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CHAPTER 10
The UI War Room and Design Prism: A User Interface Design Approach from Multiple Perspectives

Kevin T. Simpson
Financial Models Company, Mississauga, Canada
email: kevin.simpson@hwcn.org

Table of Contents
Abstract
1.  Introduction
1.1.  Why this Chapter
1.2.  Design Context
2.  The “User Interface War Room” as a Metaphor for Interface Design
2.1.  Design Context — The UI War Room
2.2.  User Requests
2.3.  User Objects
2.3.1.  Recording the Origins of Objects
2.3.2.  Organizing the Objects
2.4.  The Whiteboard
2.4.1.  Too Few Cooks’ll Spoil the Broth
2.4.2.  User Involvement in Design
2.4.3.  Existing Interfaces as a Source of Ideas
2.4.4.  Flirting with Scenario-Based Design
2.5.  Prototypes
2.5.1.  Choosing between Idea Sketches
2.5.2.  Concurrent Top-Down Iteration
2.5.3.  Separating out Mutually Exclusive Prototype Systems
2.5.4.  Matching User Requests to Developed Features
3.  Designing from Multiple Perspectives — The Design Prism
3.1.  Design Context — The Design Prism
3.2.  Extract User Elements
3.3.  Define Interrelations
3.4.  Prototype Each Perspective
3.4.1.  Idea Sketching from each Perspective
3.4.2.  Screen Design using Design Guides
3.5.  Consolidate Perspectives
4.  Some Suggestions for Making Simultaneous Use of the War Room and Design Prism Methods
5.  Benefits, Limitations, and Difficult Questions
6.  Acknowledgments
7.  References

ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on two practical design approaches to bridging the gap: the User Interface War Room method and the Design Prism method. The walls of the “user interface war room” served as a metaphor used in redesigning the interface of a computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tool for telecommunications research. To begin, user requests (derived from task analysis interviews with software developers) were posted on the first wall of the war room. The English text describing these requests was grammatically parsed to yield user objects (and the functions which acted on them). These user objects were organized into hierarchical relationships and posted on the second wall. Design ideas were then generated in a creative process that drew ideas from team members, users, existing software, and scenario data. This led to the development of several mutually exclusive prototype systems, which could then be verified against the original user requests to make sure that concrete designs matched user requirements.

In the Design Prism work, which involved redesigning the interface for a power plant, the user objects and functions of the war room were subdivided into four categories of user elements: Information, Objects, Goals, and Actions. Relationships between these user elements were captured in a “table of relations.” Prototype ideas were then sketched from the perspective of each category (e.g., from a user Goals perspective first). These idea sketches were fleshed out into actual screen designs, with the help of plant-specific design guides for coding information and for displaying graphical objects. Finally, the alternative designs from each of the four perspectives were consolidated to yield either a single “best-of” prototype or several distinct alternatives that could then be evaluated with users.


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