The Gains Design Process: How to do Structured Design of User Interfaces in Any Software Environment

Abstract

This paper describes a user-interaction design process created and used by a consultant to solve two challenges: (1) how to decrease the need for changes in the user interface by subsequent system releases without doing big design up-front and (2) how to apply a structured user-interaction design process no matter when brought into a project or what software methodology was being used. The four design levels in the process parallel Beck and Fowler’s four planning levels described in their book Planning Extreme Programming. The design process is called “GAINS” because the user-interaction designer has only Attraction, Information and Navigation to connect users’ Goals with the project sponsors’ criteria for Success. Thus there are five questions, one for each letter of the acronym GAINS, asked at each of four levels of design: The first two design levels, Rough Plan and Big Plan, focus on business-process actions and objects that define users’ goals. The next two levels, Release Planning and Iteration Planning, focus on the user interface objects that support the tasks necessary to achieve those goals. Release Planning identifies the displays the user sees for each goal included in that release, and also the across-display navigation for the proposed functionality. Iteration Planning focuses at a lower level of interaction, such as the within-display navigation among ontrols. For a voice system, the word “sees” would be changed to “hears,” but the design rocess and the levels of focus are the same for user interfaces that are vision output (e.g., GUIs), voice output (e.g., VRs), or multimodal.