Lauretta Jones

BlogCentral: the role of internal blogs at work

This paper describes a preliminary investigation into an internal corporate blogging community called BlogCentral. We conducted semi-structured interviews with fourteen active bloggers to investigate the role of blogging and its effects on work processes. Our findings suggest that BlogCentral facilitates access to tacit knowledge and resources vetted by experts, and, most importantly, contributes to the emergence of collaboration across a broad range of communities within the enterprise.

Perspectives on HCI patterns: concepts and tools

This workshop will explore a diversity of perspectives on Patterns and Patterns Languages for HCI as well as the requirements for software tools needed to improve the effectiveness of both pattern creation and pattern use. Through discussion of conceptual and methodological issues of why (and how) patterns are identified and in what circumstances they are useful in the design process we hope to map out the conceptual landscape of HCI patterns. By moving closer and examining pattern-related behavior and experiences we hope to identify the requirements for tools to make progress through that landscape.

Extending User-Centered Methods beyond Interface Design to Functional Definition

The contributions of human factors or usability practitioners to application development often begin with a functional specification handed down from an external source. User-centered design methods are commonly applied to how function is delivered but not what functions will be delivered. We in the Interactive Transaction Systems (ITS) group at the T.J. Watson Research Division of IBM have succeeded, during several application development efforts, in expanding the scope of our user-centered, iterative design approaches to include functional as well as interface definition for both software and hardware (kiosk/workstation) design. By learning our customers business and owning the entire development process, we can better design our solutions to solve their problems (and their clients problems in the case of service industry solutions). We achieve this by including the functional definition in the first of four phases we have defined for all of our development projects. A significant facilitation for this in the arena of software development has been the CADT (Customer Access Development Toolset) development platform we use to build our applications. This set of tools for iterative application design and development gives us the flexibility to quickly and effectively address emerging functional requirements.

Iterative development in the field

In this paper, we describe Iterative Development in the Field (IDF), a User-Centered Design approach for developing interactive applications. This approach is characterized by repeated evaluation and redesign cycles that are carried out throughout the product life cycle, from initial discovery and gathering of requirements to beyond deployment in the field. The evaluation is based on the use of interactive prototypes and is performed by actual users in the field. We describe how IDF has evolved over the past 13 years through the experience gained from four major projects and offer a set of guidelines for successful IDF that we illustrate with examples from our experience. We discuss limitations in the applicability of IDF and conclude with some comments regarding the future of IDF.

MoMA and the three-legged stool: fostering creative insight in interactive system design

We view the design of interactive systems as a three-legged stool. The legs are: an understanding of technology, an understanding of the users and the use context, and creative insight. As the metaphor implies, if any of the legs is missing, the stool will not stand. Although much work has gone into the effort to develop tools and methodologies to enable programmers and designers to create outstanding applications, we believe the hard truth is that good design requires skill, and creative insight is an essential ingredient that must be recognized and supported. Although it is difficult to manage, plan for, and control insight and creativity, we can create an atmosphere in which creative insight is encouraged, recognized and valued. In this design study, we offer guidelines for creating this environment and present some examples of their application to a project on which we are currently working with The Museum of Modern Art in New York. The project explores learning by ddiscovery and grows out of our research into cognitive HCI.

Avoiding the mistake of cloning: a case for user-centered design methods to reengineer documents

In this case study, we demonstrate how user-centered design techniques can enhance the introduction of documents into electronic commerce. A finance company, in order to compete on value rather than rate, sought to develop an electronic system for automobile financing. User-centered design principles and techniques were used to separate the fundamental business process from the supporting information process. Rather than simply reproducing the associated paper documents in the new information process, these techniques enabled us to craft electronic documents that achieved the customers goals, while still meeting legal and business process requirements. We also employed the power of electronic documents to significantly increase accuracy and completeness.

Issues and concerns in Internet based financial applications: an example from an auto finance system

The Internet is an important resource for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer commerce. Its advantages over private networks are often overshadowed by concerns about using public networks for commercial transactions. We present a case study that describes adoption of an Internet-based auto finance system by a financial institution and multiple auto dealerships. We discuss four issues that we needed to solve in order for the system to be accepted. These are: the implications of the open nature of the Internet on existing business-to-consumer relationships; security of enterprise data and systems; ensuring connectivity across enterprises; and the management of information assets generated by large volumes of electronic transactions.

A dive into online community properties

As digital communities grow in size their feature sets also grow with them. Different users have different experiences with the same tools and communities. Enterprises and other organizations seeking to leverage these communities need a straightforward way to analyze and compare a variety of salient attributes of these communities. We describe a taxonomy and tool for crowd-sourcing user based evaluations of enterprise relevant attributes of digital communities and present the results of a small scale study on its usefulness and stability across multiple raters.