Abstract

Currently proposed User-Centered Design (UCD) artefacts such as patterns and personas lack commonly defined standards and tight integration into the design process. This is particularly important in the case of rapidly evolving industrial projects where high pressure from the market competes with the usability objectives. As a result, final design is often based on expert experiences without any ability to trace back the decisions. We propose a UI design process and supporting software tightly integrating both artefacts with a goal to produce a conceptual design from user experiences. The proposed process consists of three phases: Persona Creating, Pattern Selection and Pattern Composition, resulting in representative persona set, ordered list of suggested patterns for each persona and a conceptual design respectively. On the other hand, the proposed tool supports the first two phases of the process by providing various automation algorithms for user grouping and pattern selection combined with the benefit of rapid pattern and user information access. Presented persona and pattern formats are augmented with a set of discrete domain variables to facilitate automation and provide an alternative view on the information. Finally, the tool and the method are evaluated in the scope of a study on a bio-informatics tool. The results of the study are presented demonstrating a significant improvement in usability measures