USER DRIVEN DESIGN

Tuesday, September 10^th from 9⁰⁰ - 17³⁰

Target Audience: This workshop is intended for all professionals involved in the development of complex information systems including: executives making funding decisions, product managers, planners, systems analysts, requirements engineers, software developers, systems maintenance, what the heck, even end users.

Tutorial Outcome: The attendee will have a better understanding of organizational and psychological sources of user-UNFRIENDLY design and be in a position to apply heuristic, organizational, and procedural approaches to enhance user-friendliness of commercial products.

Description: Design nearly always starts with the recognition of a problem, proceeds with the development of opportunities, and finishes with the delivery of a product. As designers, we must recognize all of the essential features, develop just the right number of expected features, and create, for good luck (and ego), a few really exciting gee whiz features. We have discovered great benefits in including critical users as an integral part of the design activity.

We will discuss, in this highly interactive presentation, the means we have used to include these users - from start to finish. This includes the initial product concept advancement, the business plan, requirements development, systems design and implementation, testing, delivery, and refinement in the market place. We will illustrate a handful of heuristics that we have found to be particularly useful in eliciting several of the many dimensions of user needs and wishes as well as surfacing previously unrecognizable, but highly desirable, functionality. We will also introduce a number of practical systems understandability heuristics. As an important by-product, these heuristics make design thinking much more visible to all concerned parties in time for more user-centered decisions. We are provided a much clearer picture of design responsibilities, project scope and risk, and, most importantly, a more consistent view of user expectations.

Donald C. Gause, is a Principal of Savile Row, LLC as well as a Bartle Professor in Systems Science in the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering, SUNY/Binghamton. Don Gause has worked as an engineer and computer programmer and has managed engineering, programming and education groups with General Motors and IBM. He has been active as a consultant and professor for the past 34 years and served for many of these years as an adjunct member of IBM's Systems Research Institute (SRI). He has been a visiting scholar and has lectured at many universities and institutes around the world, has been an associate editor of the International Journal of Cybernetics and Systems, and has served as a national lecturer for a number of professional societies. Mr. Gause's consulting and research interests include the development and analysis of requirements engineering and systems design processes, the design of user-oriented systems, and the management of innovation within large organizations. He has advised in the elicitation and documentation of business plans and requirements for Internet start-ups and Fortune 100 companies. He has also consulted on the development of strategic business systems, new products and processes for many leading firms.

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