Entangled Design Knowledge: Relationships as an Approach to Claims Reuse

As a discipline, human-computer interaction produces creative and innovative designs that could provide a reusable collection of design knowledge on which future efforts could build. It is unfortunate that so much of this knowledge is not fully reused by designers today. To encourage the use of previously identified HCI knowledge, we propose a model of reuse building on Carroll?s notion of claims, design knowledge components that capture the positive and negative psychological effects of design features. We address four challenges associated with reuse in a library of claims, adopted from software engineering?a discipline in which the notion of reuse has been prevalent for quite some time. Building on Krueger?s definition of reuse and his conceptualization of four key aspects?abstraction, selection, specification, and integration?we propose a reuse approach based on incorporating these four aspects into the design process. To abstract, select, specify and integrate claims, we identify claim relationships, descriptions of connections between claims. We portray how claim relationships can be used to aid in identifying claim types, searching for claims, creating new claims, and aggregating claims. By integrating relationships into a claims library, we demonstrate how they can be applied to assist claims reuse and present studies related to each application of the relationships

Designing Attention-Centric Notification Systems: Five HCI Challenges

Through an examination of the emerging domain of cognitive systems, with a focus on attention-centric cognitive systems used for notification, this document explores the human-computer interaction challenges that must be addressed for successful interface design. This document asserts that with compatible tools and methods, user notification requirements and interface usability can be abstracted, expressed, and compared with critical parameter ratings; that is, even novice designers can assess attention cost factors to determine target parameter levels for new system development. With a general understanding of the user tasks supported by the notification system, a designer can access the repository of design knowledge for appropriate information and interaction design techniques (e.g., use of color, audio features, animation, screen size, transition of states, etc), which have analytically and empirically derived ratings. Furthermore, usability evaluation methods, provided to designers as part of the integrated system, are adaptable to specific combinations of targeted parameter levels. User testing results can be conveniently added back into the design knowledge repository and compared to target parameter levels to determine design success and build reusable HCI knowledge. This approach is discussed in greater detail as we describe five HCI challenges relating to cognitive system development: (1) convenient access to basic research and guidelines, (2) requirements engineering methods for notification interfaces, (3) better and more usable predictive modeling for pre-attentive and dual-task interfaces, (4) standard empirical evaluation procedures for notification systems, and (5) conceptual frameworks for organizing reusable design and software components. This document also describes our initial work toward building infrastructure to overcome these five challenges, focused on notification system development. We described LINK-UP, a design environment grounded on years of theory and method development within HCI, providing a mechanism to integrate interdisciplinary expertise from the cognitive systems research community. Claims allow convenient access to basic research and guidelines, while modules parallel a lifecycle development iteration and provide a process for requirements engineering guided by this basic research. The activities carried out through LINK-UP provide access to and interaction with reusable design components organized based on our framework. We think that this approach may provide the scientific basis necessary for exciting interdisciplinary advancement through many fields of design, with notification systems serving as an initial model. A version of this document will appear as chapter 3 in the book Cognitive Systems: Human Cognitive Models in Systems Design edited by Chris Forsythe, Michael Bernard, and Timothy Goldsmith resulting from a workshop led by the editors in summer 2003. The authors are grateful for the input of the workshop organizers and conference attendees in the preparation of this document

Spiraling Toward Usability: An Integrated Design Environment and Management System

Decades of innovation in designing usable (and unusable) interfaces have resulted in a plethora of guidelines, usability engineering methods, and other design tools. However, novice developers often have difficulty selecting and utilizing theory-based design tools in a coherent design process. This work introduces an integrated design environment and knowledge management system, LINK-UP. The central design record (CDR) module, provides tools to enable a guided, coherent development process. The CDR aims to prevent breakdowns occurring between design and evaluation phases both within the development team and during design knowledge reuse processes. We report on results from three case studies illustrating novice designers use of LINK-UP. A design knowledge IDE incorporating a CDR can help novice developers craft interfaces in a methodical fashion, while applying, verifying, and producing reusable design knowledge. Although LINK-UP supports a specific design domain, our IDE approach can transfer to other domains

A first empirical study of direct combination in a ubiquitous environment

In dynamic ubiquitous environments, end users may need to create services by causing two or more devices or resources to interoperate together in ad-hoc circumstances. In general, users can find this kind of process hard to manage. At the same time, existing UI architectures are not well suited to supporting such activities. It is proposed that a good basis for addressing these and related problems in a principled, scaleable way is the principle of Direct Combination (DC). The principle is summarized, and analytical arguments are presented that predict that DC can reduce the amount of search required by the user. Other things being equal, such a reduction in search would be expected to offer interactions which are faster, less frustrating, and impose less mental load on the user. We present a proof-of-concept implementation, and a small-scale evaluation of a DC interface. Within the limitations of a preliminary evaluation, consistent support is offered across several measures for the analytical predictions

Collaborative Storyboarding: Artifact-Driven Construction of Shared Understanding

Collaborative storyboarding, with a focus on aggregating designers’ expertise in the storyboarding process, offers the opportunity for a group of designers to make progress toward creating a visual narrative for a new interface or technology, but it requires the designers to work together to explore ideas, differentiate between options, and construct a common solution. Important in collaborative storyboarding is the shared understanding that emerges among the designers and the obstacles they face in establishing that understanding. This paper defines a model for collaborative storyboarding, presents a study that explores group interactions in collaborative storyboarding, and analyzes the interactions using the distributed cognition and common ground theories. Our findings demonstrate that joint interaction and enthusiastic efforts within each phase lead to active information exchanges and shared understanding among the members of the group

A Critique of Design Approaches for Notification Systems

The Fall 2004 Virginia Tech Undergraduate Research in Computer Science (VTURCS) class, taught by Dr. McCrickard, covered the following topics: problem, activity and information/interaction phases of design; scenario based design; interruption, reaction, and comprehension (IRC) values; stages of action; ubiquitous computing evaluation areas (UEAs) and participatory negotiation. This critique is my assessment and observations of how these design approaches worked for our project