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.247
