Eamonn O'Neill

The topic of the research reported here is direct user participation in the task-based development of interactive software systems. Building usable software demands understanding and supporting users and their tasks. Users are a primary source of usability requirements and knowledge, since users can be expected to have intimate and extensive knowledge of themselves, their tasks and their working environment. Task analysis approaches to software development encourage a focus on supporting users and their tasks while participatory design approaches encourage users' direct, active contributions to software development work. However, participatory design approaches often concentrate their efforts on design activities rather than on wider system development activities, while task analysis approaches generally lack active user participation beyond initial data gathering. This research attempts an integration of the strengths of task analysis and user participation within an overall software development process. This work also presents detailed empirical and theoretical analyses of what it is for users and developers to cooperate, of the nature of user-developer interaction in participatory settings. Furthermore, it makes operational and assesses the effectiveness of user participation in development and the impact of user-developer cooperation on the resulting software product. The research addressed these issues through the development and application of an approach to task based participatory development in two real world development projects. In this integrated approach, the respective strengths of task analysis and participatory design methods complemented each other's weaker aspects.

Building Common Ground and Usable Systems

User-Developer Cooperation in Software Development

Philippe Palanque

Peter Johnson

HCI is a fundamental and multidisciplinary research area. It is fundamental to the development and use of computing technologies. Without good HCI, computing technologies provide less benefit to society. We often fail to notice good HCI. Good HCI passes us by without comment or surprise. The technology lets you do what you want without causing you any further work, effort or thought. You load a DVD into your DVD player and it works: why shouldn't it? You take a photograph with your digital camera and without any surprise you easily transfer and view these on your computer. You seamlessly connect to networks and devices with a common interface and interaction style. Yet when HCI is wrong the technology becomes useless, unusable, disrupts our work, inhibits our abilities and constrains our achievements. Witness the overuse and inconsistent use of hierarchical menus on mobile phones; or the lack of correspondence between call statistics on the phone handset itself and the billed call time on the account bill; or the lack of interoperability between file naming conventions on different operating systems running applications and files of the same type (e. g. the need for explicit filename suffixes on some operating systems). Those programmers, designers and developers who know no better, believe that HCI is just common sense and that their designs are obviously easy to use.

Proceedings of HCI 2003

People and Computers XVII — Designing for Society

The theme of the seventeenth British human-computer interaction conference is designing for society. Contributions range from innovations in computerized ambulance dispatch team work to overcoming usability limitations and game-playing in multi-user sessions.

Eamonn O'Neill

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