ASUR - Focus group
Contributors
- Main contributors: E. Dubois, C. Bach
- Other contributors:
S. Charfi, G. Gauffre
Overview
Traditionally, two forms of design approaches can be met in the field of interactive systems:
- The first one focuses on human-centred approaches and aims at understanding user's needs in a comprehensive way.
- The second one is more formal: it aims at structuring the design space and generating conceptual models in order to facilitate the transition between the requirements analysis phase and the development phase. It mainly relates to software engineering considerations.
Most of the time, these two approaches are used in a concurrent manner, by experts of different domains. ASUR-FocusGroup is an articulation of an informal design method, the focus-group, with a formal design model for mixed systems, the ASUR model. We are working on this articulation because we believe that it constitutes a resource for guiding the management of the Focus-Group and that the outcome is directly reusable and beneficial in further steps of a development process.
Illustration
A complete and progressive illustration is presentend in the paper published at the international conference CADUI'06.Principles
This articulation is a 10 steps process:
- Introducing the context of the session
- analyse the user's task
- identifying domain concepts
- identifying the data that must be made perceivable in the physical world during the realisation of the task
- identifying data flows aimed at the computer system
- focuses on the digital concepts identified in step 3 and aims at attributing to each of them one of the 3 possible kinds of ASUR digital component (object, info or tool)
- identifying output and input ASUR adapters
- characterising the data transfer to the physical world on the basis of the ASUR characteristics
- characterising the data transfer to the digital world, on the basis of the ASUR characteristics
- "breaking" relationships connected to Ain and Aout by inserting new entities
Following this working process, tables have been predefined to structure the results. The use of these tables constitutes a solid anchor to further design steps, especially the interaction design with ASUR ans subsequent design considerations based on ASUR (link with task analysis, translations into software components and simuation).
This approach has been applied in two different concepts and constitutes one of the current research axis of the Praxis-Environnement Project.