Mapping the Design Process: Visualizing What We Don't See

THE PANEL SESSION

1. 1. the project: its content, context, goals, and constraints.
2. 2. the participants: who they were, their expertises, their roles; did they work in a team and at what level of participation? was there a project leader? appointed or elected? what role did the leader assume?
3. 3. the process: were you following an established process? was it divided into clear steps? how much "winging it" did you end up doing?
4. 4. prototyping and testing: how much and how often? formal or informal? who were the subjects?
5. 5. lessons: what one thing would you do differently next time around?

After the three presentations, we will keep the three process maps up on the screens and discuss their similarities and differences. We will then open the session up to comments, questions, and challenges from the audience, as well as from the panelists themselves. The diversity of maps, projects, and panelists should produce a range of responses; some of them possibly controversial, all of them, hopefully, informative.

Does the HCI community subscribe to one basic model of development? This is one question we hope to shed some light on with this panel. With the information shared by the panelists, it is also our hope that the audience returns to their home institutions and builds in some time - during the design process and at the end of it - to reflect on their own methods and procedures, map them, and ideally, keep improving them.

PANELIST 1

Touchscreen banking for people with disabilities Recently, Two Twelve Associates in New York was commissioned to design an unusual interface for an automated teller machine (ATM) - the first touchscreen application specifically designed for the disabled. We helped innovate an interaction method that would enable the visually impared, the blind, and people with motor, reading, and learning disabilities to get cash and make deposits. The project was a consequence of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which specifically mentioned ATMs as public devices that should accomodate users with disabilities. To comply, Citibank developers first embarked on a discovery process that yielded customer expectations and focused on the technical possibilities of software engineering. Graphic designer, David Peters, worked closely with the Citibank team to create visuals and an interactive prototype that was used to study the behavior and needs of customers hindered by various disabilities. The knowledge gathered from these tests was then applied to further refine the interface before its implementation by the bank. The resulting interface has been heralded by customers for making banking accessible and transcending the inadequacies of braille that typify conformity with ADA guidelines in the 90s.

David Peters is responsible for the design of electronic media and information products at Two Twelve Associates in New York City. He is an advocate of co-designing information systems with their users. He worked in Halifax, Nova Scotia and Dusseldorf, Germany before joining Two Twelve. He is currently consulting with T. Rowe Price Associates on the design of new electronic services, and with HarperCollins on CD- ROM product development.

PANELIST 2

Microsoft Windows '95 My team worked as product designers on the user interface design of Microsoft Windows '95, code named Chicago. This product was designed to be a significant user interface and technology upgrade from the previous version, Windows 3.1, while maintaining speed and performance, and compatability with hundreds of hardware configurations and thousands of existing applications. The user interface needed to serve a very wide range of skills among millions of existing users. The design process was iterative, extensively usability tested, and included feedback from a wide range of sources: from beta users on Compuserve to vice presidents. It used a tight multidisciplinary team approach. The design process was more complex than usual because of the huge installed base of users, the wide range of tasks and skill levels of those users, the vociferous opinions of everyone on the large development team, and the aggressive schedule for completion.

Virginia Howlett is a visual interface designer at Microsoft, where she spent the last year leading a team on this project. She adds a unique perspective to this panel, coming from a software company the size of Microsoft. A regular participant at CHI conferences, she assisted on the well-attended tutorial on visual communication issues for interface design this past spring in Boston. Currently on leave from Microsoft, Viriginia is writing a book.

PANELIST 3

The next-generation medical dignostics system Ciba Corning is the leading manufacturer of medical diagnostics systems worldwide. Our Research and Development facility in Oberlin, Ohio is currently involved in the development and design of a new medical diagnostics system, one that provides a range of blood testing parameters. Typical users are medical technologists in a reference lab or a hospital, their job being to prepare specimens, load them, schedule their testing, and note the results when available. Our primary design goal is to minimize the physical and time interaction with the machine, striving to automate more and more of the actions that are time intensive. The new scenario would have the clinician prepare specimens, replenish supplies when necessary, and check for results, thereby allowing for time on other tasks. This project is in its second year of design and development. In contrast to past projects, a change we made was to integrate the user interface design team into the entire development process. The results have been encouraging, supported by a recent phase of evaluations.

Scott Mathis manages industrial design and user interface design activities at Ciba Corning's Research and Development facility in Oberlin, Ohio. These activities cover development groups in industrial design, graphic design, user interface design, and usability testing disciplines. As manager, Scott both oversees and participates, in some capacity, in each of these groups. Scott's background is in industrial design and he has been with Ciba Corning for 16 years.

MODERATOR AND PANEL ORGANIZER

Daniel Boyarski is Professor of Communication Design at Carnegie Mellon University's Design Department. He teaches courses in typography, information design, and human-computer interface design. He is interested in exploring how word, image, sound, and motion may be combined to produce effective communication. As Director of Graduate Studies, he coordinates and teaches in two new graduate programs in the department, one of them in human-computer interaction design. Professionally, Dan consults on interface design, as well as graphic design, projects.