The development and design of visualization solutions that are truly usable is essential for ensuring both their adoption and effectiveness. User-centered design principles, which focus on involving users throughout the entire development process, are well suited for visualization and have been shown to be effective in numerous information visualization endeavors. In this paper, we report a two year long collaboration with combustion scientists that, by applying these design principles, generated multiple results including an in situ visualization technique and a post hoc probability distribution function (PDF) exploration tool. Furthermore, we examine the importance of user-centered design principles and describe lessons learned over the design process in an effort to aid others who also seek to work with scientists for developing effective and usable scientific visualization solutions.
The term user-centered design was first used by Donald Norman @cite_54 @cite_73 , who described a design process that primarily focuses on specific needs of the user rather than less important factors, such as aesthetics. The topics of usability engineering and usability testing were heavily influenced by user-centered design as presented in multiple books @cite_40 @cite_55 @cite_69 . Later in 2010, an ISO standard @cite_4 was established on human-centered design processes for interactive systems, which identifies key activities as: understanding context of use, determining requirements, producing designs, and performing evaluations.
@cite_69 @cite_4 @cite_55 @cite_54 @cite_40 @cite_73
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Historically, the development of computer systems has been primarily a technology-driven phenomenon, with technologists believing that "users can adapt" to whatever they build. Human-centered design advocates that a more promising and enduring approach is to model users' natural behavior to begin with so that interfaces can be designed that are more intuitive, easier to learn, and freer of performance errors. In this paper, we illustrate different user-centered design principles and specific strategies, as well as their advantages and the manner in which they enhance users' performance. We also summarize recent research findings from our lab comparing the performance characteristics of different educational interfaces that were based on user-centered design principles. One theme throughout our discussion is human-centered design that minimizes users' cognitive load, which effectively frees up mental resources for performing better while also remaining more attuned to the world around them. Contents: S.W. Draper, D.A. Norman, C. Lewis, Introduction. Part I:User Centered System Design. K. Hooper, Architectural Design: An Analogy. L.J. Bannon, Issues in Design: Some Notes. D.A. Norman, Cognitive Engineering. Part II:The Interface Experience. B.K. Laurel, Interface as Mimesis. E.L. Hutchins, J.D. Hollan, D.A. NormanDirect Manipulation Interfaces. A.A. diSessa, Notes on the Future of Programming: Breaking the Utility Barrier. Part III:Users' Understandings. M.S. Riley, User Understanding. C. Lewis, Understanding What's Happening in System Interactions. D. Owen, Naive Theories of Computation. A.A. diSessa, Models of Computation. W. Mark, Knowledge-Based Interface Design. Part IV:User Activities. A. Cypher, The Structure of Users' Activities. Y. Miyata, D.A. Norman, Psychological Issues in Support of Multiple Activities. R. Reichman, Communication Paradigms for a Window System. Part V:Toward a Pragmatics of Human-Machine Communication. W. Buxton, There's More to Interaction Than Meets the Eye: Some Issues in Manual Input. S.W. Draper, Display Managers as the Basis for User-Machine Communication. Part VI:Information Flow. D. Owen, Answers First, Then Questions. C.E. O'Malley, Helping Users Help Themselves. L.J. Bannon, Helping Users Help Each Other. C. Lewis, D.A. Norman, Designing for Error. L.J. Bannon, Computer-Mediated Communication. Part VII:The Context of Computing. J.S. Brown, From Cognitive to Social Ergonomics and Beyond. Usability is increasingly recognized as an important quality factor for interactive software systems, including traditional GUIs-style applications, Web sites, and the large variety of mobile and PDA interactive services. Unusable user interfaces are probably the single largest reasons why encompassing interactive systems --- computers plus people, fail in actual use. The design of this diversity of applications so that they actually achieve their intended purposes in term of ease of use is not an easy task. Although there are many individual methods for evaluating usability; they are not well integrated into a single conceptual framework that facilitate their usage by developers who are not trained in the filed of HCI. This is true in part because there are now several different standards (e.g., ISO 9241, ISO IEC 9126, IEEE Std.610.12) or conceptual models (e.g., Metrics for Usability Standards in Computing [MUSiC]) for usability, and not all of these standards or models describe the same operational definitions and measures. This paper first reviews existing usability standards and models while highlighted the limitations and complementarities of the various standards. It then explains how these various models can be unified into a single consolidated, hierarchical model of usability measurement. This consolidated model is called Quality in Use Integrated Measurement (QUIM). Included in the QUIM model are 10 factors each of which corresponds to a specific facet of usability that is identified in an existing standard or model. These 10 factors are decomposed into a total of 26 sub-factors or measurable criteria that are furtherdecomposed into 127 specific metrics. The paper explains also how a consolidated model, such as QUIM, can help in developing a usability measurement theory. From the Publisher: Difficult to learn and awkward to use, today's information systems often change our activities in ways that we do not need or want. The problem lies in the software development process. In this book John Carroll shows how a pervasive but underused element of design practice, the scenario, can transform information systems design. Traditional textbook approaches manage the complexity of the design process via abstraction, treating design problems as if they were composites of puzzles. Scenario-based design uses concretization. A scenario is a concrete story about use. For example: "A person turned on a computer; the screen displayed a button labeled Start; the person used the mouse to select the button." Scenarios are a vocabulary for coordinating the central tasks of system developmentunderstanding people's needs, envisioning new activities and technologies, designing effective systems and software, and drawing general lessons from systems as they are developed and used. Instead of designing software by listing requirements, functions, and code modules, the designer focuses first on the activities that need to be supported and then allows descriptions of those activities to drive everything else. In addition to a comprehensive discussion of the principles of scenario-based design, the book includes in-depth examples of its application.