ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a method that was developed and used by the authors while they were co-managers of the Human Factors Services group within the Personal Conferencing Division at Intel Corporation. The method described here was developed to help bridge several gaps we saw occurring in the process of incorporating user information into the definition, design, implementation, and evaluation of new software products. The method was targeted for use in developing new products based on new technology and therefore, not currently available. Our primary goal was to ensure that early adopters of these new products could see immediate, as well as potential, benefits of this new technology. Achieving this goal would facilitate the acceptance of this technology in the market place. The largest gap we saw was transforming user information into product design, both in terms of required functionality and in providing the necessary support for this functionality via the user interface. Additionally, we saw smaller gaps during the definition and development process that also needed to be bridged. In essence, what we wanted to create was a framework that could be used at every step during design, development, and testing to make decisions based on the original user 217information. In this chapter, we’ll describe the framework we created and we’ll describe how we use the methodology in theory, along with examples from one of the systems we worked on. This product was a second version of an earlier product, but with some radically different functionality added.
