The Usability Architect

Under the umbrella of User Experience - Usability Engineering and Interaction Design in 2010

2009-12-28T10:20:00.003+01:00

The last years of usability engineering practice where shaped by a war of terms, among them interaction design, user experience design, information architecture and many more. This phenomenon could also be witnessed by reading through job descriptions in Europe and the U.S.

I also had my difficulties in finding my own place in this pool of notions. This is why I wrote about the topic earlier this year: http://www.usability-architect.com/2009/06/who-am-i-from-interface-designers-to.html

In the meantime, I have the impression that in 2010 and in the subsequent years, too, there will be a consolidation of terms. I believe that information architecture (IA) will disappear from the scene, because the web becomes increasingly interactive. IA was especially associated with an expertise in building content and navigation structures that rather had a static form. Today, technologies like Silverlight, AJAX and Flash turn the web into a highly interactive media. Because the design of interactive systems is headlined with the term interaction design (IxD), it will absporb IA as a discipline. Naturally, this comes with an increasing need for IAs to enhance their knowledge and design capabilities beyond static forms of content representation.

In addition, user experience (UX) will molt to be the umbrella term for the design of software systems people will like to use and buy. This will underline the relationship of software design and customer experience management. But first of all, UX relates to the goal companies want to reach. Hence, UX does only describe a few methods and tools that provide guidance in actually designing UX.

This is why both usability engineering and interaction design will be the more concrete terms and discplines below the umbrella of UX. Both fields are relevant for designing interactive software systems in the future and there will be an ongoing discussion about the interfaces between both populations, including the role of industrial and graphic design.

I believe this is a very positive outlook for 2010 and it will help to promote the ROI of usability and design activities. I think it is always difficult to convince a client of investing into your profession, if you are unable to explain your discipline in a few words.

Book: User Interface Specification for Interactive Software Systems

2009-11-02T19:35:00.005+01:00

My book on "User Interface Specification for Interactive Software Systems" was just published by VWH Verlag, Germany. The book, which is written in English, is based on my PhD thesis.

Please find an abstract below.

The book can be ordered here:
(1) http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/3940317535/
(2) https://shop.strato.de/epages/Store8.sf/?ObjectPath=/Shops/61236266/Products/978-3-940317-53-7

Abstract (German):
User-Interface-Spezifikationsprozesse involvieren unterschiedliche Akteure mit jeweils eigenen Ausdrucksmitteln. Dadurch ergeben sich Herausforderungen bei der Umsetzung von Anforderungen in gutes UI-Design. Durch einen Mangel an interdisziplinären und kollaborativen Methoden und Werkzeugen dominieren dabei vor allem textbasierte Spezifikationsdokumente. Diese reichen jedoch mangels Interaktivität nicht aus, um innovative und kreative Prozesse zu unterstützen.

In diesem Buch wird eine Spezifikationstechnik vorgestellt, mit der Benutzer-, Aufgaben- und Interaktionsmodelle mit unterschiedlich detailliertem UI-Design verbunden werden. Dadurch entsteht eine erlebbare UI-Simulation, die im Vergleich zu interaktiven UI-Prototypen zusätzlich den visuellen Drill-Down zu Artefakten der Anforderungsermittlung erlaubt. Das Resultat sind interaktive UI-Spezifikationen, mit denen eine höhere Transparenz und Nachvollziehbarkeit im Spezifikationsprozess möglich sind.

Abstract (English):
When the user interface is be specified, a picture is worth a thousand words, and the worst thing one can do is write a natural-language specification for it. Because this practice is still common, it is a challenging task to move from text-based requirements and problem-space concepts to a final UI design, and then back again. However, this activity is required frequently and is necessary to drive creative ideas. Advanced UI specifications should therefore be made up of interconnected artefacts that have distinct levels of abstraction. With regards to the transparency and traceability of the rationale of the specification process, transitions and dependencies must be visual and traversable. For this purpose, this book introduces a model-based user interface specification method and a corresponding experimental tool that interactively integrates interdisciplinary and informal models with different levels of fidelity of user-interface prototyping. With innovative styles of interaction and user input, the presented method and tool support the collaboration required in a multidisciplinary context.

Agile User-Centered Design at German UPA 2009

2009-10-11T11:40:00.001+02:00

We have just published the complete slide-set from our tutorial on Agile User-Centered Design on Slideshare.

As I chair the UPA workgroup on Agile UCD, I am happy to receive comments and throughts about the combination of Agile Methods with Usability Engineering.

Please also visit our XING group:
https://www.xing.com/net/agileusability/

Agile UCD (UP09 Tutorial)

View more documents from dirkzimmermann.

Bringing User-Centered Design Practices into Agile Development Projects

2009-09-16T13:56:00.001+02:00

During the literature research I currently make on "Agile User Experience", I found the following presentation on Slideshare.

Bringing User-CenteredDesign Practices intoAgile Development Projects

View more presentations from abcd82.

UPA 2009 - Tutorial Agile UCD

2009-09-14T16:22:00.002+02:00

Together with other usability professionals I hosted a workshop on Agile User-Centered Design at the UPA conference in Berlin, 2009.

I like to share my slides and thoughts with you.

The GC-UPA founded a work group for Agile UCD, which will be chaired by Hartmut Obendorf and me. We invite people from Austria, Switzerland and Germany to contribute.

UPA 2009 - Tutorial Agile UCD

View more presentations from Thomas Memmel.

Agile + Usability on usabilityblog.de

2009-08-17T17:42:00.003+02:00

I wrote two small articles on the combination of agile processes and usability engineering. The first one was recently published on the leading German Blog on Usability, managed by eResult GmbH Germany.

http://www.usabilityblog.de/2009/08/agile-usability-produkte-mit-hoher-bedienqualitat-agil-entwickeln-teil-1/

Part two will follow soon.

Presentation on UX Deliverables in Practice

2009-08-08T08:44:00.001+02:00

I like to share a good presentation on UX I found on the web.

UX Deliverables in Practice

View more presentations from Peter Boersma.

User Experience / Agile User Experience

2009-08-07T13:09:00.004+02:00

Usability and user-centered design have found their way into many organizations and development processes. There is a solid body of usability knowledge available all around the world and maybe in your company as well.

However, new areas of user-centered design become more and more popular and usability experts should catch up with them. At the latest since Microsoft uncovered Surface and started sending an army of “evangelists” around the world, the term “user experience” raised a lot more attention compared to the recent talking about usability in the media.

User experience adds a new dimension of design to the supply chain of software development. For many products, it is no longer about how you “use” a piece of software, but how you “experience” it. From computer games we know, that a high user experience even outweighs an imperfect usability quality.

Usability experts should participate in designing processes for developing great user experiences and we should investigate in which areas of expertise we have to extend our current method- and tool-sets. Usability experts should also be able to provide methods to develop for a high “user experience” if a customer decides that this is a primary goal in a project.

In addition, the combination of agile processes and user experience as well is a very interesting field. Especially because the success stories of Apple’s gadgets, which typically all provide a great user experience to huge audience, go back on agile processes to some extent as well. Usability professionals therefore should discuss about the chances of combining agile and usability/user experience know-how to provide customers with great software products developed in time and budget, as well as equipped with emotionally and aesthetically pleasing user interfaces. This actually goes beyond usability engineering and it is a new and challenging of activity.

Career Profile for Usability Engineers

2009-07-23T13:15:00.006+02:00

The German Chapter of the Usability Professional Association (UPA) has just published a job role description for usability engineers including a summary of typical areas of work of usability staff along the software development lifecycle.

Although this is a very valuable document, it is still an open issue how usability job roles are reflected in appropriate job titles. Especially for people who find themselves in varying assignment along the supply chain, finding the right naming is very often difficult. I have discussed this in an earlier post already (see http://www.usability-architect.com/2009/06/who-am-i-from-interface-designers-to.html) and continuing a discussion in this topic seems both reasonable and necessary to me.

The article can be found at: http://germanupa.de/german-upa/berufsfeld

Full reference of the article:
Beschreibung der Rollen und Aufgaben von Usability Professionals im benutzerorientierten Entwicklungsprozess Weitergabe nur mit Genehmigung des Arbeitskreis Berufsbild des German Chapter der UPA e.V. Herausgeber: German Chapter der UPA e.V., Arbeitskreis Berufsfeld Autoren: C. Bogner, T. Geis, P. Huber, C. Lutsch, K. Petrovic, K. Polkehn Ansprechpartner: Clemens Lutsch, Microsoft Deutschland GmbH Version 1: April 2009

Agile + User Experience

2009-07-21T08:21:00.003+02:00

Dave Robertston and John Johnston from Thoughtworks made are interesting presentation on the relationship between Agile Methods and User Experience.

The presentation and video can be found at
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Agile-UCD-Robertson-Johnston

News on Expression Blend 3

2009-07-20T18:47:00.003+02:00

During the time we have to wait for the new MS Expression Blend toolkit, some exciting demo videos present the capabilities this new user interface engineering tool will provide.

I have found the following videos on YouTube after reading through some news on the web:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsAZjb7FKXA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3ErrS68YMM&feature=related

The UI prototyping support looks more and more amazing. I assume the sketching functionality will start get become even more exciting by using some multi-touch or pen input devices.

User Interface Prototyping - Toolkit Overview

2009-07-07T15:13:00.007+02:00

I have been asked several times already which UI prototyping tools I know or which ones I could recommend.

Typically, there is no all-in-one tool suitable for all prototyping purposes. But I decided to summarize some tools I already applied here in my blog.

Justinmind (http://www.justinmind.com): From wireframes to simulations. Acceptable price for single user license
Axure Pro (http://www.axure.com): very advanced tool, great support for developing detailed protoypes, but strong web focus. Additional widget libraries (e.g. http://www.acleandesign.com/2008/11/the-top-10-axure-resources/, or http://www.acleandesign.com/2008/09/axure-design-pattern-library-v2/) help to build quite interactive UI prototypes, which can be employed as UI specification. Belongs to my tools of the daily business.
Mockupscreens (http://mockupscreens.com): very cheap tool for building static UI mockups
Microsoft Visio: if your company own Visio licenses, this might be a rational choice. However, the UI prototyping support is rather poor and heavily relies on plug ins such as the one from http://www.guuui.com/issues/02_03_02.php
Adobe Photopshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Flex (http://www.adobe.com): I used tools of the Adobe suite when things have to look pretty (Photoshop) or the prototype needs to have special interactive behavior (Flash, Flex). The latter demand some ActionScript know how.
Microsoft Expression Blend (http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Overview.aspx?key=blend): the new star on the horizon for usability professionals. With Blend 3, Microsoft will enter the market with specific prototyping features built into a tool that can be used along the whole UI development supply chain. A great playground for usability people and UI designers, who have some C# skills.
iRise Studio (http://www.iRise.com): one of the most sophisticated prototyping tools, the big brother of Axure Pro. Very expensive, but very advanced. For more interactive UIs, Flash movies can be plugged-in.

I have also heard (but never used) the following tools:

RapidRabbit (https://rapidrabb.it/de): very motivated approach, I expect to see more mature versions in the future. We need more tools like this!
OmniGraffle (MAC only)
Serena Composer (http://www.serena.com/geo/de/products/composer/)

Another very good overview on prototyping tools can be found at
http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2009/03/24/rapid-prototyping-tools/

Interaction-Design.org Encyclopedia: Information Architecture

2009-06-30T15:18:00.002+02:00

The Interaction-Design.org Encyclopedia has just published an encyclopedia entry on Information Architecture by Michael Cummings.

See: http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/information_architecture.html

What is Interaction-Design.org?

Interaction-Design.org is all about making research accessible. We deal with human-centered aspects of technology: Interaction Design, User Experience (UX), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Information Architecture (IA), Human Factors, Usability, and related fields.

Domain knowledge vs. usability skill set – the methodological desert in usability marketing material

2009-06-29T18:40:00.006+02:00

In many situations, a usability expert is required to conduct a usability expert review of a software application that runs in an application domain unknown to him. Is the unfamiliarity with the domain really a reason for declining a usability review? Or in other words, is the expert constricted to provide valuable usability advice only in contexts of use he does widely know?

I argue that the fundamentals of usability engineering abstract from the underlying application domain and provide methods and tools that allow the assessment of usability quality independently from previous knowledge. And, would you really favour the usability engineer with a low methodological profile, but very specific and deep domain know-how over the one with decades of experience, but no experience in the very special domain? Or in other words, is it the surface or the preserves you care about the most?

I have seen representatives of both types and I will always prefer to have the method-guru on the team. If he has a profound background, he will get into the domain easily anyway. Moreover, I have experienced the huge benefits of cross-domain knowledge transfer several times by myself and I consider it as being much more important than biased in-domain knowledge.

In my opinion, the misleading tight coupling of usability expertise and domain knowledge therefore is ill-conceived. As a wide spread phenomenon, it is caused by the marketing materials found on the websites of many usability consulting companies. Some try to compete with others by making domain knowledge the driver of valuable usability work. Many consulting companies state, that the expert must have a certain experience in the specific application domain in order to do the expert review seriously.

This is absurd – especially because usability engineers are usually particularly trained in accessing different domains and moderating between the disciplines.

Where does the nonsense come from? Typically, companies provide a clearly laid out set of different usability services for diverse problems. Because some specific terms, among them the “expert review”, have gained increased popularity, other related techniques do practically no longer exist. Therefore, the term is used to represent usability testing techniques that are rather slight or small-weight and which do neither require extensive preparation nor use involvement. On the other side of the spectrum there is the formal usability test, which requires a development of test cases, the testing environment (lab) and the analysis of the recorded findings. In between: methodological desert.

So, can you explain who kidnapped – for example – well-established walkthrough techniques? Besides one to several experts on the review team, a domain expert from the client-side can participate in the analysis and guide the usability people through the main application scenarios and provide important domain information on the fly. There is absolutely no argument against an expert review just because the usability expert does not have domain specific knowledge. Therefore, the expert review can be applied in well known domains as well as in unknown environments, with the conquerable variation that somebody with domain knowledge (but no usability expertise) joins the review team during the analysis is conducted.

Naturally, people interested in usability advice should not be overwhelmed by too many different kinds of methods. No consulting company wants to strike its clients with dozens of explanations and definitions. And, the celebrity of some usability methods significantly helped in transporting user-centred design into the heads of decision makers. But the tendency to associate wrong statements with a small sub-set of techniques is equally misleading. As companies promote hard prerequisites such as domain knowledge, they educate clients in a way that contradicts the nature of usability as a discipline. The focus on just a small subset of usability techniques thwarts the efforts of many sapient usability people who developed a bouquet of usability techniques to take varying initial situations into account.

As a usability mentor, I try to rather point out to the adaptability of a certain test setting depending on the application domain. This also provides the chance of underlining usability competency instead of narrowing the discipline to a few hyped terms. Naturally, you can only promote diversified method competence if you actually have got some – otherwise, you need to continue to sell expert reviews doped with domain knowledge.

Providing Requirements Engineering Training in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

2009-06-26T10:40:00.007+02:00

I just returned from providing a requirements engineering training to a class in Malaysia. It was an awsome experience.

The training is the preparation course for the IREB certification in requirements engineering (foundation level), which is already quite popular in Germany and Switzerland.

The participants were software architects and software testers. They all work at a popular Malaysian IT company.

I was very happy to be in KL and I am looking forward to provide more training sessions there in the future. Besides the exciting experience of being in KL, the time in SEA also was a journey back time for me, cause it reminds me of my stay in Singapore in 2006.

UX, Information Architecture and Agile Development

2009-06-20T20:23:00.002+02:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation. As we are currently preparing our "Agile Usability" workshop for the UPA conference in Berlin, a colleague forwarded this interesting slides to us. I decided to share them with you, because they provide a great example of agile user-centered development.

IA und agile Softwareentwicklung verbinden: eine schwierige Beziehung?

View more OpenOffice presentations from eparo.

Prototypes as UI specification

2009-06-12T23:17:00.003+02:00

I just ran across an article, which describes the use of user interface prototypes as software specification method.

"The user interface specification provides an illustrative requirements specification for a system, because the specification visualizes the functionality of the system in a form that both the client and the supplier understand."

Read the full article at http://www.interacta.fi/ui_spec.html

In her blog on bridging the gap between business and IT, Laura Brandau recently also discussed the form of UI specifications.

"Good UI specifications take into account the data and context of the user within the application. This sort of spec does not replace UI design, but it does help you lead your team through thinking through the UI design and how users will actually experience information within it."

Read the full article at http://www.bridging-the-gap.com/how-to-create-a-user-interface-specification/

Who am I? From interface designers to usability architects

2009-06-12T21:53:00.005+02:00

HCI professionals are known as interaction designers, usability experts, graphic designers, user-experience experts, etc. (Belenguer et al. 2003).

With a greatly diversified range of interactive products and the growing need to „get the UI right‟, a variety of job descriptions has emerged (Preece et al. 2002):

Interaction designers - people involved in the design of all the interactive aspects of a product
Usability engineers - people who focus on evaluating products, using usability methods and principles
Information architects - people who come up with ideas of how to plan and structure interactive products
User-experience designers - people who do all the above but who may also carry out field studies to influence the design of products

Although UE is a well-established and broadly used term, (Preece et al. 2002) state that the discipline of interaction design is the umbrella term covering all of these aspects that are fundamental to all disciplines, fields, and approaches con-cerned with researching and designing computer-based systems for people.

Because the world of existing terms is not enough, I recently decided to add a nomenclature: the usability architect. I chose this term because it is the counterpart of the software architect - one who can analyse requirements, conceptualize models and designs and actually build the interactive software system with a focus on the user interface and usability.

References:
Belenguer, J., Parra, J., Torres, I. and Molina, P. J. (2003), 'HCI Designers and Engineers: Is it possible to work to-gether?', in In IFIP Working Group 2.7/13.4, INTERACT 2003 Workshop on Bridging the Gap Between Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction.

Preece, J., Rogers, Y. and Sharp, H. (2002), Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction, John Wiley & Sons.

Usability Engineering Return-on-Invest

2009-06-11T20:29:00.017+02:00

Because arguments for usability return-on-invest play a great role in today`s usability engineering business, I have made up my mind on the benefits of usability once more. As a result of my brainstorming, I just summarized a couple of benefits along the software development lifecycle.

Because some methods are typically employed at several stages of development, both the investment and ROI may occur several times in the following diagrams.

During software development, the ROI of usability method mainly derives from the engineering-truth that early changes are less expensive that those during later stages of development.

Another very positive effect of usability integration may derive from a shared understanding of design principles and basic usability rules. Agile practices like pair programming especially foster the distribution of usability awareness.

After the software was delivered, several benefits can be measure if usability engineering contributed to the design if the product. Usually, well designed applications require less training effort. Moreover, several ROI-related usability studies have shown that support costs are likely to be much lower if usability was part of the software lifecycle.

Because people love to buy and use soft- and hardware that is easy to use and pleasurable, companies that understand the role of user interface usability can be more successful.

Naturally, usability quality cannot evolve if the functional requirements are not satisfied as well.

After all, usability investments provide the chance for some valuable benefits. However, usability efforts are not for free. It would therefore be dubious if usabilty engineers just talk of pure added value. Additional time and budget must be allocated for modelling and visualizing requirements. In the beginning, the usability ROI will be less concrete. At the latest, a closer look to the total costs of ownership help understanding why it is justifyable to invest between 5 to 10% into usability methods.

User Interface Specification - From Models To UI Design

2009-06-10T19:47:00.007+02:00

A reader of this blog has just posted a comment on one of my previous entries on the Inspector tool.

The tool´s website is http://hci.uni-konstanz.de/inspector. Both the theoretical and practical approach is published in my thesis (http://kops.ub.uni-konstanz.de/volltexte/2009/7992/).

The according software project is continued at http://hci.uni-konstanz.de/BlendedIxD with focus on collaboration, support and simulation.

While research is dealing with new visions for blended development techniques, the basic idea of collaborative and interdisciplinary user interface specification must still find its ways into practice. Corporate developers and project managers hanker for appropriate means of joint modeling and prototyping. Some commercial tools (iRise, Axure, Microsoft Expression Blend) already pave the way for sophisticated, but easy to use methods applicable in what I call "visual requirements engineering".

Usability engineers and business analysts need a framework that supports them in travelling from analysis models to the visually specified design of the user interface.

With UI specifications that substitute ambiguous textual specifications with graphical representations of the desired UI and diagrammatic models describing user tasks and behavior, the work of usability professionals will become more engineering-driven and probably more accredited by software developers and formalists.

eBusiness: How to argue usability investments to your CEO?

2009-06-06T12:40:00.008+02:00

Many eBusiness managers ask how they can argue for usability investments and how they can measure the return-on-invest (ROI) of usability methods. There is not much serious literature available on this topic and the web is spammed with voodoo economics and rather doubtful metrics of usability ROI.

Usability experts, however, should have some comprehensible answers if clients approach them with the ROI question.

First of all, usability has a ROI. This is a widely accepted truth. The problem is, measuring the ROI is not so easy, especially because in most cases comparative data is not available and typically usability is not the only action taken to increase the quality of an eCommerce website.

Luckily, in eBusiness the ROI of usability can sometimes be measured more easily. If the business runs professional traffic analysis tools, there are some metrics that make usability ROI traceable. For example, if changes to the design of your checkout process result in an increased conversion rate, this can be the benefit of usability engineering. Most likely, such benefits can be measured well because they are the result of a pipelined process, such as the checkout at an online store. If you also changed the presentation of your shopping basket such that cross references to other attractive products appear before the customer proceeds to the checkout, you might even be able to increase the average value of the shopping basket.

While this might sound good on the first sight, the above example does imply a critical problem. If you try to measure the usability ROI after you have implemented both changes, will you be able to determine which usability method has increased the commercial success of your site? And guess you also changed the information architecture and search process in order to make people find your products more easily. Will you still be able to tell your CEO which part of the usability effort really impacted the sales figures?

I’d say no, you are not.

The nightmare of metrics gets even worse, if the marketing department runs an online campaign at the same time. Or, the other way around, cancels a larger amount of marketing activities. If the conversion rate then suddenly decreases to a level even lower than before usability methods were applied, how can you still argue that your usability spending has a ROI?

Measuring the ROI of usability would therefore demand to take one step after another in redesigning your website for more usability. As this would critically defer the time to market, there is not really a straightforward approach to measure the ROI of usability on the basis of figures from traffic analysis data in most project settings.

Even though you might be able to deduce some arguments from analysis data, the facts you will be able to present might be annulled by others easily.

In order to understand the ROI of usability engineering, you have to consider several aspects.

First of all, you have to understand that increasing a site's usability must not be restricted to specific processes, such as the checkout. The challenge rather is to make visitors find and use the processes and applications you provide. If people are unable to find a product or a service, even the most usable checkout design won't help. Again, you will most likely identify increased site usability by the sales figures of your store. But you must understand that the improvement does not just come from a newly designed checkout. If people do not find the products they are looking for, they will not even access a checkout or inquiry process. They will rather remember your store as a dealer with unfriendly sales staff and a bad allocation of products.

Second, and as a consequence of the above mentioned, you have to consider that usability already starts on the home page (or even at the search engine that leads to the right landing page) and continues to play a major role during several other processes, especially the search and find process. The ease of finding products is linked to the filtering and focusing information on your site. The architecture of your site should provide a clear guidance and support different access strategies, e.g. browsing vs. searching for products.

Third, a strictly process-driven design of your website is not a very good strategy. Most users will not access the content of your site in the way you expect. As a website manager, you should think about the motivation why people come to your website and take different types of visitors into account. Once you have an imagination about people's goals and what people expect from your site, you will be able to design an UI architecture that enables a high user experience by providing many ways of interacting with your site.

Altogether, arguing for usability investments should not exclude specific parts of your digital sales channel. If you invest in ease of use with a broader perspective, you can increase the user and customer experience by enabling people to find, understand and buy your products with less effort and in less time. Moreover, ease of access to your product landscape might allow decreasing your headcount of customer support and call-centre agents. A certain amount of usability ROI therefore also comes from decreased total costs of ownership.

Continuous usability testing or customer surveys are the better choice compared to traffic analysis. Monitoring real users while they interact with your site or querying your customers after they ordered a product will give you a much better impression about user (dis-)satisfaction. Unlike vague interpretations from marketing and product management, usability testing will show you how your users and customer really think. Moreover, the effort to invite real end-users to usability testing sessions is usually much lower that the implementation and maintenance of a non-standard traffic analysis tool - which coincidentally is usability ROI again.

Axure Pro 5.5

2009-03-19T15:05:00.000+01:00

Axure released a new update for their prototyping tool. Since version 5.5, Axure developers can save their own widgets in libraries and share them with others. I am using this feature to make special widgets available in other projects without copying them between my different project files.

The Axure team already provides one new widget, namely a tree widget. I already had the change to employ it in one of my most recent prototypes.

Together with some other new features, amount them a new location and size panel that allows for easier modification of widget properties, the new Axure 5.5 underlines its applicability as easy-to-use prototyping tool.

The users of Axure do still have a long list of desired features, which will keep the Axure team busy on the long. Naturally, in times of AJAX and GWT, the ability to build some more advanced animations into your prototypes generally is a good idea. However, more functionality in Axure can easily lead to a more complex tool – which is likely not what Axure wants to be.

I hope to see more from Axure in the future.

Brainstorming - An efficient technique for gathering ideas?

2009-01-15T15:25:00.007+01:00

Brainstorming is a wide-spread technique used in various contexts. In usability engineering, brainstorming is often used in design teams to think about one or more potential design solutions. Brainstorming is also used to prepare interviews with stakeholders, because the usability experts have to choose the questions he wants to ask.

Brainstorming comes with several pros and cons. Brainstorming is not a tool that is in any case successful. The reason is the people that take part in the brainstorming. They might feel uncomfortable, because they are required to contribute ideas in a specific time. Others might be overwhelmed by dominant speakers. Naturally, brainstorming can be very successful if the people on the team are creative thinkers that are able to play with their own ideas and those of others. Then, brainstorming usually generated loads of ideas.

My recommendation is: if you intend to use brainstorming to think about a problem at hand, do carefully consider the people you invite for the brainstorming. This does not mean that reserved and tacit people should not take part in the process. But to integrate them, you should rather consider inviting them to a electronic brainstorming. In the end, the results of different kinds of brainstorming can be consolidated.

Disregarding the technique you will use, the introduction to the topic of the brainstorming is crucial. Many brainstorming sessions are less successful simply because the team is not sure what the discussion is all about. This will make participants feel very unsecure and in a worst case, people will be frightened to contribute ideas because they are frightened to be wrong. Because brainstorming is all about gathering any idea that comes to anyone’s mind, this would be a mess.

As with all usability techniques, the application of brainstorming as requirements engineering and data gathering techniques requires a charismatic and experienced expert.

The temporalily final version of INSPECTOR was published

2009-01-15T11:55:00.006+01:00

I developed the INSPECTOR tool to demonstrate the added value of interactive UI specifications in the development of modern software systems.
The following video will provide a small snapshot on the main capabilties of the tool. The focus of the video is to outline the advantages of increased traceability and transparency of requirements and their association with abstract or concrete user interface designs.

UI Specification: travelling from strategy to surface

2008-10-09T09:21:00.002+02:00

In the last postings of my Catalyze blog, I described the idea of interactive UI specifications. Such a specification incorporates not just UI design prototypes, but the set of all models and artefacts that make up the design process and the design rationale. This includes text-based descriptions as well as diagrammatic notations.
Interactive specifications provide a more tangible and living way to define the look and feel of a UI. When the UI is discussed at the design layer, stakeholders and experts can drill down into the information layers below the surface in order to look at, review or change the underlying requirements. Accordingly, interactive UI specifications especially enhance transparency and traceability.
Travelling between the abstract and the detail belongs to the most frequent and most important activities in the design of innovative UIs. Staring with early design visions, the team will soon develop first sketchy layouts and more concrete design proposals later. During all phases of the design process this comes with facing design challenges, making difficult decisions and handling trade-offs. In the end, the iterative design process leads to a UI specification that is forwarded to developers.
Because interactive UI specifications lean upon a visualization of requirements and solutions, they can eliminate many shortcomings of text-based specification documents. The aim is to turn specification-driven development processes into processes where prototypes drive the progress. They externalize the outcome of translating requirements into the UI. And, they can substitute textual specifications if they include other detailed information that us usually integrated into hundreds of pages of text.

The idea of interactive specifications can be very well mapped to the so called 5-S-approach of Garret. The levels of surface and skeleton relate to abstract and detailed prototyping activities. The structure stages addresses the need of having descriptions of dialog flow. With regards to notations that are adequate to describe UI storyboards, the structure is as well best described with rather visual and diagrammatic notations. For example, diagrams such as flow charts, activity diagrams or data flow diagrams are very helpful to describe the structure. The scope of the software must describe functions and content. Both usability experts and software engineers know notations such as (essential) use cases or use case diagrams to address this assignment. The needs and visions that are behind the UI development project are defined in the strategy stage. For this purpose, textual notations such as scenarios are very useful.

For interactive UI specifications, the 5-S approach is an interesting construction that additionally underlines the idea of incorporating different means of expression into UI specifications. With adequate tool-support, the different levels can be traversed interactively. If all artefacts at the corresponding levels are linked, the UI specification adds transparency and traceability to the development process. This not just helps to develop better UIs, but also strengthens the role of the usability professional.