Catriona Macaulay

User-Sensitive Inclusive Design

Although “User-Centred”, “Participatory”, and other similar design approaches have proved to be very valuable for mainstream design, their principles are more difficult to apply successfully when the user group contains, or is composed of, older and/or disabled users. In the field of design for older and disabled people, the “Universal Design”, “Inclusive Design” and “Design for All” movements have encouraged designers to extend their design briefs to include older and disabled people. The downside of these approaches is that they can tend to encourage designers to follow a traditional design path to produce a prototype design, and only then investigate how to modify their interfaces and systems to cope with older and/or disabled users. This can lead to an inefficient design process and sometimes an inappropriate design, which may be “accessible” to people with disabilities, but in practice unusable. This paper reviews the concept that the authors have called “User-Sensitive Inclusive Design”, which suggests a different approach to designing for marginalised groups of people. Rather than suggesting that designers rely on standards and guidelines, it is suggested that designers need to develop a real empathy with their user groups. A number of ways to achieve this are recommended, including the use of ethnography and techniques derived from professional theatre both for requirements gathering and for improving designers’ empathy for marginalised groups of users, such as older and disabled people.

Scenarios and the HCI-SE design problem

Abstract Diapers critical review of Carrols book ‘Making Use’ raises a number of interesting issues about how to set about the design of interactive systems. In particular Diaper poses an issue that has long dogged the area of Human–Computer Interaction and Software Engineering (HCI-SE), namely how to deal with the formality required by the SE side and the sensitivity to context required by the HCI side. In this paper, we report on the experience of using scenario-based design and reflect on the effectiveness of the approach. This work fits into a broader context concerned with understanding exactly what the HCI-SE design problem is and now it might be best conceptualised.

Editorial: The emerging roles of performance within HCI and interaction design

As Brenda Laurel noted as far back as 1992, the operation of computers has always been a performative activity (Laurel, 1992). A system’s state changes as a computer runs through a program acting out the tasks specified in the script of a program. With interactive systems, human actors take their place on stage alongside computers, performing activities with and through such systems. The recent emergence of ubiquitous and tangible computing moves the stage of the interaction from the virtuality of the screen to the physical environment. This provides opportunities to address performative interactions that include bodily movements to create novel multimodal approaches. For interaction designers, this requires thinking about interaction in a different way, for example considering the role of the body, beyond ergonomics, for its increased relevance as a presentational, representational and experiential medium. Recently there has been a growing interest in developing interaction design methods that more explicitly recognise and exploit the performative elements and potentials of design activity itself. Across all design disciplines, the importance of effective communication has led to an awareness of the need to consider and improve our ability to represent ideas in ways that open up, rather than shut down, dialogue. Performance, theatre and dramaturgy have begun to figure in the design of interactive systems. There have been long standing debates about the nature, utility, form, timing and quality of communication within the design process. For example, scenarios have found widespread acceptance as a tool for communicating rich user experiences within requirements and design specifications. Whilst they are typically not performed as such, their roots in the forms of traditional narrative point to a performative potential that could be more fully explored. Within object-oriented software design, the CRC Cards technique combines role-playing with scenario walkthroughs and use-cases to provide design teams with a software object’s perspective on the

Ethnography, theory and systems design

The idea for this paper came from a debate at the 1998 ISCRAT conference in Denmark on cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). A leading activist in the movement to bring CHAT into systems design, Bonnie Nardi, asked the question; would design not benefit more from training better ethnographers than from burdening them with such a complex set of theoretical concepts and debates as CHAT? This paper seeks to answer that question on the basis of our experiences applying CHAT concepts in a long-term design ethnography at a UK newspaper. It examines the history of the often controversial triadic relationship between ethnography, theory and systems design and argues that the CHAT framework provided us with the opportunity to move from ethnographic intuition to design insight, and that therefore the answer to Nardis question is no?simply training good ethnographers is unlikely to be enough for a number of reasons (not least of which is the problem of how inexperienced fieldworkers become design ethnographers). The explicit use of theoretical frameworks, at least those such as CHAT which are particularly suited to design issues, discourages the tendency for ethnographers to see themselves as “proxy users” by encouraging greater reflexivity about the researchers role in constructing the object of study. At a more pragmatic level, it helps the fieldworker navigate the apparently never-ending mass of “potentially interesting material” any field experience throws up.

Investigating design issues in household environments

This paper argues that the current involvement of end users in the design of technological artefacts is too superficial. It is common to involve people in requirements generation, but rarely in product inception or design. A study is reported involving five households in central Scotland, who were each visited on three occasions, using a new investigative framework. Illustrative examples are provided of the strengths and weaknesses of the methods used. Despite the latter, it is demonstrated that the general public can both generate and critique design ideas and that valuable contributions to understanding peoples relationships with technologies can be expected both from children and from the elderly.

Usability and User-Centered Design in Scientific Software Development

Scientific software development projects that integrate usability and user- centered design methods can have an impact that goes beyond a limited set of users.

Special issue on interacting with technologies in household environments

The history of studying homes and technologies is well established, going back to the early impact of infrastructure technologies such as electrification and plumbing. Since the ‘information age’ came upon us, homes have been invaded by information and communication technologies of various sorts and the impact of these has been examined from various perspectives. The early twenty-first century is a good time to take another look at the household domain as we are seeing such a dramatic change in technologies and their impact on households and homes. The papers in this special issue collectively provide an excellent review of the current state of the art in the analysis and design of household technologies and how we have arrived here. The papers were invited following a workshop held in Aarhus in March 2001 jointly sponsored by IFIP working groups 9.3 (Home Oriented Information technology, HOIT) and 13.2 (Methodology for Interactive Systems Design). This followed a track at the 2000 HOIT conference on interacting with home technologies. The theme for the conference was methodologies for designing home-oriented (or household) technologies. This is a new and emerging area since almost all consideration of human–computer interaction and cognitive ergonomics to date has dealt with work situations. Even the title of this journal emphasizes work and, while this can be taken as a general term for achievement rather than just efficiency or effectiveness, it does focus attention away from many of the issues that face the designers of technologies aimed at the leisure market. The papers in this issue show that the principles of how to undertake analysis of household technologies and of finding an appropriate unit of analysis are emerging. We are also seeing more clearly how to involve people in the design of the technologies in their homes and how to evaluate design concepts and ideas. The consensus is that analysis must be grounded in the real experiences of household members, that we need to think in terms of a ‘living space’ rather than a physical house and that we need to focus on concepts and activities that are meaningful to people as a unit of analysis. Most importantly the papers presented here highlight how our understanding of technologies and people needs to be expanded from the work-based tradition that has informed most methods of analysis and design to include the people-centred issues such as personalization, experience, engagement, purpose, reliability, fun, respect and identity (to name but a few) that are key to these emerging technologies. The six papers in this special issue can be seen along a continuum beginning with an exploration of the home as a social/cultural phenomenon and finishing with design issues for specific technologies. We start with sociological contributions in the wild and finish with usability evaluation in the laboratory. In travelling this course we encounter a wide range of issues and methods concerned with household technologies and the people who use them. Of course, all the papers in some way attempt to address the home as a social and cultural phenomenon, but the emphasis shifts as we move through the papers. In The social consumption of information and communication technologies (ICTs), James Stewart introduces some key social theories, notably theories of consumption, domestication and appropriation, that have been used to study household environments. The home space is changing, technologies are becoming increasingly personal and personalized and the distinctions between home, community and work are becoming more blurred. Cogn Tech Work (2003) 5: 2–3 DOI 10.1007/s10111-002-0110-y

Fault lines of user experience: the intersection of business and design

One of the central challenges of the User Experience discipline has always been how early in the development cycle it can exert any degree of influence. The challenge that our field is facing today more pronounced than ever is how to influence the decision makers that give directions guiding individual product development. And vice versa, this early decision making process can benefit from user experience approaches that help ground its direction in user research, and inform its decisions creatively through concepts and design thinking -- see for example the concept of Business Design™ (as taught by the Rotman school of management, with similar approaches being the foundation of successes such as design consultancies like IDEO). The goal of the panel will be to draw together a community of experts and interested audience members in this topic and initiate a discourse on its key issues and opportunities.

Designing computer systems for and with older users

The ageing population in the developed world, and the centrality of computer systems in many aspects of daily life, are factors commonly cited as necessitating the provision of computer technologies appropriate for older users. Much of the research on older people and computer systems is undertaken and presented with a crusading zeal, based on the assumption that computer systems are, of themselves, a positive influence on the lives of older people (Selwyn et al. 2003). We have argued elsewhere that insufficient data exist to determine whether or not computer systems, as they are currently constituted, improve wellbeing among older users (Dickinson and Gregor 2006). In this special issue, we have focused on approaches, techniques and methodologies that support a fuller and more sophisticated analysis of the relationship – or potential relationship – between older adults and computer systems. The seven selected papers published here offer a variety of perspectives on this area, and add both empirical data and theoretical richness to the field. The paper by Convertino and colleagues explores theoretical issues of intergenerational collaborations using computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) in a work environment. The authors persuasively argue the vital point that older workers bring different – not fewer – talents and qualities to intergenerational work relationships. Comparative lack of technical knowledge is offset by valuable and extensive domain expertise and problem-solving skills. To maximize usefulness to industry, where such skills are highly valued, designers of such systems should aim to support these talents and qualities as well as those of younger workers. Another paper which benefits from a strongly theoretical approach is the work by Turner et al. who use ‘learned helplessness’ theory to explore the qualitative and discursive outcomes of a nine month study of older adults learning to use interactive systems. Their analysis of the experiences of the learners, and the ways in which these are described in conversation, provides us with important and rich information on the barriers that older adults perceive to their own computer use. An important theory which informs the paper by Sokoler and Svensson is that of non-stigmatizing technologies and the ways in which these might be developed. The work, based on qualitative field work in residential homes, focuses on the difficulties of inducing people explicitly to recognize and express feelings that might be regarded as stigmatizing, such as loneliness and isolation. Arguing that older adults themselves have various strategies for dealing with such problems in indirect, non-stigmatizing ways, the authors seek to develop technology that enables such strategies, rather than technology that stigmatizes the recipient through defining them as having a problem such as, for example, being ‘lonely’. These theoretical approaches and, in the case of Sokoler and Svensson, the production of a prototype system, are thought-provoking and useful, offering new insights into the issues surrounding older adults’ use – or non-use – of computer systems. Renaud and Ramsay report on the development of an identification and authentication procedure to increase the accessibility of web content to older users, through focusing on strengths which do not change with age, such as recognition of one’s own handwriting, rather than current approaches that demand perfect recall. The system developed provides a number of insights into ways in which designs can be made more widely accessible and in which the seriousness of user errors can be reduced without compromising security. The special issue concludes with three papers focused on methodological strategies for working with older adults. Rice et al. look at the use of requirements gathering techniques adapted from Forum Theatre in working with older adults. These techniques, the authors argue, allow the social and attitudinal implications of potential technologies to be explored with people who may have little technical knowledge, thus overcoming significant communication barriers between older users and designers. They report on sessions carried out with older participants on the topic of interactive television to illustrate the richness of the data gathered with these techniques. In his paper, Hawthorn explores adaptations to user centred design techniques using the example of the development and evaluation of a tutorial program, FileTutor, which teaches older people about file management. Behaviour & Information Technology, Vol. 26, No. 4, July –August 2007, 273 – 274

Listen to this: using ethnography to inform the design of auditory interfaces

Within the wider Human-Computer Interaction community, many researchers have turned to ethnography to inform systems design. However, such approaches have yet to be fully utilized within auditory interface research, a field hitherto driven by technology-inspired design work and the addressing of specific cognitive issues. It is proposed that the time has come to investigate the role ethnographic methods have to play within auditory interface design. We begin by discussing “traditional” ethnographic methods by presenting our experiences conducting a field study with a major UK-based computer games developer, highlighting issues pertinent to the design of auditory interfaces, before suggesting ways in which such techniques could be expanded to consider the role sound plays in peoples lived experiences and thus merit further research.