Human-Systems Integration

• Usability Engineering/User-Centered Design (UCD)
• Multimodal Interaction Design

 

Usability Engineering/User-Centered Design

Design Interactive offers human-centric design support for existing/legacy systems as well as new systems in the conceptual, prototype and detailed design stages. We leverage systematic methods and techniques to ensure a high degree of usability in products and systems. Our usability engineers help government agencies and commercial clients to enhance their products and services or reform their development lifecycles by including the end users' needs into the design and evaluation process.

Through both analytical and empirical methods, we leverage a a complimentary set of evaluation techniques throughout various stages of the engineering lifecycle. Our UCD process includes:

  • contextual analysis: obtain user-centered model of tasks/jobs; identify user goals, desires, behavioral patterns, usage context, competitors, technology barriers...
  • competitive analysis: identify strengths and weaknesses of existing systems
  • user requirements definition: specify system requirements based on user needs.
  • use scenarios: develop use scenarios that cna be leveraged in design and evaluation.
  • conceptual design: decompose tasks into modular components and develop overall concept for the human-computer interface.
  • prototyping: build multiple iterations of interactive conceptual designs.
  • evaluation: conduct user testing and leverage user feedback to refine conceptual design, obtaining both quantitative and qualitative data.
  • detailed design: our final interface designs emerge in an evolutionary way from the findings of the previous stages.

Our goal is to ensure that a system, product or service is accepted by the target user community due to enhanced system intuitiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction. Targeted reporting techniques provide tangible results which imply design recommendations.

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Multimodal Interaction Design

Design Interactive is driven to developing proven threoretically and empirically driven multimodal design guidance that results in enhanced situation awareness, decision making and human performance. Our Multimodal Information Perceptualization (MIP) techniques strive to optimize the distribution of perceptual and cortical processing and thus take advantage of the totality of human processing capacity through activation of multiple perceptual (visual, aural, haptic, olfaction), cognitve (verbal, spatial), and response (speech, motor) channels. These techniques aim to transform multimodal interaction design fro its current state of whim to a systematic design science.

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Other DI services:

Training Systems Design and Evaluation
 
Next-Generation HSI Research