Experience in remote user-centered design

ABSTRACT

To meet an immediate need in a new market, the corporation needed a customer document for installing a suite of tools that had previously been installed only by experienced service engineers. More than one support engineer had written a short document describing the installation tasks, but these documents pre-supposed a high level of expertise on the part of the installer. The challenge presented to Information Engineering was to create, from two such documents, a text that a customer could use to install the software tools.

With the help of a world-wide team, internet tools, and two virtual sessions following user-centered design practices, a customer-oriented document was successfully created quickly at very low cost. This paper describes the process.

Documentation, Design, User-centered Design, Remote collaborative work, Design of communication, Computer-supported collaborative work

REFERENCES

• 1: William Hart-Davidson, Seeing the project: mapping patterns of intra-team communication events, Proceedings of the 21st annual international conference on Documentation, October 12-15, 2003, San Francisco, CA, USA [doi>10.1145/944868.944875]
• 2: Tasha Hollingsed , David G. Novick, Usability inspection methods after 15 years of research and practice, Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication, October 22-24, 2007, El Paso, Texas, USA [doi>10.1145/1297144.1297200]
• 3: Jakob Nielsen, The Usability Engineering Life Cycle, Computer, v.25 n.3, p.12-22, March 1992 [doi>10.1109/2.121503]
• 4: Jakob Nielsen, Iterative User-Interface Design, Computer, v.26 n.11, p.32-41, November 1993 [doi>10.1109/2.241424]
• 5: Nielsen, J., Guerrilla HCI: Using Discount Usability Engineering to Penetrate the Intimidation Barrier, www.useit.com/papers/guerrilla_hci.html, 1994.
• 6: David G. Novick , Karen Ward, What users say they want in documentation, Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication, October 18-20, 2006, Myrtle Beach, SC, USA [doi>10.1145/1166324.1166346]
• 7: Shaun Slattery, Research methods for revealing patterns of mediation, Proceedings of the 21st annual international conference on Documentation, October 12-15, 2003, San Francisco, CA, USA [doi>10.1145/944868.944876]
• 8: Ingo Stock , Michael Weber, Authoring technical documentation using a generic document model, Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication, October 18-20, 2006, Myrtle Beach, SC, USA [doi>10.1145/1166324.1166364]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems

General Terms:
Design, Documentation

Keywords:
best practices, computer documentation, computer-supported collaborative work, design of communication, development process, information development, remote collaborative work, software development, software documentation, task-based design, user assistance, user-centered design