User Requirement Gathering: what Task Models have to offer

A full day tutorial at the OZCHI conference

CONTACT DETAILS

Sandrine’s email address is: her first name @acm.org

REGISTRATION

Register now online.

DATE and LOCATION

This tutorial will take place in the University of Melbourne IDEA lab. A state of the art usability lab, geared not just to usability testing, but also to teach students about usability engineering. So, a fabulous location for this tutorial!

Date: Monday 23rd November 2009

Address: IDEA lab, level 4, IDG building, 111 Barry Street, Carlton. Out of the lifts or stairs, once passed the glass doors, turn right in the corridor. The door in the front of you before the corridor splits, are the doors of the IDEA lab.

OBJECTIVE

This tutorial’s objective is two-fold:

  • To introduce novices/designers to requirement gathering methods for informing the design of user interaction.
  • To provide instruction in the established practice of requirement gathering and hands on experience with task analysis.

AUDIENCE

This tutorial is designed for people with no or little experience in task analysis. Experience in user interaction design in general, and requirement gathering in particular, is preferable, but not necessary. Participants with prior knowledge in user interaction design will be able to apply readily what they learn in comparison to their own experience, which is always beneficial.

DESCRIPTION

Participants of this full day tutorial will gain an overview of User Requirement Gathering techniques through the explanation of three of its most widespread approaches: ethnography, contextual design, and task analysis. We will cover briefly the first two approaches, and will describe in detail the task analysis approach to User Requirement Gathering. This description will be illustrated using various notations, including essential use cases, BPMN and DIANE+. Participants will acquire knowledge about the various roles task analysis plays in the development of information and communication technology, and will gain practical experience through various design exercises building their own models.

JUSTIFICATION

This tutorial was initially designed to introduce the usability team of ScanSoft International in Montreal (Canada) to task models, a methodology outside of ScanSoft norms. Comment from one of the participants: “I totally enjoyed the discussion and hands-on aspect of the course, and got more out of it than I expected. I am looking forward to applying the methodology to our next project.”

The tutorial has been re-designed to address the need of less experienced user interaction designers. In its new form, this tutorial has also been successfully delivered at the University of Melbourne (Australia), within the Department of Information Systems to staff and post-graduate students interested in the area of requirement engineering and task analysis, and also to OZCHI in 2005 and to the linux 2008 conference in a 2 hour version.

INTENDED LEARNING OUTCOMES

At the conclusion of this tutorial, participants will have a better understanding on how to:

  • use appropriate modelling techniques to best understand user requirement specifications
  • describe and apply requirements gathering techniques
  • document user requirements specification
  • compare and contrast different systems development methodologies
  • select and justify using a systems development methodology to solve a business problem

OUTLINE

Timing Format
9:00-9:30 Introduction– Welcome, objectives & agenda
9:30-10:30 Introduction to User Requirement Gathering, around a first short design exercise to understand the fundamentals of User Requirements & Usability.
10:30-11:00 morning tea break
11:00-13:00 Interactive Lecture on the techniques for gathering User Requirements.
13:00-14:00 lunch
14:00-14:45 Hands-on activity: a design exercise using DIANE+ or BPMN
14:45-15:00 afternoon tea break
15:00-16:00 Groups’ presentations and Debrief
16:00-17:00 Conclusion, wrap-up and Final comments

Drinks and dinner will follow at the Corkman Irish pub (a pub with no pockies nor TV screens, and often with live music), 2 minutes walking distance from the ICT building.

INSTRUCTOR BIOGRAPHY

Dr Sandrine Balbo is a business Analyst at Deakin University in Geelong. Prior to joining the Deakin she has been a lecturer at the University of Melbourne for 6 years, worked as an information architect in London for 2 years and as a research scientist at CSIRO in Sydney for 6 years.
Since 1990, Sandrine’s research and industry experience has focused on usability engineering within the human-computer interaction field to improve quality and usability of interfaces for professional software, web applications or wireless devices. Her main interest has been on the theme of task analysis and the exploitation of task models. Her main contribution in this area is to apply and expand on task modelling notations.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Below are listed major publications Sandrine has in the area this tutorial covers.

  • Peter Francis, Sandrine Balbo & Lucy Firth. Towards co-design with users who have autism spectrum disorders. To be published in the Universal Access in the Information Society International Journal
  • Steve Goschnick, Sandrine Balbo & Liz Sonenberg. From Task to Agent-Oriented Meta-Models, and back again. In proceedings of the 7th International workshop on TAsk MOdels and DIAgrams (TAMODIA 2008), 25-26 September 2008, Pisa, Italy.
  • Björn Busch-Geertsema, Sandrine Balbo, John Murphy & Scott Davey. Towards a framework to analyse Information Architecture work practices . In Proceedings of the OZCHI2005 conference. Canberra , Australia, 23-25 Nov.
  • Sandrine Balbo, Dirk Draheim, Christof Lutteroth, Gerald Weber. Appropriateness of User Interfaces to Tasks. In proceedings of TAMODIA2005, the 4th International Workshop on TAsk MOdels and DIAgrams for user interface design, Gdansk, Poland, September 26-27, 2005.
  • Sandrine Balbo, Steve Goschnick, Derek Tong & Cécile Paris. Leading Web Usability Evaluations to WAUTER. In Proceedings of the 11th Australian World Wide Web Conference (AusWeb), Gold Coast, Australia, 2005.
  • Sandrine Balbo, Nadine Ozkan, Kristina Pitula & Elise Bonneville. Usability Design Notations: A Comparison Of Functional Flow Diagrams and Task Models. In Proceedings of the Usability Professional Association Annual Conference. Montreal, Canada, 2005.
  • Sandrine Balbo, Nadine Ozkan & Cecile Paris. Choosing the right task modelling notation: A Taxonomy. In The Handbook of Task Analysis for Human-Computer Interaction, D. Diaper and N. Stanton (Eds.), Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (LEA), 2004

Sandrine’s full list of publications