1. Design Quotes
"The two most important tools an architect has are the eraser in the drawing room and the sledge hammer on the construction site."
—Frank Lloyd Wright
Hemingway rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms 39 times. When asked about how he achieved his great works, he said, "I write 99 pages of crap for every one page of masterpiece." He has also been quoted as saying "the first draft of anything is shit."
"The physicist's greatest tool is his wastebasket."
—Albert Einstein
"Rewrite and revise. Do not be afraid to seize what you have and cut it to ribbons … Good writing means good revising."
—Strunk and White, Elements of Style

2. User Centered Design
January 23, 2007

3. Design Good design is good because of its
fitness to a particular user
fitness to a particular task
In general, you are not your user!
Our class will stress user centered design.

4. Design
Why is it important?

5. Design Why is it important?
Design exists whether you think about it or not.
When you don’t think about design, bad design will be the result.

6. The Design Process
… I arrived at the studio room, and found a man at a drawing table, sketching out different variations of the Walkman® he was designing. I got close enough to see the large sketchpad and saw 30 or 40 different variations that he had considered and put down on paper. I introduced myself, pleaded ignorance about design, and asked him why he needed to make so many sketches. He thought for a second, and then said, "I don't know what a good idea looks like until I've seen the bad ones.“
By Scott Berkun

7. Design
To choose the best solution, you must have more than one solution to choose from.

8. The Historic Waterfall Model
System feasibility
Analysis
Specifying functionality
Design
Implementation
Coding and unit testing
Integration and testing
Operation and maintenance

9. User Centered Design Cycle
Composed of a series of steps like most design methodologies.
Developed to
give the design team maximum exposure to the users
feature specific measurement of usability.
Development is essentially iterative and self-correcting, and this model supports those aspects of design.

10. From CNN’s When good software goes bad By Jeordan Legon
Almost one in five computer users surveyed by Consumer Reports encountered software problems serious enough to contact technical support in the past 12 months. The high number of pleas for help, suggests the magazine, may be caused by frequent and persistent software glitches.
Software is riddled with errors because of its growing complexity, experts say, but also because much of the development costs -- as high as 80 percent by some estimates -- are spent on finding and fixing defects in millions of lines of code.

11. Design Cycle Needs Analysis User & Task Analysis Functional Analysis
Requirements
Analysis
Set Usability Goals
Design
Prototype
Evaluate

12. Northeastern University ACM
Scott Berkun: Why Software Sucks

13. Design Cycle Needs Analysis User & Task Analysis Functional Analysis
Requirements
Analysis
Set Usability Goals
Design
Prototype
Evaluate

14. Design Cycle Needs Analysis
Thumbnail sketch
Why is a new system/product needed?
Describe in one sentence or phrase
Basic user (audience) description
Benefit
Basic systems characteristics/capabilities

15. Design Cycle User and Task Analysis
Identifies
Characteristics of the potential user population(s), eg. demographics, domain knowledge.
Goals that the user wants to accomplish.
Tasks that the users perform.
May identify
Mental models.
Familiar metaphors.
Mental Model
when we store info we build a mental model of how something works.
Car – put key in, turn ingnition, car goes
Mechanic’s mental model may be very different
Expectations are made based on our own mental models
Metaphors.
way to relate a new or difficult task to a familiar one
typewriters / word processors
physical calculator / calculator program
When we see a calculator program for the first time if the interface looks like a calculator we use our preconceived mental model and intuitively know how or can make an educated guess about how to use it.
User analysis
Our class
group of 4th graders
group of senior citizens
Goal: Send a birthday present to a friend
Task: Select gift
Subtask: check several websites
Subtask:Check mall
Subtask: based on price, availabilty and free gift wrap option and delivery decide on a gift and store
Task 2: Buy gift
Task 3: Deliver gift if local
or notify its coming if remote.
Analyzes the tasks to develop layers of sub-tasks. (All of this should be in terms of tasks,not actions).
Gather as much information as you can for design and later testing.

16. Design Cycle Functional Analysis
Who does what?
Which system functions will accommodate which tasks ?
What part of the task is the human going to do?
What part of the task is the computer/device going to do?
Will there be manual tasks? Will there be tasks that can be solved by an off-the-shelf package? [Not everything needs to be automated or developed from scratch.]
Functionality or computer services that users will need and what will be automated to accomplish tasks
Close correspondence between functions and tasks
Examples: travel site task: “find all flights to xyz, ordered by price”
Needs search function and sorting capability
Music CD site: task “buy a CD”
Needs secure on-line transaction functionality

17. Design Cycle Technical Requirements Analysis
Formal technical specs
Flowchart
Schematic

18. Design Cycle Set Usability Goals
Metrics
Determine the quantifiable measures of how good is "good enough" e.g. task completion time, error rates, user preferences
Set these goals up front
Keep refining the system until you meet these goals

19. Design Cycle Design Where the planning pays off… Appearance
Functionality
Perceived affordance
A door affords exit or entrance from or to a room
Is a result of our mental model
Perceived affordance is affordance that is obvious to the user

20. Design Cycle Prototype the Interaction
Try it out
Build the prototype

21. Design Cycle Evaluate Get feedback on the prototype
User-based, testing
Expert-based
Quantitative and qualitative measures

22. In Class Assignment Divide up into two groups of two and one of three.
Look at or
Select one bad design you would like to present to the class or come up with your own example.
Prepare to present this to the class. Include:
The bad design.
The URL of the bad design.
Why do you think this is poorly designed? Can you describe the problem using any of the terms discussed in class (perceived affordance, mental model, metaphor)
Can you suggest or improve on the suggested remedy for the poor design?

23. Design and Art
2D and 3D design
Animation – Making of Finding Nemo

24. Homework
Free Writing due 01/28 - Compare and contrast the animation, engineering and software design processes described in class last week and today.