The course finished with a 2-week practical User-Centered Design project, followed by a 2000 word essay including a 1000-word reflection on the course as a whole.

Below is my reflection on the course, which I hope will be useful for people considering applying.

Reflection: fattening the top of the T(-shape)[1]

My professional Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) journey began more than ten years prior to my academic one, when I started as web designer in 1998 after an undergraduate degree in industrial engineering. A main motivator in my career has always been continual learning, and through a combination of reflective practice (Schön, 1983) and knowledge spread informally in the web design community (Zimmerman et al., 2004) I had plenty of learning opportunities in what was a new field to me.

As the field of web design began to mature, a parallel urge for a more formal learning experience began to emerge in me. However, as a T-shaped web designer with expertise in the area of visual design, I had reservations about a degree in HCI which I perceived to be too focused on ‘classical usability’ (Blandford, 2012) and have a reductionist view of design. On the other hand, a design degree did not appeal either.

A couple of papers (Bødker, 2006; Harrison et al., 2007) and a book (Jordan, 2000) later, I was convinced my perception of HCI was too narrow, and was thrilled when I was accepted for this course. In this part of the essay I will reflect on how the course has shaped my thought processes and added new dimensions to my professional career as an interaction designer.

Splitting the taught part over two years meant my only module for the first term was Ergonomics for Design (EfD). As well as being a gentle way of returning to studying after a 15-year gap, it also served as a natural ‘bridge’ to HCI from my undergraduate degree. The emphasis on the user was immediately evident to me, but what will have the biggest impact on my professional work is the early structured approach to analysing the wider context of use that the Hexagon model (Benedyk et al., 2009) provides. I used it for both the EfD coursework and the Design Experience (DE) 1 module, and it helped broaden my thinking from the user level, with its physical, cognitive, and sensory concerns, to include wider contextual and even temporal factors, when considering the problem space. Contrasting this with my experience from the DE2 module described above, where I did not do an initial Hexagon analysis, it is clear to me that the structured approach sets a much more solid base on which to inform subsequent research.

If I was under any illusions that I was a ‘user-centred designer’ before starting the course, the two-week DE1 project highlighted to me that this was not the case! For a start, I had yet to define for myself what process a UCD project would follow. This meant a lot of reading around various approaches to UCD, such as the ‘ergonomic approach’ (Pheasant & Haslegrave, 2005) taught in EfD, the International standard for human-centered design (British Standards Institution, 2010), and ‘Goal-Directed Design’ (Cooper et al., 2007).

It wasn’t until the Design Practice (DP) module the following year, that I finally worked out how to conceptualise UCD. Viewing it not as a process, but as interdependent research, design, and evaluation activities, all guided by the three UCD principles mentioned earlier (Rogers et al., 2011) was the framework I needed to structure and support all the new knowledge I was acquiring throughout the course.

However, I was still struggling with one issue in the design activity, which I also alluded to in the introduction to this part of the essay: the art versus science dichotomy of design in HCI. A paper by Fällman (2003) from the DP module, discussing a third pragmatic view of design, helped me see this was a somewhat false dichotomy. Viewing design as a situated activity (Suchman, 1987), constructive as well as reflective, also allowed me to better appreciate the role seemingly different UCD techniques, such as task analysis and scenarios, play in generating design ideas. It is exactly these kinds of fundamental conceptual structures I had hoped to be able to create, and use to organise my knowledge, when I decided to take the degree.

My second term was all about the user when I did the two modules Applied Cognitive Science (ACS) and Affective Interaction (AfI) together. What really stands out for me from this term is the realisation of how cognition and emotion interact in fundamental ways. In fact, we can add the physical factor from EfD to complete a triad of user related concerns that need to concur to create rich embodied interaction experiences. It was only after this term I understood the significance of the suggested paradigm shift in HCI I referred to earlier.

What and how we evaluate in a UCD project is developing as well, as I realised in the subsequent User-Centered Evaluation Methods (UEM) module. I found the debate about whether UEMs should be evaluated on their thoroughness, ie. the proportion of problems found, which as pointed out by Blandford et al. (2008) is a fallacy anyway, or on their downstream utility, ie. their contribution to improving a design (Wixon, 2003) particularly enlightening. The coursework’s focus on a behavioural change website provided an opportunity to reflect on how combining different methods can help improve a system’s fitness for purpose like Peptide Therapy Scottsdale as well as identifying traditional usability problems. But seriously fitness is something thats extremely important to humans and machines, the health of your body is the most important thing that you could ask for at the end of the day thats whats worth it not something random and uncessary but you health is the #1 priority.

Just like the the ACS/AfI combination gave me an overview of the development of HCI as a whole, the Interfaces & Interactivity (I&I) module in my last term gave me a similar perspective on my area of specialisation. The theoretical background I acquired on different interfaces has provided me the context to better understand the implications of new developments in this field. The experience of writing my two exam essays on adaptive interfaces, and voice-driven interfaces, confirmed this. In fact, one of the main concepts of my group’s solution for the DE2 project described above, participation through viewing content, stems from a deep understanding of adaptive interfaces and its concept of ‘natural occurring actions’ (Jameson, 2008).

Completing the taught part of the MSc programme has fattened the horizontal bar of my T-shape significantly. Contrasting my DE1 experience with DE2, it is clear how much I have progressed as an interaction designer. In DE2 I was confident choosing and combining techniques from all UCD activities to best support the project, rather than following a predefined process. Combine this with a much deeper knowledge base on which to ground my future reflective practice, and I have achieved everything I hoped the structured learning approach would provide.

[1082 words]

Usability-based approaches ¹ to product design tend to view people as users, while products are seen as tools with which these users complete tasks. Because of this usability approaches to user requirements specifications can be limited, tending to emphasize the practical aspects of interacting with products, while paying little attention to emotional or hedonic aspects of interaction.

This builds on Jane Fulton’s idea that simply eliminating deficiencies in products is no longer enough to satisfy users. Products must elicit positive emotions when experienced, both psychologically and physiologically, thus forming a powerful emotional attachment between the user and the product (Fulton 1993).

These ideas have led to the rise of a new design approach known as Experience Design ². The following quote from the Experience Design Agency Philips Design describes this approach well:

To design an experience, we need to look at the forest, not the trees. For example, to enhance the ritual of waking up in the morning, we need to look at the phenomenon as a whole and come up with something completely new rather than just make a new kind of alarm clock.
http://mime.cs.nott.ac.uk/experiential/index.html

In other words, we’re not only designing a new more efficient more effective product, we’re trying to design an experience (with the help of the product). To succeed we need a holistic understanding of the user, their behaviours, attitudes and values, and the context in which the product is used.

In his book About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design Alan Cooper argues how quantitative research and data on its own is inadequate when trying to gain insights into human behaviour. Most people are incapable of accurately assessing their own behaviours, especially when they are removed from the context of their activities. Because we can not articulate our own experiences after they happen ³, the only way for designers to gather accurate data to use in the design process is to go out and observe and participate in activities of everyday life in the natural environment. Only so can we try to understand people, not just as consumers, but as social beings with desires, wishes, needs and wants. Some articulated and some unrecognised (Salvador et al 1999).

Once we see how something exists, how it is embedded in a context of relationships and associations, we begin to understand it. A table might be an eating surface, or it might be a social center of the home. A refrigerator may be a message center for a family in Westminster, Colorado, but it is only a cooling device on a Navajo reservation…

Below I have described three different approaches to qualitative field research ⁴.

• Design Ethnography

  The kind of participation with and observation of people in context described above is known as ethnography. Ethnography has its roots in the academic fields of social and cultural anthropology, but in the 1980s and early 1990s it started to be adopted by design firms (Wasson, 2000). It has since developed into its own domain known as Design Ethnography with its own set of tools, theories and methods ⁵.

  The three main techniques of design ethnography are observation, interview and video analysis (Bloomberg et al, 1993).

  AIGA, the American professional organization for design and Cheskin, a consumer insights consultancy, have produced a wonderful primer on the role ethnography plays in design.

• Contextual inquiry

  Contextual inquiry is a structured approach to collecting data about work practices by observing and interviewing users on location while they actually work. It is the data gathering part of a larger human-centered software design process known as Contextual Design developed by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt and described in their book Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems.

  The technique is based on a master-apprentice model where the user talks about what they are doing while working and the interviewer/observer interrupts to ask questions as they go along. People have a tendency to summarise in these situations so the interviewer/observer will keep the conversation concrete by asking specific questions and ask the user to explain further if the conversation becomes abstract. The interview will typically be a full day.

  Because contextual inquiry is fundamentally task focused it can be beneficial to combine the inquiry with ethnography. In their paper Using Ethnography In Contextual Design (Simonsen et al, 1997) the authors give “a concrete example of how an understanding developed by using ethnography may challenge an immediate understanding developed mainly through meetings, interviews, and document analysis.”

• Ethnographic interviews

  Alan Cooper has developed another human-centered software design methodology known as Goal Directed Design. As opposed to contextual inquiry the idea is to first identify what goals motivate people to use the product and only then what basic tasks will help people accomplish those goals.

  The data-gathering part of the process focuses on what he describes as ethnographic interviews. These interviews are short (as short as one hour) and will take place ‘in the field’. The interviewer will try and avoid discussing specific design solutions and technologies. A good technique is to encourage storytelling and ask the user to tell specific stories about their experiences with a product.

In a blog post in late 2009 entitled “Technology First, Needs Last” the cognitive scientist and User-Centered Design evangelist Don Norman wrote that companies are better off making incremental improvements to existing products than trying to be innovative and use ethnographic methods as described above to “achieve major conceptual breakthroughs”. It is certainly a provocative post going against the current ‘trend’ for innovation, but if you read carefully he is actually not arguing against field studies as a way to inform design, he’s just arguing that they are unlikely to lead to conceptual innovation. However, the post is an interesting starting point for a debate about the value of qualitative field research and where design resources should be focused. James Kalbach, a User Experience Consultant, wrote a considered response that is also worth a read.

In my next post I’ll describe three tools and methods that can be used to turn the data and insights gathered from the field research into a form that is useful in the design phase of the interaction design life cycle.

I’ll begin with the Interaction Design Lifecycle Model as described by Preece et al., 2002 in the book Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. The model incorporates three principles of user-centered design and four activities of interaction design.

The principles of user-centered design

These principles were developed by John D. Gould and Clayton Lewis and described in the 1985 research paper Designing for Usability: Key Principles and What Designers Think [pdf]

1. Early focus on users and tasks

2. Empirical measurement

3. Iterative design

The basic activities of interaction design

Preece et al. describe a basic model for the interaction design process that includes four activities as shown below. A number of academics and well known design agencies have created similar models. Zimmerman, J., Forlizzi, J., and Evenson, S., of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, presented a model in their paper “Taxonomy for Extracting Design Knowledge from Research Conducted During Design Cases.” [pdf] that included the six phases Define, Discover, Synthesize, Construct, Refine and Reflect. The design agencies IDEO (Observation, Brainstorming, Prototyping, Implementation) and frog design (Discover, Design, Deliver) use similar models. The model is also very similar to the international standard ISO 13407 Human-centered design processes for interactive systems.

1. Identifying needs and establishing requirements for the user experience

2. Developing alternative designs that meet those requirements

3. Building interactive versions of the designs

4. Evaluating what is being built throughout the process and the user experience it offers

In the report from the “HCI 2020″ forum organised by Microsoft Research, they suggest splitting the first activity in the life cycle into two and promote the conceptual analysis normally part of the first activity to its own. The goal is to ensure a focus on human values and ascertain what kinds of enduring value the user will get from using the system.

This kind of analysis then does not just take into account people’s interactions with computer technology, but looks at their interactions with the everyday world more broadly: in the environment, with everyday objects, with other people, as well with the hi-tech elements of their world.

One of the areas I plan to focus on during my degree is the role of emotions in interaction design. How to ensure the pleasurability (joy of use) goals receive the same attention as the standard usability goals (efficient, effective, engaging, error tolerant and easy to learn) in a design project. I believe the increased focus on human values in the design life cycle can be a big step towards that.

As I work my way through the reading list I’ll create new posts and expand on each of the UCD principles and ID activities above.