A Load of Cobbler’s Children: Beyond the Model Designing Processor

HCI has developed rich understandings of people at work and at play with technology: most people that is, except designers, who remain locked in the information processing paradigm of first wave HCI. Design methods are validated as if they were computer programs, expected to produce the same results on a range of architectures and hardware. Unfortunately, designers are people, and thus interfere substantially (generally to good effects) with the ‘code’ of design methods. We need to rethink the evaluation and design of design and evaluation methods in HCI. A logocentric proposal based on resource function vocabularies is presented

Diffusion of Worth Mapping: The worth of resource functions

This workshop paper uses a resource function vocabulary from the Working to Choose framework to analyse diffusion of the Worth Maps approach across several application domains. It explores how a resource function vocabulary can indicate aspects of design approaches and their use that favour successful diffusion

Making Designing Worth Worth Designing

This position paper on Methods to Account for Values in Human-Centred Computing summarises the Working to Choose framework as an option for addressing several of this CHI 2012 workshop’s topics. It also lists worth-focused design and evaluation approaches that my collaborators and I have developed, applied and assessed

Facilitating the take-up of new HCI practices: a ‘diffusion of innovations’ perspective

The workshop Made for Sharing: HCI Stories of Transfer, Triumph & Tragedy focuses on collecting cases in which practitioners have used their HCI methods in new contexts. For analyzing the collected body of cases we propose to apply a framework inspired by the Diffusion of Innovations approach which focuses on what facilitates the adoption, re-invention and implementation of new practices in social systems

Creative Worthwhile Interaction Design

Over the last two decades, creative, agile, lean and strategic design approaches have become increasingly prevalent in the development of interactive technologies, but tensions exist with longer established approaches such as human factors engineering and user-centered design. These tensions can be harnessed productively by first giving equal status in principle to creative, business and agile engineering practices, and then supporting this with flexible critical approaches and resources that can balance and integrate a range of multidisciplinary design practices

Falsification testing for usability inspection method assessment

We need more reliable usability inspection methods (UIMs), but assessment of UIMs has been unreliable [5]. We can only reliably improve UIMs if we have more reliable assessment. When assessing UIMs, we need to code analysts’ predictions as true or false positives or negatives, or as genuinely missed problems. Defenders of UIMs often claim that false positives cannot be accurately coded, i.e., that a prediction is true but has never shown up through user testing or other validation approaches. We show this and similar claims to be mistaken by briefly reviewing methods for reliable coding of each of five types of prediction outcome. We focus on falsification testing, which allows confident coding of false positives

Inspection based evaluations

Usability inspection methods (UIMs) remain an important discount method for usability evaluation. They can be applied to any designed artefact during development: a paper prototype, a storyboard, a working prototype (e.g., in Macromedia Flash™ or in Microsoft PowerPoint™), tested production software, or an installed public release. They are analytical evaluation methods, which involve no typical end users, unlike empirical methods such as user testing. UIMs only require availability of a designed artefact and trained analysts. Thus, evaluation is possible with low resources (hence discount methods). Although risks arise from low resources, well-informed practices disproportionately improve analyst performance, improving cost-benefit ratios. This chapter introduces UIMs, covering six and one further method, and provides approaches to assessing existing, emerging and future UIMs and their effective uses