Allan MacLean

User-tailorable systems: pressing the issues with buttons

It is impossible to design systems which are appropriate for all users and all situations. We believe that a useful technique is to have end users tailor their systems to match their personal work practices. This requires not only systems which can be tailored, but a culture within which users feel in control of the system and in which tailoring is the norm. In a two-pronged research project we have worked closely with a group of users to develop a system to support tailoring and to help the users evolve a “tailoring culture”. This has resulted in a flexible system based around the use of distributed on-screen Buttons to support a range of tailoring techniques.

Realizing a video environment: EuroPARC's RAVE system

At EuroPARC, we have been exploring ways to allow physically separated colleagues to work together effectively and naturally. In this paper, we briefly discuss several examples of our work in the context of three themes that have emerged: the need to support the full range of shared work; the desire to ensure privacy without giving up unobtrusive awareness; and the possibility of creating systems which blur the boundaries between people, technologies and the everyday world.

Design rationale: the argument behind the artifact

We assert that the product of user interface design should be not only the interface itself but also a rationale for why the interface is the way it is. We describe a representation for design based around a semi-formal notation which allows us explicitly to represent alternative design options and reasons for choosing among them. We illustrate the approach with examples from an analysis of scrolling mechanisms. We discuss the roles we expect such a representation to play in improving the coherence of designs and in communicating reasons for choices to others, whether designers, maintainers, collaborators or end users.

Freeflow: mediating between representation and action in workflow systems

In order to understand some problems associated with workflow, we set out an analysis of workflow systems, identifying a number of basic issues in the underlying technology. This points to the conflation of temporal and dependency information as the source of a number of these problems. We describe Freeflow, a prototype which addresses these problems using a variety of technical innovations, including a rich constraint-based process modelling formalism, and the use of declarative dependency relationships. Its focus is on mediation between process “and action, rather than the enactment of a process. We outline the system and its design principles, and illustrate the features of our approach with examples from ongoing work.

Graphical argumentation and design cognition

Many efforts have been made to exploit the properties of graphical notations to support argument construction and communication. In the context of design rationale capture, we are interested in graphical argumentation structures as cognitive tools to support individual and collaborative design in real time. This context of use requires a detailed understanding of how a new representational structure integrates into the cognitive and discursive flow of design, that is, whether it provides supportive or intrusive structure. This article presents a use-oriented analysis of a graphical argumentation notation known as QOC (Questions, Options, and Criteria). Through a series of empirical studies, we show that it provides most support when elaborating poorly understood design spaces, but is a distraction when evaluating well-constrained design spaces. This is explained in terms of the cognitive compatibility between argumentative reasoning and the demands of different modes of designing. We then provide an account based on the collaborative affordances of QOC in group design meetings, and extend this to discuss the evolution of QOC argumentation from short term working memory to long term group memory.

Knowledge management support for teachers

Business organizations worldwide are implementing techniques and technologies to better manage their knowledge. Their objective is to improve the quality of the contributions people make to their organizations by helping them to make sense of the context within which the organization exists; to take responsibility, cooperate, and share what they know and learn; and to effectively challenge, negotiate, and learn from others. We consider how the concepts, tools, and techniques of organizational knowledge management can be applied to the professional practices and development of teachers. We describe a framework for knowledge management support for teachers where the sharing of concrete knowledge scaffolds the attainment of more abstract levels of knowledge sharing. We describe the development of a knowledge management support system emphasizing long-term participatory design relationships between technologists and teachers, regional cooperation among teachers in adjacent school divisions, the integration of communication and practice, synchronous and asynchronous interactions, and multiple metaphors for organizing knowledge resources and activities.

Design practice and interface usability: Evidence from interviews with designers

Research into human-computer interaction (HCI) is mainly conducted by engineering psychologists, cognitive psychologists and computer scientists. The principal consumers of applied HCI research, on the other hand, are human factors practitioners and system designers and developers. The HCI researcher who believes his or her findings to be of practical relevance has therefore to consider the interface between researcher and practitioner as well as that between system and user: the products of HCI research must not only be relevant but also “user-friendly” to the practitioner. This problem is not merely one of communication between different professional communities, as the optimal route for the translation of research findings into terms that will be of practical use in the design process is itself a matter of considerable uncertainty and debate. Thus there are many instances in the research literature where apparently contradictory recommendations can all too easily be drawn from findings based on sound but, by its very nature, limited experimentation (e.g., compare the findings of Landauer et al., in press, Ledgard et al., 1980, and Scapin, 1981, on naming text-editing operations). One of the prerequisites for tackling both the communication problem and the translation problem is an understanding of relevant aspects of decision-making in design which influence the usability of the end-user interface. This is so for three reasons. First, an appreciation of the nature of design practice will at least help identify those areas where research input might have the greatest impact and allow researchers to direct their efforts towards them. Second, it may identify possible modifications to existing design practice which would allow research input to be used more effectively. Finally, it would be somewhat surprising if current design practice were not to furnish researchers with any insights into the underlying processes of users. The experience and skills of the practitioner should be a valuable source of information for the HCI researcher. For these reasons, we have been documenting some of the relationships between design practice and the usability of systems for use by non-experts. While there is considerable literature on programming behaviour (e.g. Mayer, 1981), reports of design behaviour are rare, other than occasional descriptions by practitioners of the interface design of their own products (e.g., Botterill, 1982; Smith et al., 1982). This paper focusses on the influence of the individual designers decision-making. Evidence is taken from interviews with experienced system designers concerning design issues influencing the nature of the user interface which had arisen with systems they had recently worked on. For two of the systems usability investigations had been performed (see Lewis & Mack, 1982 and Hammond et al., 1983).

Multidisciplinary modelling in HCI design…in theory and in practice

In one of the largest multidisciplinary projects in basic HCI research to date, multiple analytic HCI techniques were combined and applied witiiin an innovative d e s i ^ context to problems identif ied by designers of an AV communication system, or media space. The problems were presented to user-, systemand design-analysts distributed across Europe. The results of analyses were integrated and passed back to the designers, and to other domain experts, for assessment. The aim of this paper is to illustrate some theory-based insights gained into key problems in media space design and to convey lessons learned about the process of contributing to design using multiple theoretical perspectives. We also describe some obstacles which must be overcome if such techniques are to be transferred successfully to practice.

Reaching through analogy: a Design Rationale perspective on roles of analogy

A powerful way of reaching through technology is to use analogy to make the technology transparent by exploiting the user’s familiarity with other situations. However, analogy has a number of roles in user interface design in addition to the one of helping the user understand the system. In this paper we consider some of these roles and their relationship to our Design Rationale (DR) framework (MacLean et al., 1989). Our goals are to develop the DR framework by exploring the implications of explicitly taking account of analogy, and to articulate an account of the roles of analogy in design by organizing them around DR concepts.

Reasoning with Design Rationale: practical experience with design space analysis

Abstract Design Rationale is an approach to design which emphasizes working with explicit representations not only of possible design solutions, but also of the reasons and processes behind them. Design Space Analysis is a Design Rationale-based framework which emphasizes the production of a design space (rather than a single solution). We report here on the use of Design Space Analysis and its associated notation, QOC (Questions, Options, Criteria), to support the design of user interfaces for educational hypermedia systems. We describe lessons learned about how to make best use of it, where it works well, and some of the difficulties we have encountered.