Transcript Where does user and task analysis come from?

Users
People act toward technology in a way that
is based on the meaning that it has for
them.
Design continues in use.
Where does user and task
analysis come from?
• Anthropology and ethnography
– Thursday’s readings
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cognitive psychology
technical communication, tech writing
instructional systems design
market research:
– Market research tends to focus on attitudes and
opinions, user and task analysis on behavior.
• Participatory design and Scandinavian model
Starting a user and task analysis
1. Assemble group of people who interact with
users.
- Including sales, service personnel; help staff
2. Brainstorm preliminary list of users and potential
users. Create a user/task matrix or a
user/characteristic matrix.
3. Discuss the relevant characteristics that you
assume are typical of your user community.
4. Decide how to test your assumptions.
Types of Users
• Primary users
• Secondary users
– E.g., the customer of the travel agent
• Gatekeepers, early adopters
• User communities:
– new learners and experts, teachers and students, those
administering and operating systems, those who use products
and those who supervise them, those who repair products and
those who break them.
• Users as buyers – a potential design conflict
– Market researchers tend to concentrate on the people who buy;
designers (ideally) concentrate on the people who perform tasks.
• Surrogate users
– May not speak effectively for the products’ users.
– (But may be efficient source of information – e.g., librarians)
Sources of user identities
• functional specifications
– targeted users or goals
• organizational priorities
– users you are mandated to serve (e.g., people in
specific organization, doing specific jobs)
• structured analyses and marketing studies
– – people currently using you or a competitor
• observations, surveys, user feedback, user
registrations
• R&D – projected users
What do you want to know about your users?
• Users and their jobs
– What they do
– what they know about their tasks & tools
– their mental models and vocabulary
• User communities
– Disciplines, work groups, organizational units…
– People who communicate with one another
– People who share knowledge, expertise, orientation…
• Individual differences
– personal characteristics & preferences, physical &
cultural differences
– motivational differences:
• E.g., willingness to change vs. hostility toward learning
something new.
Representative Users
as Subjects
• Validity
• defining relevant characteristics:
– demographics are cheap and easy but often
irrelevant
– age as a proxy for experience: ask about
experience
– race, ethnicity as proxy for language
– gender?
– Experience or expertise
User characteristics: Expertise
• Expertise is relative
– In degree
• How to define more, less expert
• Relative to others: who are the referents?
– To a domain
• Content area, functionality
– E.g., researchers versus technicians; students vs. faculty
• Technology
• Expertise changes over time
• Help users to use local expertise
– Image library users who knew the photographers
needed photographer names
Local Definitions of Expertise:
CalFlora on plant identification
• Professionals can generally answer yes to one of the following:
– I am a professional botanist or have professional training in
botany.
– Although not a botanist, I am a professional biologist expert
in the plants for which I will be submitting observations
– Although I do not have formal credentials, I am recognized
as a peer by professional botanists
• Experts can generally answer yes to this:
– Although I do not consider myself to have professional-level
knowledge, I am quite experienced in the use of keys and
descriptions, and/or am very familiar with the plants for
which I’ll be submitting observations.
• Non-experts should be able to say yes to this:
– I am confident that I know the correct scientific names of the
plants for which I’ll be submitting observations.
Some Tensions in
User-Centered Design
• Current and/or known users and uses vs.
unknown, future, emergent
– New or different users
• Users change over time (learning)
– New or different uses
• Customization for a specific group vs.
universal (or at least more general) design
– Trying to be too many things to too many
people?
Ethnography
• Useful method studying people’s behavior
and understandings
• Can learn from anthropologists,
sociologists, others who have extensive
experience with this method
• Course IS272 – Qualitative Methods –
addresses in more detail
Ethnography and HCI (Blomberg)
• studies of work
– where new technology might be intro’d but w/o explicit
design agenda
• studies of technology in use
– situated use of specific technologies, classes of
technology
• participatory/work-oriented design
– people who use/are affected involved in design –
based on their understandings of their work
Central premises
• It is difficult for people to articulate tacit
knowledge and understandings of familiar
activities
– So we observe them as well as talk to them
• Participants act (toward technology) based
on their own understandings and
meanings
– So we listen to them as well as observe
them
Presuppositions (Blomberg)
• Natural settings
• Holistic
– concern with understanding relation of particular
activities to the constellation of activities that
characterize a setting
• Descriptive of lived experience
– how people actually behave, not (just) their accounts
– withhold judgment, recommendations, design
• Members’ point of view
– Use their categories, language
• Your point of view affects what you see and
understand
Ethnographic Data Collection
Methods
• Observation
– Video, photography
• Interviews
• Participation (do it yourself)
Getting Access
• Whose approval, agreement do you need?
– Officially
– Really (they can let you in and not tell you anything)
• Why should they let you in?
– Benefits to them? What will they learn? Better
system design? A way to communicate their point of
view?
• Concerns about deleterious effects:
– Privacy
– Power relations among participants
Getting Access (II)
• Who are you?
• Double hermeneutic (Giddens): observing
and writing about them will affect them
– Knowing that they are observing you and
reviewing your work affects you
Representation: how to report
what you learned?
• Textual accounts
– Descriptive reports
– Scenarios
• Storyboarding techniques
• Video (edited)
• Case-based prototyping
Difficulties with Ethnography
• Harder to do well than it appears
• High resources demands
– Human resources – time and expertise
– Calendar time
• Difficult translating observations and
understandings for others
• How to link to design?
• How to use to develop designs of more
general use
But:
• Useful as an orientation, set of principles
• Important reminder to stay grounded in the
users’ actual experience and
understandings