Conceptual Models Core to the Design of Interactive Applications

This book presents readers with an exploration of the concept of Conceptual Models and argues that they are core to achieving good design of interactive applications that are easy, effective, and enjoyable to use. The authors’ years of experience helping companies create interactive software applications revealed that interactive applications built without Conceptual Models generally result in fraught production processes and designs that are confusing and difficult to learn, remember, and use. Instead, the book shows that Conceptual Models can be a central link between the elements involved in the use of interactive applications: people’s tasks (domains), their plans for performing those tasks, the use of applications in the plans, the conceptual structure of applications, the presentation of the conceptual model (i.e., the user interface), the terms used to describe it, its implementation, and the learning that people must do to use the application. Readers will learn how putting a Conceptual Model at the core of the design and development process can pay rich dividends: designs are simpler, more coherent, and better aligned with users’ tasks; unnecessary features are avoided; documentation is easier, development is faster and cheaper; customer uptake is improved; and the need for training and customer support is reduced. 

To support its use in instruction, this second edition has been revised to explain the history and theoretical context of conceptual modeling using a consistent vocabulary, describe the structure of conceptual models, provide more current and more complete examples, explain how conceptual models fit into design and development, and further summarize the benefits of conceptual modeling.

Austin Henderson's 45-year career in Human-Computer Interaction includes user interface research and architecture at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, Bolt Beranek and Newman, Xerox Research (both PARC and EuroPARC), Apple Computer, and Pitney Bowes, as well as strategic industrial design with Fitch and his own Rivendel Consulting & Design. Austin has built both commercial and research applications in many domains including manufacturing, programming languages, air traffic control, electronic mail (Hermes), user interface design tools (Trillium),workspace management (Rooms, Buttons), distributed collaboration (MediaSpace), and user-evolvable systems (Tailorable - ""design continued in use,"" Pliant - ""designing for the unanticipated"" and ""scalable conversations""). These applications, and their development with users, have grounded his analytical work, which has included the nature of computation-based socio-technical systems, the interaction of people with the technology in those systems, and the practices and tools of their development. The primary goal of his work has been to better meet user needs, both by improving system development to better anticipate those needs, and by broadening system capability to enable users themselves to better respond to unanticipated needs when they arise in a rich and changing world.