David Allen Schell

User centered design in action: developing an intelligent agent application

This paper describes the User Centered Design (UCD) methodology for developing software products, and how the methodology is used within IBM to design solutions that meet customer needs. A case study, demonstrating the use of User Centered Design, describes a team’s efforts to develop a user interface for an intelligent agent application. The paper discusses issues involved in designing and developing user interfaces for intelligent agent applications, The results of the IBM User Centered Design team’s design phase are shared. The final section focuses techniques used by information designers and writers in IBM to apply the User Centered Design methodology to the development process for information (whether hardcopy, wizard, web, etc.). Introduction User Centered Design (UCD) is a design methodology focusing on users and their tasks, the design of the overall solution, and competitor products, The key point is that the total user experience drives the design. User feedback is gathered throughout the User Centered Design process and is integral to product plans, priorities, and decision making. Competitive analysis is used to assess the design against what the competition offers. Section 1 of this paper describes the User Centered Design process in more detail. This approach to design has been successfully implemented on numerous projects within IBM, including the case study for this paper, the Task Builder project. Permission to make digilalihnrd copies of all or port of this nlnterial for perSoflid Or ckwroom use is mted without fee provided tJ,at tile copies W not mnde or distributed for profit or commercinl advnntge, the copyri&h( flolice, Ihe title oftbe publication nnd its date appear, and notice is liven IbRt copyright is by permission of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires specific permission and/or fee, SIGDOC 97 Snowbird Utah USA C%YrigJrt 1997 ACM O-89791-861-4/97/10..

Specialization in DITA: technology, process, & policy

3.50 Task Builder is an intelligent agent application that helps a user build rules for handling e-mail. An example of an e-mail rule is: “If I receive mail horn Jeanne about the IA project marked low priority, put it in my IA folder.” The user interface has an “interview format” that asks users for rule criteria (e.g., sender or subject) and conditions (e.g., low priority) in a friendly manner. Users are guided through a series of questions and answers to build as few, or as many, rules as they need. Confirmation screens and other user interface elements give the user confidence that their rules operate as intended. The complexity of the intelligent agent rules processing is hidden from the user. Hiding the complexity of the intelligent agent technology is a critical element of the design and contributed significantly to ease of use. User Centered Design is especially effective on projects where the product technology is new or where audience characteristics and habits are not well defined. The Task Builder project had both characteristics. Intelligent agent technology is fairly new and can be intimidating to users. E-mail is a universal task, but user habits and preferences differ widely among users. The goal was to create a useful, approachable interface for all types of users. Section 2 of this paper describes how the User Centered Design methodology was applied to the Task Builder project and shows the resulting design. User Centered Design governs all aspects of the user experience, including the design of information. Section 3 of this paper describes how User Centered Design guides the structure and writing of user information, including hardcopy, wizards, and everything in between. Section 1: The User Centered Design Methodology User Centered Design involves users in all stages of a product’s deveIopment. The methodology is based on the knowledge that easy-to-use products don’t just happen. Their creation involves a design team with members from various disciplines who work together to design a total product solution. Continuous user input ensures that the team has a good understanding of what users do and want to do, and how well the design satisfies those tasks.

Interactive station indicator and user qualifier for virtual worlds

DITA is an architecture for creating topic-oriented, information-typed content that can be reused and single-sourced in a variety of ways. It is also an architecture for creating new information types and describing new information domains, allowing groups to create very specific, targeted document type definitions using a process called specialization, while at the same time reusing common output transforms and design rules.Specialization provides a way to reconcile the needs for centralized control of major architecture and design with the needs for localized control of group-specific and content-specific guidelines and controls. Specialization allows multiple definitions of content and output to coexist, related through a hierarchy of information types and transforms. This hierarchy lets general transforms know how to deal with new, specific content, and it lets specialized transforms reuse logic from the general transforms. As a result, any content can be processed by any transform, as long as both content and transform are specialization-compliant and part of the same hierarchy. You get the benefit of specific solutions, but you also get the benefit of common standards and shared resources.For some groups, specialization requires a radical move away from centralized processes into a world of negotiated possibilities that introduces many new stakeholders to the information management infrastructure. For other groups, specialization introduces centralization, and, while it provides new opportunities for sharing and reusing logic and design, it also requires new policies and procedures to bring disparate design and development activities into a cohesive, coordinated framework.Previous papers ([1],[2],[3],[4]) have described in some detail how the technology of specialization works, and how it can be implemented using off-the-shelf tools that are dependent only on base levels of W3C standards (XML 1.0, XSLT 1.0). This paper provides a brief summary of recent changes to DITA specialization, and describes their effects on processes, but concentrates primarily on policy considerations involved in the deployment of a specialization architecture.