February 2008
Chapter Business
Chris Hass started the meeting with announcements, and thanked AutoDesk for hosting the meeting. The UPA membership in Boston has grown to over 650 people. We have a number of events coming up over the following months. Our upcoming talks will include Hillary Coolidge on March 19, and Carolyn Snyder on April 23rd. For more information about their topics see the 2008 Meeting Schedule.
May 28th is the 7th annual UPA mini-conference. This year it will be hosted at Bentley. We're looking for attendees, sponsors and presenters. There is room for 30 presenters. If you're interested please submit your proposal by March 17th. See the conference site for more details.
Presentation: Short Talks, Hosted by Chauncey Wilson and the AutoDesk Revit Design Team
Autodesk has been building design tools for 25 years, and is now building a competency for design. This evening they shared a series of experiments to build competency in design. The Autodesk team has a wide array of skills and backgrounds.
Chauncey - Claims Analysis: Claims Analysis is a simple technique to look at the consequences that a new feature may have. A claim is a statement about a positive or negative thing about the design. You assert positive and negative claims from multiple stakeholders. The process is to then reduce the negative claims. It's a method to find drawbacks and positives.
David - Design Workshops: The purpose of a Design Workshop is to generate new and fresh ideas in a short amount of time. In a design workshop you follow this process:
- Goal creation
- Metaphors and brainstorming
- Deconstruction
- Scenario creation
- Idea generation
- Design concepts and sketches
- Visions
Brainstorming is about quantity, not quality, wild ideas, new ideas, everything is open. The idea is to create a large initial set without critique or criticism. Create many ideas of how to work with your data, take ideas outside of computers as a metaphor. You focus on a metaphor and deconstruct the elements and attributes of the metaphor and map those attributes to the tasks. From those you create quick scenarios about what a person wants to do as a user centered story. You can then evaluate the ideas using other methods like claims analysis.
Make sure goals are clear so you solve the right problems. Get out of the office to change the environment. Provide a warm-up activity to get people thinking about being creative. Examples are important for getting people up to speed. Maintain momentum; don't divide a workshop over an extended period. Keep things going so you don't lose it.
Chauncey - Monetary Method (Features for Sale): You come up with a series of ideas and you ask your product team how much each idea will take to develop. It gives relative cost to each idea/feature. You can give people paper money. This is used to give users a vote on what should be done. Each person is given a fixed amount of money and costs are associated with features. This forces users to really choose what matters. You say that these are possible features and you won't necessarily get any of these. You give people enough money that they can buy about a 1/3 of the features.
Tom - Pushing Paper Prototyping: The product team had a very large amount of commands that needed to get reorganized. He tested prototypes on 16 users and modified the prototype as they went. Autodesk university was a good venue with many users at one location to perform the study. Paper prototyping is a cheap and fast way to produce many designs and modify those designs on the fly. The prototypes were done in Visio and PhotoShop to represent the real designs. These tools had to be used to give a better representation of the actual quantity of commands. Using higher fidelity designs encouraged more feedback. The team had a printer on-site to produce revisions as they went.
Paper prototypes weren't a great tool because of the complexity of the prototype. The team is evaluating other methods such as PowerPoint or using XAML to produce more interactive prototypes since the design was digital to begin with. During the study they used Morae software with a Web cam to record the paper prototype, but it produced huge files that were hard to handle.
David - Pinups (Not that Kind!): Informal design reviews are an easy way to get feedback throughout the design process. Designers would place designs or sketches in an open space where people can wander in and view the designs in progress. This makes the designs easy to interact with, easy to move, write on, change and discuss. By having dialogs, screens and concepts pinned up and visible it's easy to discuss and evaluate topics and get consensus on various ideas. These were then used to create design patterns that could be re-used across the product.
The lessons learned is not to attack designs but to support an active design process. Do it early in the process so the design concepts can be used. Record the results with photos since the designs may change over time.
Xiaoyu - Working in a Global Design Team: You have to think about design challenges across cultures. For example, they wanted to get a task model from different users. They used a technique with Post-its and index cards to arrange, stack and connect tasks. This worked well in the first round of testing with more junior people, but the process broke down with more senior engineers. The cultural differences made it not acceptable for senior engineers to write on index cards and present ideas that where not completely thought out. More senior engineers thought that this was manual more junior work.
The third trial was revised so that the more senior engineers could criticize and comment instead of writing on index cards. A more junior moderator would help arrange the cards and clarify the ideas.
James / Chauncey - Public Relations (Selling Design): They created a brainstorming session of 52 ideas of how to sell and promote things. Cars, dashboards, magazines, vacuum sweepers, store sales, etc. They then deconstructed how these sales are done. From this they performed a claims analysis. This produced a very large list of ideas of how to promote design across management and the team. They used a progressive hallway to pin up ideas of the design process to help people visualize how designs are done. This included before and after shots and other diagrams to help people visualize the design process.
Lilly - Going Green: Lilly worked on a team to create a presentation about what it means to go green and design sustainable buildings. They iterated on the project to create a video of what the future could be like in terms of green initiatives. They wanted to convey a vision of the future. They started out with basic concepts but it took a while for the ideas to gel. They got inspiration from a multi-touch video wall. They created various visions of what this type of design could be like and developed this concept of how architects could interact to create green and efficient buildings. The team hired a film crew and a prototype team to create the video. The interaction model was much more direct in manipulation of the building. The concept was very well received however the drawback was that some people didn't realize it was just a concept and not a real product.