ABSTRACT
As subject matter experts within a large multinational corporation, the authors often have to communicate and justify the results from user-centred investigation to colleagues from different disciplines. These findings can be from a number of sources including empirical data from traditional usability studies, data from heuristic reviews or recommendations based on experience. It is a challenge to present this information in a form that is meaningful and compelling to colleagues from different disciplines. A considerable amount of time can be spent summarising data in multiple forms or using specially constructed physical models to communicate usability problems. For instance, when assessing visibility to a portion of a selfservice terminal, such as an automated teller machine (ATM) fascia, we have had
to resort to such labour intensive methods as constructing physical models of a concept, manually holding a camera at eye heights corresponding to people of varying stature and overlaying vision lines on annotated drawings (e.g. taken from computer aided design or CAD packages). In a similar manner, although reporting statistically significant results from studies has resonance with colleagues from related scientific disciplines, alternative presentation forms are often needed to make a more compelling case for design changes, which sometimes means that valuable input is only made later in the design process.
