PUBLICATIONS
Cross Industry Collaboration and Community of Practice
Authors: Delia Grenville (Intel), Misha Vaughan (Oracle)
Summary: Intel took a field trip to Oracle in August. It was a little like a school field trip: Remember how your teacher tried to tie everything together, from history to math to music? You spent weeks preparing, and you were encouraged to take notes and ask questions throughout the day. The trip was designed to be memorable and to connect what you learned back to your schoolwork. Our field trip to Oracle was very similar. We wanted to make sure that the conversation we had with Oracle tied together user experience and product development in ways that made sense for our company. We took a lot of notes, asked a lot of questions, and found interesting connections that related directly to the work we are doing right now at Intel.
Authors: Misha Vaughan; Interview with: Delia Grenville
Summary: Intel and Oracle are coming together for a day-long exchange of user experience best practices. This is the first in a two-part exchange. This effort is being led by Misha Vaughn and Delia Grenville, User Experience Program Manager, Corporate Platform Office, Intel. Intel will be engaging with Oracle’s Applications User Experience team to understand how they’ve been able build a mature, multidisciplinary UX organization. As a co-owner of the event, I asked Delia if she could put into words for me what she hopes to get out of the day.
Participatory Design for Product Development
Authors: Delia Grenville (Invited Paper)
Summary: In this case study, we developed a scenario-based card sorting |method to assist in the co-design of a community of practice in user experience. Card sorting is typically used for the development of a computer interface. In this work, we modified and extended the use of card sorting to the participatory design of an organizational interface: a community of practice. The data we gathered informed the design of the both the real-world community and the virtual/digital artifacts that supported our community.
Authors: Delia Grenville
Summary: In this paper, we modified a methodology developed for the user-centered design of a physical community to design an employee community. We were most interested in how the service perspective would impact 1) the design recommendations for an employee community and 2) the adoption of the community by employees. Like in a physical community, the “right” amenities and services make a community a good fit for those who are a part of it. We designed services based on the feedback from our participants and then observed their adoption to understand whether those services were a good fit. As in PD projects, there were challenges caused by the inherent disruption of the power structure as the community gained momentum.
Authors: Delia Grenville
Summary: Like many corporations, the evolution of high-tech, social media trends, and continued thrust towards increased personalization in computing has impacted both our product development philosophy and our organization’s culture. Consumers and employees alike expect products that better represent our experiences as people. In the last year, my team has focused on three vectors—connection, intention, and transformation—in the development of a corporate user-experience (UX) framework for our products. The naming of the vectors corresponds to the UX practices that we have identified to develop better product experiences. The vectors also acknowledge the cultural activation that is essential to creating a self-sustaining experience-driven product development community within our corporation. Both participatory design and a collaborative approach are allowing the community to thrive and position us to support common goals for our corporate-level user experience design agenda. This paper focuses on the co-design of the user experience practices to be adopted by the organization.
New Methods and Practices:
Product Life Cycle, Technology
Transfer, Digital Research
Authors: Delia Grenville
Summary: Power is the speed with which you can come up with a new idea, enroll others in taking it on and implement it/ have it be part of the culture; e.g., if you come up with a new idea for a product and it takes you 10 years to implement we would not say there is much power there. If you can invent a new idea, enroll others and implement it in a matter of months then we would say you/your team/your department have real power. McRobb, Insigniam Performance Participatory design methods can be used to drive a powerful idea that will resonate throughout the organization or community to create change. In this case study, we learned that employing participatory design together with a process and communication framework 1) reduced decision making time and 2) the time needed to create a common understanding of future software architectural goals. We started the process by employing our understanding, derived from a rich body of consumer-centered research, of what consumers wanted in the future of the television experiences -- in the living room, their homes, and beyond. Then, we incorporated our understanding of consumers’ needs with our desire to optimize our software architecture and technology integration engagements. Through a modified participatory approach, we created a rich foundation for future software development and the delivery of product experiences that would match consumer’s expectations and optimize our engagement with partners and stakeholders.
Authors: Delia Grenville
Summary: In this time of unprecedented technological change, how can we leverage our perspective, as designers, researchers, and consumers? How can we enhance our ability to adapt, adopt, and remain receptive to changes in digital media and devices that deliver content into people’s homes and lives? Are we evaluating and managing change with meaningful tools? Let’s discuss how research methods, analysis, and product definition should adapt to inform product design and innovation in this new era.
Authors: Sasanka Prabhala, Delia Grenville
Summary: Many of the organizations, companies, and industries today are focusing on User Experience to differentiate themselves from competitors in the design and development of products, services, and/or applications. Intel Corporation which has primarily been a semi-conductor manufacturing company for a long time has shifted its focus to address the needs, desires, and expectations of users. The fundamental question to be answered is how to design and develop different products, services, and/or applications that add value to users and enhances their experiences. This paper addresses this fundamental question through a systematic approach of understanding the competitive landscape environment. The paper describes the results of the systematic approach in the context of consumer electronics (CE) domain and concludes with the benefits of understanding the competitive landscape environment.
2005
Technology Transfer of User Interface Research
(in print only)
Authors: Delia Grenville
Summary: Technology that is developed must be accepted before it can be applied to a business process. In the technology acceptance phase, teams on both the research and development sides of the company must communicate across organizational boundaries to maximize success, minimize barriers, identify requirements, and reduce impediments. Teams are typically challenged by issues of integration (How do research and development teams blend?); differentiation (Who should develop what and where is the hand-off point?) and how should roles in the personnel subsystem emerge in both organizations to support the research idea as it is introduced and absorbed into the software development cycle. The management methods and metrics for the technology acceptance phase of the process are not well developed. In this paper, a macroergonomic approach has been used to describe levels of technology acceptance and metrics for each level.
Multi-Modal User Interface and Information Processing: On Small Devices and in Vehicles
Authors: Delia Grenville, Chunmei Lu and Anna M. Wichansky (Invited Paper)
Summary: Multimodal natural language user interfaces provide a compelling solution for improving user experience of enterprise applications on mobile devices. Unlike structured query language and single modality UIs, there may be some ambiguity when the multimodal system attempts to interpret the user’s natural language or multimodal command. A multimodal test bed system was developed and experimental testing was conducted in order to determine how users would evaluate system response when the system partially succeeded in interpreting their request. Our results indicated that users perceived our application to be most usable when their natural language commands were spoken and system response was completely successful. Although system performance was consistent across input modalities, user perception of system performance was least favorable for spoken commands where the system was only partially successful.
Authors: S.R Fussell; D. Grenville; S Kiesler.; J.Forlizzi; A.M. Wichansky
Summary: Multimodal interfaces have been identified as a possible solution for reducing the visual and motor demands of small devices such as cell phones. In a within-subjects factorial experiment, we explored where audio is useful in a cell phone interface that supports database applications. Participants sat at a desk and drove in a car simulator while choosing a hotel from a descriptive long list. We compared participants’ performance with and without the option to listen to the information while it was presented in text. Participants rarely preferred or used the audio option while seated. A substantial number preferred and used the audio option while driving, especially when the hotel choice task was more difficult. Those who chose the audio option looked less at the phone, but increased their task time and did not improve their driving performance. We discuss implications of reading and listening for safety and design.
Digital Content:
The Internet and TV
Intro: Genevieve Bell
Authors: Delia Grenville, Heather Campbell
Summary: A defining tenet of the User Experience Group holds that to truly drive user-centered technology development, we must look beyond our own experiences to understand how people around the world live and how they use technology. We are not our own consumers. To that end, my team has spent time in over 800 households in more than 22 countries to learn how consumers perceive and use technology in their daily lives, to ensure that we don’t base our User Experience vision on our own lives, and those of our tech-savvy Intel colleagues. Recently, however, we did investigate how, why and where Intel employees use technology in a research game (fueled by free cupcakes) that we set up in a few Intel site cafeterias in Oregon. This event expanded our knowledge of how the technology experiences of our Intel colleagues compare with those of consumers we’ve studied around the world, and gave us the opportunity to bring our research to our primary stakeholders in a very real and fun way. Here are Heather Campbell and Delia Grenville to tell you more about why we did it and what we learned – the expected, the unexpected and some of the key insights that help us think through what we are seeing beyond Intel’s walls.
June 2010
Intro: Genevieve Bell
Authors: Delia Grenville
Summary: When I first moved to America, a very long time ago indeed, I remember being overwhelmed by the number of channels available on television, admittedly cable television, but still, it was a revelation. After all, in Australia, at the time, we had 5 channels total–two government-sponsored ones, and three commercial broadcasters. I remember too staying up for hours and hours just surfing the dial. There were so many things to watch. Fast forward twenty years and the number of channels and other content streams have continued to multiple and diversify, as have the number of remote controls we all suffer through. This week, I asked Delia Grenville, a Human Factors Engineer on my team, to talk little bit about the future of finding something to watch on TV.
Measuring and Designing Organizations and their Practices: Human Factors and User Center
Design Challenges in Distributed Teams
Authors: Delia Grenville, Brian Kleiner
Summary: In our study, a basic science approach was used to explore the constructs that defined the design of a distributed meeting space from the user’s perspective. Although there is a body of literature in the group communication domain, the research in this multidisciplinary area has paid minimal attention to users’ environmental preferences in the design of a meeting space. Fifty participants, half with experience and half without experience in distributed meetings, used foam-core components to create a design of their ideal distributed meeting space. Fourteen themes emerged from content analysis of responses to the post-task interview. These themes addressed the rationale participants used when creating their designs. There was a significant positive relationship between the experience level and the following design themes: visibility of displays, status, team collaboration, VTC (video teleconferencing) needs, and auditory clarity. There was also a significant positive correlation among the occurrences of several design themes.
Authors: N.D Grenville, B.M., Kleiner, S.A.Anderson, M.W.Denson
Summary: The use of visual telephony is steadily becoming a business necessity. However, human factors issues in video teleconferencing (VTC) work systems can determine whether the benefits of VTC are fully realized. VTC meeting environments are augmented by visual displays, auditory systems, computer hardware and software. This generates complexity of managing these systems during the meeting. Furthermore, when managing these systems, other human factors issues arise such as systematic function allocation and training for the facilitator, technographer, and team members.
Macroergonomics and Sociotechnical
Design in manufacturing Organizations
Authors: Delia Grenville, Brian M. Kleiner
Summary: Over the last decade, organizational change has promoted flatter management structures. Organizations typically have less middle management through the integration of those tasks into upper management or lower management responsibilities. A sociotechnical systems framework was used to examine the impact of recent organizational design changes on managerial time allotment. Ninety-one transformation and downstream first-level managers participated in a research study examining time allotments to STS subsystems, level of joint optimizations, value of time use and performance in their departments. The study showed a significant relationship between the perceived level of joint optimization and perceived department performance.
1997
Sociotechnical systems approach to time allotment in manufacturing supervision (Conference Paper)
Authors: Delia Grenville, Brian M. Kleiner
Summary: Due to restructuring of organizations, first- line managers in manufacturing facilities have increased responsibilities, have higher demands on their time, and still must meet or exceed expectations in their department’s performance. A sociotechnical systems approach was designed to examine how first-line managers allot their time to both the technical and social subsystems in their departments. A survey instrument was developed for first-line managers in purchasing, production, maintenance and logistics to examine the association of time allotment in the social and technical subsystems with the cultural values of time use within the organization, joint optimization, and department performance. This approach focuses on operationalizing the STS principle of joint optimization through time allotment in manufacturing departments.