Reflection – Visualization

Challenge

I’m a member of my department’s software engineer group.  My challenge is to provide a graphical user interface for our new test system which is designed by a  group of system engineers and electrical engineers. This user interface shall reflect all possible  parameters that were designed by the electrical engineers, and at the same time provide an easy-to-use  and well-structured way to operate the system as requested by the system engineers. How to drive the  discussions about designing it?

Selection

For this challenge I’ve selected the tool “Visualization”. Mainly because for designing a graphical user  interface you’ll need to create an image of it in the minds of the involved persons, e.g. by drawing rough  sketches of the windows and their contents. These sketches become a tangible and concrete item for  the involved engineers and they can use them to express their ideas of how to operate the system. A  planned operation sequence of the windows can easily be shown by drawing arrows between the  depicted windows.

Application

Start point was just an empty rectangle representing the main window of the user interface. This was  already enough to trigger the first ideas about what elements the operators would like to find on it.  After placing buttons into the main window to trigger the alignment and calibration routines we  continued to draft the related sub-windows. The engineers quickly found out that there were  parameters that needed to be adjusted in both the alignment and the calibration mode. Quickly we  drafted a super-window around alignment and calibration window and placed these common  parameters in there.

Insight

It was a fantastic experience to see how ideas for designing a graphical user interface can be triggered  with just a few drawn lines, and how easily the story of the operation of the system can be developed  and told. These sketches will run through several iterations until they can be confirmed as a target for  implementation. You therefore need a white-board of sufficient size where you can draw, wipe out, and  redraw. Pictures do so much a better job for designing a user interface than just pure lists of the  involved parameters.

Approach

I would use the tool “Visualization” again for designing the graphical user interface of a future system.  It did a good job in getting ideas out of the involved persons.  Perhaps I will try to use the tool “Learning Launch” as a follow-up step after the design phase. There I  would generate empty shells (without functionality) of the designed windows with a graphical user  interface editor so that the engineers can play around with real windows on the screen hoping to  receive still better feedback about the design.

