OneMind - Recently Updated Pages

1. Work Experience

Refnocs — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 18:16:44 CDT

Sears Holdings Corporations
Chicago, Illinois April 2007 to present
User Experience Manager - Online Services

ManageMyHome.com | MyGofer.com | PartsDirect.com

Sears Holdings Corporation, the publicly traded (NASDAQ: SHLD) parent of Kmart and Sears, Roebuck and Co., is the nation's fourth largest broadline retailer with over $50 billion in annual revenues and approximately 3,800 full-line and specialty retail stores in the US and Canada.

Orbitz Worldwide, a Travelport Company–
Chicago, Illinois March 2005 to April 2007
Information Architect

• Support mission critical applications & Orbitz powered consumer storefronts
• Conduct primary R&D.

iLeo / Arc Worldwide, a Publicis Groupe Company–
Chicago, Illinois September 2003 - March 2005
Senior Information Architect / Experience Planner

• Refined existing work estimating tool for design tasks (Excel)
• Co-created 21 process templates for Information Architecture deliverables to establish repeatable process

Client: Cadillac.com
• Planned and conducted usability testing and redesign recommendations
• Wrote and implemented site intercept survey
• Conducted large-scale requirements gathering for feature-function analysis involving stakeholder interviews and
document reviews
• Created detailed site map for major site redesign highlighting proposed functionality additions vs. as-is state

Client: McDonald’s (2 projects)
1) Planned and conducted extensive content audit for Worldwide Marketing Intranet portal
• Developed redesign strategy & collaborated on new visual design style guide to provide consistency

2) Architected & wireframed hybrid promotional Audio / CD-ROM for healthy eating (Bob Greene)
Client: Northern Trust (2 projects)
1) Planned and conducted a Usability & Design Competitive Review to serve as baseline for redesign strategy
2) Research & Designed new process for users to open accounts online (Interaction models and wireframes)

Client: U.S. Army (US Army and US Army Reserve) (2 projects)
1) Integrated 19 websites into one cohesive user experience for U.S. Army (www.goarmy.com)
• Wireframed Rich Media and persuasive content experiences based on web credibility guidelines
• Created usability evaluation test materials and criteria for multi-million dollar project
• Conducted and led vision workshops for online recruiting during wartime
• Developed accessibility section 508 compliance standards audit and recommendations
• Documented original user personas to guide design and development
• Researched and documented ‘Design Technical Specifications’ for GoArmy.com

2) United States Army Reserve web site design: inception to delivery, including leading the style guide creation

CNA Insurance – IT Solution & Architecture Group,
Chicago, Illinois January 2002 - Sept 2003
Usability Solution Design Lead

• Established CNA Usability Team with design standards that Architecture & Development teams adopted
• Redesigned CNA Insurance Agent Portal: CNA Central. Performed heuristic review & created new designs to streamline transactions.
• Redesigned CNA.com corporate site: Comprehensive solution for information architecture & site design, including task analysis, design, site architecture, usability evaluation planning

Diamond Cluster International,
Chicago, Illinois November 1999 - October 2001
Experience Design Group & Center for Technology Innovation
Lead Cognitive Designer – Sr. Associate

• Planned Usability Lab - created specifications and supervised build-out of lab and provisioning portable equipment
• Set standards for intellectual capital, including Field Perspective
• Recommended usability features and strategies while developing use cases and sequence diagrams, insuring that ease of use was supported by the data models and application architecture.
• Created method and document templates, and "best of breed" designs, which supported & standardized our department's designs.
• Collaborated in multi-disciplinary groups with graphic designers, project managers, marketing mangers and programmers to create designs which were attractive, compelling, and technically sound.
• Co-Authored design method “Cognitive Ergonomics for Websites: from Concept to Realization” presented at conference
• Created client proposals and new service offerings
• Integrated usability discipline into “Diamond Object oriented Iterative Techniques” (DO IT)
• Rapidly expanded Experience Design group by recruiting and mentoring team

Neoglyphics Media Corporation, a Zefer Company,
Chicago, Illinois June 1998 - November 1999
Cognitive Designer

• Conducted end-to-end User Centered Design for internet applications
• Delivered training guidelines for Cognitive Engineers
• Designed cost-efficient usability studio
• New business development

Process Management Group, Client: Ameritech.net,
Chicago, Illinois February 1997 - June 1998
Software Tester – Quality Assurance

• Tested database driven website publishing system & billing processes
• Created & conducted test cases

Bell Communications Research (Bellcore),
Piscataway, New Jersey August 1995 - May 1996
Human Factors Engineer

• Researched Multimedia Design Standards for Multi-platform Design Guide

IBM Santa Teresa Labs,
San Jose, California September 1993 -September 1994
Usability Engineer

• Designed & user tested multimedia database
• Supported DB/2 based query products
• Created comprehensive Lotus Notes training for creating software demos

Sun Microsystems,
Colorado Springs, Colorado June 1993 to September 1993
Usability Intern

• Usability tested & simplified a complex installation process for Solaris.
• Aided set up of new usability lab.

National Center for Advanced Transportation Technology,
Moscow Idaho Fall 1992
Research Assistant

• US Department of Transportation report about Smart Highways. Focused on in-vehicle routing and traveler assistance (predecessor to GM On-Star) displays and mapping portion of report.

Visio tools

Refnocs — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:22:14 CDT

The Visio smartstencil for creating Conceptual Graph Structures (CGSs) can be downloaded from the attachments section at the bottom of this page.

We welcome your comments and feedback!

About the authors

Refnocs — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:26:19 CDT

Joanna Wiebe and Scott Confer developed this method as Information Architects at Orbitz.com in Chicago, Illinois.

Joanna currently works at Orbitz and Scott is at Sears Holdings.

Home

joannawiebe — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:56:48 CDT

Jumpstart Agile IxD processes with concept graphing

Agile interaction designers need to quickly represent problems.

Our lightweight concept graphing toolkit enables rapid modeling, giving Agile teams metacognitive scaffolding for user-centric solution design.

Semantic relationships and built-in grammar make it unique. Nodes and arcs can only be connected in “legal” ways, an approach derived from cognitive task analysis and research in story telling.

Six types of agency can be linked via eighteen interaction types to indicate relationships (e.g. “event” and “goal” connect via an “initiates” arc). Workflows, taxonomies, domains, goal hierarchies, causal relationships, and more are built by simply snapping arcs to nodes.

Download our EuroIA 2007 presentation from SlideShare.net

Poster presentation at the IA Summit 2007

This wiki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Joanna Wiebe

joannawiebe — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:44:04 CDT

As an information architect and interaction designer with Orbitz Worldwide, Joanna Wiebe works with Agile teams on customer-focused travel solutions. Previous work with her Canadian interactive design firm OneMind Inc included UI design for healthcare applications now used widely by US and UK delivery systems. Joanna is a Registered Graphic Designer since 1997 in Ontario, Canada, has a Bachelor’s from the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas, and a 2008 Master of Distance Education degree from Athabasca University, Alberta, Canada, specializing in learning interaction design (LxD). She’d rather be outdoors.

Contact Joanna at joannawiebe_at_hotmail.com

Rich Pictures

joannawiebe — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 11:48:24 CDT

What's a Rich Picture?

Drawing a Rich Picture is a way to find out about the problem situation and express it through cartoon-like diagrams which are a preliminary mental model of the situation. The mnemonic “CATWOE” is used to help people remember the elements of the Rich Picture: customers, actors, transformation, worldview, owner, and environment. The Rich Picture is typically drawn before the analysis phase.

Below is an example of a hand-drawn Rich Picture, showing CATWOE elements for the process of making coffee!

Peter Checkland introduced the concept of the Rich Picture in 1981 in his book Systems Thinking, Systems Practice, the textbook on his soft systems approach to creating solutions to human problems. A rich picture doesn't have to be done electronically, like this one -- in fact, Checkland's examples are all hand-drawn. It's just that as information architects, the idea of using pencil and paper to draw something seems awkward. What if you want to revise your drawing? Share it with others? So we use Visio.

Below is an example of a pretty complex Rich Picture.

Click to view full-size Example Rich Picture (the PDF can be downloaded from the link at the bottom of this page, under "Attachments".)

The development of a “Rich Picture” as shown in the example above is the second step in the CORE process (Cognitive Organization for Requirements Definition, Wiebe & Confer, 2006). This Visio sketch was produced by Joanna Wiebe, information architect at Orbitz.com, working from raw notes of one-on-one interviews with each team member and representative site users. The project was an integration of a third party event and meeting registration site with the Orbitz site used by corporations for managed business travel, Travelport for Business.

Ideally, at the time the Rich Picture is developed, existing applications and business processes already have been captured in functional requirements documents and use cases. Or more realistically, as in this case, the information architect works from raw interview notes, whiteboard sketches and assumptions.

This sketch is a way to pinpoint key actors who are impacted by or involved in developing the new Travelport features.

The Rich Picture depicts:

the structure of actor interactions with the existing application and the new feature
the functions of the new feature and how they integrate with existing functions
basic elements of the process flow
environmental factors
“hard” or “soft” information relevant to the project
types of requirements that will have to be developed
primary tasks involved in understanding each requirement type.

This wiki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

2. Education, Publications, and Public Speaking

Refnocs — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 08:44:47 CST

Education

M.S. Psychology (1998) - University of Idaho, Experimental Psychology: Human Factors with HCI emphasis

B.A. Psychology (1991) - University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Publications

Confer, S. (2007) & Wiebe, J. CORE: Cognitive Organization for Requirements Elicitation, A seven-step methodology using cognitive graphing in a soft systems framework. Presentation at Euro IA Summit, Barcelona.

Confer, S. (2007) & Wiebe, J. CORE: Cognitive Organization for Requirements Elicitation, Poster at IA Summit, Las Vegas.

Confer, S. (2002) & Moll, R. Visual Iteration Artifacts for System Design. W3C Workshop at NIST, Washington D.C.

Confer, S. (2000) and Batra, S. Cognitive Ergonomics for Websites: from Concept to Realization. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 44th Annual Meeting. (Pp. 429-432). Santa Monica, CA:
Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

Confer, S. (2000) and Batra, S. Field Perspective for Cognitive Design. Internal department toolkit and white paper for consultants. DiamondCluster.

Confer, S. (1999) and Hollands, J.G. Effects of Cognitive Style, Task Type, and Emergent Features on Display Effectiveness. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 43rd Annual Meeting. (Pp. 1353-1357). Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

Dingus, T., Hulse M., Alves-Foss, J., Confer, S., Jahns, S., Rice, A., Roberts, I., Hanowski, R., Sorensen, D. (1996), Development of Human Factors Guidelines for Advanced Traveler Information Systems and Commercial
Vehicle Operations: Literature Review. U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration. Pub. No. FHWA-RD-95-153

Gillan, D.J., Confer S.M., and Belt, G. (1994). Measuring the Mental Representation of Physical Space. University of Idaho Human Factors Research Laboratory.

Wiebe, J, & Confer, S. (2007 – in press). Understanding Requirements at the
CORE: Cognitive Organization for Requirements Elicitation (Poster and Software tool). IA Summit Conference, Las Vegas, Nevada.

ZEFER/ Neoglyphics Whitepapers (1999):
1. Usability tips for e-commerce
2. Accessibility planning for e-commerce and beyond

Public Speaking

1999 Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 43rd Annual Meeting, Thesis Presentation on Graph Design

2000 Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 44th Annual Meeting, Diamond Cluster “Concept Car” Design Method

2000 International Academy for Technology and Design, Guest lecturer.
Topic: Careers in E-commerce

2001 IIT ID graduate program, Guest lecturer
Topic: Experience Design in the Real World.

2001 HFES: Internet Technical Group session co-chair at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 45th Annual Meeting Topic: Display Issues Affecting Web Usability

2005 Roosevelt University, School of Integrated Marketing Communications. Guest lecturer
Topic: Experimentation Research

Scott Confer

Refnocs — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 08:31:15 CST

contact:scottconfer(at)yahoo(dot)com

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"

-Arthur C. Clarke

It really is magic. Cell phones, DVDs, and even silly putty.
....................................................................................................................
I enjoy collaborating on new ideas for products that will make people feel something magical is happening when they use them. Currently at Sears, I'm managing a group of user experience folks working on sites related to Home Services: Manage My Home, My Gofer, and Parts Direct.
Check out how Sears is making your life at home easier and more enjoyable!

Here's my career summary:

Senior User Experience Designer with a successful track record of delivering satisfying & profitable products.
Human Factors Psychology training emphasizing projects brings a solid foundation to my design work.
Skilled in design planning, wireframe creation/prototyping, and executing designs
Experienced with activities such as estimating, testing, heuristic reviews, user analysis, task analysis and use case development.

Industry Experience

Worked full time and consulted in many verticals, with a common goal of rapidly creating high-quality and profitable user experiences.

Automotive / Transportation	Retail / Home
Cadillac GM Electromotive	Grainger Sears
Consumer Packaged Goods	Telecommunications
Energizer Market Day McDonald’s Nestle / Purina Sara Lee Silgan Packaging	Ameritech / SBC Bellcore / Telecordia Motorola
Financial Services	Travel / Entertainment
CNA Insurance Northern Trust Scudder Investments	Moviebeam Orbitz Worldwide
Hardware / Software	US Government
3Com IBM Sun Microsystems	Federal Highway Administration Centers for Disease Control United States Postal Service US Army Recruiting Command US Army Reserve

More info:

1. Work Experience

2. Education, Pubs, and Speaking Engagements

CORE: Cognitive Organization for Requirements Elicitation

Refnocs — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 16:03:22 CDT

How to get out of a mess:

use the CORE methodology (Cognitive Organization for Requirements Elicitation)

Poster presentation by Joanna Wiebe and Scott Confer at the IA Summit 2007

Using a case study drawn from the Orbitz.com information architecture environment, our 2007 IA Summit poster uses visuals and text to describe a rules-based soft systems methodology for collaborative decision-making, Cognitive Organization for Requirements Elicitation (CORE).

In this case study, the Orbitz information architect was faced with a need to rapidly develop specifications for new web application features. Produced in the absence of use cases, functional requirements, or business requirements, these new specifications had to be both culturally and technically acceptable, and meet changing business and user needs.

Our poster describes the seven-step structure-definition process which was followed by the Orbitz information architect:

1. An unstructured situation is identified, along with the team of people who play the roles of investigator, subject matter expert, client, problem-owner and problem-solver. Research follows a taxonomy of question probes.

2. The investigator develops an ‘as-is’ “Rich Picture” to focus on structure, function, process, and environment. Ideally, existing applications and business processes have been captured in functional requirements documents and use cases. Or more realistically, the investigator may be working from raw interview notes, whiteboard sketches and assumptions.

3. Root definitions of “relevant systems” are written to describe Rich Picture elements of structure, function, process and environment.

4. The descriptions are analyzed and graphed as Conceptual Graph Structures (CGSs). Dynamic conversations and debate lead to consensus about concepts and goals, captured iteratively in CGSs.

5. IA comparison of the CGSs with the Rich Picture leads to iterations of the CGSs. Two types of knowledge emerge to inform the user interface:

· inconsistencies or problems with the existing situations/systems and
· new solutions/innovations for the user tasks.

From this phase, a list of preliminary requirements is made.

6. Systemically desirable and culturally feasible requirements are agreed upon. A key benefit of the CORE methodology is that team members are invested collaboratively in the requirements.

7. Requirements are translated into information architecture. These include changes to structure, function, process and environment of the situation as collaboratively defined. Changes in attitude and policy also may result.

Read the full case study

Take a look at the templates for Rich Pictures, Conceptual Graphs, and Visio Tools

Download our CORE Powerpoint loaded with information!

This wiki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Feedback & Comments

Refnocs — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 13:13:26 CDT

Please let us know what you have to say, what you think, etc.

Conceptual Graph Structures

joannawiebe — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 14:44:07 CDT

Cognitive task analysis (CTA) is often used to study how people make decisions in their unstructured, dynamic, real-time environments. Sallie Gordon-Becker, working with colleagues, developed a formal approach to CTA called Conceptual Graph Structures (CGS) (Gordon & Gill, 1992; Gordon, Schmierer, & Gill, 1993). CGSs are semantic networks with specific syntax (concept maps don't have a syntax). CGSs are comprised of nodes, connected by arcs only in certain "legal" ways. A CGS can be developed for:

document analysis
analysis of structured and unstructured interviews
analysis of postperformance review of recordings of multiple experts performing a variety of task scenarios

There are six kinds of nodes. Think of the nodes as nouns and the arcs as the verbs. The nodes can be simple concepts, but can also be other places and ways of being in space-time and mental space, such as goals, actions, events, states and styles. There are 18 types of arcs, each with a specific meaning.

Use the reference charts below to understand how nodes and arcs are defined, and how to "legally" combine arcs and nodes. (These are also available from the Attachments section at the bottom of this page.)

Learning the CGS grammar does take some learning and time to develop proficiency. However, the process has been made a little easier with the Viso tools developed by Wiebe, Confer & Rice (2007), which automate the selection of legal arc-node combinations.

Finally, look at an example Conceptual Graph Structure. You can see more example CGSs in the Attachments section at the bottom of this page.

Orbitz Worldwide Case Study

joannawiebe — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 14:57:00 CDT

How to get out of a mess:
seven steps when requirements are vague or missing

In late 2006, a team of people from various software development disciplines at Orbitz met around the table to kick off a project to integrate a third party meeting and events registration site. Initial requirements were presented, but the Information Architect (IA) judged that they were not complete, organized and coherent enough to begin the design work.

The third party site was to be integrated with Travelport for Business, a complex, evolving web application licensed by Orbitz to large corporations for managed employee travel. A second quarter 2007 launch date had already been set, so it was important to quickly define a “buildable” set of requirements.

Final details of the contract with the third party had not yet been resolved, one of the reasons that requirements were not complete at kickoff (sound familiar?).

The IA could not turn to any standardized method of requirements definition, for Orbitz had not bought into any. Finally, in the flat organizational structure at Orbitz, it would be critical to achieve team consensus to ensure that team members would be committed to the same goals.

CORE (Cognitive Organization for Requirements Elicitation), an emerging methodology at Orbitz, was used by the IA to lead the team to clarify, elicit and iterate the initial vague requirements. CORE, a conceptual toolkit, integrates two analytical methodologies:

an empirically-validated conceptual graphing method from the field of cognitive task analysis (Gordon, Gill, Schmeier, 1993), which includes a formal grammar for diagramming goals, spatial relationships, taxonomies, and causal networks in a collaborative process and
a collaborative soft systems inquiry framework (Checkland, 1981).

CORE has broad utility for all types of user experience practitioners, in design contexts including physical products, services, training, and software. It helps designers define:

what information and inputs are needed,
at what time they are needed,
in order to make decisions.

The CORE process which was followed is outlined in the seven steps, below.

Step 1: Unstructured situation

The IA began by pointing out that the project team was in an unstructured situation; it was deemed “unstructured” because it had not been analyzed and no cognitive models had been applied to it.

In an unstructured situation, “…human perceptions, behavior or actions seemed to be the dominating factors and…goals, objectives and even interpretation of events are all problematic.” (Naughton, 2005)

It is understood that all “problems” are subjectively interpreted, and so the definition of the problem basically answers the question, “What shall the problem be deemed to be?” – not “what is the problem?” A soft systems approach also realizes that these problems are organic, evolving, and open-ended, and that every “solution” is again just the perception of a solution, which in turn may reveal new aspects of a “problem”.

The IA then analyzed the existing project team to determine who was playing the roles of investigator, subject matter expert, client, problem-owner and problem-solver. Playing the role of investigator, the IA recognized that she was a part of the situation. If no team would have existed, she would have assembled one. Ideally, by project kickoff, existing applications and business processes have been captured as functional requirements documents and use cases. In this case, in their absence, the IA conducted secondary and primary research, including interviewing project team members following a taxonomy of question probes under the headings:

What is this thing?
What’s happening?
What to do?
Where is it?
Where can I find out more?

Click to view full-size example Rich Picture

Step 2: Rich Picture

Research was next organized into a rough “Rich Picture”, which was Checkland’s term for a visual capture of the elements of structure, function, process and environment. The IA worked from her raw interview notes, whiteboard sketches and assumptions, to create the Rich Picture, using Visio.

Many Rich Pictures are simply drawn on a whiteboard or notepad. Drawing the picture is a way to methodically walk through some or all of key aspects of the project.

The Rich Picture depicts:

Key actors impacted by or involved in developing the new features
Structure of actor interactions
Functions of new features and how they integrate with existing functions
Process flow for new features
Environmental factors such as resource availability and time
“Hard” or “soft” information. Hard information includes verifiable data and knowledge; soft information includes feelings, perceptions, opinions, values—often key to project success or failure
Types of requirements, for example: functional, data, content, creative, data safety, testing performance, user interface, localization, technical, financial, temporal, managerial
Tasks involved in understanding each requirement type

This Rich Picture may or may not be shared with the entire team, but it allows the IA and team members to create a preliminary mental model of the situation. In this case, the Rich Picture was not shared, but from analysis of the Rich Picture, an Issues Log was created (at Orbitz, in Excel, stored on the project wiki) to permit team members to log, track and resolve issues in a coordinated way.

Step 3: Relevant systems

Once the Rich Picture had provided a visual overview of the situation, goal/action models, or root definitions of “relevant systems” were written by the IA. The definition for each relevant system attempted to describe Rich Picture elements of structure, function, process and environment.

In this case, three different systems could be considered relevant to finding an acceptable solution to the problem situation:

System A (Customer perspective): A system to enable customers to book and manage travel online at the same time that they register for meetings without having to log into another application
System B (Business perspective): A system to provide incremental transactional revenue and revenue share offerings for Orbitz and third parties
System C (Development perspective) A system to add features to the online travel booking web application.

Click to view full-size Example Conceptual Graph Structure (CGS)

Step 4: Conceptual Graph Structures (CGS)

The first step in building a conceptual model was to tease out the primary and secondary goals and goal-actions from the root definition of each relevant system. The investigator then began to graph the relevant system(s) as Conceptual Graph Structures (CGSs). These structures use a formalized grammar and templates for CGS structure, arcs and nodes. There are six types of nodes, which are graphical representations of one piece of declarative knowledge (i.e., vehicle type, number of travelers). Eighteen types of arcs, or directional arrows, connect the nodes, indicating the kind of relationship that exists between the nodes. There are four types of knowledge substructures for a conceptual graph:

Goal hierarchy
Taxonomy
Causal network
Spatial relationship

The CGS method is inherently applicable to human endeavors since Gordon’s grammar is based on the cognitive psychology and story comprehension research by Arthur Graesser (1991).

The IA built her CGS iterations by analyzing the definitions of the Relevant Systems, the Rich Picture, the Issues Log, research notes, and other documents, then identifying which knowledge substructures needed to be addressed. Nodes and links were identified and linked using Visio templates that guided the IA in selecting valid node-arc-node combinations.

Step 5: Preliminary requirements

A completed CGS affords macro and micro views. A CGS makes information explicit and clear by organizing concepts and procedures. The CGS process led to cognitive breakthroughs, discoveries and innovation to meet user goals. Implicit relationships were revealed as the IA was able to visualize what was known, and what was missing in the CGS.

The key benefit to creating a CGS is the process of analysis that is encouraged. This process yields twotypes of knowledge:

Inconsistencies or problems with the existing situations/systems and
Potential new solutions/innovations for the means of accomplishing user goals.

The IA may or may not share the CGSs with the project team. However, the process of developing Cognitive Graph Structures builds a conceptual framework for dynamic conversations and debate with the rest of the team. Issues continued to be brought back to the team for clarification, via the Issues Log, and through this process, the IA was able to make a list of preliminary requirements.

Step 6: Requirements consensus

By Step 6 in the CORE methodology, a project team usually can efficiently reach requirements consensus.This is a key benefit of the CORE methodology, that team members are invested collaboratively in the requirements, because they have been integral to requirements definition. At Orbitz, requirements are captured in Word documents, and stored and shared on an open-source wiki.

Step 7: Requirements translated to IA

In the final step, these agreed-on requirements are translated into information architecture. Once a system is implemented, whether software, a product, a service or a curriculum, the result is a set of changes to structure, function, process and environment of the original situation as collaboratively defined. Changes in attitude and policy also may result for the larger organization.

The result is a set of changes to structure, function, process and environment of the original situation as collaboratively defined.

Advantages of the CORE method

This method centers on the user, drawn as a key actor in the Rich Picture. Cross-disciplinary teams can work collaboratively to define quality requirements. Other advantages include:

CORE is scalable for large or small projects
The method is domain-agnostic
A rules-based formal grammar for cognitive graphing ensures a thorough approach
CORE is based on empirically validated methods
Ecologically valid, CORE combines two methods widely used in industry and business today
Above all, CORE is a driver for innovation

References

Atlantic Systems Guild Limited (2006). Volere Method Requirements Specification Template, Edition 11. Available at http://www.systemsguild.com and http://www.volere.co.uk.

Beyer, H. & Holtzblatt, K. (1998). Contextual Design: A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs. Morgan Kaufmann.

Carroll J.M., Rosson M.B., Chin G., Koenemann J. (1997). Requirements Development: Stages of opportunity for collaboration needs discovery. Proceedings of the conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques. ACM Press. New York, NY, USA.
--> 5 stages of Requirements Development instead of gathering (Genesis & Types) on p.63

Checkland, P B (1972). Towards a Systems-based methodology for real-world problem-solving. Journal of Systems Engineering, vol. 3, no. 2.

Checkland, P.B. (1981). Systems Thinking, Systems Practice. John Wiley & Sons.

Constantine, L. & Lockwood, L. (2000). Usage-Centered Design: Practical Abstract Modeling with Use Cases. ACM CHI 2000 Tutorial.

DuFour, R., & Eaker, R. (1998). Professional Learning Communities at Work: Best Practices for Enhancing Student Achievement. National Educational Service.

Gordon, S. E. & Gill, R. T. (1997). Cognitive Task Analysis. In C. Zsambok & G. Klein, (Eds.), Naturalistic Decision Making (pp. 131-140). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Gordon, S.E., Schmierer, K.A., & Gill, R. T. (1993). Conceptual graph analysis: Knowledge acquisition for instructional system design. Human Factors, 35, 459-481.

Graesser, A.C., Golding, J.M., & Long, D.L. (1991). Narrative representation and comprehension. In R. Barr, M.L. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, and P.D. Pearson (Eds.), Handbook of Reading Research (pp.191-205). White Plains, NY: Longman.

Hackos, J. and Redish, J. (1998). User and Task Analysis for Interface Design. John Wiley and Sons. Bloomington, IN: National Educational Service.

Holtzblatt, K. & Beyer, H. (1995). Requirements gathering: the human factor. Communications of the ACM. Volume 38, Issue 5. Available at http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/203356.203361.

Hutchings, F. & Knox, S. (1995). Creating Products Customers Demand. Communications of the ACM. Volume 38 , Issue 5, Pages: 72 - 80.

Leffingwell, D. & Widrig D. (2000). Managing Software Requirements - a Unified Approach. Object Technology Series (Series editors Booch, Jacobson, & Rumbaugh). Addison-Wesley.

Lengler R., Eppler M. (2007). Towards A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for Management. IASTED Proceedings of the Conference on Graphics and Visualization in Engineering (GVE 2007), Clearwater, Florida, USA. Available at http://www.visual-iteracy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.pdf.

Naughton, J. (2005). Soft systems analysis: An introductory guide. Milton Keynes: The Open University.

Robertson S. & Robertson J. (2006). Mastering the Requirements Process—Second Edition. Addison-Wesley. Available at http://systemsguild.com/GuildSite/Robs/RMPBookPage.html.

Senge, P. M. (1990) The Fifth Discipline. The art and practice of the learning organization. London: Random House.

This wiki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Example Rich Picture

Refnocs — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 21:01:00 CDT

Example Conceptual Graph Structure

joannawiebe — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 15:57:16 CDT