Tim Schneidermeier

Smart sol: bringing user experience to facility management: designing the user interaction of a solar control unit

While a lot of attention is paid to the design of consumer electronics like mobile phones, various other domains have been neglected so far when it comes to user experience. In this paper a user-centered design approach for designing the user interface of a controller for solar thermal plants and heat exchanger stations - called smart sol - is described. The design process is characterized by the cooperation of user experience designers on the one hand and engineers and programmers on the other hand.

Customized Usability Engineering for a Solar Control Unit: Adapting Traditional Methods to Domain and Project Constraints

This paper describes the adaption and customization of usability engineering methods for the interface design of a solar control unit. The design of a nontraditional interface, constrained access to representative users and a lack of common interface standards were domain-related issues to overcome. Due to limited resources, a Guerilla HCI approach was established. Traditional low-cost methods like prototyping and simplified usability testing were applied and adapted to fit in the domain-specific context. Good feedback indicates suitability of modified discount methods in the new domain.

Developing UX for Collaborative Mobile Prototyping

Prototyping is an essential part of the user-centered design process (UCD). Since the emergence of touch-based mobile devices in recent years, a broad range of efforts has been taken to adapt professional prototyping tools to the mobile context. However, none of the existing mobile prototyping solutions adapts sufficiently to the needs of multidisciplinary teams or considers the experience of the users’ working environments explicitly. Our goal was to develop a mobile prototyping tool that supports the users in their tasks with special attention to the context of use. We especially considered the holistic experience relating all tasks of the human-centered design process. Our approach of requirements engineering focused on UX methods to get a deep insight not only on pragmatic features but also emotional demands (i.e. hedonic qualities). Therefore we tried to strengthen the hedonic qualities to support action mode usage for leveraging creative potentials. We’d like to reveal whether and to what extent a detailed look on UX can ensure the working progress efficiency and motivation of a multidisciplinary software engineering team practicing agile methods. We will illustrate this by presenting the development process of our mobile prototyping tool Prime, especially concerning new perspectives of a design process that focuses on hedonic parameters.

Human-centered communication planning: a conceptual approach

This paper presents an interdisciplinary approach to transfer knowledge of human-centered design and usability engineering to the field of communication planning. Communication planning is a systematic process to identify target groups for specific marketing goals and when and how to reach them. We believe that by transferring methods and an overall iterative design process effectiveness and efficiency of the communication planning process as well as the overall success could be improved.

Lessons Learned in Usability Consulting

User-centered design in varying domains and contexts defines the daily routine of (external) usability consultants. Understanding users, their tasks and goals is essential for a successful project. This can be quite challenging, especially in more complex domains. Documenting design decisions and solutions provides a sound basis for efficient and sustainable further development by reusing design knowledge and artifacts.

Practice What We Preach – Checking the Usability of HCI Conference Websites

Today many conferences invite human-computer interaction and usability professionals for presentations, discussions and networking. Dedicated conference websites offer general information on the conference, on the submission process as well as on practical aspects of attending the conference. Considering the domain expertise of the audience, these websites should have extraordinary usability and offer a formidable user experience (UX). In order to evaluate this hypothesis, we have conducted a comparative usability study of three international conference websites with novice and expert users. The results show that previous experience has a slight influence on task efficiency, but also that the findings vary strongly from site to site. Independently from their experience, all participants rated the websites’ overall usability moderate to low.

Usability guidelines for desktop search engines

In this article we describe a usability evaluation of eight desktop search engines (DSEs). We used the heuristic walkthrough method to gather usability problems as well as individual strengths and weaknesses of the tested search engines. The results of the evaluation are integrated into a set of 30 design guidelines for user-friendly DSEs.

Design guidelines for coffee vending machines

Walk-up-and-use-systems such as vending and self-service machines request special attention concerning an easy to use and self-explanatory user interface. In this paper we present a set of design guidelines for coffee vending machines based on the results of an expert-based usability evaluation of thirteen different models.

Der Newbie, der Fortgeschrittene und der Power-User. Warum es nicht reicht, “einfach mal die Nutzer zu fragen”

Zusammenfassung Innerbetriebliche Software entwickelt sich häufig über Jahre hinweg inkrementell weiter, sammelt so Schritt für Schritt Funktionen an und verliert an Übersichtlichkeit. Soll diese Software hinsichtlich ihrer Gebrauchstauglichkeit optimiert werden, müssen aus Sicht eines externen Usability-Beraters zunächst die Domäne des Kunden verstanden und die Arbeitsprozesse analysiert werden. In der Analyse muss insbesondere der Umgang unterschiedlicher Nutzergruppen mit der Software berücksichtigt werden, um fundierte Neuvorschläge in einem Redesign erarbeiten zu können. In diesem Erfahrungsbericht beschreiben wir anhand eines konkreten Praxisbeispiels Eigenschaften von Nutzergruppen und deren Einfluss auf die Analyse, und warum es nicht reicht, die Nutzer “einfach mal zu fragen, wie sie die Software denn finden”.