Jan Gulliksen

Key principles for user-centred systems design

The concept of user-centred systems design (UCSD) has no agreed upon definition. Consequently, there is a great variety in the ways it is applied, which may lead to poor quality and poor usability in the resulting systems, as well as misconceptions about the effectiveness of UCSD. The purpose of this paper is to propose a definition of UCSD. We have identified 12 key principles for the adoption of a user-centred development process, principles that are based on existing theory, as well as research in and experiences from a large number of software development projects. The initial set of principles were applied and evaluated in a case study and modified accordingly. These principles can be used to communicate the nature of UCSD, evaluate a development process or develop systems development processes that support a user-centred approach. We also suggest activity lists and some tools for applying UCSD.

Usability professionals-current practices and future development

The usability concept has now received such a wide recognition in information technology (IT) development that working with usability can be regarded as a profession in its own right. In recent research projects, we have surveyed and studied usability work on an individual level in a number of Swedish development organisations, including success factors and obstacles. What we have seen relates to the individual usability professional and her background and experiences, the organisation in which she operates, the development process, communication and communication means, and finally the attitudes and basic values held by the people involved. In this paper, we compile and reflect on selected findings from different studies on usability work in practical systems development in a number of Swedish organisations. We discuss our findings from a practical point of view and relate them to the research of others within the international HCI community. Finally, we discuss some issues we consider important for the future development of the practice of usability that we believe is of interest to the international community of usability professionals.

Making a difference: a survey of the usability profession in Sweden

Poor usability in interactive systems/products is still a major problem for users and buyers, despite efforts made by an increasing number of usability professionals. How come this is so and what are the main obstacles to usability work? In this paper we report the results of a survey of usability professionals in Sweden, conducted in 2003. The survey identified, e.g. their background and experiences, the type of employment, organization, and products/systems, the software development process being used and some key success factors for usability work. The results indicate, among other things, that management support and project management support are essential for the usability worker. Moreover, they face problems such as, usability and user involvement having low priority in the projects.

Human-Centered Software Engineering - Integrating Usability in the Software Development Lifecycle

The fields of HCI and Software Engineering have evolved almost independently of each other until the last decade, when it became apparent that an integrated and combined perspective would benefit the development of interactive software applications. The chapters in this book are written by prominent researchers who bring to light the major integration issues and challenges, and offer a variety of solutions to bridging the HCI and SE gap, including: Extending software engineering artifacts for UI specification, such as annotating use cases with task descriptions, Enhancing object-oriented software engineering notations and models Possible extensions of HCI methods for requirements gathering through field observations and interviews, deriving a conceptual design model from scenario, task models and use cases and using personae as a way to understand and model end-users, New methodologies for interactive systems design, as well as approaches complementing existing methodologies.

Informal feedback rather than performance measurements – user-centred evaluation in Scrum projects

The main features of the Scrum process are intense communication between different stakeholders, and rapid feedback based on regular delivery of working software. The integration of traditional user-centred evaluation activities in this context is challenging. Hence, this paper presents an interview study of 21 informants, categorised in four different professional roles. The main contribution of the paper is an overview of the types of user-centred evaluation conducted by information technology professionals in various Scrum projects. Results show that various forms of feedback are indeed gathered on the usability and user experience of the software, system or service being developed. However, the user-centred evaluations conducted typically are informal with few users, gathering empirical qualitative data and performed during short unplanned sessions. Performance measurements gathering quantitative data are seldom used. The informants in the business specialist role merely ask users about their opinion, whereas the other roles use several user-centred evaluation activities to gather feedback on their design. Generally, feedback is gathered throughout the whole project, but often evaluation is conducted early in the project or even before the actual development starts. Finally, these results are discussed in relation to previous studies in the area.

Usability Design - Extending Rational Unified Process with a New Discipline

A new discipline, Usability Design, is proposed as an extension to Rational Unified Process (RUP). The aim is to make RUP more user-centred. The discipline springs out of best practices for user-centred design and contains activities that have been carefully tested. Five new roles are introduced to take responsibility for the different activities. An example is given to show the content of the workflow, the workflow details and the activities. The Usability Design discipline help projects to focus on usability and the users throughout the system development lifecycle.

Work environment and computer systems development

Work environment and occupational health problems of different nature are constantly increasing in computer supported work. Most efforts to improve the work environment are focused primarily on physical aspects, and to some extent on psychosocial aspects. Mental workload and cognitive problems are of a more complex nature, more difficult to measure and provide efficient solutions to, and are more seldom studied or solved. Solutions to work environment problems are usually applied to already existing work situations through improved equipment and work place design, health programmes, education, reorganizations, etc. The problems are seldom prevented by means of applying relevant methods early in the systems development process, before the artefacts have been designed and implemented. This paper, and the following papers of this special issue, will focus on the need to integrate different interdisciplinary methods at different phases in the development process of computerized support systems, with the ultimate goal to prevent work environment problems and decrease the health risks to the users.

Domain-specific design of user interfaces

The use of graphical user interfaces in a computerized work environment is often considered to substantially improve the work situation. The outcome can, however, often be the opposite. Inappropriate use of windowing techniques, scrolling, and colors can result in tedious and confusing interaction with the computer. Todays standards and style guides define basic design principles but are insufficient for design of interfaces to end‐user applications. Here detailed domain knowledge is indeed essential. A domain‐specific style guide (DSSG) is an extension of todays standard with domain‐specific primitives, interface elements, and forms, together with domain‐specific guidelines. Careful dedicated analysis of information utilization in a domain is the development basis for a DSSG. The development is performed with an object‐oriented approach to facilitate the reuse of interface components and to support consistency and structure. Using a DSSG, the development of applications can be performed with a simplifi...

Integrating work environment considerations into usability evaluation methods—the ADA approach

The ADA-method is an attempt to integrate work environment issues into a usability evaluation method. The intention is to provide a method that can be used for the analysis of computer systems that ...

Existing but Not Explicit - The User Perspective in Scrum Projects in Practice

Agile software development processes are becoming more common, but this does not mean that the user perspective in the development is catered for. It has its challenges to integrate the users’ aspects in Scrum projects in practice. In order to better understand these challenges we have interviewed IT professionals using Scrum focusing on four different areas: responsibility for the user perspective, emphasis on usability and user experience through documentation, usability activities with users and the organisational and contextual settings for emphasizing the user perspective. Results show that the responsibility for the user perspective is unclear in Scrum projects, and that often the user perspective is neither discussed nor described in the projects. However, the user perspective is often present through informal feedback used to understand the context of use and inform design for example. Finally the paper presents implications for working with the user perspective in Scrum projects.