Talking to the User

Introduction

To design a new system, it is important to understand what your prospective users might want from it, and how they may expect to interact with it. Understand the problem is probably one of the hardest parts of good system design.

You should have general discussions within your group and outside of it, to informally try to understand what people will expect of your system.

The following information will help you develop and administer a questionnaire to elicit some more structured information.

You should also try to obtain an understanding of how people perform tasks with similar systems - this is called "task analysis".

Reading

Questionnaires: Chapter 11, section 11.5.3, pp.390 - 393
Task Analysis: Chapter 7, pp. 221-250