Designing worth is worth designing

"...practitioners have understood for at least two decades that there is no absolute standard for usability...Despite this, research on evaluation methods in the 1990s struggled with defining what constituted a usability problem. ...what is a usability problem in one product usage context may not be one in another." pp. 165

"...a priori usability measures or thresholds cannot apply to all systems. Usability targets must be set on a project by project basis. ...[This] requires discussion between all stakeholders, and revisiting of measures and targets throughout the development, since it is highly unlikely that appropriate targets will be selected initially." pp. 166

"From the perspective of VCD, targets can only be rationally derived from the intended value of a product or service." pp. 166

"Usability approaches assess quality in use through observing and measuring users’ experiences. They are mostly concerned with 'getting the design right'. In the second decade of HCI, the emphasis moved to 'getting the right design' by studying usage in context. This revealed not only inefficiencies and dissatisfaction due to interaction design, but also ineffectiveness due to missing or inappropriate functionality." p. 166

”The nature of value manifestations can best be distinguished from impositions of (ethical) values by adopting the more morally and politically neutral word ‘worth’ as a synonym (in all except connotations and associations) for ‘value’.” pp. 167

"Noting that things of value are worthwhile, or things of worth, we can advance one letter in the alphabet from VCD to WCD. This ‘re-branding’ is motivated by the need to differentiate value-centred approaches from narrower approaches such as VSD and commercial product design. ...WCD focuses development on the worthwhile, that is, things that will be valued, as manifested in people’s motivation, individually or collectively, to invest one or more of time, money, energy and commitment." pp. 168

"...designing worth means designing things that will motivate people to buy, learn, use or recommend an interactive product, and ideally most or all of these. Thus the differing motivations of users, sponsors and other stakeholders need to be understood and confirmed early in design." pp. 168

"Worth...is hopefully a better umbrella term for the words that designers typically use to indicate people’s motivations, especially ‘needs’ and ‘wants’, as well as product motivators such as ‘quality’. While some designers may quaintly see the latter as being ‘within’ the product, ‘needs and wants’ clearly lie within people. As such, a product’s quality is essentially its ability to meet wants and/or needs. Poor quality thus reduces worth, but as this is always relative to wants and needs, we do not need to consider quality alongside wants and needs. Thus although designers often talk in terms of product quality, we should regard this at best as a surrogate for users’ wants and needs." pp. 168

”...with innovative products, user may only realise their worth having chosen to use them [12]. The implication, as with unfelt needs, is that people may not be able to articulate (name) what they could value; only what they have found to be worthwhile. While many counselling approaches seek to uncover unfelt needs, encounters with new designs can be more clear cut, establishing the existence of unfelt needs simply by making them felt through usage and experience.” pp. 169

"The motivations of individuals and social groupings define what is worthwhile. It is through examining these that HCI can broaden its scope, not only beyond the Taylorist efficiency of office productivity tools, but also beyond the...‘Disneyism’ of some affective HCI. WCD should be able to provide digital support for anything that people consider worthwhile, whether as individuals or collectively." pp. 169

"The VCD framework structured development around four logical processes. Firstly, opportunity identification expresses the intended worth of a digital artefact. Secondly, the design process envisages the achievement of worth as a result of human interactions with a system. Evaluation establishes the impact of the quality of human-computer interaction on achievement of worth. Iteration is the fourth process, where adverse impacts of quality in use on achieved worth are first understood, and then addressed by recommended changes."

"Equating worth and motivation shifts the original phase of opportunity identification to a more focused study of needs, wants, and unfelt needs. Poorly met or unmet current needs or wants can be identified through existing HCI approaches such as ethnography, interviews and competitor analysis."

"The elicitation of unmet or poorly met wants and needs will not identify all opportunities for new digital products and services. Nor may personas, which tend to focus on individual’s goals but not necessarily how well these are currently, or could be, accomplished. In both cases, unfelt needs are unlikely to emerge."

"envisionment or performance, and are thus better suited to surfacing through exploratory design. Furthermore, methods for identifying needs and wants, and how well they are currently met, may carry a high degree of risk. Prototyping is thus vital, even with apparently well grounded analyses of wants and needs, to validate ‘worth as requirements’ in a timely and reliable manner."

"Wherever possible, worth should be expressed using words and images of users, sponsors and other stakeholders."

pp. 172

"WCD focuses evaluation on assessing the impact of user experience and performance on achievement of intended worth. An early focus on evaluation lets worth be considered in terms of success criteria and human motivation. Expressing worth as both success criteria and product motivations is a useful design method, since inconsistencies can require further reflection that should improve product goals. Evaluation can also become structured around hypothesis testing if design impact matrices are used, as the expected impact of design decisions can be compared with actual impact." pp. 172

"Worth is achieved in the world and endures after interaction. One exception is transient individual worth in the form of pleasure in entertainment systems, which must be measured during interaction (memories however may endure). However, for all enduring forms of worth, impact must be assessed in the world, and not in interaction." pp. 172

"...consider a website for van hire. The worth of van hire lies in “hiring an appropriate van for a suitable period at an economical cost as regards price and personal effort required to collect and return it”. Achievement of such worth can only be made at a van depot, or by a follow up interaction with the customer. An on-line booking will indicate that the price and the perceived cost of picking up and returning a van are acceptable, but until the van is successfully collected and then successfully returned after transporting the load, nothing worthwhile has been achieved." pp. 173

"To assess the effectiveness of the van hire-site, it must either be extended to cover post-sales feedback, or the depot must be instrumented through operational systems and/or public feedback kiosks, or both." pp. 173

"A traditional usability test of a van hire web-site could assess ease of booking and ease of confident and appropriate van selection, but these are largely hygiene factors. The main customer motivators are price, what needs to go in the van (and when and where) and convenience. These are largely independent of the web-site, unless price is dynamically adjusted." pp. 173

"Evaluation ends with achieved worth assessed in terms of 4Ds: donation, delivery, degrading and destruction, where respectively the design delivers more, as much, less or none of the worth than was intended. Evaluation data allows partial causal analysis, but this may be insufficient to allow confident syntheses of design fixes. This may need further focused exploration of user difficulties and dissatisfaction, but it may also be due to flaws in worth expression."

"Iteration ‘fixes’ in HCI are mostly associated with changes to a design. However, the causes of user difficulties or dissatisfaction may be deeper, and be due to misconceptions about what is worthwhile, or due to incomplete field research. Development in WCD can begin with any logical development process. So too can iteration require fixes to any development process, not just to Design, except when iteration leads to termination and the 5th D of WCD: denial. Here, causal analysis can deny one or more of: the viability of the value proposition; the possibility of adequate risk management via appropriate field research; or the possibility of any successful design fix being possible with known currently available technology."

"Developers may prefer evaluators to provide design fixes, but in a well managed team, design, business, sponsor and other stakeholder roles during iteration cannot be excluded. Everything can be iterated, so everyone must iterate." pp. 173

"Centring design on worth is worthwhile because this provides common ground · for all development processes, with total iteration potential (activity integration) · between design management sponsors, users and other stakeholders (role integration) · through cultural forms in worth arenas (domain integration) ...the value of WCD is that is allows development to focus clearly on sponsor and user goals for digital products and services. ...WCD keeps development teams focused on what motivates usage, purchase and recommendations." pp. 173

"There is no viable alternative to focusing on worth. Focusing on the system, interaction or contextual fit distracts from what really makes systems worthwhile." pp. 173