Software designers must understand the domain, work practices, and user
expectations before determining requirements or generating initial design mock-ups.
Users and other stakeholders are a valuable source of information leading to that
understanding. Much work has focused on design approaches that include users in the
software development process. These approaches vary from surveys and questionnaires
that garner responses from a population of potential users to participatory design
processes where representative users are included in the design/development team. The
Design Exploration approach retains the remote and asynchronous communication of
surveys while making expression of feedback easier by providing users alternatives to
textual communication for their suggestions and tacit understanding of the domain. To
do this, visual and textual modes of expression are combined to facilitate communication
from users to designers while allowing a broad user audience to contribute to software
design. One challenge to such an approach is how software designers make use of the
potentially overwhelming combination of text, graphics, and other content. The Design Exploration process provides users and other stakeholders the Design
Exploration Builder, a construction kit where they create annotated partial designs. The
Design Exploration Analyzer is an exploration tool that allows software designers to
consolidate and explore partial designs. The Analyzer looks for patterns based on textual
analysis of annotations and spatial analysis of graphical designs, to help identify
interesting examples and patterns within the collection. Then software designers can use
this tool to search and browse within the exploration set in order to better understand the
task domain, user expectations and work practices. Evaluation of the tools has shown
that users will often work to overcome expression constraints to convey information.
Moreover, the mode of expression influences the types of information garnered.
Furthermore, including more users results in greater coverage of the information
gathered. These results provide evidence that Design Exploration is an approach that
collects software and domain information from a large group of users that lies
somewhere between questionnaires and face to face methods.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-1907 |
| Date | 02 June 2009 |
| Creators | Moore, John Michael |
| Contributors | Shipman, Frank M. |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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