Goal Derived Design

Aww s@#t. I feel like a course failing... and to add insult to the injury, it is the only really interesting course of this whole semester.

What's this course about then? Goal-derived user interface design (GDD), a hugely promising pen-and-paper method for designing software user interfaces. Other hot topic at the course are user interface design patterns, something that, from my view, feels perhaps even more interesting and applicable than design pattern thinking applied to software architecture does.

GDD, in short, means that UI specialist formulates various user goals and designs a paper prototype of the optimal user interface by means of an iterative process where the developing prototype is tested against and refactored to support a growing collection of supported goal-based tasks. The testing is done by the designer by repeatedly simulating optimal use of the prototype by an imaginary user. Design is complete when all goal-based use cases are supported to the best of the designer's ability.

GDD's strength lies in finding the right features to implement and optimising the efficacy of the user interface. Learnability issues are not addressed, and must be fixed using other methods such as cognitive walkthrough by an expert or usability reviews with end users.

If you want to take a peek at GDD and the GUIDe software process that utilises it, the best english-speaking introduction I have manged to found has to be Sari A. Laakso's paper Ensuring quality of the user interface with the GUIDe project model.