Reducing Risk through Human Centred Design

The National Academy of Science’s report on Human-System Integration in the system development process (NAS HSI report) [12] explains how human needs can be integrated into system design using an incremental systems engineering development process that continually assesses risks at each phase of the system development. This paper suggests how appropriate Human Centred Design (HCD) methods can be selected to mitigate risks to project success. 1. RISKS IN SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT The NAS HSI report points out that the ultimate goal of system development is to produce a system that satisfies the needs of its operational stakeholders (including users, operators, administrators, maintainers and the general public) within acceptable levels of the resources of its development stakeholders (including funders, acquirers, developers and suppliers). Operational stakeholders need a system that is effective, efficient and satisfying [1]. Developing and delivering systems that satisfy all of these success-critical stakeholders usually requires managing a complex set of risks such as usage uncertainties, schedule uncertainties, supply issues, requirements changes, and uncertainties associated with technology maturity and technical design. Boehm and Lane [4] suggest five principles for managing these risks: 1. Stakeholder satisficing; identifying the success-critical stakeholders and their value propositions (what is offered at what cost); negotiating a mutually satisfactory set of system requirements, solutions, and plans; and managing proposed changes to preserve a mutually satisfactory outcome. 2. Incremental growth of system definition and stakeholder commitment: incremental discovery of emergent humansystem requirements and solutions using such methods as prototyping, testing with users, and use of early system capabilities. 3. Iterative system development and definition: cyclic refinements of requirements, solutions, and development plans. Such iteration helps projects to learn early and efficiently about operational and performance requirements. 4. Concurrent system definition and development: that includes concurrent engineering of requirements and solutions without waiting for every requirement and subsystem to be defined. 5. Risk management – risk driven activity levels and anchor point milestones. The level of detail of specific products and processes should depend on the level of risk associated with them. Principles 2, 3 and 4 are consistent with approaches to human centred design, such as recommended in ISO 13407. The other two principles (Stakeholder satisficing and Risk management) provide a means to determine which human centred design activities and methods are needed in a project to be confident that the final system will be acceptable to the operational stakeholders. This contrasts with existing approaches to human centred design, which are commonly based on a one-size-fits-all methodology (e.g. [5], [14]) that may be justified by a cost benefit analysis to assess the potential business benefits of producing a more usable system [3]. The additional expenditure needed for human centred activities is often difficult to justify because the budget holder for project development usually does not personally gain from longer-term benefits such as increased sales or reduced whole life costs. Project managers are much more likely to be influenced by the risks of not achieving stated project objectives. It is thus useful to recast the potential cost benefits of usability as risk reduction strategies. Table 1 restates the list of cost benefits in [2] as potential project risks. 2. HUMANCENTRED DESIGN ACTIVITIES Looking for advice on which methods to use for human centred design can be bewildering. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Ferré [6] analyzed the methods contained in six popular HCI textbooks and identified 96 categories of HCD techniques. Individual textbooks each contained between 21 and 43 of these categories of technique: