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Chapter 3
Transforming Representations in User-Centered Design

Thomas M. Graefe
Digital Equipment Corporation, Littleton, Massachusetts
email: graefe@tnpubs.enet.dec.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract
1.  Introduction
2.  What is the Gap?
3.  Representations in Design: Decisions and Transformation
3.1.  Process Overview
3.2.  Viewing the Managed Resources: The Operator’s Window onto the World
3.2.1.  Scenarios and Use Cases
3.2.2.  Objects, Conceptual Models, Metaphors
3.2.3.  Detailed Screen Design
3.2.4.  Storyboards and User Interface Flow
3.2.5.  Usability Goals
3.2.6.  Prototype and Field Testing
4.  Links Among System Representations
5.  The Psychology of the Designer: Toward Useful and Usable Representations in Design
5.1.  Decision Making in Design: Why “Traditional Designers have Bad Intuitions about Usability”
5.2.  Heuristics and Metaheuristics: Guidance in Decision Making
5.2.1.  Defining the Represented World: Start off on the Right Foot
5.2.2.  Minimizing the Gap: Help the Magic Happen
5.2.3.  The Right Tools for the Job: Using Converging Operations
6.  Conclusion
7.  Acknowledgments
8.  References

ABSTRACT

This chapter describes the activity of bridging the gap between user-centered analysis and a concrete design as a cognitive process of transforming representations of information. Like other cognitive tasks, such as remembering or problem solving, success in design hinges on the ability to code and recode information effectively. A case study illustrates this process within the proposed framework, and shows how the use of appropriate mediating representations facilitates bridging the gap. Finally, it is argued that user-centered design can be thought of as a corrective for biases in traditional system design and further that metaheuristics can and should be developed to guide design.

1. INTRODUCTION

Planning, installing, controlling, and repairing the infrastructure on which society’s pervasive Information Technology (IT) is based has engendered a new software application domain. Loosely defined this new industry comprises the network and systems management applications used to support near real-time monitoring and control of this widely distributed infrastructure. Any given IT network is made up of many heterogeneous resources, each of which can be a complex system itself. Moreover, the whole inevitably has emergent properties unanticipated by the makers of the individual parts. This variability, and the magnitude and technical content of the problem domain, creates a significant mismatch between the complexity of the managed technology and the capabilities of the people who manage it. User-centered design techniques must be used to simplify, integrate, and infuse network and system management applications with purpose and intelligence.

User-centered design prescribes involving the end users of a technology in the definition of how the technology is applied within a problem domain. The diverse techniques for bringing users into the development process all provide for including user-based data to determine the make up of systems. However, these techniques are less clear on how the user-centered data are transformed into a specific design. This chapter examines the question of how user-centered analysis becomes a concrete design with two particular issues in mind: what is the nature of the transformations a designer makes to move from the user-centered analysis to concrete design and how does the process of transformation relate to the psychology of the designer? The next section describes a framework for discussing these issues, after which an example is given. Finally, in light of this analysis the last section looks at psychology of the designer.


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