Hilary Johnson

Helping and hindering user involvement — a tale of everyday design

The importance of an early and on-going focus on users in interactive system design is widely accepted. However, in practice, involving users poses many problems and requires designers to balance conflicting demands. Various factors can hinder or ease the involvement of users. This paper reports a case study involving the design of a bespoke application and gives a detailed account of the obstacles and facilitators to user involvement encountered during the design activity. The obstacles and facilitators are presented in terms of issues such as contacting and selecting users, motivating users, facilitating and mediating meetings and offering points of focus for user contributions. We report and contrast the views of various stakeholders in the design process, and supplement these with our own observations as non-participant observers. Finally, we discuss issues raised by the study and draw out a number of lessons for the CHI community.

Explanation facilities and interactive systems

Our main research aim is to improve the provision of explanation facilities in information systems generally, and to identify what is meant by “explanation”. This paper reports research which identifies both the strengths and weaknesses of current research and shows how to overcome those weaknesses. We are also concerned with both present and future uses of explanation in information systems and the role of explanation in a broad range of interactive applications.

Costs and Benefits of User Involvement in Design: Practitioners' Views

Many design approaches recommend some form of user involvement in the design of interactive systems, although there has been little empirical research directed towards assessing the benefits to be gained, and costs to be incurred, from having users involved during the design process. Moreover, the work that does exist has tended to take a narrow view, considering the gains and losses primarily from an organizational perspective. This paper offers richer definitions of the costs and benefits by which user involvement might be assessed, emphasizing the contrasting views of different ‘stakeholders’ in the design process. It presents and discusses two empirical studies conducted in the light of these definitions to examine the costs and benefits of user involvement as perceived by design practitioners.

PatchWork: a software tool for early design

In this paper we describe the design and motivation for a novel prototyping tool to support the exploration of early design ideas. This software tool, Patchwork, allows the designer to rapidly create rough looking, runnable prototypes using simple building blocks which we call patches. Patches are arbitrary-shaped digital images, typically of low-tech design materials or domain objects. Prototypes are constructed through the specification of storyboards.

Supporting creative work tasks: the potential of multimodal tools to support sketching

Our research goal was to investigate, theoretically and empirically, the nature of creative work tasks, in particular sketching, with the aim of providing computer tool support. The domain investigated was character development in animation and illustration. The empirical studies into sketching, along with literature sources, provided the basis for a set of requirements for a multimodal tool to be designed to support the sketching task. The multimodal system included voice input and radial marking menus in an effort to support the need for rapid access to system functionality, and to avoid screen clutter. Informal evaluations were conducted which provided qualitative feedback about the use of the system.

Interaction in the large: developing a framework for integrating models in HCI

With the continuing expansion of HCI concerns, the field encompasses many local models. We have, for example, models of individual users and computers; models of group settings of system use, including the modeling of social, organizational and technological features; and models of the context and environment of system use. In the course of systems development, several of these models may be used. But it is in general unclear how they are, or may be, interrelated or integrated with each other. Understandings of how such models may be related and of the semantics of their relationships are important both to HCI as a discipline and to systems development practice.

An Empirical Study in Using Linked Documentation to Assist Software Maintenance

A software system’s success is primarily dependent upon its usability and maintainability. Changes to user requirements and the circumstances under which the system is used, means that a well-engineered system must be easily adapted to these changes, otherwise its usability and utility will diminish. An experiment is reported which hypothesises, that by linking related aspects of the system, reacting to change will be easier. The paper concludes that, although linking related aspects can increase the maintainers’ comprehension of the system, they are apt to rely too heavily upon the links. The conclusions have implications for design rationale in general.