A Systematic Design towards Usability for Novice Designers

Abstract

IntroductionExperienced designers rely on the available design guidelines, past design experiences, templates and problem-solution sets from previous experiences. This concurs to the study claimed that practitioners were depended on their intuition and experiences gained [1]. Thus, novice designers would find difficulties in designing intuitively if experience and knowledge are not sufficiently gained. Subsequently, further research works have been explored on how knowledge and experience were used among experienced and novice designers such as in [2,3] and [4]. Reference [4] suggested that design strategies, knowledge, and information should be included in developing support methods for novice designers as a guide to them.Previous works in [5,6] explored the use of guidelines and patterns as an aid to teach design. The result from [5] has shown the use of design patterns displayed a greater impact on the novice designer's performance than guidelines. We considered all design related knowledge and information such as design decision and design pattern in the proposed method that leading to the development of the tool.This research aims to understand how the proposed assistance tool and method drive the novice designers in designing a usable system, and thereby contribute towards developing a reliable tool and method for them in making design decision, particularly in determining usability goals and patterns, and selecting the best prototype. This paper was extended from [7] which included 2 experiments conducted following the proposed approach. The proposed tool was adopting the application of AHP technique in prioritizing the common usability goals and prototypes. AHP, a multi-criteria technique, has been applied in various disciplines. Recently, in engineering itself, the AHP technique was applied for the purpose of economic efficiency [8] and planning [9]. Relevant to the study, it is also applied in product design such as in [10]. A