Tutorials

By focusing on usage rather than users and abstract rather than realistic models, designers can more quickly capture the essence of user needs and derive innovative designs that better support those needs. This hands-on tutorial covers techniques for rapid abstract prototyping based on simplified user role and task models.

PARTICIPANT KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE EXPECTED

This tutorial is targeted toward practicing usability and design professionals interested in expanding their repertoire of modeling and design techniques. Participants should be familiar with basic usability principles and have practical experience in visual and interaction design for real-world software or Web-based applications. Some knowledge or prior experience in user and task analysis is helpful but not absolutely required. The tutorial will serve as an introduction to usage-centered design as well as to abstract prototyping and related abstract modeling techniques.

GOALS FOR THE SESSION:

Participants in this tutorial will:

• learn basic and advanced techniques of “agile” modeling for constructing, organizing, and prioritizing user and task models
• learn how to quickly capture and organize user roles as a compact and focused understanding of users in relation to a proposed system
• learn how to quickly build a fine-grained user task model in the form of task cases that highlight user intentions and core needs
• learn how to drive visual and interaction design with streamlined models of user interface contents based on abstract prototypes with canonical abstract components
• gain understanding of the distinct features and advantages of a usage-centered design process
• increase their knowledge of abstract models and modeling to drive and organize more effective visual and interaction designs

HOW THIS TUTORIAL WILL BE CONDUCTED

The tutorial will use the presenter's characteristic hands-on approach to learning, a carefully choreographed combination that alternates illustrated lecture-discussion style presentation of concepts and demonstration of techniques with hands-on application to a real-world case problem. Hands-on practice will be supported by active coaching and consultation from the tutorial leader and will be followed by class review and discussion of the work and the process.

TUTORIAL SCHEDULE WITH TIME ALLOCATION

The timings shown below are provisional and approximate based on past experience. Actual times will necessarily depend on class size, questions, level of participation, and specific interests of participants.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF TUTORIAL

Content Overview

Models are essential parts of the toolkit of most usability and design professionals and core components of nearly all organized design approaches. User profiles, personas, scenarios, and other descriptive models help professionals to capture, explore, analyze, elaborate, and validate their understanding of users and the tasks they need to perform. Paper prototypes enable designers to express, explore, and evaluate design alternatives without committing to implementation.

Usage-centered design, a proven, industrial-strength design approach, exploits the power of abstract models to speed the modeling process and guide designers toward innovative solutions that are closely tuned to the real needs of users. Simplified abstract models help distill the essence of the relationships between users and a system, their intentions in these relationship, and the content and organization of a user interface that simply and straightforwardly supports those intentions.

This tutorial will focus on “agile” modeling techniques that exploit the inherent flexibility and conceptual power of low-tech media—such as ordinary index cards and Post-it notes—to construct minimalist models that provide maximum payoff for improving designs. A variety of these techniques will be explained and applied. Abstract models of user roles, task cases, and abstract prototypes based on canonical abstract components will be compared and contrasted with other modeling techniques, such as personas, user profiles, scenarios, user stories, and low-fidelity prototypes.

Covered Topics

Usage-centered and user-centered design

• Overview of a model-driven design process
• Relationships among role, task, and content models
• Model-driven derivation of visual and interaction designs
  

Usage-centered, model-based exploration

• Beyond paper prototypes: traditional and novel low-tech tools
• Managing chaos with holding bins
• Card-based modeling: cognitive and pragmatic advantages
• Basic techniques:
  card-storming, affinity clustering, prioritizing, coordination clustering and other specialized categorizations
  

Users, actors, user roles, personas, and user profiles

• Concise and efficient modeling based on relationships
• Generating a provisional user role inventory
• Ranking user roles by occupancy and functional priority
• Refining user role models through affinity clustering and role elaboration
• Role-support analysis
  

Tasks, use cases, scenarios, and stories

• Writing abstract dialogs
• Elaborating task models:
  workflow, preconditions, extensions, inclusions, rules and constraints
• Ranking techniques for card-based task models
• Combining and comparing alternative rankings
• Affinity clustering and task model refinement
  

Bridging the gap from task models to design

• Cooperation clustering of tasks into interaction contexts
• Content inventories, abstract prototypes, and canonical abstract components
• Deriving visual and interaction designs from abstract models

SPEAKER BIO

Larry L. Constantine

Chief Scientist

Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd.

Larry Constantine is both an award-winning designer (Performance-Centered Design Competition 2001) and an award-winning author (1999 Jolt Award for best book). He is a highly respected teacher who has taught in 17 countries around the world. One of the pioneers of modern software engineering and design practice, Constantine's work now focuses on visual and interaction design techniques and processes. With Lucy Lockwood he is the co-developer of usage-centered design and co-inventor of essential use cases, widely recognized as a best practice in requirements and task modeling. In a career spanning four decades, he has had over 150 professional papers published along with 16 books, including the Jolt Award winner, Software for Use (Addison-Wesley, 1999).