IMAT 3712

Human Computer
Interaction
User Centred Design
Acknowledgements
 Some slides originated in
 Lectures developed by Howell Istance
 Lectures developed by John Burns
 Supporting PowerPoint materials for Interaction

Design by Sharp, Preece and Rogers

 Chapter 1 of McCracken and Wolfe, User-Centred

Website Development, Prentice Hall, 2003

Overview
 Different approaches to interaction design
 User centred design
 Importance of involving users
 Iterative design
 Agile UX
What is involved in interaction
design?
 Interaction design is a process:
 a goal-directed problem solving activity

informed by intended use, target domain,

materials, cost, and feasibility
 a creative activity involving imagination
 a decision-making activity to balance trade-

offs
Four approaches to interaction
design
 From Dan Saffer Designing for Interaction (2010)
 Extreme caricatures – mixture in real life

 User Centred Design

 The user knows best – focus is user goals and

needs
 Activity Centred Design
 Based on behaviour surrounding particular tasks
 Systems Design
 Structured, rigorous process, focus on context,

good for complex problems

 Genius Design
What is a user centred
approach?
 You don’t know what the users want and need
 Even if you’re a user, you’re not a typical user
 There may not be a typical user

 The users don’t know what the users want and

need
 Know a lot about needs and situations
 Don’t know how to tell you – how to turn their

insight into usable requirements

 Don’t know what technology can give them
 Think of new requirements when they see

prototypes
What is a user centred
approach?
 User-centred approach is based on:
 Early focus on users and tasks: directly studying

cognitive, behavioural, anthropomorphic &

attitudinal characteristics
 Empirical measurement: observing and

analysing users’ reactions and performance to

scenarios, manuals, simulations & prototypes
 Iterative design: when problems are found in

user testing, fix them and carry out more tests

 Talking to users: users know things you don’t

about what they want and need

Importance of involving users
 Understand user needs
 Functionality
 Matching system to human capabilities
Importance of involving users
 Expectation management
 Realistic expectations
 No surprises, no disappointments
 Timely training
 Communication, but no hype
Importance of involving users
 Ownership
 Make the users active stakeholders
 More likely to forgive or accept problems
 Can make a big difference to acceptance and

success of product
Clashes with needs and
expectations
 Within-function interactions – speed, memory load,
behaviour of controls, format of information
displays…
 Functions – operations don’t match users’
conception of tasks
 Tasks – developers haven’t identified all the tasks
the users want or need to perform
Clashes with needs and
expectations
 Activities – developers have misunderstood the
nature of some or all of the users’ activities
 Architecture – system design can’t support
workload, or enable modification of feature sets, or
is incompatible with other systems
 Development process – developers and users have
clashing expectations of project, or process can’t
support identification of requirements
Who are the
users/stakeholders?
 Not as obvious as you think:
 those who interact directly with the product
 those who manage direct users
 those who receive output from the product
 those who make the purchasing decision
 those who use competitors’ products

 Three categories of user (Eason, 1987):

 primary: frequent hands-on
 secondary: via someone else
 tertiary: affected by its introduction, or will

influence its purchase

Who are the stakeholders?
Check-out operators

Suppliers

Local shop
owners

Customers
Managers and owners
Degrees of user involvement
 Member of the design team
 Full time: constant input, but lose touch with

users
 Part time: patchy input, and very stressful
 Short term: inconsistent across project life
 Long term: consistent, but lose touch with users
 Consultant
 Interviewed, shown prototypes, as needed
 Newsletters and other dissemination devices
 Reach wider selection of users
 Need communication both ways
 User involvement after product is released
Four basic activities
1. Establishing requirements
2. Designing alternatives
3. Prototyping
4. Evaluating

 How should these be organized?

Iterative development
 Setting your requirements in concrete at beginning
doesn’t work well for interactive systems

 Iterative interaction design…

 Your first interface designs aren’t your best
 You can’t fully understand user requirements for

interactive systems before you’ve tested

prototypes
 There will be usability glitches

 Repeating design, development, testing

 Recognize mistakes, quickly

Iterative development
 After preparatory phase, REPEAT
 ANALYSE
 DESIGN
 PROTOTYPE
 EVALUATE

UNTIL satisfactory, or out of time

 Test-and-revise is planned in

 RAD is an example of an iterative development

methodology
Iterative development

DESIGN

PROTOTYPE

EVALUATE

MEET USER READY TO

SPECIFICATIONS? IMPLEMENT
NO YES
Rapid Application Development
 RAD
1. Methodology proposed by James Martin
2. More general term for rapid iterative
development

 User Design employs

Joint Application
Development techniques
(developers collaborate with
users to produce models and
prototypes)
UX in Agile Development
 Agile and UX don’t mix… easily

 Agile Manifesto didn’t involve UX practitioners

 About the problems faced by programmers
 UX doesn’t turn up in the rhetoric of agile
 Development methodologies in all industries
address problems their instigators find
challenging…
 Main agile software methodologies (Scrum, XP,

etc) focus on solving problems that make coding

hard
 Technology-centric, not user-centric
 Not obvious how to get interface design
UX in Agile Development:
Problems
 Tight turnround times for new versions make
interaction design hard to do right
 Idea that you can divide development into small

units of functionality – doesn’t always fit UX

perspective
 Idea that changes in functionality can happen

quickly
 Idea that whole team can work on the same

aspect of a project at once

 Creates pressure to create, test, refine, deliver

interface designs unrealistically fast

 Cuts out space for big picture thinking and

understanding context
UX in Agile Development:
Needs
1. Managers and stakeholders get it
 Leaders understand why UX is important and

what good UX needs

2. UX people show leadership
 Point out assumptions
 Teach, explain, so developers get it

3. Agile process is actually flexible

 Don’t do rigid scrum without getting the point of

agile!
4. UX pros and developers are part of the same team
 Ownership of project and mutual respect
 Interact as much as needed
UX in Agile Development:
Solutions
 Get UX perspective into project planning
 Get UX perspective into setting sprint goals

 You CAN have a UX team using Scrum, figuring out

the designs, a few sprints ahead of the dev teams
 Do you have enough interaction, mutual respect,

mutual support?
The guiding principle
 Design cost-effectively!
 Explore alternatives
 Find out what users want to do with your system
 Find problems and weaknesses with design

proposals
 Avoid premature commitment
 Don’t invest effort into elaborating or

implementing a design before you’ve done what

you can (with earlier versions) to make sure it’s
the right design

 Don’t work harder, work smarter!

Pixar:
Iterative development of films
 “Early on, all of our movies suck. That's a blunt
assessment, I know, but I… choose that phrasing
because saying it in a softer way fails to convey
how bad the first versions of our films really are.
I'm not trying to be modest or self-effacing by
saying this. Pixar films are not good at first, and
our job is to make them go… from suck to non-
suck. We are true believers in the iterative process
- reworking, reworking and reworking again, until a
flawed story finds its throughline or a hollow
character finds its soul.”

-- Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar

Reading
 Chapter 2 of Rogers, Sharp, Preece, Interaction
Design, 6th ed. (Otherwise the chapter on
development process in earlier editions.)
 (Also useful) Chapter 1.4-1.6 of Stone, Jarrett,
Woodroffe, Minocha, User Interface Design and
Evaluation
Reading
 Short web article by Page Laubheimer, Agile Is not
Easy for UX: (How to) Deal with It
 https://www.nngroup.com/articles/agile-not-easy-ux/
 Very short video by Hoa Loranger on making agile
UX dev work by getting UX focus into project
planning
 https://www.nngroup.com/videos/does-agile-destroy-ux/
 Very short video by Anna Kaley on how to do UX
design at a sprint
 https://www.nngroup.com/videos/design-sprints/
 Very short video by Rachel Krause on how to get a
user focus in sprint reviews
 https://www.nngroup.com/videos/sprint-reviews/
The textbook
Yvonne Rogers
Helen Sharp
Jenny Preece
Interaction Design,
6th ed
Wiley, 2023
ISBN 978-1-119-90109-9