with sociocultural theories of human activity. This article lays out the problem of unintegrated scope and examines it through critical analyses of two field methods used in UCD research. It concludes by proposing an integrated-scope research methodology for UCD research, with roots in both sociocultural theory and the central issues of technical communication. http://tc.eserver.org/24381.html http://tc.eserver.org/24381.html If you’re looking for a quick, simple, and cost-efficient way to survey your members, you may want to try a Web-based survey service such as Zoomerang. Zoomerang offers users the ability to create and design their own surveys, send the surveys to targeted groups, and download the results, which Zoomerang tabulates. http://tc.eserver.org/24282.html http://tc.eserver.org/24282.html Are you interested in a gaining a better understanding of tasks and task analysis? Are you looking for practical hints on doing workflow analysis, job analysis, or procedural analysis? Are you used to writing about tasks based on product features, when you know the product would be better if the team had done task analysis first? If so, come participate in this demonstration/workshop in which we'll explore how to understand users' work by doing task analysis before designing the product. http://tc.eserver.org/24225.html http://tc.eserver.org/24225.html In this paper we will report on the development and implementation of the first part of a two-part web-based survey distributed to a university population of over 20,000 faculty, staff and students. This large-scale project presented multiple operational, technical and design challenges. User-centered design was crucial to the successful development and deployment of the survey. This survey tool was used to explore the richness and potential value of web surveys motivated by a combination of a desire to improve both the survey-taking process and results-computing process. The objective of this research is to design and implement an effective Web survey tool, record user participation, determine the value of implementing a two-part survey over time (longitudinal), and to identify improvements for future web-based surveys. The benefit to the organization will be the identification of service areas in need of improvements and the ability to match satisfaction level with actual product/service costs. http://tc.eserver.org/24213.html http://tc.eserver.org/24213.html We think about them every day. We try to anticipate their every need, predict their every question. They are our readers, our audience, the users and consumers of our documentation. http://tc.eserver.org/23646.html http://tc.eserver.org/23646.html IBM WebSphere Commerce is a software product that enables merchants to sell goods and services online. The user audience who has the task to understand the product complexities and build stores for the customers consists of store developers - a large group of users from external companies or within IBM. Conducting a survey to gather their feedback on store development proved to be a powerful method for understanding the various store development scenarios and identifying areas for product improvement. Some of the techniques that helped us create a successful customer survey involved using a multidisciplinary group to create the survey questions, tirelessly communicating the results, and following up on the issues. http://tc.eserver.org/23509.html http://tc.eserver.org/23509.html When it comes to usability testing, the field of anthropology is offering new insight into effective research methodologies.  Ethnography is a form of research that anthropologists developed to observe how people behave in their own environments — and it's catching on in product development. http://tc.eserver.org/23351.html http://tc.eserver.org/23351.html This toolkit enables you to build up detailed profiles of the personas themselves, their relationship to the product, and the context in which they use the product. The intended user of the toolkit is the product's designer, so it's it advisable to streamline the personas to critical aspects when presenting them outside the product development team. Even within the development team, not everyone may need every single detail about the persona. http://tc.eserver.org/23293.html http://tc.eserver.org/23293.html ' Personas' is an interaction design technique with considerable potential for software product development. In three years of use, our colleagues and we have extended Alan Cooperís technique to make Personas a powerful complement to other usability methods. After describing and illustrating our approach, we outline the psychological theory that explains why Personas are more engaging than design based primarily on scenarios. As Cooper and others have observed, Personas can engage team members very effectively. They also provide a conduit for conveying a broad range of qualitative and quantitative data, and focus attention on aspects of design and use that other methods do not. http://tc.eserver.org/23039.html http://tc.eserver.org/23039.html User-centered design professionals pay special emphasis to one type of stakeholder—the users of the system—arguing that user experience needs to be carefully crafted to satisfy user needs. While understanding user needs and goals is certainly necessary, it is often not sufficient for producing a successful design. http://tc.eserver.org/22121.html http://tc.eserver.org/22121.html This file contains the responses I received to a message I sent on January 21, 2000 to the TECHWR-L and WINHLP-L discussion lists. It was posted on the Techwhirl website for awhile but was removed during a reorganisation of the site. Other people's comments are included with their permission. http://tc.eserver.org/21777.html http://tc.eserver.org/21777.html Marco Zappa lavora come visual designer in una web agency. Quando ha iniziato, tre anni fa, la societa' era composta da una trentina di persone, mentre oggi le persone sono quasi settanta. I progetti a cui lavora sono cambiati, e anche i ruoli all'interno della sua azienda si sono modificati e specializzati. Ora le attivita' sui progetti sono divise in maniera piu' rigida e precisa. Per questo motivo, insieme al fatto che i progetti sono piu' complessi e ci sono piu figure professionali coinvolte, non e' raro che si lavori in dieci o quindici persone sullo stesso progetto. Fino a un anno prima tutti i materiali venivano lasciati su un server con accesso pubblico: ogni progetto aveva una sua cartella, strutturata al suo interno in piu' sottocartelle per i documenti di progetto, le proposte grafiche, i materiali forniti dai clienti e tutti gli elementi grafici e contenutistici prodotti. Il sito vero e proprio risiedeva invece su un server di preview, con accesso riservato ad alcuni membri del team. http://tc.eserver.org/21333.html http://tc.eserver.org/21333.html Defining requirements and features can be a daunting task under the best of circumstances. The Vision Prototype allows the user-centered vision to be seen—and discussed—by all team members and then easily translated into a set of functional requirements. http://tc.eserver.org/21029.html http://tc.eserver.org/21029.html Describes how technical communicators can use field research--observing people in their workplaces, homes, and schools--to gain a better understanding of user behavior. http://tc.eserver.org/20928.html http://tc.eserver.org/20928.html For those who are interested in usability – whether long-time advocates or newly introduced – this is a good time to introduce a user-centered design process. http://tc.eserver.org/20297.html http://tc.eserver.org/20297.html When it comes to learning about your users, a plethora of methods await you. But which one is best for your situation? The answer depends on many factors, including the kind of information you hope to discover, the time and budget you have available, and your access to users. http://tc.eserver.org/19748.html http://tc.eserver.org/19748.html The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they have about their users. When teams have the right information, the job of designing a powerful, intuitive, easy-to-use interface becomes tremendously easier. When they don't, every little design decision becomes a struggle. While techniques, such as focus groups, usability tests, and surveys, can lead to valuable insights, the most powerful tool in the toolbox is the 'field study'. Field studies get the team immersed in the environment of their users and allow them to observe critical details for which there is no other way of discovering. http://tc.eserver.org/14758.html http://tc.eserver.org/14758.html Smart reviews several user-centered methods technical communicators can use to gather information for designing and improving customers' experience with documentation.