• Human Centric
• UCD in action
• The importance of social and human aspects
• UCD Methodology and Dimensions
• The factors

This page presents a set of dimensions which should be addresses by the players involved in the system design, in order to maximize desired system outcomes. This group includes the designers of the device and planners of work processes, the experts leading the implementation process and of course the users.

Vision

User Interface design and development methodologies for multimodal wearable applications as further developed by the wearIT@work project get the successful state of the art means to be used for the development of robust and useable wearable solutions for the professional environment and help software companies to support new work and business processes.

Strategy

The development of useable wearable systems and applications is heavily depending on two main issues:

• The careful selection of appropriate in- and output modalities used for the interaction scheme of wearable computers in working environments. Here, factors such as the dynamics and changeability in the environment and the specific nature of the primary task, which the computer is used to support, should be considered.
• The introduction of appropriate modelling techniques supporting the user centred approach in the various stages of the software development process.

Based on detailed mapping of the nature and complexity of the primary tasks and the dynamic factors of the working environment in a number of different settings, we want to investigate how the usability of the supporting wearable computer is affected by the in- and output modalities chosen, considering the physical and cognitive prerequisites of use in each situation.
Furthermore, we will investigate the application of (possibly extended) task models in various stages of the design and development process of wearable computing solutions. Task Models do a good job at capturing work processes including tasks to be done and temporal relations between those tasks. A promising application of task models we want to investigate is their use in the requirements elicitation and specification stages. Another aspect we intend to research on is the use of run-time task models. Task models already capture the temporal behaviour of the work process. We will investigate to what extend this knowledge can be used to adapt the user interface to improve the user experience.

Methods to be applied

The mapping and classifying of the primary tasks for the different application scenarios will be done by carefully studying the task diagrams and task descriptions produced in the different application scenarios and analyzing these. Also, the different scenarios will be analyzed in order to identify the typical dynamic factors in the environment. Mock-ups and prototypes will be developed using varying in- and output modalities. These will then go through usability testing in scenarios with focus on varying combinations of primary tasks and dynamic factors found to be especially interesting. The usability studies can be performed using simulated scenarios (i.e. is performed in a usability lab or similar) if the aim of the study is such that the necessary circumstances can be modelled, or in the real working environments when the complexity of reality is needed.
For researching the suitability of task models suitable representations and tools for the manipulation of such models need to be investigated. It will be necessary to conduct user studies in order to discover the suitability for different stakeholders.