Design Methods
Kelly Nigh
Prototyping Exercise
• Split into groups of 2-3 and choose one of these
interfaces (or another of your choice)
• a new car display (including speedometer, odometer, etc.)
• a new weather forecast display
• a system that keeps track of a person’s prescription drugs
• a new social networking site
• a system to replace Stanford’s Axess
• Individually, come up with a design and rapidly
develop a prototype
• use paper, scissors, colored pencils/markers, post-it notes
• or another tool of your choice (i.e. Adobe Flash)
Compare your prototypes.
What can you learn from
comparing a variety of designs?
Getting the Right Design and
the Design Right: Testing
Many Is Better Than One
Maryam Tohidi, William Buxton, Ronald Baecker, Abigail Sellen
(2006)
“…Help the designers in selecting the
right design, before proceeding with
getting the design right.”
Evaluation of One Prototype
vs. Multiple Prototypes
• Three prototypes of same system (House
Climate Control System)
• Research subjects split into four groups
–
–
–
–
Evaluate only prototype #1
Evaluate only prototype #2
Evaluate only prototype #3
Evaluate all three prototypes
• Hypotheses
– Evaluating multiple prototypes will yield…
• Lower overall score for each prototype
• More negative, less positive comments
• More suggestions for improvement
Results
• Subjects who evaluated only one
prototype (in comparison to those who
evaluated all three)…
– gave it an overall higher score (for all three
cases, but results significant in only 2/3)
– gave more positive and less negative
comments
– provided the same number of suggestions for
improvement
• but also tended to give more superficial
suggestions
(Results similar for other two prototypes)
“Perhaps the focus in usability testing
should remain in detecting errors, not
soliciting ideas.”
Do you agree? Can untrained users
provide good ideas, or is a
background in design necessary to
make valid suggestions?
Other questions based on class
critiques…
Reinventing the Familiar: Exploring
an Augmented Reality Design Space
for Air Traffic Control
Wendy E. Mackay, Anne-Laure Fayard, Laurent Frobert and Lionel Medini
(1998)
Revisit a question from ethnography discussion:
How do you bridge the gap between collecting
information and coming up with a design?
Reinventing the Familiar: Exploring
an Augmented Reality Design Space
for Air Traffic Control
Wendy E. Mackay, Anne-Laure Fayard, Laurent Frobert and Lionel Medini
(1998)
Revisit a question from ethnography discussion:
How do you bridge the gap between collecting
information and coming up with a design?
Ethnographic study
Brainstorm/Prototype
Evaluate
Results of Ethnography
• Controller routine: constantly checking that
planes on radar correspond with flight strips
• Strips as mental representation: controller
keeps an active picture of planes’ current
states in mind
– Layout of flight strips
– Physical act of writing to remember changes
• Communication between controllers:
physical, non-verbal interactions that indicate
different levels of urgency
Prototype design
• Goal: provide support for
communication
• Keep strips, as they fulfill controller’s
needs
– Digitized version of strip
– Main needs:
• capture information from strips
– graphics tablet with pen input, touch-sensitive
screen, video camera
• track location of strips
– video camera, stripboard that detects resistance in
strip holders
• present information onto strips
Evaluation
• Process
– Present scenarios based on observations
made during ethnographical study
– “Wizard of Oz” techniques
– Iterative design
• Based on observations, make changes to
prototype and reevaluate
• Findings
– Need for evolution (i.e. set of annotations)
– Simplicity, mental representations
important
End Result
• “Interaction browser”
– Controllers can experiment with different types of
annotations
• Conclusion:
– “Physical objects play an important role in
cooperative work and automation efforts that get
rid of them risk losing important aspects of the
interface.”
– Solution: some combination of automation and
physical representation that leverages benefits of
each
Did this paper succeed in demonstrating
the transition from ethnographic
observations to iterative prototyping?
Was it lacking?
Did the researchers really try different
designs, or just iterations on the same
design?
By taking the results of an ethnographic
study into account, is a designer
restricting the design space too greatly?
Other questions based on class
critiques…