Abstract
The rate of emerging technological innovations has exceeded the rate at which individuals can assimilate new technologies into their lives. Yet, businesses continue a breakneck pace for the development of new technologies resulting in the creation of products based on a particular type of technology, i.e., technocentric product development, rather than on its utility and usability, i.e., user centric product development. One reason for this misplaced focus on technology rather than on the intended users, may be that few methodologies exist to genuinely incorporate the user in the product development cycle, which would otherwise more tightly link users’ requirements to product design and usability testing. This is especially the case for software user interface development. This paper identifies a framework of a discrete number of specific data classes fundamental to incorporating the user into product development.
These data classes not only represent the user, but also foster a rational decision making process for product definition, design and usability testing. This framework can be used independently of the requirements techniques used for acquiring the data from users and independently of the software development methodology used in the product development process, which implies that these general data class types are applicable to nearly all software development projects. The framework guides requirements data acquisition and facilitates requirements evaluation for systematically exploring alternative designs and testing those designs. The framework also provides necessary systematic guidance to the design process
while retaining the necessary creativity to design a novel product and marketable user interface. Finally, the simplicity and practicality of the framework makes it attractive for use in real product development. An actual example is included to illustrate the main points of the paper.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Holzenblatt, K amp Jones, S. (1993) Contextual inquiry: A participatory technique for system design. In Participatory Design, Principles and Practices, D. Schuler and A. Namioka (Eds.) Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey, USA.
Mitchell, C.M., amp Miller, R.A. 1986, A discrete control model of operator function. A methodology for information display design, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 16, 342–357.
Moore, G. A. (1991) Crossing the Chasm, Harper Business, USA.
Muller, M. (1993) PICTIVE: Democratizing the dynamics of the design session. In Participatory Design, Principles and Practices, D. Schuler and A. Namioka (Eds.) Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey, USA.
Nielsen, J. amp Landauer, T.K. (1993) A mathematical model of the finding of usability problems. In Human Factors in Computing Systems, INTERCHI’93 Conference Proceedings, S. Ashlund, K. Mullet, A. Henderson, E. Hollnagel, and T. White (Eds), Addison Wesley, pp. 206–213.
Newbery, James (1995) Contextual design v. systematic creativity: A short critique. Internal Intel Report.
Salvador, A. C. amp Sundstrom, G.A. (1993) Information organization, search and management advantages of a task-based HMI for telecommunication network monitoring andtroubleshooting. Proceedings of the 1993 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics.
Sundstrom, G.A. amp Salvador, A. C. (in press) Integrating field work and system design. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.
Sundström, G. A. (in press) Towards models of tasks and task complexity in supervisory control applications. Ergonomics.
Sundström, G.A. (1991) Process tracing of decision making: an approach for analysis of human-machine interactions in dynamic environments. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 35, 843–858.
Sundström, G.A., & Johannsen, G. (1989). Functional Information Search: A Framework for Knowledge Elicitation and Representation for Graphical Support Systems.. Proceedings of the 2nd European Conference on Cognitive Science Approaches to Process Control, Siena, Italy, October 24–27, pp. 129–140.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1996 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Salvador, A.C., Scholtz, J.C. (1996). Systematic creativity: a methodology for integrating user, market and engineering requirements for product definition, design and usability testing. In: Bass, L.J., Unger, C. (eds) Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction. EHCI 1995. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-34907-7_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-34907-7_17
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-5041-2935-0
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-34907-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive