Susan L. Spraragen

Measuring success

COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM August 2000/Vol. 43, No. 8 53 The structure of the Web is rapidly evolving from a loose collection of Web sites into organized marketplaces. The phenomena of aggregation, portals, large enterprise sites, and business-to-business applications are resulting in centralized, virtual places, through which millions of visitors pass. With this development, it becomes possible to gather unprecedented amounts of data about individuals. Data sources capturing purchase histories, casual browsing habits, financial activities, credit histories, and demographics can be combined to construct highly detailed personal profiles. Not only is it possible to collect vast amounts of data, it is vital for e-businesses to be able exploit the data effectively. In the Internet environment, products and services are constantly in danger of becoming commodities, shoppers can explore competing Web sites without leaving their chairs, and bots and agents MEASURING SUCCESS Edith Schonberg, Thomas Cofino, Robert Hoch, Mark Podlaseck, and Susan L. Spraragen

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.

Pegboard: a framework for developing mobile applications

Tool support for mobile application development can significantly improve programmer productivity and software quality. Pegboard is a novel tooling framework that extends the Eclipse integrated development environment to support the development of mobile distributed applications. Its extensible design supports multiple application models and the orchestration of external tooling components throughout the development cycle. In this paper we describe Pegboards architecture and implementation, and show how it improves the development experience through organization, visualization, simplification and guidance. We also discuss insights gained from interviewing software developers, including early users of Pegboard.

The challenges in creating tools for improving the software development lifecycle

Creating successful software systems for end user applications is a complex task. It is often proposed that tools can be built for development teams to help them do their job more efficiently and to help them communicate with their team members. The success of these tools relies on how well the technical community that builds software tools understands the needs of the technical community that uses these tools. How can we effectively apply a user centered design approach to building these tools?

A high-density catalog for online browsing

In brick-and mortar stores and paper catalogs, the experiential, non-directed consumer activity called browsing can expose a prospective buyer to hundreds of images, scents, and sounds in the space of seconds. On the World Wide Web, however, the browsers experience is attenuated, not only by the limited number of items represented at a given time on a given page, but by the number of arbitrary decisions that are often required to navigate to that page. The High-Density Online Catalog (HDOC) is a single-page, interactive visualization derived from parallel coordinate plots and intended for browsing many items with common attributes. A fully populated HDOC immediately communicates its depth and breadth, and engages the user to dip freely into its contents. A prototype of HDOC, illustrating many hundreds of musical works, has been developed in conjunction with the composer, Philip Glass. The paper discusses the HDOC interface design and initial usability studies.