Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Meta-Data
Lesson Goals
Lesson Outcomes
Assessments
Lesson Plan
Script
3.8.1 Introduction
[Link] Headshot Studio
3.8.2 Designing Audiobooks for Exercisers 1
[Link] Headshot Studio
3.8.3 Designing Audiobooks for Exercisers 2
[Link] Headshot Studio
3.8.4 Designing Audiobooks for Exercisers 3
[Link] Headshot Studio
3.8.5 Designing Audiobooks for Exercisers 4
[Link] Headshot Studio
3.8.6 Research Methods Meet Design Principles
[Link] Tablet Studio
3.8.7 Design Challenge: MOOC Recording
[Link] Headshot Studio (Behind Camera)
3.8.8 Exploring HCI: HCI Methods
[Link] Headshot Studio
3.8.9 Approaches to User-Centered Design
[Link] Headshot Studio
3.8.10 Conclusion
[Link] Headshot Studio
Meta-Data
Lesson Goals
● Students will understand the design life cycle as a complete, iterative process for
interface design.
● Students will understand the relationship between methods and principles.
Lesson Outcomes
● Students will be able to participate in an iterative design life cycle.
Assessments
● Students will reflect on the application of the lesson’s concepts to their chosen area of
HCI.
● Students will engage in a short design task based on the lesson’s concepts.
● Students will complete a short answer assignment in which they critique a provided
interface from the perspective of the lesson’s concepts.
● Students will complete a short answer assignment in which they select an interface to
critique from the perspective of the lesson’s concepts.
● Students will complete a short answer assignment in which they design a revision of
one of the critiqued interfaces from the perspective of the lesson’s concepts.
Lesson Plan
● Students will have the design life cycle demonstrated to them in one repeated
example, solidifying the lessons of the unit.
● Students will then explore the relationship between design principles and research
methods.
Script
3.8.1 Introduction
[Link] Headshot Studio
● [C] David talking
● [A] Clips of lesson playing
● [B] Topic; Design life cycle
● In this unit we’ve discussed the HCI research methods that form the design life cycle,
an iterative process between needfinding, brainstorming design alternatives,
prototyping, and evaluation with real users.
● [B] Topic; Research Ethics
● [B] Topic; Agile development
● We’ve also discussed the ethics behind this kind of research, and how it applies to
some more modern agile software development methodologies.
● In this wrap-up lesson, we want to explore a couple examples of the full design life
cycle in action.
● [B] Topic; HCI Design Principles
● We also want to tie it into the design principles unit and explore how we can use the
design principles and research methods in conjunction with one another.
3.8.2 Designing Audiobooks for Exercisers 1
[Link] Headshot Studio
● [C] David talking
● [A] Clips of the relevant portion of the unit playing
● Throughout this unit we’ve used the running example of designing an audiobook app
that would let people who are exercising interact with books in all the ways you or I
might while sitting and reading.
● That means being able to leave bookmarks, take notes, etc.
● [B] Topic; Needfinding
● We discussed doing our foundational needfinding, going to a park and observing
people exercising.
● We talked about doing some interviewing and surveys to find out more targeted
information about what people wanted and needed.
● [B] Topic; Design alternatives
● Then, based on that, we brainstormed a whole lot of alternatives.
● We thought about those alternatives in terms of different scenarios and personas to
settle on those with the most potential.
● [B] Topic; Prototyping
● Then, we took those alternatives and prototyped a few of them.
● Specifically, we constructed Wizard of Oz prototypes for voice and gesture interfaces
and paper prototypes for on-screen interfaces.
● [B] Topic; Evaluation
● Then, we put those in front of our users -- well, a user, in my case, but you would use
more users, and we got some initial feedback.
● So, at the end of one iteration of the design life cycle, we have three different low-
fidelity prototypes, each with some feedback on how effectively they work.
● But as you can tell, we’re not done yet.
● We don’t have an app.
● What’s next?
● Next, we go through another phase of the design life cycle.
3.8.3 Designing Audiobooks for Exercisers 2
[Link] Headshot Studio
● [C] David talking
● [A] Design life cycle to the side
● We take the results of our initial iteration through the design cycle and use the results
to return to the needfinding process.
● That’s not to say we need to redo everything from scratch, but our prototypes and
evaluation have now increased our understanding of the problem.
● There are things we learn by prototyping and evaluating about the task itself.
● In this case, we learned that even for exercisers with their hands free, gestures are still
tough because they’re moving around so much.
● The evaluation process may have also given us new questions we want to ask users to
understand the task better.
● For example, Morgan mentioned needing to be able to rewind. We might want to know
how common a problem that is.
● [B] Topic; Needfinding
● In many ways, synthesizing our experiences with the evaluation is our next
needfinding process.
● [B] Topic; Design alternatives
● We then move on to design alternatives: again, that doesn’t mean starting from
scratch and coming up with all new ideas.
● Here it means expanding on our current ideas, fleshing them out a bit more, and
brainstorming them in terms of those personas and scenarios we used previously.
● We might also come up with whole new ideas here.
● [B] Topic; Prototyping
● Then, more prototyping.
● At this point, we might discover that as we try to increase the fidelity of our
prototypes, the technology or resources aren’t quite there yet.
● For example, while the gesture interface might have been promising in the Wizard of
Oz prototype, we don’t yet have the technology to recognize gestures that way on the
go.
● Or we might find that the expense related to the prototype is unfeasible, or the
realizing the prototype would require violating some of our other user needs.
● For example, we could do gesture recognition if we had users hold a physical device
that could recognize gestures, but that might be too expensive to produce, and it
might conflict with our audience’s need for a hands-free system.
● So we move on with the prototypes that we can build, with the goal of getting to the
feedback stage as quickly as possible.
● For voice, instead of trying to build a full voice recognition system, maybe we just
build a system that can recognize very simplistic voice commands.
● Instead of recognizing words, maybe it just recognizes the number of utterances if
that’s easier to build.
● For the screen, maybe we build a wireframe prototype that moves between different
screens on a phone, but we don’t connect it to a real system. We still have someone
Wizard of Oz it while running along with the participant.
● That way we focus on usability instead of things like integration with audiobook apps
or voice-to-text transcription, things that take a lot of work to get right and might end
up unnecessary if we find that the prototype isn’t useful.
● [B] Topic; Evaluation
● Then, we evaluate again.
● This time, we probably get a little more objective.
● We still want data on the qualitative user experience, but we also want data on things
like: how long does it take a user to perform the desired actions in the interface? What
prevents them from working with the interface?
● Imagine that we found, for instance, that for many exercisers, they go through places
that are too loud for voice commands to work.
● Or, we find that the time it takes to pull out the interface and interact is too
distracting.
● That information is once again useful to our ongoing iteration.
● At the end of that process, we again have some higher-fidelity prototypes, but no
product yet. So, we go again.
3.8.4 Designing Audiobooks for Exercisers 3
[Link] Headshot Studio
● [C] David talking
● At the end of the last iteration through the design cycle, we had two interface
prototypes, each with significant weaknesses.
● Our voice command interface struggled in loud areas where exercises are often
working, and our screen-based interface presented too high a gulf of execution.
● But notice how far we’ve come at this point.
● We now have a pretty complete and nuanced view of the task and our possible
solutions.
● Now, let’s go through one more iteration to get to something we can actually
implement and deploy.
● [B] Topic; Needfinding
● Our needfinding has come along to the point of understanding that completely
hands-free interfaces are more usable, but we also know that gesture-based is
technologically unfeasible and voice-based isn’t perfectly reliable.
● [B] Topic; Design Alternatives
● Now we might come up with a new alternative. A hybrid system. The voice interaction
and on-screen touch interaction aren’t incompatible with one another.
● Our new alternative is to develop a system that supports both, allowing users to use
voice commands most of the time, but default to touch commands in situations where
the voice commands don’t work.
● So they always have full functionality, and usability is maximized.
● [B] Topic; Prototyping
● So, we create a new prototype, basically merging our two from the previous iteration.
● They’re still reasonably low fidelity because we haven’t tested this combination yet,
and the next stage of sophistication is going to be expensive. So, we want to make
sure it’s worth pursuing.
● [B] Topic; Evaluation
● Then, we evaluate that with users, and we find it’s good enough to go ahead and
move forward with producing it.
3.8.5 Designing Audiobooks for Exercisers 4
[Link] Headshot Studio
● [C] David talking
● So that’s the end, right? We went through a few iterations of the design life cycle
getting iteratively more high-fidelity and rigorous with our evaluation.
● Finally, we have a design we like.
● We implement it fully, submit it to the app store, and sit back while the money rolls in.
● Not exactly.
● Now instead of having a handful of users we bring in to use our interface, we have
hundreds of users using it in ways we never expected.
● And now the cycle begins again.
● We have data we’re automatically collected either through usage tracking or error
logs.
● We have user reviews or feedback they submit.
● So, we jump back into needfinding using the data we have available to us.
● We might find subtle needs, like the need for more control over rewinding and fast
forwarding. We might move on and prototype that with commands like ‘back 5’ and
‘back 15’.
● We might uncover more novel new needs as well: we find there’s a significant
contingent of people using the interface while driving.
● It’s similar in that it’s another place where people’s hands and eyes are occupied, but
it has its own unique needs as well, like the ability to run alongside a navigation app.
● So the process starts again, this time with live users’ data.
● And in general, it never really ends.
● Nowadays, you very rarely see interfaces, apps, programs, or web sites that are
intentionally put up once and never changed.
● That might happen because the designers got busy or the company went out of
business, but it’s rarely one-off by design.
● And as the design evolves over time with real data, you’ll start to see nested feedback
cycles: week to week small additions give way to month-to-month updates and year-
to-year reinventions.
● In many ways, your interface becomes like a child: you watch it grow up and take on a
life of its own.
3.8.6 Research Methods Meet Design Principles
[Link] Tablet Studio
● [V] Design life cycle
● The design principles we describe in our other unit are deeply integrated throughout
this design life cycle.
● They don’t supplant it -- you won’t be making any great designs just by applying
principles -- but they can streamline things.
● In many ways, design principles capture takeaways and conclusions found by this
design life cycle in the past in ways that can be transferred to new tasks.
● [V] Map human abilities and task analysis to needfinding
● In uncovering needs, many of our needs are driven by our current understanding of
human abilities.
● Task analysis allows us to describe those needs, those tasks, in formal ways to equip
the interface design process.
● [V] Map direct manipulation, mental models, and distributed cognition to design
alternatives
● Direct manipulation gives us a family of techniques that we want to emphasize in
coming up with our design alternatives.
● Mental models provide us an understanding of how the design alternatives might
mesh with the user’s understanding of the task.
● Distributed cognition gives us a view on interface design that lends itself to design at a
larger level of granularity.
● [V] Map design principles, representations and invisible interfaces to prototyping
● Design principles give us some great rules of thumb to use when creating our initial
prototypes and designs.
● Our understanding of representations ensures that the prototypes we create match
with users’ mental models.
● Invisible interfaces help us remember that the interface should be the conduit
between the user and the task, not the focus of attention itself.
● [V] Map feedback cycle and interfaces and politics to evaluation
● The vocabulary of the feedback cycle, the gulfs of execution and evaluation, give us
ways to evaluate the interfaces that we design.
● The notion of politics in interface allow us to evaluate the interface not just in terms of
its usable interactions, but in the types of society it creates or preserves.
● Those principles of HCI were all found through many years of going through the design
life cycle, creating different interfaces, and exploring and evaluating their impact.
● By leveraging those lessons, we can speed to usable interfaces much faster.
3.8.7 Design Challenge: MOOC Recording
[Link] Headshot Studio (Behind Camera)
● [C] David talking
● <<to be scripted>>
3.8.8 Exploring HCI: HCI Methods
[Link] Headshot Studio
● [C] David talking
● Over the past several lessons, you’ve been exploring how the design life cycle applies
to the area of HCI you chose to explore.
● Now that we’ve reached the end of the unit, take a moment and reflect on the life
cycle you developed.
● How feasible would it be to actually execute? What would you need?
● What kind of users do you need? How many? When do you need them?
● There are right answers here, of course: ideally, you’ll need users early and often.
● That’s what user-centered design is all about.
● In educational technology, that means having some teachers, students, and parents
you can contact frequently.
● In computer-supported cooperative work, that might mean having a community you
can visit often to see the new developments.
● In ubiquitous computing, that might mean going as far as having someone who
specializes in low-fidelity 3D prototypes to quickly spin up new ideas for testing.
● Now that you understand the various phases of the design life cycle, take a moment
and reflect on how you’ll use it iteratively as a whole in your chosen area of HCI.
3.8.9 Approaches to User-Centered Design
[Link] Headshot Studio
● [C] David talking
● At a minimum, user-centered design advocates involving users throughout the
process through surveys, interviews, evaluations, and more that we’ll talk about.
● However, user-centered design can be taken to even greater extremes through a
number of approaches beyond what we’ve covered.
● [B] Participatory design
● One is participatory design.
● In participatory design, all the stakeholders -- including the users themselves -- are
involved as part of the design team.
● They aren’t just a source of data, they’re actually members of the design team working
on the problem.
● That allows the user perspective to be omnipresent throughout the design process.
● Of course, there’s still a danger there: generally, we are not our user, but in
participatory design one of the designers is the user… but they’re just one user.
● So, it’s a great way to get a user’s perspective, but we must also be careful not to over-
represent that one user’s view.
● [B] Action research
● A second approach is action research.
● Action research is a methodology that addresses an immediate problem, and
researches it by trying to simultaneously solve it.
● Data gathered on the success of the approach is then used to inform the
understanding of the problem and the future approaches.
● Most importantly, like participatory design, action research is undertaken by the
actual users.
● For example, a teacher might engage in action research by trying a new activity in his
classroom and reflecting on the results, or a manager might use action research by
trying a new evaluation system with her employees and noting the changes.
● [B] Design-based research
● A third approach is design-based research.
● Design-based research is similar to action research, but it can be done by outside
practitioners, too.
● It’s especially common in learning sciences research.
● In design-based research, designers create interventions based on current
understanding of the theory and the problem, and use the success of those
interventions to improve our understanding of the theory or the problem.
● For example, if we believed a certain intersection had a lot of jaywalkers because the
signs had poor visibility, we might interview people at the intersection for their
thoughts: or, we could create a solution that assumes we’re correct, and then use it to
evaluate whether or not we were correct.
● If we create a more clearly visible sign and it fixes the problem, then it suggests our
initial theory was correct.
● In all these approaches, notice iteration still plays a strong roll: we never try out just
one design and stop.
● We run through the process, create a design, try it out, and then iterate and improve
on it.
● Interface design is never done: it just gets better and better as time goes on, while also
adjusting to new trends and technologies.
3.8.10 Conclusion
[Link] Headshot Studio
● [C] David talking
● [A] Clips of lesson
● This wraps up our conversation on research methods and the design life cycle.
● [B] Topic; User-centered design
● The purpose of this is to put a strong focus on user-centered design throughout the
process.
● [B] Topic; User needs
● [B] Topic; User Feedback
● We want to start our designs by understanding user needs, then get user feedback
throughout the design process.
● As we do, our understanding of the user and the task improves, and our designs
improve along with it.
● Even after we’ve released our designs, modern technology allow us to continue that
feedback cycle, continually improving our interfaces and further enhancing the user
experience.