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4. CONCLUSION
What remains to be done after the three-part Bridge session is the filling in of design details such as some of the dialogue boxes, icons, precise window layouts, colors, and fonts. Those remaining details are most efficiently designed by the usability engineer outside of a participatory session, though the usability engineer must continue consulting with users and other team members. Those remaining details are, of course, important, but they are much less important than the fundamental organization, appearance, and behavior that The Bridge does design.
This chapter is not a complete description of The Bridge methodology. More extensive descriptions are in the notes handed out during educational sessions of the methodology, but a complete account will require its own book. In the meantime, this chapter should at least give readers a general orientation, especially to the critical Task Object Design center span of our bridge over the gap between user needs and GUI prototype.
5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people have contributed in varying ways and degrees to development of The Bridge. Michael Muller was largely responsible for initially convincing us of the value of participatory methods in general. Michael also was a prime originator of the early versions of the CARD method (with Leslie Tudor, Tom Dayton, and Bob Root) and the PICTIVE method that we took as the starting points for developing Parts 1 and 3, respectively. Michael is also a prolific contributor to the usability lexicon, the PANDA acronym being his most recent. Bob Root added to CARD some explicit steps that we expanded and elaborated into Part 1. Jim Berney was a key to providing the various resources we needed for developing The Bridge. Much of what we have provided is just the overall structure and glue that made an integrated, end-to-end process out of component ideas that we adapted from many public sources, including common object-oriented methodologies. Our cofacilitators and the participants in Bridge sessions have provided not just valuable feedback but also original ideas. We heartily thank all the above people for their participation in the collaborative development of this collaborative methodology. We also thank Larry Wood, Andrew Monk, and Sabine Rohlfs for comments on this manuscript.
6. REFERENCES
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