[Sigia-l] RE: Use cases and user centric design (was sitepath diagramming)

[prady]

Doug Howell wrote -
"we kept sabotaging ourselves because we couldn't grasp the iterative nature
of the development process"

I agree with most of your experinces. Looks like you work in my office, too
:)

Here is what I have to add to this -

Use cases are not the final frontier, they are just a bit to perform the
'Task Analysis'. They help understanding what is required and how you 'may'
plan doing it. But as you said, they don't (and should not) have anything to
do with the user interface. Hence, usability can't be guarenteed with the
use of 'use cases', yet they are better means to be used effectively for
'feature inspection' after the development (better than SRD, offcourse).

We have also progress from 'Use Cases' to the 'Work Flow' to complement the
development process. But in my opinion, it is not to say that 'use cases'
were not needed. I feel that workflow, in fact, is very high level use case.
In our development, we at times skip writing use cases primarily for the
time constraints. But we complement this by investing more time on the
'storyboarding' and 'wireframes' stages during design.

My experience with the 'iterative' nature of development is that each stage
is an important 'investment'. You eaither pay on time or pay late (with the
late fee), but you can't avoid it.

Pradyot Rai

----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Howell (IT)" <DHOWELL at bordersgroupinc.com>
To: <sigia-l at asis.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2003 6:10 PM
Subject: [Sigia-l] RE: Use cases and user centric design (was sitepath
diagramming)


Katherine  Marshak wrote:

Briefly, we use a variety of requirements elicitation & user research
techniques to inform the development of both a use case model and a site
map early in the project. We often develop personas to supplement actor
descriptions. (Actors are part of the use case approach. Actors
represent the roles that people & systems play in relation to the
application/site being developed.) We complement the use case model and
specifications with wireframes and navigation diagrams. We strive to
keep user interface details out of the use cases so they focus on
functionality. This gives us flexibility to improve the interface and
interaction design without changing the underlying requirements.


The use case discussion hit home for me. We are still trying to find the
most helpful combination of deliverables. We started our foray into
object-oriented programming by creating use cases. We created what we
thought was a very good template, combining some of the best ideas from
several printed sources, consultants and experience. However, we kept
sabotaging ourselves because we couldn't grasp the iterative nature of the
development process. We were trying to use object-oriented techniques inside
a traditional, "waterfall" mindset. We ended up in "analysis paralysis"
because we were trying to create _perfect_ use cases. People were spending
way too much time trying to perfect the language, trying to make sure it
covered every possible scenario, and having a very difficult time figuring
out how to document alternate and exception flows.

What we're trying now is replacing the main, alternate and exception flow
narratives with flow charts (Visio) which we call business activity
workflows. The developers seem to get more out of them, and the business
people don't have to worry so much about language (except learning a few
symbols). These diagrams then become the basis of screen flows.

Thanks,
Doug Howell
Information Architect
Borders Group Inc.
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