CN28: Designing a Task-Focused Conceptual Model

Thursday, 9 April 2009, 14:30

1 unit

Instructors

Jeff Johnson,, UI Wizards, Inc.

Benefits

After completing this class, participants will:

• Know the benefits of designing a task-focused, coherent conceptual model of an applicationbefore designing the application’s user interface.
• Understand the components of a conceptual model (e.g., object-action analysis), and how to create them.
• Have experience in designing a conceptual model for a software application.

Origins

New for CHI 2009 as a separate course. Extracted from a tutorial (GUI Bloopers) presented at CHI and elsewhere. Presented separately at University of Canterbury (2006), SD Expo 2007, and UPA 2007.

Features

An important early step in designing a user interface for a software application is to design a coherent, task-focused conceptual model. Unfortunately, this step is often skipped in software development. Many designers jump right into sketching and prototyping the UI before they understand the application at a conceptual level. The result is incoherent, overly-complex applications that expose concepts that are irrelevant to the users’ tasks. This course covers:

• What conceptual models are, and how they can improve the UI design process,
• Perils and pitfalls of not designing a conceptual model,
• Object/actions analysis (part of designing a conceptual model),
• An example conceptual model for a specific application,
• Benefits of Conceptual Analysis: object taxonomy, lexicon, task scenarios, object-model,
• A hands-on exercise in performing Object/Actions analysis for a simple application.

Audience

Software designers and developers of all experience levels. Also: Q/A engineers, usability testers, and managers.

Presentation

Lecture, Q&A, class small-group exercise.

Instructors' background

Jeff Johnson is Principal Consultant at UI Wizards, a product usability consulting firm. He has worked in HCI since 1978. After earning B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in cognitive psychology from Yale and Stanford, he worked as a UI designer/implementer, usability tester, manager, and researcher at Cromemco, Xerox, US West, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun. Since 1996 he has been a consultant and an author. He has published numerous articles and chapters on HCI. He wrote the books GUI Bloopers, Web Bloopers, and GUI Bloopers 2.0.