1. CS294 Software Engineering Software Usability
Contextual Design Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt Psychology of Everyday Things Don Norman
Make it easier to create these apps?
Contributions + validation?
Focus on privacy
Understand model
Better design of applications
Certain features (evolvability)
Jason I. Hong

2. Contextual Design Overview
How to create useful, usable, and desirable software for end-users?
Recurring themes in Contextual Design
Try to understand entire context of customers
Base decisions on observations of work practices
Get continual feedback from customers
Get entire team involved
programmers, marketing, QA, and customers
Focus on customers throughout, not just at end
May

3. Contextual Design Contextual Inquiry
“Ethnographically-inspired” field studies
Go out and observe with several actual customers at their workplace (Master-apprentice model)
Customers not necessarily same as clients
Main goal is to understand Where, How, and What to expose the Why
Say they want drills, really want holes
Three secondary goals:
Avoid designer bias
Provide concrete data
Get entire team on same page
May

4. Contextual Design Questions about Contextual Inquiry
How well does this technique work?
Bang for buck compared to other techniques?
What kinds of info does it capture? Drawbacks?
How much does it depend on the interviewers and interviewees selected?
Scale? How many customers to observe?
Ex. MSWord vs custom app for small company
What tools would be useful here?
Most of the tools we’ve examined focus on software dev rather than requirements
May

5. Contextual Design Affinity Diagrams
Goal is to organize the information collected from Contextual Inquiry field studies
Entire design team uses Post-its and large spaces to spatially organize ideas
May

6. Contextual Design Affinity Diagrams
May

7. Contextual Design Affinity Diagrams
May

8. Contextual Design Some Questions on Affinity Diagrams
How reliable is this technique?
Does it capture the results of contextual inquiry well?
How often will you usually get the same diagram?
or is it really that important, ie process vs artifact?
Are there better ways of organizing the info?
What kinds of tools?
Little computer support here
May

9. Contextual Design Paper Prototyping
May

10. Contextual Design Paper Prototyping
May

11. Contextual Design Paper Prototyping
May

12. Contextual Design Questions on Paper Prototyping
Bang for buck
Gauging “improvement” in software quality?
i.e. convincing engineers and management
How many times to do paper prototyping?
How dependent is it on skills of design team?
Why not just put the software out there?
“Release early and release often”
Tools for improving software prototyping?
Again, most tools here are carbon-based
May

13. Questions on Contextual Design
How does Contextual Design compare?
Does it work? If so, how well vs other processes?
Resolving conflicts with other processes
Marketing-driven requirements
XP focuses on the Source Code
Open Source + Contextual Design?
New software changes nature of work practices
A Heisenberg effect for software
If Contextual Design is good and works, how to encourage it within our engineering culture?
May

14. Psychology of Everyday Things Overview
Author bio
Founding chair of CogSci at UCSD
VP Apple and HP
Currently Prof at Northwestern
Any favorite stories?
Horror stories or good stories?
From book or personal?
My horror story is remote control for video projector in the classroom
No affordance for the hidden flap in the remote
Little feedback as to whether it worked or not (a little blinking light)
Easier to point out horror stories b/c good designs are invisible
May

15. Psychology of Everyday Things Overview
Conceptual Models and Visibility
Crosscutting principles
Affordances
Feedback
Mappings
Constraints
Errors
Convention
Some elements of Distributed Cognition
Traditional cognition looks at individuals
In DCog, “knowledge” also in processes and physical world
These are all "low-level" examples of principles
How to make this work consistently and coherently on a larger-scale?
May

16. Psychology of Everyday Things Overall Questions (1/2)
Problems descriptive of software?
What’s different about software vs physical artifacts?
Higher barriers to entry with “invisible” s/w and chips?
Do these design principles apply to software?
If so, how?
Better tools?
Often have to explicitly design these principles in
little support for designers to do the “right thing”
How to make it easy to create good Conceptual Models? Mappings? Affordances?
Most tools and CS classes are text-oriented
Big step jumping from text to graphics and sound
Lower-level support for these?
Programming languages? (mostly text-based)
Systems?
Multimodal?
Wireless?
Ubicomp?
May

17. Psychology of Everyday Things Overall Questions (2/2)
Are these problems also cultural?
Design community focuses on novelty and aesthetics
Software community rewards code and hackworthiness
ex. Slashdot, RTFM, Unix
Little acclaim or excitement for usability and simplicity
Market doesn't always reward good designs
How can we change our tools, processes, language, and culture to focus on and match end-user needs?
Do we need to? Done pretty well so far, haven't we?
Better multidisciplinary education for undergrads?
Can we bridge Interaction Design and Software Eng?
May