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4.4. MONK (CHAPTER 5)
Monk makes a strong point that the bridge is better built if one uses the correct representation for communication and for reasoning about user activities. To be maximally useful in those two roles (i.e., communication and reasoning), documents in which representations are captured must be tailored to the context. He refers to his techniques as discount design methods, making it clear that they are well suited to everyday, relatively small scale projects, rather than very large ones. Thus, they are particularly well suited to small development teams, where resources are scarce and few team members are highly skilled in the various areas needed for effective design. Monk also assumes a relatively small and well-defined user base, either because of in-house tool development or for development of a product in a relatively narrow, vertical market. Because small projects have small teams, the members cannot be specialists, so techniques must lend themselves to being easily and quickly learned by members of the team.
The context for Monks discussion is an application used in a warehouse handling food products for a large group of stores in the U.K. His method begins with a representation of the rich picture, which is a high level description of the work to be supported and that includes the work environment described broadly enough to demonstrate that thought has been given to the impact the new application will have on everyone who might be affected by it. The rich picture takes the form of a rough, annotated sketch, broadly describing the work being performed and identifying all of the stakeholders that need to be consulted about the final design.
From the rich picture, a work objective decomposition (WOD) is performed to produce a representation in terms of required states of the world. This requires the designer to think clearly about the purpose of each process, rather than their interdependencies or the means by which they are achieved. Later on, this helps promote reasoning about alternative ways in which the work might be supported. The WOD is a hierarchical representation of objectives with each decomposed into subobjectives as far as it seems useful. Because the WOD is an idealized view of the work, it must be supplemented by an exceptions list, indicating things that can go wrong and/or points where the work might be interrupted for various reasons.
Because the WOD and exception list are relatively abstract, user scenarios are then constructed to add detail and make the understanding of the work more concrete. Functionally, they are fictional, but typical stories describing he users work. They also function as effective means for evaluating the design alternatives.
The four representations described above are preparatory to actually producing an interface design and are intended to enable the designer to incrementally and iteratively refine the understanding of the necessary aspects of the users work environment. Once that goal has been achieved, then the beginnings of a design are formulated in terms of a dialogue model, which frequently consists of a set of rough screen sketches and some indication of the flow among them. The dialogue model is at the same level of abstraction as the WOD, the exception lists, and scenarios, and thus can be verified against them. The verification might suggest a useful metaphor for data representations or other presentation/ manipulation aspects of the final interface. Necessary constraints on the order of the work can be imposed in the dialogue model, but should be restricted to only those that are necessary.
4.5. NILSSON AND OTTERSTEN (CHAPTER 6)
Nilsson and Ottersten provide an experiential, narrative approach to their chapter in an attempt to focus on the process of bridging the design gap, rather than the end result. Consequently, they avoid discussing details of a specific project, in the interest of portraying the design process as a whole, rather than risking the confusion of important issues with less significant details. They begin their chapter with a design story about a project that describes a collaborative effort between two designers, describing the activities they perform and how they accomplish their goals. They also describe their interactions with other members of a design team (e.g., a context and requirements analyst) as they attempt to bridge the design gap.
The approach taken by Nillson and Ottersten emphasizes the importance of designers reflecting on their efforts as a way of promoting creative processes that result in new insights about the design goals. They describe activities such as free sketching, Bubbling, and ways to consider appropriate metaphors. In particular, the Bubbling technique is designed to get a quick start on the design process by putting one key issue from the design space in a bubble in the middle of a piece of paper. The designer (or designers) associate freely to that issue, drawing connecting bubbles. The next step is to find ideas on how to create one or more designs for each of the associated words. The Bubbling technique is part of a more general method called Linné-VISA used at Nilsson and Otterstens company, Linné Data AB. While much of the their discussion focuses on creative activities, they point out the need for a designer to have a clear and defensible rationale for each design decision.
For Nilsson and Ottersten the final phase of the bridging process begins with a conceptual design, describing at a high level how the various parts of the users work fit together in a way that matches the users mental model. These conceptualizations are represented in rough sketches for further exploration in design. In the second phase of design, a functional design is created by making rough sketches of potential screen designs, also showing some preliminary information about potential GUI controls. The controls are then used in user evaluations with design guidelines based on principles of human perception and cognition, which is part of Linné Datas AnvändarGestaltning method.
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