Seminar 1 Notes

Data gathering and analysis, requirements, usability and user centered systems design (UCSD) are the main concepts in the literature for the first seminar. Data gathering methods considered are interviews, questionnaires and observations. These can be more or less structured, which means that they demand data in different degrees of precision. The choice of data gathering method depends on the object examined, available resources and the questions asked.
    Data analysis starts with separating quantitative and qualitative data. Basic methods include calculating means and variance for quantitative data and pattern identification and categorization of qualitative data.
    Requirements specification is an activity where a product's features and constraints are formally described. It is an important part of development because changes carried out at this stage are much more cheap than at later stages. Requirements are developed by describing the user at different levels of generality, from scenarios to use cases, and data gathering methods are used to back them up. A common starting point is the creation of personas which are fictional descriptions of potential users, their tasks, skills and personalities.
    UCSD can be seen as a development paradigm which places usability, end users and usability designers at the center of the development process. The importance of involving end users and usability designers through the whole development process from beginning to end and as co-creators is pointed out.
    Usability is described in ISO-9241-11 by very general terms and the most important issue is that the concept can only be defined in terms of context and goals. The standard also contains examples of how to measure usability and references to other standards that complement this one.
    A question I want to take up is whether and why there is a need for a usability requirements specification besides the requirements specification. My impression is that the two are different (I compare the recommendation from ISO-9241-11 with the passage that covers the Volere shell in the book.) Is the importance of usability best represented as a separate document or should it from the beginning be clearly included in the general requirements specification?