Week 8: Identifying needs & establishing requirements by DENYI

Identifying Needs:
Understand as much as possible about the users, as well as their work and the context of their work and system under development should support users in achieving their goals.

Definition of requirements:

- Statement about intended product that specifies what it should do or how it should perform.

- Specific, unambiguous and as clear as possible.

- Must know how to tell when they have been fulfilled.

Types of requirements:

Software engineering:

- Functional requirements: Specify what the system should do.

- Non-functional requirements: Specify what constraints there are on the system or its development.

Interaction design:

- Functional requirements: Capture what the product should do.

- Data requirements: Capture the accuracy and value the amounts of the required data.

- Environmental requirements: Circumstances in which interactive product will be expected to operate.

- User characteristics: Capture the characteristics of the intended user group.

- Usability goals and user experience goals: How well the users can perform.

Characteristics of Environmental Requirements:

- Physical: How much lighting, noise and dust is expected in the operational environment.

- Social: Social aspect of the interaction design - collaboration and coordination

- Organizational: How good is the user support likely to be, how easily it can be obtained and are there facilities/ resources for training.

- Technical: What technologies will the product run on or need to be compatible with and what technological limitations might be relevant.

Main principles of Contextual Inquiry:

- Context

- Partnership

- Interpretation

- Focus

Week 10: Physical Design - Getting Concrete

Design is about making choices and decisions
Physical interface of interactive product should not conflict with the user's cognitive process involved in achieving the task = DO NOT make user confuse and remember a long list. Instead, there should be a list of options for users to choose from.

Designing for different culture - Guidelines to help with International Design

• Be careful about using images that depict hand gestures or people ('thumbs-up', 'moutza', 'A-Ok', the 'Corna')
• Use generic icon (Folder, Lock and Floppy Disc for Save)
• Choose colour that are not associated with national flags or political movements.
• Ensure that the product supports different calendars, date formats and time formats.
• Ensure that the product supports different number formats, currencies, weights and measurement systems.
• Ensure that the product supports international paper sizes, envelope sizes and address format.
• Avoid integrating text in graphics as they cannot be translated easily.
• Allow for text expansion when translated from English.

Example: Coca-Cola VS Pepsi
Company can decide whether - produce 1 site that appeals across all cultures OR tailor to each country's website to the local culture?

Using scenarios in Design

• Scenarios can be used to explicate existing work situation but are more commonly used for expressing proposed or imagined situations to help in conceptual design.
• Four roles for scenarios:

1. i. A basis for the overall design
2. ii. For technical implementation
3. iii. As a mean of cooperation with design r
4. iv. As a mean of cooperation across professional boundaries - in a multidisciplinary team.

• Used for the notion of plus and minus scenarios
• Attempt to capture the most positive and the most negative consequences of a particular proposed design solution.
• Helping designers to gain

Using Prototypes in Design
Generating Storyboards from Scenarios

• A storyboard represents a sequence of actions or events that the user and the system go through to achieve a task.
• A scenario is one story about how a product may be used to achieve a task.
• How? - Break the scenario into a series of steps which focus on interaction. Then create one scene in the storyboard for each step.