1. Chapter 5 Design Overview
Conceptual Design
Physical Design
Evaluation
Interface Design Standards
Material through this and the next lecture is, much the same but, reorganized from the textbook.

2. Technology Myopia Interaction designs must be sensitive to:
Human-human communication
Implicit Knowledge
Non-technical aspects of work
Integrate technology and human activities carefully

3. Conceptual Design Conceptual design involves
Structuring the information space
Creating of alternative solutions
Determining which design concept to pursue

4. Conceptual Design The tools involved in conceptual design: Personas
Scenarios
Brainstorming
paper prototype
Semantic networks (mind maps)
Card sort
Flowcharts

5. Conceptual Design – Personas
Personas are archetypes of actual users, defined by the user’s goals and attributes.
“Personas are derived from patterns observed during interviews with and observations of users and potential user (and sometimes customers) of a product”
(Cooper & Reimann, 2003, 67)

6. Conceptual Design – Personas
A persona is created by identifying the primary stakeholder and creating an identity based on the stakeholder profiles and other collection activities such as interviews and surveys.
And your imagination – general life knowledge
A persona is a detailed description complete with as many personally identifying attributes as necessary to make it come to life.
Minimum
Give him/her a name
And a relevant life
Set him/her in an environment or context
Set some motivations and goals

7. Examples from old Exam Lecturer Student
Tom Good is a 59 year old, he works as a professor at UoA specialized in English Literature. He has 2 kids and he lives on the North Shore. His office working hours are from He has basic knowledge about using computers. He likes reading the news every morning from the Times (London). He always dresses for work with a bow tie.
What is missing from this Persona? ……
Student
Peter is a kiwi guy who is studying English literature at UoA. He is 18 years old and lives in West Auckland. He likes girls, reading and writing. He had computer subjects at school, but thinks it is boring. He likes sitting in Albert Park sharing a joint with his mates – he often misses class. He uses on the online notes to find out what he has misses in class.

8. Conceptual Design – Personas
Advantages of personas:
They are quick and easy to create.
They provide a consistent model for all team members.
They are easy to use with other design methods.
They make the user real in the mind of the designer.
Disadvantages of personas:
They can be difficult to create if the target audience is international.
Having too many personas will make the work difficult.
There is a risk of incorporating unsupported designer assumptions.

9. Scenarios
Scenarios
A description of a typical task
It describes
The basic goal
The conditions that exist at the beginning of the task
The activities in which the persona will engage
The outcomes of those activities
Scenarios afford a rich picture of the user’s tasks

10. Examples from old Exam
At 4pm Tom Good starts up his computer, logs in and starts the internet explorer window. The home page has shown up, which is the English Lit department home page. He clicks on the ‘staff’ button and logs in again! He clicks on the button for his course and then another for lecture 17 (tomorrow). He starts typing notes into the text box and then remembers he did all this last year and goes in search of the old notes to copy. All the time he is wondering why he should have to provide notes for lazy little sods like Peter, who should just turn up to class like he did when he was a student. But the Hod (his wife) has been nagging him mercilessly about getting his notes online.
Peter has his EngLit101 lecture at 2pm Monday – but he is pretty out of it and misses half the class. Tuesday morning he realizes that he had better check if there is any info for the up-coming assignment. He logs into the course page and navigates to Monday’s lecture notes. Prof Good has come through again – everything he needs is online. Another wonderful afternoon in the park and still able to do is work.

11. Conceptual Design - Brainstorming
Team activity
Stream-of-consciousness
Storyboarding/ paper prototypes
Semantic networks /mind-maps
Using informal tools (pen and paper) is one of the keys to successful conceptual design

12. Low-fidelity (paper) prototypes
The three main criteria for low-fidelity prototypes:
Easy and inexpensive to make.
Flexible enough to be constantly changed and rearranged.
Complete enough to yield useful feedback about specific design questions.

13. Old student examples
Your first paper prototypes should be very rough (lines only)
By time you hand them in they should be like this

14. Low-fidelity (paper) prototypes
Advantages of paper prototypes:
They can be used early and often.
They are inexpensive and easy to create.
They make design ideas visual.
No special knowledge is required; all team members can create them.
Disadvantage of paper prototypes:
They are not interactive.
They cannot be used to calculate response timings.
They do not deal with implementation issues (this is also an advantage).

15. So what happens as you tidy them?
Yeung, L., B. Plimmer, B. Lobb, and D. Elliffe, Effect of Fidelity in Diagram Presentation in HCI 2008, D. England, Editor. 2008, BCS: Liverpool. p

16. What happened?
Number of changes
Enjoyment

17. Conceptual Design – Semantic Network/Mind map
A semantic network is a web of concepts that are linked through association.
Best hand drawn because it is quicker and less constrained

18. Conceptual Design – Semantic Network
Advantages of semantic networks:
They allow an easy way to explore the problem space.
They provide a way to create clusters of related elements.
They provide a graphical view of the problem space.
They resonate with the ways in which people process information.
Disadvantages of semantic networks:
They require knowledge of the problem space.
They can lead beyond the problem space.
There is no formal semantics for defining symbol meaning.

19. Conceptual Design – Card Sort
Card Sorting can be used to discover user-centered groupings
Card sorting can be used to organize the information collected in the discovery phase
Used to define groupings for menus, controls and Web page content
Used to generate labels for menus, buttons and navigation links

20. Conceptual Design – Card Sort
Result of a card sort

21. Conceptual Design – Card Sort
Advantages of card sorting sessions:
They are quick and easy to perform.
They can be done before any preliminary designs have been made.
They will let you know how people organize information.
They will expose underlying structures.
Disadvantages of card sorting sessions:
They only involve the elements that you have written on the cards.
They suggest solutions that imply structures.
They become difficult to navigate with more categories.

22. Flowcharts Flowcharts can be:
Simple network diagrams that identify the pages of a Web site and the navigational links between them
Sophisticated diagrams that capture conditional junctures and computational processes

23. Questions Create two personas and scenarios for an email system.
How did you maintain the integrity of your personas?

24. Next
Evaluation, Physical design continued, standards