How Do Designers Deal With Uncertainty

Uncertainty touches most aspects of life and cannot be avoided, anybody is frequently presented with situations wherein a decision must be made when he/she is uncertain of exactly how to proceed. Narrow down into Information Systems (IS) field, uncertainty could be regarded as a basic but difficult problem that every HCI designer need to deal with within their design process. The purpose of this thesis is to find out how do human-computer interaction (HCI) practitioners deal with the uncertainty in their daily work. Based on this purpose, we assume that design approaches could be the methods for the designers to deal with uncertainty. There is however very few existing research on how to deal with uncertainty. In this study, we firstly categorized the uncertainty into a logical taxonomy, also ranked four design approaches by the extent of user involvement. We interviewed five HCI practitioners in different organizations that are or were working as designers. We found that most uncertainties are resulted from their customers, which can also be the most difficult to handle by them. In order to solve uncertainty, the designers need to make a good communication with others in specific situation, and some of them also proposed other practical solutions, such as “Role Play” and “Instinct Follower”. Additionally, the designers all proposed that the relationship between uncertainty and design approaches can be weak or inexistent. Interestingly, modest user involvement can be a helper for designers to solve or avoid uncertainty in the design process

Building Bridges – HCI and Visualization

Part 1: Long and Short PapersInternational audienceThe fields, HCI and visualization, are usually practiced as two separate disciplines by researchers with different backgrounds and capabilities. However, these two disciplines, HCI and visualization, could complement each other and leveraging on the differences and complementary features of the two research fields could be beneficial for both. In this workshop, we are going to discuss the different approaches and capabilities of these two disciplines and layout a road map for a unified approach of research using both

Teaching Information Visualization via Creative Design

Part 1: Building Bridges: HCI and Visualization (INTERACT 2011)International audienceThe importance of Information Visualization is reflected in the many courses on that subject taught worldwide. The number of those courses, however, is not of prime importance: what is of real concern is how they are presented, and to whom

How to Investigate Interaction with Information Visualisation: An Overview of Methodologies

Part 1: Building Bridges: HCI and Visualization (INTERACT 2011)International audienceAdvanced information visualisation systems offer many different forms of interaction. Nevertheless, we do not know how useful these interactions are. Researchers have suggested to develop a science of interaction. In this paper we discuss which research methods might be appropriate to study interaction with information visualisation systems. We suggest that thinking aloud, log files and eye tracking are promising candidates. These methods enable researchers to study interaction in more detail than other methods. All these methods have strengths and weaknesses. A combination of two or three of these methods might help to overcome the weaknesses