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Jean Scholtz
National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland
email: Jean.Scholtz@nist.gov
Tony Salvador
Intel Corporation, Hillsboro, Oregon
email: tony_salvador@ccm.jf.intel.com
ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a method that was developed and used by the authors while they were co-managers of the Human Factors Services group within the Personal Conferencing Division at Intel Corporation. The method described here was developed to help bridge several gaps we saw occurring in the process of incorporating user information into the definition, design, implementation, and evaluation of new software products. The method was targeted for use in developing new products based on new technology and therefore, not currently available. Our primary goal was to ensure that early adopters of these new products could see immediate, as well as potential, benefits of this new technology. Achieving this goal would facilitate the acceptance of this technology in the market place. The largest gap we saw was transforming user information into product design, both in terms of required functionality and in providing the necessary support for this functionality via the user interface. Additionally, we saw smaller gaps during the definition and development process that also needed to be bridged. In essence, what we wanted to create was a framework that could be used at every step during design, development, and testing to make decisions based on the original user information. In this chapter, well describe the framework we created and well describe how we use the methodology in theory, along with examples from one of the systems we worked on. This product was a second version of an earlier product, but with some radically different functionality added.
1. THE PROBLEMS
One goal at Intel is to make the personal computer the communication device of choice. Intels software development efforts focus on producing technology and products to enhance the home and professional lives of the general public. As human factors engineers, we were faced with the usual problems, as well as having to produce user requirements for products that users did not currently have and, possibly, did not even foresee.
1.1. PRODUCING REQUIREMENTS FOR NOVEL PRODUCTS
Human factors engineers at Intel are faced with the challenge of producing user requirements and user interface designs for products not currently on the market. Moreover, these products have to be such that they can be readily adopted by many people not just the early adopters of technology. This is difficult as market niches continue to decrease, making the search for a truly useful and usable product more and more difficult (Moore, 1991). Our biggest problem is communicating with users about nonexistent products based on nonexistent technology. It is difficult for users to quickly grasp a concept and then to imagine how this could possibly fit into their daily home life or their business environment. While a prototype system is often useful in explaining what could be offered, it can also make it difficult for users to envision a very different use the technology. For this reason, we suspected that methods such as PICTIVE (Mueller, 1993) and other participatory design methods would not be sufficient to obtain the user information we needed. Contextual Inquiry (Holtzblatt and Jones, 1993) is more closely related to what we wanted to do. Contextual Inquiry pairs observation with questions about what the user is doing in order to produce several types of models about the users work, including work flow and objects. As our products are new to the market, we are interested more in identifying problems in users current work practices than in exactly how they perform their work presently. We need information about how goals that users desired to accomplish fit with respect to their other job responsibilities. Moreover, we need to collect that information quickly and organize it in a way that the rest of the product team can easily understand the information.
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