Contextual Method for the Redesign of Existing Software Products

Abstract This article is concerned with the problem of improving software products and investigates how to base that process on solid empirical foundations. Our key contribution is a contextual method that provides a means of identifying new features to support discovered and currently unsupported ways of working and a means of evaluating the usefulness of proposed features. Standard methods of discovery and evaluation, such as interviews and usability testing, gather some of the necessary data but fall short of covering important aspects. The shortcomings of these approaches are overcome by applying an integrated and iterative method for collecting and interpreting data about product usage in context. This article demonstrates its effectiveness when applied to the discovery and evaluation of new features for standard Web clients.

[1]  Kerry Rodden,et al.  Smartback: supporting users in back navigation , 2004, WWW '04.

[2]  Marti A. Hearst,et al.  The state of the art in automating usability evaluation of user interfaces , 2001, CSUR.

[3]  Joke Kort,et al.  Usage analysis: combining logging and qualitative methods , 2005, CHI EA '05.

[4]  Kerry Rodden,et al.  Designing for Web Revisitation: Exploiting Structure from User Interaction and Navigation , 2004 .

[5]  Natasa Milic-Frayling,et al.  Predictive algorithms for browser support of habitual user activities on the Web , 2005, The 2005 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI'05).

[6]  Saul Greenberg,et al.  How people revisit web pages: empirical findings and implications for the design of history systems , 1997, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[7]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  An applied ethnographic method for redesigning user interfaces , 1995, Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems.

[8]  Abigail Sellen,et al.  How knowledge workers use the web , 2002, CHI.

[9]  Antonio C. Siochi,et al.  Computer analysis of user interfaces based on repetition in transcripts of user sessions , 1991, TOIS.

[10]  Brian Detlor,et al.  Information Seeking on the Web: An Integrated Model of Browsing and Searching , 2000, First Monday.

[11]  David F. Redmiles,et al.  Extracting usability information from user interface events , 2000, CSUR.

[12]  James A. Landay,et al.  WebQuilt: a framework for capturing and visualizing the web experience , 2001, WWW '01.

[13]  Ed H. Chi,et al.  The scent of a site: a system for analyzing and predicting information scent, usage, and usability of a Web site , 2000, CHI.

[14]  Karen Holtzblatt,et al.  Contextual design , 1997, INTR.

[15]  Tom Rodden,et al.  Moving out from the control room: ethnography in system design , 1994, CSCW '94.

[16]  W. Buxton.  Human-Computer Interaction , 1988, Springer Berlin Heidelberg.