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Chapter 2. State of the Art of Application Development Processes
users. Solutions are mostly created by developers, whereas the users are mainly in a
reactive role. The ultimate goal is to develop systems with improved user acceptance
and satisfaction since the user is in the center throughout the entire development
process. By now, user-centered design is established as its own research field in
the human-computer interaction community, such that a variety of approaches and
procedures have been developed and applied. The following gives an overview of the
most matured ones.
Contextual Design provides an entire process for designing products for and with
the customer
[
Beyer and Holtzblatt 1998
]
. The first step, contextual inquiry em-
phasizes interviewing and observing users in their natural work context and making
every e ort to understand their work practices. The developers try to get firsthand
data from potential users. Contextual inquiry postulates to apply an appropriate
relationship model, e.g. apprenticeship-master, to observe users in their context,
A shared understanding of the work to be supported by a potential application is
created by the’ analysis of gathered data. Contextual inquiry provides a set of mod-
els to analyse this data: A context model revealing influences in the organization,
a physical model representing the physical environment and artifacts, flow models
showing the division of work among roles, a sequence model specifying the sequence
of actions to accomplish a specific task, and an artifact model revealing structure of
artifacts created and used to support the work. All these models are consolidated in
an iterative process. The analysis of the knowledge about the user’s domain gained
from the di erent models is then turned into a design proposal with the intend to
support and enhance the users’ work. In the case of ambiguity, brainstorming ses-
sions shall be conducted to further shape and focus on a single vision. Finally, the
design of a mock-up user environment is proposed and common participatory design
methods, such as prototyping, are applied to converge the vision of the user and the
designer in a tested product. Contextual design provides a proven framework for
successful cooperation with users in early phases. Various iterative cycles help to
meet the user’s expectations as good as possible. This methodology is well-suited
for building as accurately as possible what the user wants to have. Accordingly, this
methodology is widely promoted by consultants and has proven useful in several
cases for industry. The drawback of contextual design, however, is that its concept
creation is very dependent on the user. Innovations that radically depart from the
user’s expectation are typically out of scope of this methodology.
Interaction Relabeling and Extreme Characters proposes two techniques to
explore interactions guided by aesthetics rather than ease of use
[
Djajadiningrat et
al. 2000
]
. Interaction relabeling asks participants to consider an existing product
and tell and act how it could work as the product to be designed. The considered
existing product should act as vehicle and stimulate the participants’ imaginations
with respect to the actual product to be designed. Forcing a mapping between things
with quite di erent functionalities, the considered and the actual product, should
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