Contextual Design and User Interface Design/Testing

I recently completed two projects required by the Master degree that I am pursuing. These two projects thought me valuable lessons in how to design a good interface by conducting a contextual design and eliciting the usability problems in the user interface design.

Contextual Design
When building a system’s user interface, we want to ensure that we build it to accommodate the existing work processes. Performing a Contextual Design (CD) helped our team collect data and model the existing work processes. The data collection process is called the Contextual Inquire (CI). When performing CI, our team visited the actual work place and observed the daily working processes. We later created a transcript of the activities that is used as the base information for the modeling for the CD. There are three models that our team generated:

• Sequence model – captures the motivation of a user to complete a task (goal/intent), a sequence of actions to accomplish the task, and the trigger that causes the sequence of actions to start.
• Flow model – captures the communication and coordination occurs between individuals or between system and individual in the work place.
• Cultural model – captures the cultural influences (policies, tone, and organization influence) that affect the individual while completing the task.

In the sequence and flow models, we can also identify problems that slow down/jeopardize the task completion) by noting them as breakdowns into the models.

After having these three models ready, we were able to learn and observe more about the work processes in the organization and the culture of the organization. With these in mind, we were ready to build a user interface prototype that suites or improve the existing work processes.

User Interface Design and Testing
The second project is to continue where we left off from the Contextual Design task. Based on the previous models and the system requirements, we built a web user interface prototype for the organization that we observed.

When building the user interface prototype, we built three artifacts (sitemap, flow diagram, and storyboard) that helped us categorize the information and visualize the layout of the user interface components.

Most importantly, after the prototype was completed, we conducted feedback session by performing usability heuristic evaluation and user test.

Heuristic evaluation is a method to find usability problems in user interface design. This evaluation process involves a set of evaluators to examine the interface and judge its compliance with recognized usability principle (Jakob Nielsen’s Ten Usability Heuristics).

User Testing, on the other hand, is a process where an evaluator (a person that conducts the test) interprets observer’s (a person who takes the test) actions and relates these actions into usability issues in the design of user interface.

After conducting these different feedback sessions, we received a set of difference feedbacks from the heuristic evaluation and user test. We noticed that feedbacks from the heuristic evaluation consist of finer grain information about mistakes we made from the prototype (incorrect color, hard to understand labels, inconsistencies, etc). The user test feedbacks gave us coarse grain information that relates more with the ease of use of the prototype.

Summary
From the first project, I learned a great deal of capturing user’s work processes and translate them into guidelines in building a user-centered user interface design. A design that is built on-top of the contextual design activity will fit better for the user by increasing the usability of the system. From the second project, I learned that the results of heuristic evaluation and user test compliment each others. These methods will definitely be great tools that I can use on my future professional endeavor.