Olympic Message System

My interest in this paper is a 9 because personally having to think about design and implementation during web applications has piqued my interest and also by skimming through the paper I saw that there were very detailed examples of how the Olympic Message System (OMS) worked.

The three main ideas of this paper are focus on the user through out system design, the importance of having models of the design through out the development process, and when problems arise to go back and fix them. The way that the paper is written illustrates how important the interaction of these three steps of design are. First, the designer must know the user. In designing the OMS, the designers had to take into account the type of telephones that callers would be using like push button versus dial and how to make up for that difference. In the paper, the authors let the designers and developers who read the paper know that they know that the ideas they are presenting seem “obvious”, but when asked about the steps none of them knew these three main ideas. As a part of the implementation phase for the OMS “printed scenarios of exactly how…the interface would look” where shown to the Olympic Committee. In the paper actual examples of messages picked up and received are shown, as well as a sign-on sequence used in a field test. During one evaluation, 24 students called OMS at the exact same time in order to try to destroy the system. In the paper the evaluation is just determining if this circular design worked and the c0onclusion is that “these principles can be done , does not take too long, and does not cost too much.”

My question for discussion is if this 1984 system is the basis of design, why do we still have products that don't seem to follow these guidelines?

I would give this paper an 8 on interest level. I am saving my 9's for something that blows me away. The three main ideas of this paper are 1)describing design principles that should be used in all system development 2) conveying that these principles can be used for actual integration even in large systems such as the 1984 Olympic Message System, and 3) ensuring that these principles will not only be feasible, but become necessary for creating the OMS system, or system like it.

The fact that this paper exemplifies user-centered design can be illustrated through the design process that these developers took. Before writing even a line of code, these developers first wrote the user guide for the system, sent the guide to the end-users, and received feedback. They took this feedback and used it for actual design of the system, which not only please the users, but also made for more efficient design. In the intermediate efforts, they accounted for user-centered design through multiple efforts: having an Olympian on the design team (implementation), touring the villages where the athletes would live(implementation), interviewing Olympians (evaluation), testing the system overseas (evaluation), and created a prototype for extensive user-testing(evaluation). All of these methods also show iterative design as they were constantly working with users in order to change any thing that did not work or was not “usuable.” They authors even state that “commitment to living in a sea of change” was essential to success (768). I have a few questions about this article:

1) What was the role of the human factors people on the team? Did they also work with these design principles?

2)Did IBM go onto implement these kiosks for other use (either physically or in concept)?

3)They do not mention HCI anywhere in this article. How can you different HCI from just good systems (or software) design?