SoCo Design Studio - Recently Updated Pages

Effective Teaching

Tom_Flanagan — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 08:22:30 CST

Effective Teaching hosts a wiki site for collaborative use by teacher groups. This organization is pioneering on-line collaboration approaches based upon the real world needs of educators across a range of cultural and geographic situations.

CONSIDER .... Less than 60% of the students entering four year colleges in America today are graduating. This means more than 40% of today's college students fail to graduate. They may go on to lead happy and successful lives, of course -- but the data isn't in on this point.

Statistics about college education in the US are discussed in "Crossing the Finish Line," a 389-page book just published by Princeton University Press (2009) and authored by Bowen, Chingos & McPherson. The authors selected 21 four- and six-year public universities in the US and analyzed multiple variables: BS degree attainment, high-school scores and college success, socio-economic variables and college success, family background and degree attainment, and demographic/cultural influence on college performance and degree completion.

CONSIDER also .... The changing focus regarding what is essential in providing good educational experiences. Twenty years ago, Dr. David Orr authored a visionary statement about what really matters in the practice of education. Dr. Orr's original article is attached HERE with the permission of the author to make the work available to Internet audiences.

AND CONSIDER ... The changes in technologies and practices that are coming over the hill today. KnowledgeWorks Foundation offers a nice graphic summary of the menu before us. The view is offered as a MAP consisting of six themes: 1) Grassroots Economics: 2) Smart Networking; 3) Strong Opinions, Strongly Held; 4) Sick Herd; 5) Urban Wilderness; and 6) The End of Cyberspace.

SoCo Design Studio Home

Tom_Flanagan — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:11:06 CDT

"The 21st century will be the century of the social sector organization.

The more economy, money, and information become global, the more community will matter.

And only the social sector nonprofit organization performs in the community,

exploits its opportunities, mobilizes its local resources, solves its problems.

The leadership, competence, and management of the social sector nonprofit organization

will thus largely determine the values, the vision, the cohesion, and the performance of the 21st century society."

Peter Drucker, Leader to Leader Institute

"Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.…

Design, so construed, is the core of all professional training."

Herbert Simon, Nobel laureate

"People who do not design the world that they live in,
Live in worlds that other people design."
Tom Flanagan, SoCoDesign Studio

However

“You have to remember one thing about the will of the people:
it wasn’t that long ago that we were swept away by the Macarena.”
Jon Stewart, “The Daily Show”

South Coast Community Collaborative Design Studio (SoCo Design Studio) is an alliance of expert sociotechnical design consultants who build strong boundary-spanning civic and commercial partnerships.

SoCo Design Studio is seeking to build community capacity to deal with complex civic challenges through enhanced collaborative planning.

As communities confront the rising challenges of sustainability and the pressures of competitive funding, collaboration needs to begin earlier and needs to be framed efficiently, effectively --- and with a capacity to retain flexibility for uncertain futures.

South Coast Design demonstrates approaches and installs the capacity to rapidly build shared frameworks to address the complex local and regional challenges of the 21st century.

Founding Partners include:
Decentralized Design (Decentralized_Design@inbox.com)
Critical Design International (Critical_Design@comcast.net)
CWA Ltd. (http://cwaltd.wetpaint.com/)

Affiliations include:
Institute for 21st Century Agoras (http://www.GlobalAgoras.org)
Green Light Foundation , Inc. (http://home.gwi.net/~greenlight)

SoCo Design Studio
SoCoDesign@inbox.com

63 Union Street, New Bedford MA 02740

SoCoDesign APPROACHES:

New Generation Program Design
Scripting Collective Narratives
Root Cause Mapping
Collaborative Decision Making
Stakeholder Identification
Complexity Assessment

SoCo Design was launched as a pilot project of the Community Foundation of Southeastern Massachusetts (www.CFSEMA.org) in 2007

International TOOL BOX of approaches for community engagement and collaboraiton.

SoCoDesign Philosophies & Methodologies

Tom_Flanagan — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:01:34 CDT

Design, Design Thinking, and Great Design
The Paradigm Shift
Tipping Points
Economics of Collaborative Planning
Tools for Collaborative Planning

Graphic Image
Barriers to Community Dialogue

Barriers to Community Dialogue

Tom_Flanagan — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:00:09 CDT

http://www.beyondpublicmeetings.com/assets/docs/Chapter%201%20-%20BPM.pdf

Twyford, Vivien; Stuart Waters, Max Hardy and John Dengate, 2006.
Beyond Public Meetings; Connecting Community Engagement with Decision-Making. Vivien Twyford Communication Pty Ltd., Wollongong NSW 2500 Australia.

Design Experts Working with SoCoDesign

Tom_Flanagan — Fri, 08 May 2009 12:37:20 CDT

Tom Flanagan
Kevin Dye
Aleco Chiristakis

If you are a participatory design expert with experience in civic system development and would like to help build community capacity in the Southcoast of Massachusetts, contact us to add your special skills.

SoCoDesign@inbox.com

VIDEO Clips _ process & celebration

Tom_Flanagan — Fri, 08 May 2009 12:36:27 CDT

Change the World clip _ Gayle Underwood

Transformation Dialogues wiki _ Institute for 21st Century Agoras
Structured Dialogic Design wiki _ CWA ltd.
Barriers to Revitalizing American Democracy wiki _ Institute for 21st Century Agoras
Structured Dialogic Design Process in Second Life wiki _ Institute for 21st Century Agoras
Structured Dialogic Design for eTeaching wiki _ Gayle Underwood
Virtual Dialogues wiki _ Institute for 21st Century Agoras
Structured Dialogic Design in Cyprus wiki _
Dialogic Design International wiki _

Programs & Projects

Tom_Flanagan — Fri, 08 May 2009 12:31:45 CDT

Health and Wellness Planning 1,
Economic Develoment Projects 1,
Community Development Projects 1,
Education Projects 1,

Fall River - South Coast Health & Wellness

Tom_Flanagan — Fri, 08 May 2009 12:30:27 CDT

There is no abstract available for this page revision.

BACKGROUND Reports

Tom_Flanagan — Fri, 08 May 2009 12:26:14 CDT

Public Health and Primary Care: Challenges and Strategies for Collaboration
Donna Ciliska; Anne Ehrlich; Angela DeGuzman, October 2005

A Scoping Literature Review of Collaboration between Primary Care and Public Health
Ruth Martin-Misener; Ruta Valaitis, September 2008

Health and Wellness Planning

Tom_Flanagan — Fri, 08 May 2009 11:58:54 CDT

Q. Why is SoCoDesign Studio undertaking a project in health and wellness deliberation? Who has a stake in this deliberation?
A. The subject area reflects a civic need to anticipate the future. The stakeholders include health and wellness service providers, consumers, and parties that can either enhance or impede the link between service providers and service consumers.

Q. What is the expected outcome that will make this effort a legitimate investment of stakeholders' time?
A. The "anticipation" of the community for the needs of the future will be received and deeply considered by policy makers at the state and at the national level. Policies informed in measure by well structured citizen deliberations have improved prospects of better serving those citizens.

"... it is when citizens engage in public deliberations about matters of public concern that they realize the democratic values of participation, public freedom, and civic responsibility." AND "... theorists of civil society and deliberative democracy believe that advancing democratic ideals today cannot rest on "revolutionary" changes subjecting all aspects of public life to grassroots democratic decision-making." AND "... democratic citizens who deliberate about public issues and thereby contribute to informed public opinion which then influences the state. In this view, the process of public deliberation is the key to achieving democratic participation and legitimacy in existing liberal representative systems." AND "Round tables reflect one of a multitude of different ways that citizens can organize themselves and exercise their freedom to participate in the public sphere. Far from being undemocratic, Round tables are spaces for the self-organization of civil society." "Yet their solutions acquire political effectiveness only insofar as the round table presents convincing arguments." __ Christiane Olivo

The Practical Problems of Bridging Civil Society and the State: A Study of Round Tables in Eastern Germany Polity Dec, 1998

"While the round table model of citizen participation and deliberation offers many advantages from the perspective of fostering deliberative democracy, it is not without problems. These show up particularly clearly in two areas, in their organization within civil society and in their relation to state authorities. The very first question that arises is who decides which actors and/or groups are invited to a round table? The goal of completeness, i.e., including every affected person or group, cannot be met in all situations, because round table organizers work from imperfect information about which citizens or groups might be interested in, or affected by, a particular situation. The organizers also have their own biases, and these affect who gets invited. Relatedly, not all citizens are interested in participating at round tables, even if they are invited to do so." (pg 8)

"Round table organizers and participants must also deal with the problem of access to the state. Small, informal round tables are often marginalized politically, unable to gain much publicity or recognition for their work, even from fellow citizens. Such political marginalization can hinder citizens' motivation to continue participating at round tables." AND "... the particular topic addressed by a round table often determines what kind of media attention it can attract. ... Publicity is not always enough to secure the success of a round table, however. The examples of round tables that ultimately failed despite significant publicity show that lack of access to the state significantly reduces citizens' motivation to continue participating at round tables." (pg 9)

"... the round table should not be a parallel government to the city parliament nor a parallel power to the city executive, but rather should exercise a consulting function as a representative of large and small organizations, most of which are not represented in the city parliament." AND "... examples of failed round tables [show] that resistance from the state sphere can be devastating to the work of round tables. Both cases indicate that most resistance came from parliamentary bodies, whose members perceive round tables as unelected, and hence undemocratic, competition. However, most round table participants do not expect or claim decision-making powers. What they want is a chance to be heard, because they believe that the power politics of legislative bodies does not always produce the best policy outcomes." (pg 11)

"One of the most important ways for round tables to be heard, i.e., to connect with the state, is through a mediating person who has an official capacity as a member of the state administration or parliament and participates at the round table. This kind of connection provides direct, face-to-face contact between actors from the state and citizens in civil society. It makes processes of state decision-making and official government concerns more transparent to citizens in civil society and also provides an opportunity for state actors to hear about wide-ranging opinions of citizens."

"... a non-institutionalized form of citizen deliberation, relying solely on informal processes of public opinion formation and influencing the state through publicity, is insufficient to advance principles of robust democratic participation in contemporary liberal democracies because it often cannot produce the efficacious connection with the state necessary to motivate citizens to participate in the public spheres of civil society."

The Learning Exchange

Tom_Flanagan — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 09:31:17 CDT

Structured Dialogic Design (SDD) at The Learning Exchange

Summary: Structured Dialogic Design (SDD) is the dialogue and decision-making methodology used by the Institute for 21st Century Agoras and others in their “co-laboratories of democracy.” Laboratories of Dialogue – Co-Laboratories – enable people to listen to each other on issues of common concern, going beyond what they think is important, to find the deep drivers that dynamically influence their situation. Armed with the knowledge of what is really driving their situation, they devise action plans with enthusiasm and commit to working together in carrying them out.

The secret of Co-Laboratory success is Structured Dialogic Design (SDD). SDD honors individual autonomy in the group dialogue, respecting everyone's words, and allowing their careful clarification. It does this in such a way that every stakeholder participant is on an equal level. SDD helps human beings transcend their boundaries of knowledge and culture to generate something that we call community wisdom. Hierarchies of power, expertise, and personality are marginalized. When everyone has submitted their answers to a triggering question and clarified them, the tension goes out of the room as everyone feels that they have been heard. The group has formed in mutual respect and with an agreed upon vocabulary.
At all stages of SDD, interactive software records, prints, and projects the words of participants and then graphically represents their conclusions in real time. SDD sessions begin with a carefully crafted triggering question. After the group has posted and clarified their answers/observations to this question, they vote individually for the observations that they consider most important, and the votes are tallied. These votes produce a ranking of the observations on the basis of their perceived importance.
The process does not stop there. The observations that receive the most votes are ranked according to their influence on each other. This is done by juxtaposing pairs of observations and deciding if they share an influence relation. Participants decide whether:

Accomplishing Observation A will help to accomplish Observation B
And vice versa
Will Observation B help to accomplish Observation A ?.
Then,
Will Observation A help to accomplish Observation C ?
Etc.

Working with paired influence evaluations in this way honors the limitations of our short-term memories (7 ± 2) and relieves participants from the oppressive chore of fitting each observation into their personal conceptual maps. The software keeps track of the logic of their choices and vastly reduces the number of required pairs. In doing this logic for the participants, the software frees them to deal with matters that really concern them. At the end of this process, the software produces a "tree of meaning" (influence pattern) where the deep drivers are at the roots and the lines of influence among the observations are traced.
The roots of the tree are the leverage points where groups can effect real and enduring change throughout the rest of the tree. By concentrating on the roots, groups avoid the trap of emphasizing the erroneous priorities represented by the importance ranking. Research on 50 SDD applications has shown that the observations deemed most important are seldom if ever the most influential ones (Dye and Conaway, 1999). Groups that fasten on what they think is most important are doomed to futility if they are not attending to a situation's influential leverage points.
Armed with this influence tree, participants concentrate on what needs to be addressed to really change a situation. They know that they have their priorities straight. Confidently in a climate of respect and cooperation they draft and evaluate actions that will help them effect the changes they desire. In the action phase, they do not create an influence tree. Instead, they break into small groups and, utilizing the action items already ranked by importance, they create scenarios that they think will best address their problematic situations. Each small group then presents its story to the whole group while posting large dots on the action items they judge as essential. Finally, the group decides by ¾ majorities which actions will be in their collaborative action plan. Being the authors of this plan, participants easily commit to carry it out.
Qualities of SDD
In the practice of Structured Dialogue, roles and functions are divided between the participants/designers and the facilitation team.

The participant/designers have complete control over the content of the dialogue.
The facilitation team controls the process.
Facilitation team personnel run the software, record the proceedings, post questions and contributions in real time both through PowerPoint projectors and as 8 1/2 x 11 sheets on the wall, play back proceedings as requested, and provide real time reports.

The facilitators of Structured Dialogue encourage participants to bring to the surface all possible concerns, insights, and fantasies. Working together, they develop triggering questions to move the discovery process along. In this way, they come together framing questions and deriving consensual answers in the manner of a Research and Development team.
In this way, SDD:

Authenticates every participant/designer;
Elicits ideas and points of view from all stakeholders;
Moves toward effective consensus;
Elicits and deals with the different priorities of stakeholder participants;
Equalizes power relations among the stakeholders;
Goes beyond identifying factors that are important, to specifying those that are most influential in achieving goals.

Structured Dialogue fundamentally differs from many other methodologies that poll stakeholders to find out what problem they think is most important, or what action they deem most effective, but do not probe deeper, proceeding directly to prescribing action plans to meet problems and effect change. These plans usually fail because they fail to identify the crucial leverage points. By performing these extra steps, Structured Dialogue enables participants to go the extra miles that spell the difference between merely talking about and actually effecting needed evolutionary change.
The technology component of SDD amplifies the power of stakeholders to focus on productive dialogue, much as the telescope amplifies the power of astronomers to focus on observing celestial bodies. It enables participants in convoluted situations to make decisions on the basis of paired evaluations without having to integrate those decisions in the grand pattern of things. The computer operated by an impartial party displays the options, records the decisions, tracks the logic that develops, and makes that logic immediately available. With its inbuilt algorithms, the computer speeds and deepens information and analysis by orders of magnitude.
SDD imposes a technology-supported discipline of open and focused dialogue. It employs traditional respectful listening and open expression within a discipline where individuals explain their ideas, clarify them, and have their actual expressions projected onto a viewing screen and have them posted on a wall along with those of their peers.
SDD enables participants to engage in "focused and open dialogue." In SDD, people generate and clarify the meanings of a large number of observations, efficiently produce "team-based patterns," and use graphic displays of the relationships among their observations. The software program embedded in the system increases the speed of group work by up to 20 times and deepens analyses as much as five times for large-scale applications involving 150 observations and twenty participants. Without the software support the production of such patterns is not feasible because of time constraints.
Unlike many group-participatory methods that elicit trust, openness, and euphoria in their preliminary sessions, and then bog down in the details, the good feeling in Structured Dialogues lasts. Satisfaction builds as the action plan makes progress toward the group's goals and leads to further commitment to the work.
Over many years of experience, Structured Dialogue run in this way has consistently helped groups transcend differences of class, culture, ethnicity, and positional power. It involves representative stakeholders (customers, victims, actors, owners of the process) and available points of view in the design process. It brings the lack of a commonly shared metanarrative into focus and encourages creative adaptations among participants. It generates novel communal insights and emergent activity scenarios. It restores and organizes the creative entanglement and intricacy that is generative of creative self-organization.
Background
The city square (agora) of Athens is the reputed birthplace of democracy. Athenians participated in their government. They discussed issues, decided courses of action, and carried them out. Democracy made Athens a dynamic, creative force 2500 years ago. Even then, however, democracy was fragile, sometimes stupid, and short-lived. Plato held it in low esteem and Aristotle likened it to "mob rule."
Why, then, do we want to create 21st Century Agoras? What we want to create are communities energized by vibrant participative democracy. In our Information Age as old hierarchies prove dysfunctional, it is imperative that human communities have flexible ways to tap their wisdom and power. We do not believe that unstructured discussion on the Athenian model is adequate for dealing with the complexities of the Information Age. It was not adequate even for the simpler situations of that bygone age.
A pivotal example of this failure of simple dialogue occurred during the originating days of the Club of Rome, circa 1970. Outstanding authorities in fields such as economics, sociology, biology, psychology, environmental science, philosophy, and politics had come together to address imminent crises, to discover fruitful ways to meet them, and to envision a humane future. They conversed profitably within their own disciplines, but they were frustrated in their attempts to converse across disciplines. Soon it became obvious to one of the founders of the Club of Rome, Alexander Christakis that differences in language, expectations, semantics, and outlooks were blocking and diverting abilities to hold fruitful ongoing conversations (Christakis, 1988).
Since then it has become routinely evident that the difficulties that bright, well-intentioned experts encountered in attempting open dialogue within the Club of Rome are symptomatic of all attempts at participatory democracy that tackle complex situations.
Subsequently, at the Battelle Institute, the University of Virginia, and George Mason University, Christakis and John Warfield developed Interactive Management (IM) that enables dialogue to work in "wicked" situations. In 1989, Christakis took IM into corporate arenas and began to refine it into SDD. Then in 2002, with the founding of the Institute for 21st Century Agoras, a determined effort was made to make SDD available to non-profit, community, and civic organizations. In 2006, Christakis and Ken Bausch published How People Harness their Collective Wisdom and Power to Construct the Future in Co-Laboratories of Democracy, which explains SDD in detail including its origins and the science behind it (cf. also Christakis et. al, 1988; Warfield & Cardenas, 1994; Christakis & Dye, 2000).
Also in 2006, Agoras successfully launched an online version of SDD and is improving its delivery system in 2007. Early successes combining face-to-face and online SDD include a series of ongoing dialogues supporting the UN's Cyprus reunification efforts through the Cyprus Civil Society Dialogue Project (blogora.net/page/Cyprus+Civil+Society+Dialogue). Other recent successes are Michigan's LDUDL program for democratizing education (www.lcudl.wetpaint.com), Americans for Indian Opportunity's formation of a functioning international Indigenous organization www.aio.org, the Agriculture Departments new 5-year plan for controlling Invasive Species, and revitalization of an historic intentional community in Pennsylvania.
To Learn More...
Visit the Institute for 21st Century Agoras website at globalagoras.org.
References

Bausch, K. (2000). The Practice and Ethics of Design, Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 17, No 1, pp. 23-51.
Bausch, K. and Christakis, A.N. (2003). Technology to Liberate Rather Than Imprison Consciousness, in Loye, David (ed.), The Great Adventure: Toward a Fully Human Theory of Evolution, SUNY Press.
Christakis, A. N. (1988). The Club of Rome revisited in: General Systems. W. J. Reckmeyer (ed.), International Society for the Systems Sciences, Vol. XXXI, pp. 35-38, New York.
Christakis, A. N., Warfield, J. N., and Keever, D. (1988). Systems Design: Generic Design Theory and Methodology, in: Systems Governance, Michael Decleris, (ed.), Publisher Ant. N. Sakkoylas, Athens-Komotini, Greece, pp. 143-210.
Christakis, A. N., and Dye, K. M. (1999). Collaboration through Communicative Action: Resolving the Systems Dilemma through the CogniScope, Systems: Journal of Transdisciplinary Systems Sciences, Volume 4, Number 1 pp.45-55.
Christakis, A. N. and Bausch, K. (2002). Technologue: Technology-Supported Disciplined Dialogue, in Roberts, Nancy (ed.), Transformative Power of Dialogue, Elsevier Publishing Co.
Christakis, A.N. and Bausch, K.B. (2006). How People Harness their Collective Wisdom and Power to Construct the Future in Co-Laboratories of Democracy. Greenwich: Information Age Publishing.
Dye, K. M. and Conaway D. S. (1999). Lessons Learned from Five Years of Application of the CogniScope Approach to the Food and Drug Administration, CWA Report, Interactive Management Consultants, Paoli, Pennsylvania.
Warfield, J. N., and Cardenas, A. R. (1994). A Handbook of Interactive Management, Iowa State University Press, Ames, 1994.

Categories: Organizations / Workplace, Communities, Venues, Exploration, Collaborative Action, Streams of D&D Practice, Organization Development, Online & High-Tech, Dialogue, Deliberation & Deliberative Democracy, Collaborative Problem-Solving & Governance, Visioning & Planning, Capacity and Community Building, Interest Areas, Planning Phase, Facets of D&D Work, Other Models & Techniques, Featured Models and Techniques, D&D Models and Techniques, Main Category
Topics: Participatory Practices, D&D Methods, Tools for D&D and Collaboration, Polling & Survey Tools, High-tech D&D Programs, Collaborative Technologies & Online D&D, Main Meta Category

Suggest changes to this listing or additional resources for the Learning Exchange.

Links & Connections

Tom_Flanagan — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 09:29:01 CDT

Transformation Dialogues - a collaborative practice of Structured Dialogic Design approaches
The Learning Exchange - a showcase of processes and experiences in dialogue an deliberation
Arete Initative - a $2 million research program on the nature and benefits of wisdom
E. F. Schumacher Society - a celebrated history of instutions and practices for working within communities
Institute for 21st Century Agoras - an international thinktank for advancing participatory democracy
IDEA Partnership - works with issue centers funded by the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP).
Effective Teaching - supports collaborative problem solving initiatives in the field of education.
Center for University, School and Community Partnerships - a university resource for working with community partners.
Social Design - a global quest for best practice in social impacts of design
US National Design Policy Initiative - Proposal 5: Community design

BNET - hints for sustaining creativity based on practices at Pixar

Generic Work Processes - for comments

Tom_Flanagan — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:13:26 CDT

This section will be seeded with content prompted from http://project.cmd.hro.nl/cmi/hci/toolkit/index2.php with all attributions to original authors retained as indicated on this site. The goal of mirroring this site here is to prompt discussion about specific methodologies that are identified as NAME PROCESSES in various design practices.

Research & Analysis

Personas
Ethnographic Research
Scenarios
Focus Groups
Demographic Research
Concept
Card Sorting
Design Research
Storyboarding
Field Ethnography
Digital Ethnography
Photo Ethnography
User Interviews
Mini Focus Group Interviews
One on One Interviews
Super Group Interviews
Triad Interviews
Party Group Interviews
Quantitative Research
Qualitative Research
Competitor Analysis
Literature Review
Surveys & Questionnaires
Web Analytics
Cultural Probes
Contextual Design
Contextual Inquiry
Task Analysis
Wizard of Oz Technique
SWOT Analysis
Marketing Mix (Four P's)
Market Positioning
Market Segmentation
Usability Engineering Life Cycle
Waterfall Method
ISO-9241
Affinity diagramming
Expert Review
Design Guidelines
Heuristic evaluation
Diagnostic evaluation
Critical Incident Technique Analysis
Measurement
Subjective Assessment (testing & post-release)
Visual Anthropology
Observational Research
Psychographics
Color Theory
Triangulation
User-centered Design Game
GOMS Model
Consistency Inspections
Thinking Aloud
Logging actual use
WebSAT
Retrospective Testing
Remote Testing
Coaching Method
Co-discovery Learning

Co-discovery Learning

Tom_Flanagan — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:05:46 CDT

Description

During a usability test, two test users attempt to perform tasks together while being observed. They are to help each other in the same manner as they would if they were working together to accomplish a common goal using the product. They are encouraged to explain what they are thinking about while working on the tasks.

Purpose

Compared to thinking-aloud protocol, this technique makes it more natural for the test users to verbalize their thoughts during the test.

Points of Interest

Have the pair of users help each other in the same manner they would if they were working together to accomplish a common goal using the product.

References

1. Nielsen, J. Usability Engineering. Academic Press, 1993. p.198. 2. Dumas and Redish, A Practical Guide to Usability Testing. Ablex Publishing. p. 31, "Co-discovery". 3. Rubin, J. Handbook of Usability Testing. John Wiley & Sons. p. 240, "Testing two participants at a time."
User Testing, Usability Engineering

Coaching Method

Tom_Flanagan — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:03:42 CDT

Description

This technique can be used for usability test, where the participants are allowed to ask any system-related questions of an expert coach who will answer to the best of his or her ability. Usually the tester serves as the coach.

Purpose

The purpose of this technique is to discover the information needs of users in order to provide better training and documentation, as well as possibly redesign the interface to avoid the need for the questions. When an expert user is used as the coach, the expert user's mental model of the system can also be analyzed by the tester. The tester can also control the answers to certain predetermined information. In an extensive series of experiments, one could vary the coach's answers in order to learn what types of answers helped users the most. But this requires skilled and careful coaches since they need to compose answers on the fly to unpredictable user questions.

Points of Interest

One variant of the method involves a separate expert user serving as the coach, while the tester observes both the interaction between the participant and the computer, and the interaction between the participant and the coach.

References

Nielsen, J. Usability Engineering, Academic Press, 1993, p199-p200.
User Testing, Usability Engineering

Remote Testing

Tom_Flanagan — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:01:44 CDT

Description

Remote usability testing is used when tester(s) are separated in space and/or time from the participants. This means that the tester(s) cannot observe the testing process directly and that the participants are usually not in a formal usability laboratory.

Purpose

Reasons for choosing Remote testing can be: * Its hard to find local users. * The development teams are spread out. * It can be costly (in time and money) to include non-local users in testing.

Points of Interest

References

Usability Evaluation. Remote Testing. Usability Evaluation, 2006. http://www.usabilityhome.com/FramedLi.htm?Shadow.htm
User Testing, Usability Engineering

Retrospective Testing

Tom_Flanagan — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:59:43 CDT

Description

Additional "testing" after-the-fact. After a user testing session has been conducted and videotaped, retrospective testing is reviewing the tape with the user to ask additional questions and get further clarification.

Purpose

Review the recording of the usability test session with the test user. Ask the test user questions and let the test user describe what he/she is doing and why.

Points of Interest

This technique should be used along with other techniques, especially those where the interaction between the testers and the participants is restricted. But using this technique means that each test takes at least twice as long. Another obvious requirement for using this technique is that the user's interaction with the computer needs to be recorded and replayed.

References

Usability first. Retrospective Testing. Usability first, 2006. http://www.usabilityfirst.com/glossary/main.cgi?function=display_term&term_id=924 Usability Evaluation. Retrospective Testing. Usability Evaluation, 2006. http://www.usabilityhome.com/FramedLi.htm?Shadow.htm
User Testing, Usability Engineering

WebSAT

Tom_Flanagan — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:57:53 CDT

Description

WebSAT is a definition of The Web Static Analyzer Tool

Purpose

WebSAT) is a prototype tool that inspects the HTML composition of web pages for potential usability problems. WebSAT allows the usability engineer to investigate these potential problems so as to determine whether they should be purged from the design of the web pages.

Points of Interest

References

Websat. "WebSAT." Visualization and Usability Group, 2006. http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/WebTools/WebSAT/overview.html
Usability Engineering

Logging actual use

Tom_Flanagan — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:56:05 CDT

Description

Logging involves having the computer automatically collect statisctics about the detailed use of the system.

Purpose

Logging actual use is useful because it shows how users perform their actual work and because it is easy to automatically collect data from a large number of users working under different circumstances.

Points of Interest

References

TMap Sogeti. "Usability testing, Kenmerken van Methoden." Expertisegroep Usability Regio Randstad- Noord 2006. http://www.tmap.net/Images/TMap.net%20Overzicht%20Usabilitytechnieken%20%5BNED%5D_tcm8-33764.pdf Nielsen, J. Usability Engineering, Academic Press, 1993. p216-p220.
Usability Engineering, Usability Research

Thinking Aloud

Tom_Flanagan — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:53:49 CDT

Description

Thinking aloud (Nielsen, 1994), may be the single most valuable usability engineering method. It involves having a end user continuously thinking out loud while using the system.

Purpose

By verbalizing the users thoughts, the test users enable us to understand how they view the system, and this again makes it easier to identify the end users' major misconceptions. By showing how users interpret each individual interface item, THA facilitates a direct understanding of which parts of the dialogue cause the most problems.

Points of Interest

a failure to lend itself well to most types of performance measurement; the different learning style is often perceived as unnatural, distracting and strenuous by the users; non-analytical learners generally feel inhibited; time consuming since briefing the end users is a necessary part of the preparation. Causing users to focus and concentrate is both an advantage and disadvantage since it results in less than natural interactions at times and THA results in being faster due to the users focus.

References

TMap Sogeti. "Usability testing, Kenmerken van Methoden." Expertisegroep Usability Regio Randstad- Noord 2006. http://www.tmap.net/Images/TMap.net%20Overzicht%20Usabilitytechnieken%20%5BNED%5D_tcm8-33764.pdf Usability Engineering Methods. "Usability Engineering Methods (UEMs) for Software Developers." Dr. Andreas Holzinger. 2005. http://user.meduni-graz.at/andreas.holzinger/holzinger%20de/usability%20holzinger.html
Usability Engineering, Usability Research